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Category: Ukraine

  • Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp from the Ukraine War?

    Photo credit: Economic Club of New York

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, known for his staunch support for Ukraine, recently revealed his greatest fear for this winter to a TV interviewer in his native Norway: that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. “If things go wrong,” he cautioned solemnly, “they can go horribly wrong.”

    It was a rare admission from someone so involved in the war, and reflects the dichotomy in recent statements between U.S. and NATO political leaders on one hand and military officials on the other. Civilian leaders still appear committed to waging a long, open-ended war in Ukraine, while military leaders, such as the U.S. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, have spoken out and urged Ukraine to “seize the moment” for peace talks.
     
    Retired Admiral Michael Mullen, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair, spoke out first, maybe testing the waters for Milley, telling ABC News that the United States should “do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.” 
     
    Asia Times reported that other NATO military leaders share Milley’s view that neither Russia nor Ukraine can achieve an outright military victory, while French and German military assessments conclude that the stronger negotiating position Ukraine has gained through its recent military successes will be short-lived if it fails to heed Milley’s advice.
     
    So why are U.S. and NATO military leaders speaking out so urgently to reject the perpetuation of their own central role in the war in Ukraine? And why do they see such danger in the offing if their political bosses miss or ignore their cues for the shift to diplomacy?
     
    A Pentagon-commissioned Rand Corporation study published in December, titled Responding to a Russian Attack on NATO During the Ukraine War, provides clues as to what Milley and his military colleagues find so alarming. The study examines U.S. options for responding to four scenarios in which Russia attacks a range of NATO targets, from a U.S. intelligence satellite or a NATO arms depot in Poland to larger-scale missile attacks on NATO air bases and ports, including Ramstein U.S. Air Base and the port of Rotterdam.
     
    These four scenarios are all hypothetical and premised on a Russian escalation beyond the borders of Ukraine. But the authors’ analysis reveals just how fine and precarious the line is between limited and proportionate military responses to Russian escalation and a spiral of escalation that can spin out of control and lead to nuclear war. 
     
    The final sentence of the study’s conclusion reads: “The potential for nuclear use adds weight to the U.S. goal of avoiding further escalation, a goal which might seem increasingly critical in the aftermath of a limited Russian conventional attack.” Yet other parts of the study argue against de-escalation or less-than-proportionate responses to Russian escalations, based on the same concerns with U.S. “credibility” that drove devastating but ultimately futile rounds of escalation in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other lost wars.
     
    U.S. political leaders are always afraid that if they do not respond forcefully enough to enemy actions, their enemies (now including China) will conclude that their military moves can decisively impact U.S. policy and force the United States and its allies to retreat. But escalations driven by such fears have consistently led only to even more decisive and humiliating U.S. defeats. 
     
    In Ukraine, U.S. concerns about “credibility” are compounded by the need to demonstrate to its allies that NATO’s Article 5—which says that an attack on one NATO member will be considered an attack on all—is a truly watertight commitment to defend them.
     
    So U.S. policy in Ukraine is caught between the reputational need to intimidate its enemies and support its allies on the one hand, and the unthinkable real-world dangers of escalation on the other. If U.S. leaders continue to act as they have in the past, favoring escalation over loss of “credibility,” they will be flirting with nuclear war, and the danger will only increase with each twist of the escalatory spiral.  
     
    As the absence of a “military solution” slowly dawns on the armchair warriors in Washington and NATO capitals, they are quietly slipping more conciliatory positions into their public statements. Most notably, they are replacing their previous insistence that Ukraine must be restored to its pre-2014 borders, meaning a return of all the Donbas and Crimea, with a call for Russia to withdraw only to pre-February 24, 2022, positions, which Russia had previously agreed to in negotiations in Turkey in March.
     
    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Wall Street Journal on December 5th that the goal of the war is now “to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.” The WSJ reported that “Two European diplomats… said [U.S. National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan recommended that Mr. Zelenskyy’s team start thinking about its realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including a reconsideration of its stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.”
     
    In another article, the Wall Street Journal quoted German officials saying, “they believe it is unrealistic to expect the Russian troops will be fully expelled from all the occupied territories,” while British officials defined the minimum basis for negotiations as Russia’s willingness to “withdraw to positions it occupied on February 23rd.”
     
    One of Rishi Sunak’s first actions as U.K. Prime Minister at the end of October was to have Defence Minister Ben Wallace call Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for the first time since the Russian invasion in February. Wallace told Shoigu the U.K. wanted to de-escalate the conflict, a significant shift from the policies of former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

    A major stumbling block holding Western diplomats back from the peace table is the maximalist rhetoric and negotiating positions of President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government, which has insisted since April that it will not settle for anything short of full sovereignty over every inch of territory that Ukraine possessed before 2014.
     
    But that maximalist position was itself a remarkable reversal from the position Ukraine took at cease-fire talks in Turkey in March, when it agreed to give up its ambition to join NATO and not to host foreign military bases in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to its pre-invasion positions. At those talks, Ukraine agreed to negotiate the future of Donbas and to postpone a final decision on the future of Crimea for up to 15 years.
     
    The Financial Times broke the story of that 15-point peace plan on March 16, and Zelenskyy explained the “neutrality agreement” to his people in a national TV broadcast on March 27, promising to submit it to a national referendum before it could take effect. 
     
    But then U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened on April 9 to quash that agreement. He told Zelenskyy that the U.K. and the “collective West” were “in it for the long run” and would back Ukraine to fight a long war, but would not sign on to any agreements Ukraine made with Russia. 
     
    This helps to explain why Zelenskyy is now so offended by Western suggestions that he should return to the negotiating table. Johnson has since resigned in disgrace, but he left Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine hanging on his promises. 
     
    In April, Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but only the United States publicly took a similar position, while France, Germany and Italy all called for new cease-fire negotiations in May. Now Johnson himself has done an about-face, writing in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal on December 9 only that “Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of February 24th.”
     
    Johnson and Biden have made a shambles of Western policy on Ukraine, politically gluing themselves to a policy of unconditional, endless war that NATO military advisers reject for the soundest of reasons: to avoid the world-ending World War III that Biden himself promised to avoid. 
     
    U.S. and NATO leaders are finally taking baby steps toward negotiations, but the critical question facing the world in 2023 is whether the warring parties will get to the negotiating table before the spiral of escalation spins catastrophically out of control.

    The post Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp from the Ukraine War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO’s Black Hole


    “Ukraine, International Money Laundering, and the Investigation of Organized Crime,” US Department of Justice.
    “Ukraine Orphanages Feeder for Child Trafficking,” childhub.org
    “After months of denial, U.S. admits to running Ukraine biolabs,” People’s World

    The post NATO’s Black Hole first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 2023: it can only get better for human rights

    It seems bold to be so optimistic, but lets not forget that the assertion starts from a very low base: 2022 was probably one of the worst years with the Ukrainian war, further repression in Russia, death sentences for protesters in Iran and no let up in China.

    Also remarkable wss the relatively poor observance of internatioanl Human Rights Day on 10 December 2022. Usually I make selection of events (e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/10/human-rights-day-2021/ and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/12/17/human-rights-day-2019-anthology-part-ii/), but this year there was little to report. Just these:

    In an interview with Global Solutions of 9 December the “new” High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, [see also:https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/09/15/new-high-commissioner-for-human-rights-volker-turk-the-man-for-an-impossible-job/] gives an answer to the question: 10 December marks Human Rights Day; With this milestone – and your new role – in mind, what’s your vision for human rights?

    I think we have to start with where we are with the world and we are at a very peculiar moment.  We have all lived through these multiple crises. We have seen the geopolitics, the divisions, the fragmentation, and all these things that have preoccupied us at a time when you would hope that the international community would come together and craft something that would respond to the big challenges that we face.

    So for me, human rights is the force that comes in and unifies us.  Because it brings us back to human dignity and to what makes us all connected with each other. Let’s not forget that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War.  It provided the inspiration and the motivation that the world needed at that time.  So, I think we need to almost counter intuitively go back to the basics of what this unifying force – this concentration on the human being – was.  We need to regain the universality and the indivisibility of the human rights regime.

    Secondly, we also need to look at human rights in the 21st century, for example in the digital transformation that we’re seeing. Take the letter I wrote to Twitter’s Elon Musk, for instance. Social media platforms play a very important role. We know the role Facebook played in Myanmar, for example, when the Rohinga crisis happened, in allowing disinformation and hatred to spread. So, human rights needs to look at the type of issues that we face today.

    And the third area that I hope we can achieve next year, is we have to look at the human rights ecosystem as a whole. So, what is the role of the treaty bodies, of the special procedures mandate-holders, of the Human Rights Council, Universal Periodic Review process, and of my own office too – and how do we strategically deal with different situations?

    Freedom House took the occasion to consider that Political prisoners and the victims of human rights abuses have taken a back seat when global summits and events occur. But it is exactly because of those events that we should be giving the victims of such abuses our full attention...

    Symbolic dates like International Human Rights Day offer space to reflect on and advocate for the rights of the brave people who have been imprisoned or experienced retaliation for standing up to repressive, authoritarian rule. But political prisoners and others fighting for freedom deserve our attention for more than one day of the year. We cannot allow their plight to be sidelined because it is inconvenient to think about them during an event like the World Cup.

    The World Cup is one of several events in recent months that has drawn criticism for the human rights controversies surrounding it. In what was meant to be a historic summit to discuss the imminent threats posed by climate change, the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), held in Egypt in early November, instead became a spotlight on the host country’s abysmal human rights record. The large number of human rights defenders and activists currently detained or imprisoned in Egypt was difficult to ignore, and one case in particular stood out for its perilously high stakes. British-Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, imprisoned for his activism, endured a six-month hunger strike, now over, which resulted in the Egyptian authorities denying his family the ability to contact him as the conference took place. They desperately pleaded with the authorities for proof he was alive, and his sister Sanaa took the stage at official summit events to advocate for her brother’s release. She faced threats from Egyptian officials who accused her of calling on foreign entities to intervene in the country’s internal affairs.

    Participating governments could have added to this pressure and set the stage for the release of Abdel Fattah and numerous other political prisoners, by conditioning Egypt’s hosting role on freeing political prisoners ahead of COP27. Instead, the conference’s setting appeared hypocritical, as climate justice depends in large part on respect for democracy and human rights.

    Similarly, this fall’s G20 summit saw leaders of multiple countries that hold political prisoners convene for strategic discussions. The lives and freedoms of imprisoned human rights defenders, journalists, and prodemocracy activists in Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, India, and even the host state Indonesia, were superseded by “other priorities.” In Indonesia, human rights defender Victor Yeimo, who has spoken out on the rights abuses occurring in West Papua, was arrested in May 2021, reportedly due to his involvement in antiracism and self-determination protests two years prior. Charged with crimes including treason, he remained in detention while the G20 met. His case and others across the various member states should have been highlighted, as respect for international human rights principles and commitment to strong democracies are key to long-term national and global security and economic stability.

    Scott Walker, a Researcher at the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, a and a Research Assistant within the Faculty of Law, Monash University.decided to draw attention to an important case concerning climate justice; On 10 December 2022 the world marks Human Rights Day commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) in 1948.  This year’s theme is dignity, freedom, and justice for all, in anticipation of the 75thanniversary of the UDHR in 2023. It gives us cause to reflect on the mobilising force that the UDHR has become in the struggle for human rights across the world. Yet, there is always more work to be done to truly achieve a world in which dignity, freedom, and justice is a lived reality for all. To do so we must utilise human rights both as a guidepost for advocacy and a tool for concrete, on the ground change to address some of the most pressing and ongoing challenges facing our world; including the immediate and catastrophic impacts of climate change. 

    Here in Australia, the path to domestic enshrinement of human rights has been a meandering one: only two States (Victoria and Queensland) and one Territory (the Australian Capital Territory) have Human Rights Acts. Yet, the capacity of these Human Rights Acts to achieve real and meaningful change in people’s lives is profound. Increasingly, people on the frontline of the climate crisis are also turning towards human rights to achieve justice. The potential impact of human rights-based climate litigation was recently demonstrated in the decision of the Land Court of Queensland in Warratah Coal Pty Ltd v Youth Verdict Ltd. In this case, the Court recommend against the grant of a mining lease and environmental authority to allow Warratah Coal to mine thermal coal in Queensland’s Gallilee Basin.  This case deserves closer examination to illustrate the way in which human rights enshrined in law can be mobilised in claims for climate justice.  

    On 10 December 2022, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRCF), the educational arm of the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) civil rights organization, announced this year’s recipients of 20 Global Innovation Small Grants as a part of the organization’s Global Partnerships Program. The grants range from $1,000 to $5,000 and are awarded to organizations around the world working to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in these countries. This announcement coincides with International Human Rights Day, which is celebrated annually around the world, marks the December 10 anniversary of the United Nations adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The declaration was the first of its kind and recognized that “every human being is born free and equal in rights and dignity.” The grants support members of of HRC’s growing global alumni network, which now consists of some 200 LGBTQ+ advocates in close to 100 countries. All of them have participated in one of the HRC Foundation’s global programs, including the flagship annual Innovative Advocacy Summit.

    The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, December 9, 2022 Ahead of International Human Rights Day on December 10, CHRD celebrated the courage and bravery of human rights advocates and calls on the Chinese government to stop violating its obligations to protect human rights and free those detained for exercising their human rights. We urge the international community to keep hope alive and continue supporting defenders on the forefront. 

    In recent years. Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has suffocated civil society and space for free expression, jailed COVID whistleblowers, journalists, lawyers, labor organizers and feminists, LGBTQ+ activists and religious practitioners. Yet we are encouraged by the glimmers of hope that have emerged in the recent protests. The protests demanding political changes began with spontaneous gatherings to pay tribute to Uyghur victims in the Urumqi Fire. The rapidly spreading protests, led by youth, likely proved to be the last straw in forcing the Chinese Party-State to reverse course on its draconian “zero-COVID” measures. 

    Reasons for hope: Young people have brought new vitality to the fight for human rights

    The scope of this short-lived wave of protests in cities across China was enormous, comparatively speaking. Thus far, there have been at least 68 protests across 31 cities since November 25, according to the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). And it has largely been young people who have led the protests. The Urumqi apartment complex fire, which took the lives of at least ten Uyghur women and children, as rescue was obstructed by barriers thought to be erected for COVID lockdown but likely for  “counter-terror” measures, brought people into the streets to mourn the loss of lives, to assemble and speak out against the devastating zero-COVID control and the political system that made such control possible.   

    Human Rights Day 2022 in China: Reasons for Hope 

    https://freedomhouse.org/article/imprisoned-not-forgotten-rights-abuses-and-global-events-hide-th

    https://genevasolutions.news/human-rights/volker-turk-it-s-my-duty-to-be-the-voice-of-human-rights

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

  • I Support Western Values More Than The West Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I’m often criticized as being “anti-west”, but I am not anti-west, I am pro-west. I am so pro-west that I want our values of peace, freedom, democracy, truth and justice to be real life things that exist in actual western civilization and not just a fiction that is taught to western schoolchildren.

    I am so pro-west that I want the west to embody the actual western values it pretends to embody. I am so pro-west that I support the practice of spreading western values to the west. I’m a western cultural imperialist, except I want to do western cultural imperialism to the west. I’m like a conquistador, a western colonialist setting sail to spread the wonders of western civilization to these godless western savages. Except instead of actually just bringing them murder, slavery, theft and disease I really am trying to bring them western civilization.

    I am so pro-west that I want the western values that were sold to me as a child to be actual things that actually exist. And because I support western values much more than the actual west does, I get called “anti-west” and told to move to China. Shit, they should move to China.

    A guy I follow on Twitter named David Gondek put it very nicely: “There is nothing wrong with western civilization that living up to its own professed principles wouldn’t fix.”

    It’s not “anti-west” to want the west to end warmongering, militarism, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, oligarchy, injustice, oppression and exploitation, it is pro-west. The “western values” of peace, justice, equality, democracy, freedom and accountability that we were taught in school are very good things. The only problem is that the west doesn’t actually value them.

    ❖

    To be clear, the US empire is getting everything it wants out of the war in Ukraine. It claims out of one side of its mouth that this was an unprovoked invasion that it never wanted, while admitting this war is giving it everything it ever wanted out the other side. The US did not just luckily stumble into a happy coincidence that just happens to advance all of its longstanding geostrategic agendas against a longtime geopolitical target. It deliberately created this situation, and only a baby-brained idiot would believe otherwise.

    Putin isn’t waging this war because he thought it would be a nice idea to grab a bit more land, he’s waging it because he assessed that he’d need to fight off NATO aggressions in Ukraine at some point and it would be easier to do it now than later. People say “Hurr hurr, if the US provoked this war to advance its own interests then Putin’s an idiot for falling for it,” but anyone who’s ever played chess knows strategy is often about forcing your opponent to choose between two bad options, either of which benefit you.

    There’s still this notion in some anti-imperialist factions that Putin is a brilliant strategic wizard who is outfoxing the empire in a game of 5D chess, but really he’s just fighting on the back foot against a far wealthier, far more powerful foe, and it’s costing his nation dearly.

    Whether Ukraine “wins” this war or not is irrelevant to the fact that the US empire was for relatively little cost able to create a massive sinkhole for Moscow to pour its energy and attention into, freeing up the imperial machine to focus on turning the screws on China.

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that China poses a threat solely to the US empire and its agendas of planetary domination, not to the US as a country. Empire architects are intentionally confusing Americans and other westerners by conflating these two issues in a massive propaganda campaign.

    ❖

    Being a child of wealthy parents is like being born into a cult whose entire focus is reinforcing class solidarity for the ruling class. Their social culture, academic culture, family culture etc are all dedicated to building an elite commonality that excludes the common riff raff.

    That’s why the ruling class have such vastly superior class solidarity to the working class. Most of us aren’t raised with an acute awareness that we are very different from the ruling class and that their interests conflict with our own, but everyone in the ruling class is. By the time they’re mature enough to take the reins, members of the ruling class have been run through an entire cultural processing system dedicated to forming solidarity with their class, while the rest of us have been focused on keeping our heads above water.

    ❖

    One of the dopiest beliefs on the “populist right” currently is that the ruling elites care about normalizing wokeism and social justice. Our rulers don’t give a fuck about trans rights or whatever, they only care about fanning the flames of culture war to prevent a class war. Our rulers would happily incinerate every trans person in the world if it meant cementing their rule. The instant Black Lives Matter sloganeering ceases to be politically useful it will be flushed down the toilet. They don’t care about marginalized groups, they just use them.

    It’s so stupid. Like yeah, powerful plutocrats and secretive government agencies are scheming to normalize LGBT rights because they stopped caring about power and domination and just love wokeness now. Good thinking, dipshit.

    In reality, marginalized groups pose no threat to you in any way whatsoever. You are meant to view them as the enemy so that you don’t view your rulers (who don’t care about either of you) as the enemy.

    ❖

    Rightists who think of themselves as anti-establishment rebels while clapping along with Trump, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are exactly the same as Democrats who called themselves The Resistance for clapping along with Mueller and Rachel Maddow. They’re the same kind of mainstream dupes, just with different narratives.

    “Resistance” liberals thought they were fighting the man because they were trying to get the president arrested. MAGA rightists think they’re fighting the man because something something deep state. But in reality they’re both just mainstream partisans who fully support the imperial uniparty.

    At least Democrats are honest about being Democrats. Rightists will clap along with mainstream Republican politicians and mainstream Republican pundits and then call other people mainstream partisan NPCs. Really they’re exactly the same. They’re Republicans LARPing as nonpartisan free thinkers.

    ❖

    I don’t dismiss mainstream politicians and media because it’s inherently bad to be mainstream, I do it because right now we live in a highly controlled civilization wherein the only things permitted to go mainstream are those that help (or at least do not hinder) our rulers. Right now the ruling class which controls all means of mainstream elevation only elevates things which either (A) actively advance their interests or (B) normalize the status quo we live in with things like shows and movies that depict people thriving under our current systems.

    So right now there’s a wisdom in rejection of the mainstream. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the idea that being mainstream is always bad. Our goal should be to have our own healthy values of peace, equality and justice be the mainstream one day.

    It’s a sign of toxicity to be elevated to the mainstream under the current status quo. But we should keep in mind that if we are successful in changing the status quo, the shifting of what becomes mainstream will one day be a sign of health.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.

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  • Ukrainian Women Prove Resilient in the Face of War



    The war in Ukraine is having growing negative effects on women and girls’ health and well-being. They encompass not only gender-based violence but include all aspects of women’s and girls’ lives. Access to basic services and life-saving sexual and reproductive healthcare has been drastically disrupted.

    Since the 2013 Maidan revolution, also known as the “dignity revolution,” Ukrainian women have been increasingly engaged in the political, social, and economic affairs of the country. This engagement has led to an increase in women’s political participation, manifested by gains in parliamentary seats and in village and regional councils. As a result, Ukraine has ratified or joined most international agreements on gender equality.

    The years of conflict… increased and deepened pre-existing gender inequalities and created new ones such as arbitrary killings, rape, and trafficking.

    In spite of these advances, however, gender inequalities persist, bolstered by traditional norms that promote systemic discrimination and biases against women and girls. These inequities have been aggravated by the war conducted by Russia in eastern Ukraine since 2014. The years of conflict since then have increased and deepened pre-existing gender inequalities and created new ones such as arbitrary killings, rape, and trafficking.

    The war has particularly affected marginalized and disadvantaged groups such as female-headed households, internally displaced persons, Roma people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. As a result, women facing multiple forms of discrimination are in need of special assistance.

    Today, millions of people have fled Ukraine and millions more—nearly two-thirds of them women and children—have been internally displaced and, as a consequence, do not have access to essential services such as healthcare, employment, and housing. Poverty and dependency on social assistance have increased and have pushed many women into the unprotected informal sectors of the economy.

    The Covid-19 pandemic, which began in Ukraine on March 3, 2020, threatened the gains that had been made on women’s rights, economic empowerment, and access to healthcare. Prolonged restrictions on mobility, particularly for women and young people, have increased despair and isolation, and have increased its negative effect on people with mental health challenges. Young people and children are forced to sacrifice their future so they can survive in the present.

    Even in times of peace, women tend to be more food insecure than men, but the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the number of women experiencing hunger, energy insecurity, and economic instability. The Russian aggression on Ukraine has provoked a redistribution of family roles, adding to the already heavy burden of women who, in addition to traditional home responsibilities are now obliged to look for additional sources of income.

    Women who are caring for children face extreme shortages of essential medicines, healthcare, and funds to obtain basic items, including baby food and formula. Many women face the challenge to accommodate and feed internally displaced people. This increases their unpaid care and domestic work responsibilities, often at the expense of their physical and mental health and well-being.

    The martial order issued by the Ukraine State Border Guard Service at the beginning of the Russian invasion that led to tens of thousands of civilians fleeing to other countries decreed that those between 18 and 40 years old should stay in the country. It is estimated that 95% of single-parent households are headed by single mothers, who now face increased pressure to provide for their families while male family members are more directly involved in defense activities.

    Despite the heavy burdens imposed by the war, Ukrainian women have shown considerable resilience and have contributed greatly to defense efforts. It is estimated that women make up 25% of the Ukrainian armed forces. This is an almost 10% increase from the beginning of the Russian invasion. Women have integrated fully into the armed forces, performing duties as soldiers and holding positions of command.

    The Russian military leaders didn’t expect such a strong resistance from the Ukrainian soldiers, and even less from a Ukrainian army strengthened by the participation of women, something that needs to be acknowledged and honored as a critical factor in the defense of their country.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Agroindustry Lobby Is Using the Ukraine War to Push Unsustainable Farming Policy

    During World War II, Hitler’s campaign of violence had disastrous consequences not only for the millions of civilians and soldiers who were killed, but also for the environment itself — driving the declines of bumblebees and other wildlife in the U.K. and continental Europe. Now, it seems that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine might have a similar effect, sparking a drive to increase food production…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Negotiate Now! A Call for Diplomacy in Ukraine



    The Russo-Ukrainian War drags on like a bad dream. Admittedly, there are slight glimmers of hope: Russian President Vladimir Putin stated his readiness to participate in an international peace conference; but Ukraine must firstrecognize Russian annexations, especially Crimea and territories around Kherson, demilitarize, and also guarantee Russian security. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he, too, is willing to negotiate; but Russia must first meet ten conditions including withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories including Crimea. The insincerity on both sides is striking: negotiations are unnecessary when the demands of each have been met in advance.

    Negotiate now! The stated preconditions for talks are merely excuses to delay them. There is no time to wait. Waves of Russian bombs are blasting Kyiv and Ukraine’s cities to bits while its Kamikaze drones have struck 600 miles into Russia, whose citizens are languishing under stringent sanctions. The defeats have mounted and Putin’s possible successors including Yevgeny Prigozhin, the power behind “Wagner,” the savage mercenary group, are sharpening their knives. Following the failure of the Russian president’s initial land strategy, which littered Ukraine with mass graves, his air attacks have wrecked one-third of Ukraine’s electric grids and power stations leaving one-third of its citizens without heat, water, or electricity in freezing temperatures. Estimates are that 100,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed. Thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost at the front, and many more at home through lack of consumer staples, hospital beds, and medicines. Those numbers will climb: Russia is preparing for a counter-attack using 200,000 fresh troops, Belarus might open a “second front,” Ukraine is continuing its land-war and employing ever more lethal missiles.

    The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments.

    Contradictions also exist whose resolution is possible only with the success of negotiations between these warring states:

    • Ukraine is completely reliant on Western humanitarian and military in defending its sovereignty. Terminating aid is unthinkable though indefinitely maintaining it at current levels is impossible.
    • Under present circumstances, Russia has an incentive to drag out the conflict while Ukraine feels the pressure to win an unwinnable war as quickly as possible. Either way, further escalation is likely.
    • Ukraine’s territorial victories have led Russia to bomb civilian targets mercilessly in a spiraling increase of violence. That will lead Ukraine to attempt strengthening its aviation corps, and air defense systems, whereas Russia will expand its army to protect against invasion. However, what both sides present as “defensive” strategies will likely turn into future offensives.
    • Leaders of Ukraine and Russia have staked their reputations on military victory even though their economies are on the verge of collapse, and their citizens are despairing. The national interests of civil society, and the national interests of the state, are thus objectively in conflict.

    Congress has just provided the American military with a 35% increase and a total budget of $813 billion. Much of it is intended to replenish weapons already sent to Ukraine, and new weapons will surely need replenishing in the future. Close to $20 billion has already gone to Ukraine and upwards of $48 billion has just been allocated for the coming year, including “patriot” defense missiles. However, the United States seems ready for talks: President Joe Biden has refused to send battle tanks, precision missiles, and fighter jets to Ukraine even while pressuring Iran to cease sending drones to Russia. That can all change. The House of Representatives in 2023 will have a new Republican majority controlled by its far-right wing. That faction’s most extremist representatives are very influential. They blame inflation on aid to Ukraine, call for abolishing it completely, and consider this “Biden’s war.”

    The United Kingdom is the second largest donor to Ukraine; it has provided roughly 2.3 billion euros in aid during 2022. However, the UK is expecting a recession; it is still reeling from Brexit, erratic economic policies, and its inflation rate is over 10%. The European Union is now shouldering more of the burden by implementing a total embargo on importing Russian oil. This will negatively impact the Russian economy, but also create hardships for its own citizens. Fissures are also growing between the Eastern and Western democracies over how to distribute the costs of aid as well as the destructive capacities of weapons sent to Ukraine. Understandably, Eastern countries are more worried about Russian territorial ambitions than their Western counterparts. They also differ in their views on possibility of war between NATO and Russia. Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible for any of them to ignore signs of an alliance forming between Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, and other dictatorships, to counter NATO.

    Western media justifiably salutes the courage and resilience of Ukraine in facing Russia’s genocidal invasion. However, support for the citizens of Ukraine is uncritically conflated with support for the government’s war efforts. Such thinking is compounded by fears of “appeasement,” though costs imposed by this war should temper Russia’s imperialist ambitions for the foreseeable future. Self-styled realists’ dismissal of negotiations with Russia reinforces their indifference to turning prolongation of the war into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, human rights activists bemoan Russian atrocities even as they endorse policies that assure their continuance. Should the situation worsen for Russia, probabilities increase that Putin will launch a “tactical” nuclear strike.

    Negotiations cannot wait until that happens, there is a withdrawal of forces, and the war aims of each side are accepted. That is especially the case since rough parameters for an agreement exist.

    • Negotiations must include all nations directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, and initially call for immediate de-escalation and troop withdrawals to the borders of March 23, 2022.
    • Security guarantees are necessary for both nations: Ukraine must agree to become a neutral and non-nuclear state, and agree to remain outside NATO in exchange for permission join the EU. Sanctions on Russia would be lifted in accordance with its de-escalation of the conflict.
    • Monitoring the implementation of peace and investigating human rights violations must involve independent international agencies. For example, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) will need to oversee plans to deal with refugees, exchange of prisoners, collection of corpses, and elimination of land-mines.
    • Creating an international “fund, similar perhaps to the global climate fund, is necessary for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

    Continuing support for Ukraine is vital, but it must come with conditions. Even speculative suggestions for peace are necessary when there is only talk of war. The humanitarian catastrophe is worsening and the global community must prioritize the material needs of everyday citizens (and soldiers) over those of governments. Not to talk about peace is to perpetuate war—pure and simple—and that is something the people of Russia and Ukraine cannot afford. Negotiate now!

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Year 2022 Displayed the Woeful Shortcomings of Humankind



    A year that started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is ending with famine in Africa, while still spreading death and misery through an enduring pandemic and a deteriorating climate crisis — 2022 has been an apocalyptic warning of the frailty of our planet and the woeful shortcomings of humankind.Beyond the stark statistics of millions of people displaced by war and natural disasters, it has been a 12 months that tragically highlighted our global interconnections and how a confluence of events and trends can bring another year of record levels of hunger.

    Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians (numbers given by the UN and involved parties vary enormously) have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched war on February 24. More than 7.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country. Billions of dollars have been spent on armaments.

    But the impact of the war has been felt worldwide, driving up prices of basic commodities such as oil, gas, grain, sunflower oil and fertilisers. Somalia, now in the grip of the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 40 years, used to import 90 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

    Commodities have been weaponised. Countries slipped back into recession, just as they were slowly recovering from the economic distress of Covid-19 lockdowns. A deepening relationship between sanctioned Russia and an energy- hungry China exacerbated existing tensions with the US over Taiwan. The result? China broke off climate cooperation efforts with the US in the run-up to the COP27 climate conference hosted by Egypt in November with 200 countries and 35,000 people attending.

    Against the backdrop of devastating floods in Pakistan and West Africa, and with 2022 on its way to becoming one of the five hottest years on record, agriculture and food security joined the COP27 agenda. Talks ran into extra time, as they tend to, and countries of the global South emerged with the landmark creation of a special fund paid by wealthier countries to address the Loss and Damage caused by climate change in the most vulnerable nations.
    “After 30 contentious years, delayed tactics by wealthy countries, a renewed spirit of solidarity, empathy and cooperation prevailed, resulting in the historic establishment of a dedicated fund,” said Yamide Dagnet, director for climate justice at the Open Society Foundations, reflecting a sense of hard fought victory among developing countries.

    Still unresolved however is which countries will give money and to whom. China in particular seems uneasy over which category it belongs to. However COP27 joined its 26 forerunners since 1995 in not reaching a binding agreement on cutting fossil fuel burning which has continued to rise globally, except for a brief pandemic dip. For this, many branded it a failure. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish. It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the opening plenary session. By the end, many felt the conference had concluded with the latter. Rather than falling, the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project show that total worldwide CO2 emissions in 2022 have reached near-record levels.

    Victims of devastating floods, heatwaves and forest fires, and severe drought in Central Sahel and East Africa surely needed no confirmation from the final decision text of COP27 which recognises “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger” and the vulnerability of food production to climate change.

    In this respect, COP27 recognised the importance of nature-based solutions – a theme driven by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in ringing alarm bells on the degraded soil, water sources and eco-systems caused by intensive agriculture with overuse of fertilisers and pesticides. According to FAO, more than 25 percent of arable soils worldwide are degraded, and the equivalent of a football pitch of soil is eroded every five seconds. The planet’s bio-diversity is being devastated as a result. As highlighted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in stressing the vital connections between Nature and people, a landmark report in July found that 50,000 wild species provide food, cosmetics, shelter, clothing, medicine and inspiration. Many face extinction. As international agencies and NGOs (and media outlets) jostled and competed for funding to deal with the fallout from wars and climate emergencies, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which is active in the Sahel cautioned that only 1.7 per cent of all climate finance reaches small-scale producers in developing countries and as little as 8% of overseas aid goes to projects focused primarily on gender equality. Women’s empowerment has been made a major focus of ASAP+, IFAD’s new climate change financing mechanism.

    Women and girls are paying “an unacceptably high price” among communities hit by severe drought in the Horn of Africa, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). It launched a $113.7 million appeal to scale-up life-saving reproductive health and protection services, including establishment of mobile and static clinics in displacement sites.

    Also overshadowed by wars and pandemics in 2022 were marginalised communities lacking a voice, suffering diseases such as leprosy or exploited in the form of child labour.

    Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, says many issues have been sidelined because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Society has the knowledge and means to stop and cure leprosy, he says in the ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ campaign by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative.

    “When people are still being discriminated against even after being cured, society has a disease. If we can cure society of this disease—discrimination—it would be truly epoch-making,” he told IPS.

    A similar message was delivered by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi who told the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour that a mere $53 billion per annum – equivalent to 10 days of military spending – would ensure all children in all countries benefit from social protection. International Labour Organisation and UNICEF statistics from 2020 show at least 160 million children are involved in child labour, a surge of 8.4 million in four years. Children denied education became a burning issue in Afghanistan in March when the Taliban declared that girls would be banned from secondary education. The UN said 1.1 million girls were affected. The late-night reversal of a decision by Taliban authorities to allow girls from grades 7 to 12 to return to school was met with outrage and distress, inside and outside Afghanistan. Denial of human rights to girls and women has fuelled the desire of many to get out of Afghanistan and seek a better life elsewhere, adding to the millions around the world forced to flee their homes because of conflict, repression or disaster. The Ukraine conflict has displaced more than 14 million people, about a third of the population.

    A UN Office on Drugs and Crime report on trafficking warns that refugees from Ukraine are at risk of including sexual exploitation, forced labour, illegal adoption and surrogacy, forced begging and forced criminality.

    As they come over border crossings into Poland, refugees – including victims of rape – are greeted with posters and flyers carrying warnings about jail terms for breaking local abortion laws, images of miscarried foetuses, and a quote from Mother Theresa saying: “Abortion is the greatest threat to peace”.

    UNDP, which is assisting the Ukraine government in getting access to public services for IDPs, says in its 2022 report, Turning the tide on internal displacement, that earlier and increased support to development is an essential condition for emerging from crisis in a sustainable way.

    “More efforts are needed to end the marginalization of internally displaced people, who must be able to exercise their full rights as citizens including through access to vital services such as health care, education, social protection and job opportunities” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.

    Nearly one million Rohingya refugees languishing in refugee camps in Bangladesh after being driven out of Myanmar in waves since 2016 would surely agree.

    Asif Saleh, executive director of BRAC, said to be the world’s largest NGO and founded by Sir Fazle after the independence of Bangladesh in 1972, says work needs to “shift towards a development-like approach from a very short-term humanitarian crisis-focused approach”. But the only solution for the Rohingya refugees is their sustainable and voluntary repatriation to Myanmar. As 2022 closes, that unfortunately looks highly unlikely as the military junta that seized power in 2021 fights ethnic armed organisations on multiple fronts.

    There was one seismic milestone event that happened in late 2022 although no one is quite sure exactly where and when. The few people to witness it were not aware either – not that it prevented the UN from declaring it a special day. The birth of the 8 billionth person was celebrated on November 15. The world’s population has doubled from 4 billion in 1974 and UN projections suggest we will be supporting about 9.7 billion people in 2050. Global population is forecast to peak at about 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

    Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, sent a message to the baby, and the rest of the world, as countries meet in Montreal for the COP15 biodiversity conference this month.

    “We’ve just welcomed the 8 billionth member of the human race on this planet. That’s a wonderful birth of a baby, of course. But we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure,” she said.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Urgent Foreign Policy Steps Biden Should Take in 2023



    It’s been an extraordinary year in foreign policy, dominated by an ongoing, brutal war following the February Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO, struggling with its mission before 2022, appears more emboldened and unified than ever.

    Meanwhile, tensions have continued to roil between the U.S. and China on a number of fronts, not the least, the fate of Taiwan.

    In the Middle East, Biden’s post-Russian outreach to Saudi Arabia and inability to stop assistance to Riyadh in the Yemen war underscores the problematic nature of Washington’s relations with despotic governments there, while trying to maintain an “autocracies vs. democracies” approach to geopolitics in other parts of the world.

    After two years in office, the Iran nuclear deal looks “dead,” while the U.S. slaps more sanctions on Tehran in the wake of crackdowns on protesters and reported drone transfers to Russia.

    Phew.

    With so much going on, we asked our own Quincy Institute experts to weigh in on the following prompt: what needs to happen almost immediately in 2023 for U.S foreign policy to start out on the right foot for the year? Why?

    Bill Hartung, senior research fellow; arms trade, Pentagon budgets :

    The Biden administration should start the year by stemming the tide of ever rising Pentagon budgets. The current budget is one of the highest since World War II, and the increase from FY2022 to FY2023 alone is higher than the entire military budget of every other country in the world except China. Large portions of these funds are wasted on price gouging, cost overruns, and weapons that aren’t useful for the current challenges we face. We can provide a more effective defense for less by cutting waste, eliminating dysfunctional and unnecessary weapons programs, and pursuing a more restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy that truly puts diplomacy first.

    Ben Freeman, research fellow; foreign lobbying, transparency

    Congress and the president must, finally, enact meaningful reforms to curb foreign influence in the U.S. Behind most U.S. foreign policy decisions are agents working on behalf of foreign powers—in both illicit and legal influence operations—that often push U.S. foreign policy in a decidedly more interventionist and militarized direction. This is usually in the interests of these foreign governments, not the U.S. national interest.

    To thwart this malign influence or, at the very least, to increase the public’s awareness of it, a number of reforms are needed. This includes improvements to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring think tanks to disclose all foreign funding (particularly when those think tank’s scholars are testifying before Congress), and providing more resources to the Department of Justice and other government agencies investigating illicit election interference operations like those launched by Russia and the UAE.

    Anatol Lieven, Director of Eurasia Program

    The first priority for the Biden administration in 2023 should be to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine, leading to peace negotiations. The longer the war continues, the greater the damage to the world economy and to key U.S. allies in Europe.

    Ukraine has preserved its independence and saved or reconquered the great majority of its lands and has little more of real importance to gain in this war. Further major Ukrainian advances would threaten Russian control of Crimea and risk nuclear war. They would also take Ukraine into territories whose populations are in fact loyal to Russia.

    In the meantime, Russian bombardments are causing great harm to the Ukrainian population and economy, and the exigencies of wartime are increasing authoritarianism in Ukraine. Only when the fighting ends can Ukraine begin the process of reconstruction, political reform, and moves to join the European Union.

    Suzanne Loftus, research fellow, Eurasia Program:

    While continuing to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, the Biden Administration, with the help of the international community, must start encouraging a feasible end to the war through the use of diplomacy. Concomitantly, a long-term security agreement for the future of Europe should be reached to ensure lasting peace on the continent. Through the use of political pragmatism, Washington must help open a path to a peace that would ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, end the ongoing suffering, uphold international law, create lasting peace in Europe, and ease current ripple effects on the world economy

    Sarang Shidore, Director of Studies and senior research fellow, Asia:

    The United States should do two things to start off the new year. First, return, through concrete actions, to the One China policy that has been a solid foundation for peace and stability in Asia for decades. The current drip-drip undermining of this policy is a dangerous, slippery slope that is generating a major risk of great power war. Second, discard counterproductive tropes that stretch credibility such as “democracy v. autocracy” and “rules-based order” when engaging the Global South. Instead, begin the hard work of finding intersections of interests and fashioning new bargains that retain or expand non-militarized U.S. influence in the region.

    Annelle Sheline, research fellow, Middle East Program:

    The Biden administration should end all U.S. support for Saudi military actions in Yemen. If the administration fails to take action, Senator Bernie Sanders should reintroduce the Yemen War Powers Resolution to end U.S. involvement in that devastating conflict. Biden could transform U.S. policy towards the Middle East overall by rethinking America’s support for dictators by reducing arms sales to these governments, and instead prioritize partnership in the realms of economic development, education, and technology.

    Steve Simon, senior research analyst, Middle East:

    The U.S. should declare a renewed focus on climate change and international public health challenges, especially early warning systems; schedule a major address on the administration’s trade and diplomatic initiatives, especially in Asia and Africa. A policy is emerging but a statement would be useful for Congress and in foreign capitals. In the State of the Union address in January, broach the topic of a national security budget that would allocate resources to agencies and departments outside of the Pentagon; and, hearkening back to days of old, declare a renewed commitment to science education and research funded out of DoD resources.

    Michael Swaine, Director of the East Asia Program:

    Stop digging the hole.

    In Asia, the United States needs to discard any remaining aspirations for regional dominance, listen more closely and respond more realistically to the concerns and needs of the middle powers, including key U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan. Most of these powers want to work with both the U.S. and China to develop a more economically-oriented, inclusive, and positive-sum set of policy objectives that reverse the polarization of the region, lessen the securitization of virtually every policy sphere, and provide a revised set of regional norms and standards that most countries can support, including China. Many of these nations also want the Taiwan situation stabilized on the basis of a revived commitment by the U.S. and China to One China and peaceful unification, respectfully.

    The U.S. could start this process by framing these efforts as a search, in consultation with other Asian nations, of a model for constructive, beneficial forms of peaceful coexistence among all political systems.

    This is broad and aspirational, but as a first step, requires serious listening and the dropping of the usual political slogans.

    Adam Weinstein, research fellow; Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan

    Washington needs to recalibrate its engagement in parts of the world where U.S. military intervention and its side-effects dictated relations for decades, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. Drawdowns and reductions in U.S. troops should not spell diplomatic and economic disengagement. Military cooperation and force are occasionally useful tools to augment diplomacy, but for too long they have eclipsed it altogether. Traditional diplomacy was relegated to putting out fires for failed U.S. military interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our generals became reckless, while our diplomats grew risk averse.

    Now what is needed is a creative rethink of how diplomacy, aid, and economic engagement is conducted. These tools are less blunt than military intervention, but their results are inherently more sustainable. Washington must possess the humility to accept the conditions it cannot positively influence, strategic patience and foresight to tackle what it can, and self-awareness to know the difference.

    Jake Werner, research fellow; East Asia, China

    The Biden administration should prepare a hard pivot to U.S.–China cooperation on issues of global significance, to launch at Blinken’s upcoming visit to Beijing. The administration devoted its first two years to organizing the most powerful countries in the world against China, from steady condemnation of China’s system and its foreign policy, to initiatives countering China’s overseas endeavors and cutting off its economy from advanced technology, as well as increasing saber-rattling around Taiwan.

    The Biden record signals that China cannot survive and prosper in the world the U.S. seeks to shape. If the administration devoted as much energy and resources to working with China on the truly existential threats facing humanity—including necessary revision of some of the most hostile and coercive policies of the last two years—then the relationship could be diverted from the current path of destructive conflict toward constructive coexistence.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies

    When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).

    This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).

    I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.

    This censorship is so normal in America so that on 24 November 2016, the Washington Post headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”, and it reported that a

    group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).

    The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

    PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

    It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.

    If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.

    There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).

    On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.

    I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:

    Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:

    Dear Eric, do you know who are these guys? https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/rating-process-criteria/

    They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.

    Do they have any influence on Search engines and social media? Will we have any problems at all?

    Thanks

    D.

    I replied with an email

    Subject: Since you are a co-founder,

    Date: Dec 24, 2022 at 9:20 AM

    To: moc.hcetdraugswennull@llirb.nevets

    Cc: [D.]

    I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:

    [I pasted in D.’s message to me.]

    As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.

    It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:

    Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site 

    https://moderndiplomacy.eu/author/ericzuesse/ 

    (but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:

    You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!

    Sincerely,

    Eric Zuesse

    Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:

    I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?

    D. responded:

    Dear Eric,

    Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.

    I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.

    Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.

    Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.

    Kind Regards

    D.

    Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:

    We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?

    [Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]

                   We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.

                   For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”

    [The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]

                   However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. … Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

                   A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”

                   In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.

                   In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]

                   An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)

                   The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:

    “Mortar shelling in Kramatorsk. Nazis attacking city district.” 18 May 2014

    “Ukraine crisis: ‘Those fascists killed this girl and they will be in hell’” 5 May 2014

    “Ukraine Crisis: Kiev’s Slovyansk ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ Kills 300 Pro-Russian Separatists” 4 June 2014

    “Luhansk. After Air Strike. Part 4 (of 6)” 2 June 2014

    “AP’s Matt Lee challenges White House’s lies on Ukraine” 7 July 2014

    “Obama Definitely Caused the Malaysian Airliner to Be Downed” 18 July 2014

    “How Our People Do Their Extermination-Jobs In Ukraine” 23 October 2014

    “What Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did” 10 October 2014

    “Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed in Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’” 3 February 2015]

    My final reply to D.’s final rejection of my position was:

    As regards myself, I am with Chris Hedges (who quit the N.Y. Times over this) and with Consortium News (which is standing up against the same pressure that you are caving to), in order to have any hope that the future might possibly be better than the present.

    At the same time when News Guard was threatening Modern Diplomacy and perhaps forcing that site to reject all future submissions from me, the news-site, Consortium News, was likewise being threatened by Brill’s shills. On December 29th, Consortium News headlined “On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine: A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to NewsGuard’s charge that Consortium News published false content about its extent”. That, too, is an excellent example of censors killing truths and leaving only lies. However, mega-corporate America has a number of such ‘fact-checking’ truth-destroying organizations: New Guard is only one of them.

    These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).

    The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.

    Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.

    The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.

    The post Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Putin Planned Before Invasion to Cut Off Ukraine’s Electricity During the Winter

    Despite international calls for a holiday ceasefire, the Russian military launched massive missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian towns and energy infrastructure this week, killing several civilians and robbing millions more of heat and light as the new year approaches. Russian President Vladimir Putin is clearly punishing Ukrainians for resisting his invasion and locking his forces in a bloody…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Zelensky’s Road to Washington


    Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Larry Fink are preparing to turn a profit on the destruction of Ukraine.
    “Blackrock to Take Zelenskyy’s Panhandling Act to the Next Level.”

    The post Zelensky’s Road to Washington first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Best of CounterSpin 2022

          CounterSpinBestOf2022.mp3

    All year long CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need.

    CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them.

    Rakeen Mabud

    “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources (2/1/22). The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address them in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year.

     

    Bryce Greene

    The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. 

    The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because of sooprise, sooprise of how we’re portrayed in US media.

    Layla A. Jones

    Layla A. Jones

    We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com. 

     

     

    As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage, we talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles,  Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,  the 40th remembrance and rededication at VincentChin.org. 

    Jeannie Park

    Jeannie Park

    Of a piece with elite media’s denial that racist harm is still meaningfully happening is the flicking away of efforts—decades long, thoughtful, inclusive efforts—to address that harm. We talked with  Coalition for a Diverse Harvard‘s Jeannie Park about affirmative action at Harvard University. 

    Muslim Advocates' Sumayyah Waheed

    Sumayyah Waheed

    In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them—given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—”based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.” We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. 

    CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are so many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation, in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, leaving the vast majority outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise, or try to find the space to talk around it.

    Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that it’s their way or the highway….it’s just not true.

    Free Press's Mike Rispoli

    Mike Rispoli

    One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old media outlets, which are for sure suffering… but about instead about invigorating community information needs—a very different thing! The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy Mike Rispoli at Free Press. 

    The post Best of CounterSpin 2022 appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Awakening From The Narrative Matrix: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Western analysts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine, westerners spent four years being propagandized into hating Russia, then Russia invades and now western imperialists say the war is advancing US interests. But remember: it was an “unprovoked invasion”.

    The official narrative is that western aggressions played no role in provoking the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then how come so many western experts spent years warning that western aggressions would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

    Then in the years leading up to the invasion, westerners were hammered with media-induced panic about Russia, a nation they hadn’t thought much about since the early nineties. These mass media narratives all had their origins in the US intelligence cartel, which happens to have sought the destruction of the Russian Federation since the fall of the Soviet Union.

    Oh, and don’t forget the 2019 Pentagon-funded RAND paper which found that US geostrategic interests could be advanced by provoking Russia into overextending itself in areas like Ukraine. And now western imperialists are merrily boasting that this war is being used to advance longstanding US strategic interests.

    But remember, it’s very important that you believe Putin invaded Ukraine completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. It couldn’t possibly have been the US empire doing what it always does and advancing its geostrategic interests by sinister means after lubricating the way with mass media propaganda, wedging Moscow into choosing between two bad options. Putin is just an evil crazy Hitler man.

    Because Putin is Bad, that means the US and its allies are necessarily Good. We know this because we’ve spent our lives being conditioned by Hollywood to look for Good Guys and Bad Guys in every conflict. If someone is doing a Bad Thing, the other side must be doing Good Things.

    And while we’re all busy clapping along with this artificial children’s cartoon show version of reality, experts are saying this conflict has put our world at greater risk of nuclear war than we have ever been, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole world is being imperiled by a unipolarist power grab orchestrated by our rulers. The only thing keeping this from being obvious to everyone is the massive amounts of propaganda that our entire civilization has been aggressively hammered with since well before it began.

    ❖

    It is always legitimate and good to criticize the well-documented aggressions of the world’s most powerful government, wherever they occur. Always, always, always. It requires no justification. If people act like you’re a weird freak or a Russian propagandist for doing it, it’s because their position is wrong and their arguments are dogshit.

    ❖

    Every few years the right produces a billionaire with extensive ties to the US deep state who poses as a populist hero who is fighting the deep state. Before it was Trump. Now it’s Musk. Later on it’ll be someone else. But it’s just a show to make it look like someone’s fighting.

    Both Trump and Musk get the opposite mainstream faction barking and snarling at them in exactly the same way Hillary Clinton drove Republicans insane. And in reality Musk, Trump and Clinton all serve the establishment that’s defended by both the Democrat and Republican parties. It’s all kayfabe combat staged to make it look like someone’s fighting on behalf of the disaffected Americans who are growing angry with their rulers’ complete indifference to them. Give them a hero to clap along with and they won’t take up the fight for themselves.

    Keeping everyone barking at shiny figureheads who represent one mainstream faction keeps people glued to mainstream factions which are framed as for or against those shiny figureheads. This keeps everyone subscribed to mainstream worldviews.

    They don’t just control the opposition, they control the opposition to the controlled opposition. That’s what the AOC/Bernie/TYT progressives are, and it’s what the MAGA/Tucker Carlson/Elon Musk faction is as well. They pretend they’re fighting the establishment while protecting it.

    ❖

    It actually isn’t an exaggeration to compare the mainstream worldview to the virtual world depicted in The Matrix. The only difference is that instead of AI keeping us imprisoned, it’s psychopathic oligarchs and secretive government agencies, and instead of code, it’s narrative.

    Few understand just how pervasively dominated our civilization is by narrative. How all our culture, beliefs, political and economic systems, are all made entirely out of mental stories that we collectively pretend are real — towers of narrative built on top of our basic animal needs.

    The experience of the individual is likewise dominated by narrative. If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know how the mind babbles and churns even when you try to silence it for a minute. All that babbling is made of mental stories about life that have no concrete reality. Even your very idea of yourself is made of narrative. Not just your stories about who you are and how you are, but the actual existence of a “self” that’s separate and separable from the rest of life. It’s all made of believed mental narrative, and its reality is entirely illusory.

    Because human life is so dominated by narrative both collectively and individually, anyone who can manipulate the narrative can manipulate the humans. They can manipulate how we think, speak, act, shop and vote, as individuals, and at mass scale.

    And they do.

    Power is controlling what happens. Real power is controlling what people think about what happens. Our rulers do this by exerting massive amounts of influence over news media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, think tanks, NGOs, and other systems of narrative manipulation.

    They manipulate to start wars and roll out major control agendas of course, but their narrative control goes so much deeper than that. The bulk of it consists of mundane day-to-day manipulations which manufacture the normalization of status quo systems, making us think madness is sanity. They manipulate us into thinking poverty is normal, that our economic systems are the only way things could possibly be, that militarism is good, that it’s perfectly sane and expected that we’d keep voting in political systems that never change anything no matter who we vote for, and that there’s no other option anyway.

    They don’t just lie to us about what’s happening — they lie to us about who we are. About what we should value. About how we should measure our successes and failures as individuals. We’re saturated in these narratives from birth, and they all serve those who rule over us.

    And we remain enslaved in that way: thinking, speaking, moving, working, spending, voting and behaving in perfect alignment with the wishes of the powerful. In the west we think we’re free because we can do what we want, not seeing that our rulers control what it is we will want to do. We don’t grasp how profoundly unfree we actually are, because another major purpose of the narrative matrix is to trick us into thinking that we are free. In reality we’re no freer than we would be if we were kept in a coma in a vat with our brains jacked into a digital world.

    Awakening from the narrative matrix isn’t easy. It takes work. And just like in the movie, the path down that rabbit hole begins with a choice. That choice, that red pill, is committing yourself to a sincere devotion to living in truth, come what may. Even when the truth is inconvenient. Even when the truth goes against your biases and partisan loyalties. Even when it means seeing that everything you believe is a lie.

    It takes time and effort to extract the lies from your perception, because you’ve been consuming them your whole life. It takes sincerity. It takes self-honesty. It takes a willingness to go places that you’d rather not go. And even when you think you’re done, you’re probably not.

    Extracting yourself from the narrative matrix is a rabbit hole that keeps going and going. You clear one pile of lies only to find another. You get clear on your delusions about the outer world and discover a whole dimension of delusions about your inner world. It goes on and on.

    But the clearer things get, the faster and more fun it becomes. The clearer you are on the false narratives about the world, the more effective you are at helping others see them. The clearer you are on the false narratives about yourself, the happier and more effective you become.

    And then you’re ready to fight. You’re awake enough from the narrative matrix to help dismantle it, and to help wake up others.

    And of course the Agent Smiths will appear to try to stop you. They will appear wherever you try to shine light upon things that want to stay hidden. They’ll appear as strangers on the internet. They’ll appear as your friends and family. They’ll appear in you, trying to dissuade you from looking at parts of yourself that can only exist in unconsciousness.

    But they are very beatable. Absolutely they are. Every positive change in human behavior, whether individual or collective, is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. And that’s all we’re doing here: expanding consciousness. Making the unseen seen. That’s the path. Just as in The Matrix there will be forces within and without that want to maintain the status quo of darkness and unconsciousness, but the hidden can’t remain hidden forever. “As sure as God made black and white, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.”

    Really we’re just an adolescent species going through an awkward and confusing transition phase as we learn to use these newly evolved brains more maturely, and our confusion is being exploited in the meantime by a few clever humans who understand manipulation better than the rest of is. That’s all this really is. We’re on the journey to becoming a mature and conscious species, and when that happens the manipulators won’t be able to function, because they won’t have these large pools of human unconsciousness to hunt in. They’ll be like sharks flopping around on the beach sand.

    We can help facilitate this by taking that red pill. By making a sincere commitment to be true to what’s true, come what may. And then awakening the others, so that we can overthrow our oppressors and build a beautiful world together.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • BlackRock Accused of ‘Trying to Cash In On the Disaster’ With Ukraine Reconstruction Deal



    Investment behemoth BlackRock was accused Thursday of what author Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism” after war-ravaged Ukraine’s president announced he would work with the firm to coordinate foreign investment in the country’s reconstruction.

    “The BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said Wednesday following the president’s video conference with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

    Zelenskyy’s office said that the two men “agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.”

    In language evocative of Klein’sThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, tweeted that BlackRock is “already trying to cash in on the disaster in Ukraine.”

    Investigative journalist and Status Coup CEO Jordan Chariton predicted that “this is going to make the neoliberalism and privatization the U.S. inflicted on post-Soviet Russia look like child’s play.”

    New York-based BlackRock—the planet’s largest asset manager—handles about $8 trillion in client assets and has around 70 offices in 30 countries. The firm has faced intense criticism for actions including being the world’s top investor in fossil fuels and deforestation, war profiteering, and doing business with human rights violators.

    Zelenskyy had a message for foreign investors as he virtually opened the September 6 trading session at the New York Stock Exchange: “We are free. We are strong. We are open for business.”

    “Ukraine is the story of a future victory and a chance for you to invest now in projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars to share the victory with us,” he added.

    On that day Zelenskyy also launched the Advantage Ukraine initiative in a bid to draw $400 billion in foreign investment in a land of “superior growth opportunities.”

    The program focuses on 10 key sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including the military-industrial complex, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, power, natural resources, and industrial manufacturing.

    “It is necessary to invest in Ukraine now, and not wait for the end of the war,” Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said in a statement touting the initiative.

    In July, top officials from some of the world’s leading economic powers met in Lugano, Switzerland for the most recent Ukraine Recovery Conference. Last year’s conference agenda included core “shock doctrine” policies of “decentralization, privatization, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform,” as well as “Euro-Atlantic integration.”

    The Russian onslaught against Ukraine has devastated its infrastructure and economy. According to the World Bank, it will cost at least half a trillion dollars to rebuild Ukraine once the war ends.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Can Russia and Ukraine Negotiate an End to War Amid New Wave of Strikes?

    The war in Ukraine is now in its 11th month, and Russia unleashed a new bombardment this week of cities across the country, including the capital Kyiv. This comes as both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin have expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the war — but their positions remain so far apart that there are no real hopes of peace talks…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?



    When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

    It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

    Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

    Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

    Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

    Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

    The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

    In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

    Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

    In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

    The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

    Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

    On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

    Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

    That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

    Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

    The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

    France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

    Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

    Scholz was even more specific. In an article in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

    This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

    Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

    Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

    Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

    Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

    A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

    Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

    U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

    Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

    Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic ‘Security Dilemma’

    On December 27 2022, both Russia and Ukraine issued calls for ending the war in Ukraine, but only on non-negotiable terms that they each know the other side will reject.

    Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a “peace summit” in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the precondition that Russia must first face prosecution for war crimes in an international court. On the other side, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov issued a chilling ultimatum that Ukraine must accept Russia’s terms for peace or “the issue will be decided by the Russian Army.”

    There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded, and the stench of death.

    But what if there were a way of understanding this conflict and possible solutions that encompassed the views of all sides and could take us beyond one-sided narratives and proposals that serve only to fuel and escalate the war? The crisis in Ukraine is in fact a classic case of what International Relations scholars call a “security dilemma,” and this provides a more objective way of looking at it.

    A security dilemma is a situation in which countries on each side take actions for their own defense that countries on the other side then see as a threat. Since offensive and defensive weapons and forces are often indistinguishable, one side’s defensive build-up can easily be seen as an offensive build-up by the other side. As each side responds to the actions of the other, the net result is a spiral of militarization and escalation, even though both sides insist, and may even believe, that their own actions are defensive.

    In the case of Ukraine, this has happened on different levels, both between Russia and national and regional governments in Ukraine, but also on a larger geopolitical scale between Russia and the United States/NATO.

    The very essence of a security dilemma is the lack of trust between the parties. In the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis served as an alarm bell that forced both sides to start negotiating arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms that would limit escalation, even as deep levels of mistrust remained. Both sides recognized that the other was not hell-bent on destroying the world, and this provided the necessary minimum basis for negotiations and safeguards to try to ensure that this did not come to pass.

    After the end of the Cold War, both sides cooperated with major reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but the United States gradually withdrew from a succession of arms control treaties, violated its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and used military force in ways that directly violated the UN Charter’s prohibition against the “threat or use of force.” U.S. leaders claimed that the conjunction of terrorism and the existence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons gave them a new right to wage “preemptive war,” but neither the UN nor any other country ever agreed to that.

    U.S. aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was alarming to people all over the world, and even to many Americans, so it was no wonder that Russian leaders were especially worried by America’s renewed post-Cold War militarism. As NATO incorporated more and more countries in Eastern Europe, a classic security dilemma began to play out.

    President Putin, who was elected in 2000, began to use international fora to challenge NATO expansion and U.S. war-making, insisting that new diplomacy was needed to ensure the security of all countries in Europe, not only those invited to join NATO.

    The former Communist countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO out of defensive concerns about possible Russian aggression, but this also exacerbated Russia’s security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders, especially as the United States and NATO refused to address those concerns.

    In this context, broken promises on NATO expansion, U.S. serial aggression in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, and absurd claims that U.S. missile defense batteries in Poland and Romania were to protect Europe from Iran, not Russia, set alarm bells ringing in Moscow.

    The U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms control treaties and its refusal to alter its nuclear first strike policy raised even greater fears that a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons were being designed to give the United States a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.

    On the other side, Russia’s increasing assertiveness on the world stage, including its military actions to defend Russian enclaves in Georgia and its intervention in Syria to defend its ally the Assad government, raised security concerns in other former Soviet republics and allies, including new NATO members. Where might Russia intervene next?

    As the United States refused to diplomatically address Russia’s security concerns, each side took actions that ratcheted up the security dilemma. The United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, which led to rebellions against the post-coup government in Crimea and Donbas. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

    Even if all sides were acting in good faith and out of defensive concerns, in the absence of effective diplomacy they all assumed the worst about each other’s motives as the crisis spun further out of control, exactly as the “security dilemma” model predicts that nations will do amid such rising tensions.

    Of course, since mutual mistrust lies at the heart of any security dilemma, the situation is further complicated when any of the parties is seen to act in bad faith. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted that Western leaders had no intention of enforcing Ukraine’s compliance with the terms of the Minsk II agreement in 2015, and only agreed to it to buy time to build up Ukraine militarily.

    The breakdown of the Minsk II peace agreement and the continuing diplomatic impasse in the larger geopolitical conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia plunged relations into a deepening crisis and led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials on all sides must have recognized the dynamics of the underlying security dilemma, and yet they failed to take the necessary diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis.

    Peaceful, diplomatic alternatives have always been available if the parties chose to pursue them, but they did not. Does that mean that all sides deliberately chose war over peace? They would all deny that.

    Yet all sides apparently now see advantages in a prolonged conflict, despite the relentless daily slaughter, dreadful and deteriorating conditions for millions of civilians, and the unthinkable dangers of full-scale war between NATO and Russia. All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win, and so they keep escalating the war, along with all its impacts and the risks that it will spin out of control.

    President Biden came to office promising a new era of American diplomacy, but has instead led the United States and the world to the brink of World War III.

    Clearly, the only solution to a security dilemma like this is a cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage, followed by the kind of diplomacy that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and successive arms control treaties. Former UN official Alfred de Zayas has also called for UN-administered referenda to determine the wishes of the people of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.

    It is not an endorsement of an adversary’s conduct or position to negotiate a path to peaceful coexistence. We are witnessing the absolutist alternative in Ukraine today. There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded and the stench of death.

    If proposals for peace talks are to be more than PR exercises, they must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the security needs of all sides, and a willingness to compromise to see that those needs are met and that all the underlying conflicts are addressed.

  • ‘Every War Ends in a Diplomatic Way’: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Floats February Peace Summit



    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Monday that his government is aiming to hold a “peace summit” in February with the goal of ending Russia’s assault, which is now in its 10th month.

    “Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” Kuleba said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”

    Kuleba suggested the summit could be mediated by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, a vocal advocate of diplomatic talks to end an invasion that has killed thousands of civilians, devastated Ukraine’s infrastructure, and sparked a massive humanitarian crisis.

    “The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit, because this is not about making a favor to a certain country,” the foreign minister said. “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

    But Kuleba added that Ukraine would only extend an invite to Russia if it first faced war crimes prosecution in an international court—a precondition certain to draw objections from Moscow. The International Criminal Court is currently investigating alleged war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine.

    Kuleba’s remarks came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is “ready to negotiate” an end to the war, though he has refused to discuss withdrawing forces from the territories he illegally annexed in September.

    Peace talks to end the war in Ukraine have been backed by dozens of countries around the world.

    During his visit to the United States last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a “just peace” would entail “no compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom, and territorial integrity of my country” and “payback for all the damages inflicted by Russian aggression.”

    Zelenskyy recently dropped his demand that Putin be removed from power before peace talks can resume.

    The Biden White House approved another $2 billion in military assistance for Ukraine during Zelenskyy’s visit, agreeing to send the war-torn country a Patriot missile system as well as so-called precision bomb kits.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Claim That The Ukraine War Advances US Interests Discredits The Claim That It’s “Unprovoked”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    One of the most illustrative examples of how the mainstream worldview is based on narratives rather than facts is the way Republican officials like senate minority leader Mitch McConnell have been branded servants of Russia despite consistent track records as virulent Russia hawks.

    “Moscow Mitch”, as Democrats absurdly titled him during the height of Russiagate hysteria in 2019, gave a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday arguing that the primary reason to back Ukraine in its war against Russia is because doing so serves US interests.

    “President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”

    McConnell argued that backing Ukraine “will massively wear down the arsenal that is available to Putin for future efforts to use bullying and bloodshed,” taking a stab at the Biden administration for not requesting more money for this immensely useful proxy war.

    “So I’ll say it one more time. Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests,” McConnell said. “That’s why Republicans rejected the Biden Administration’s original request for Ukraine assistance as insufficient.

    “Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia,” McConnell concluded. “Increasing the pressure on Putin’s regime can and should be a bipartisan priority.”

    You see US empire lackeys gushing all the time about how extraordinarily efficient and cost-effective the proxy war in Ukraine is for furthering US interests against Russia, which is funny because they spend the rest of the time talking about how this invasion was “unprovoked” and rending their garments about how horrible it is. The official imperial position is somehow simultaneously (A) “We hate this war and never wanted it,” and (B) “This war benefits us tremendously.”

    The only way to reconcile these two positions is to believe that Vladimir Putin acted against the interests of Russia in the service of the United States by invading Ukraine, for no other reason than because he is too stupid and evil to do otherwise. The other choice is to do what most empire loyalists do and simply not think very hard about those obvious contradictions.

    Alternatively, you can consider the possibility that Putin was pressured into choosing between two bad options by the many aggressive provocations the empire has been making for years. Empire apologists always claim that western provocations had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then why did so many western experts spend years warning that western provocations would lead to an invasion of Ukraine?

    Plainly the claim that the US is just an innocent bystander helping its good buddy Ukraine because it loves freedom and democracy is discredited by the claim — often made by those very same claimants — that this war serves US interests. But you hear them bounce seamlessly between the two all the time.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Some of the usual suspects are using Zelensky's visit to whine about how expensive aid to Ukraine is, so it's a good opportunity for this CEPA report that notes that for just 5% of the US military budget, we've disabled 50% of Russia's military power. https://t.co/T4ksyeqx3M

    — Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) December 21, 2022

    There’s a viral thread making the rounds on Twitter right now by a historian named Brett Devereaux that exemplifies this perfectly. In the first tweet in the thread he’s enthusing about how “for just 5% of the US military budget, we’ve disabled 50% of Russia’s military power,” then in the very next post in the thread he’s weeping about what a humanitarian crisis the war is and how we just want peace, and then in the very next post after that he’s saying “from a pure realpolitik perspective, Putin’s war was a massive blunder that has strengthened the US global position, degrading Russian capabilities (which frees up resources for other threats) and strengthening our alliances.”

    California representative Adam Schiff, who has been calling this war “unprovoked” since the invasion, was saying all the way back during the Trump impeachment hearings of 2020 that “the US aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

    Another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, said on Twitter this past May that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

    “It is in America’s interests to help Ukraine defeat one of our most powerful foes,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David French in the wake of Zelensky’s PR appearance in Washington.

    “It is in America’s national security interests for Putin’s Russia to be defeated in Ukraine,” tweeted warmongering senator Lindsey Graham.

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    US chauvinism & warmongering is so ingrained that @AdamSchiff can openly declare, in Jan 2020, that US uses Ukraine to “fight Russia over there,” and our elites applaud. Fast forward two years later when Russia fights back, and the same circle is outraged. pic.twitter.com/6B4QVFSZvV

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 26, 2022

    Statements like these should fully discredit the official narrative that the US is helping Ukraine fight off an unprovoked attack by a reckless tyrant. These are mutually contradictory positions; either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that Washington didn’t want, or it’s an excellent way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.

    But of course they do not discredit the official Ukraine narrative in the eyes of the public, because the US has the most effective propaganda machine that has ever existed. The many glaring inconsistencies and misdeeds of the empire are simply airbrushed away with a little spin and sweet talk.

    If it weren’t for the imperial spin machine, nobody would believe the US just coincidentally stumbled its way into a lucky proxy war that happens to help it advance its agendas of global domination.

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  • More Than 1,000 Faith Leaders in the US Call for a Christmas Truce in Ukraine

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has wrapped up a one-day visit to Washington, D.C., where he called on the Biden administration and lawmakers to provide more military and financial aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia. This was Zelensky’s first overseas trip in nearly a year, since the war began. Ahead of the trip, over 1,000 faith leaders in the United States called for a Christmas…

    Source

  • America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion

    During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow); and, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.

    The war in Ukraine started in February 2014, by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-American one on Russia’s border, in order ultimately to become able to place just 317 miles away from the Kremlin U.S. missiles which would be only a five-minute flight-time away from nuking Russia’s central command — far too little time in order for Russia’s central command to be able to verify that launch and then to launch its own retaliatory missiles. It would be nuclear checkmate of Russia, by the U.S. (with the assistance of its NATO allies, which then would include Ukraine).

    Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclear checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclear checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).

    President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion. That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually  on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.

    On November 16, I headlined “U.S. Will Have Spent $100B on Ukraine This Year,” and now it’s clear that my prediction was on the conservative side, by $12 billion.

    The post America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chomsky: Advanced US Weaponry in Ukraine Is Sustaining Battlefield Stalemate

    It’s now more than 300 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict has intensified rather than subsided, with Ukrainian leaders expressing fears of impending mass infantry attacks from Russia and U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announcing this week that the U.S. will send Ukraine $1.8 billion in military aid, including a Patriot missile battery. On December 21…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The McProxy War Continues: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The war in Ukraine is so aggressively marketed and PR-intensive and so interwoven with US corporations we should just call it the McProxy War.

    ❖

    The mass media enthusiastically promote US propaganda of their own volition. The National Endowment for Democracy openly runs information ops to help overthrow foreign governments. Social media corporations voluntarily and intimately coordinate with US government agencies. What does the CIA even do anymore?

    ❖

    The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats say they want to do good things but they’re lying and Republicans say they want to do bad things and they’re telling the truth.

    ❖

    By golly, I’m beginning to suspect the “national security concerns” about releasing all JFK documents are concerns that it would completely invalidate the entire US government.

    ❖

    Hard proof could emerge of the CIA directly assassinating JFK and as long as it was only covered by Tucker Carlson it would have zero meaningful impact.

    Carlson now plays the role of Alex Jones: make sure he’s the only one talking about an inconvenient truth and it makes it look like a right wing crackpot conspiracy theory. Only difference is Carlson has a much larger audience and therefore kills the story much more effectively.

    What does it look like when someone criticizes nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, for example, and then starts babbling about woke M&Ms and saying the commies are trying to make your son wear a dress? It makes it all look bogus. And that’s exactly what Alex Jones would do too: say real things about how the US is arming terrorists in Syria or whatever and then turn around and start babbling about Hillary Clinton being a reptile and child slave colonies on Mars, making the whole thing look crazy.

    I used to think it was great when I’d see Tucker Carlson covering an inconvenient narrative like the chemical weapons false flag in Syria or whatever. I’d say “Ah good, it’s getting mainstream coverage!” But over the years I’ve seen Carlson’s “coverage” do far more harm than good.

    Now good faith critics of empire get associated with Carlson and his right wing ideology whenever they talk about unauthorized narratives. Even very left wing empire critics like me get called right wing for criticizing US proxy warfare in Ukraine, just because Carlson does.

    And this is possible because only the farthest fringes of the left ever talk about unauthorized narratives. No left-leaning media outlets close to the mainstream ever provide meaningful coverage to transgressive stories, so it makes it possible to spin them as right wing issues. So I’m not actually even blaming Carlson for this. Even if there wasn’t a mountain of evidence that he’s a US intelligence lackey (and there is), it’d still be primarily the fault of the left (and what passes for the “left” in the US) for leaving a right wing pundit to cover this stuff.

    And of course it’s not like Carlson is only reporting inconvenient facts. He spouts mainstream empire propaganda constantly. He’s the single most effective promulgator of anti-China propaganda in the English-speaking world. So he’s like a two-way propaganda street: the empire reverse-launders information through Carlson to make good info look dirty, and also he pipes propaganda into the minds of his establishment-wary audience making bad information look good. He may be America’s best and most effective propagandist.

    I don’t claim to know exactly how planned out this all is or who’s doing the planning, I only know that that’s the effect of what Carlson does. When someone very prominent does something very convenient for the most powerful people in the world, it’s probably not an accident.

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s possible that the empire’s violent shutdown of the awakenings of the 1960s was the mortal wound that would ultimately kill our species, and the last few decades have just been humanity lying on the ground bleeding out and waiting to die of ecocide or nuclear armageddon.

    It’s also possible that awakening is inevitable, and that the sixties were the first morning stirrings before we opened our eyes to the light.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Washington Preps for Visit From Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy This Week

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit Washington D.C. on Wednesday to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden and speak directly to Congress, which is set to vote later this week on increasing funding for Ukraine as it continues its war against Russia. Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. capital will be his first foreign trip since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia

    War was inevitable outcome of 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine

    Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Die Zeit, published on December 7, that “the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It…used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”

    These comments echoed those of Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, who came to power in snap elections after the 2014 coup d’état. Regarding his signing of the Minsk Accord, Poroshenko repeated in a Deutsche Welle interview last June his previous admission: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war—to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel gives a joint news conference with Ukrainian President following their talks at the Mariinsky palace in Kiev, on August 22, 2021.
    Angela Merkel [Source: cnbc.com]

    Meaning that Ukraine had no real intention of following the accords, but wanted to buy time while Ukraine built fortifications and developed a military strong enough to wage a war of aggression against the Russian-tilted Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which had demanded autonomy from the Ukrainian government installed in the February 2014 coup.

    Petro Poroshenko [Source: thefamouspeople.com]

    Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) became a target for regime change when he spurned an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and instead drew his country closer to Russia.

    When protesters backed by the U.S. did not have enough signatures for Yanukovych’s impeachment, they overthrew his government by force and hunted down Yanukovych’s supporters. The new Ukrainian government further tried to impose draconian language laws and attacked the people of eastern Ukraine after they voted for their autonomy after the coup—an attack that began right after then-CIA director John Brennan visited Ukraine.1

    RTR3ON7I
    People cast ballots at polling station in Donetsk following U.S.-backed coup in May 2014. [Source: newsweek.com]

    Signed originally on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia, rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by leaders in France and Germany, the Minsk agreement had followed a twelve-point protocol advocating for a cease-fire in the fighting between the Ukrainian military and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and to decentralize power, giving those Republics autonomy which they had voted for in popular referenda.

    October 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, in talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (foreground) and French President Francois Hollande (center back). [Source: consortiumnews.com]
    Map Description automatically generated
    Map of the buffer zone established by the Minsk protocol. [Source: wikipedia.org]

    Additional provisions included the withdrawal of illegal armed groups and mercenaries from Ukraine, the release of hostages and illegally detained persons, the establishment of security zones and independent monitoring of the conflict zones, prosecution and punishment of war criminals, and continuance of inclusive national dialogue.

    Unfortunately, the Minsk protocol was never followed, and conflict in eastern Ukraine persisted, leading to the signing of the Minsk II protocol in February 2015.

    This protocol reaffirmed many aspects of the first Minsk agreement, including the promotion of decentralization and autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, which was to be enshrined in a new Ukrainian constitution that was to recognize the diversity of religions, languages and cultures within Ukraine.2

    The Ukrainian right sector, however, vowed not to follow Minsk II, claiming that it was unconstitutional and the U.S. State Department accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of violating the protocol by deploying Russian Armed Forces around the contested city of Debaltseve to assist the Donetsk Army. (Putin’s spokesman denied this and said that Russia could not assist in the implementation of Minsk II because it was not involved in the conflict.)

    Sergey Lavrov [Source: thefamouspeople.com]

    When a law was passed in the Ukrainian parliament granting Donetsk and Luhansk partial autonomy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the “law was a sharp departure from the Minsk agreements because it demanded local elections under Ukrainian jurisdiction.”

    A person with blonde hair Description automatically generated with medium confidence
    Maria Zakharova [Source: it.sputniknews.com]

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Angela Merkel’s comments on December 7 were nothing short of the testimony of a person who openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kyiv regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict.”

    Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal in turn that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation, and all kinds of distortions of truth, law, and rights imaginable.”

    Loss of Trust

    Russian President Vladimir Putin for his part told journalists at a Eurasian Union Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on December 103 that he had thought the leader of the Federal Republic of Germany, even though Germany was on Ukraine’s side, had been sincere in negotiating the Minsk agreements, but now it was apparent that “they were deceiving us. The only purpose was to pump arms into Ukraine and get it ready for hostilities. We are seeing this, yes. Apparently, we got our bearings too late, frankly. Perhaps we should have started all this sooner, but we still simply hoped to come to terms under these Minsk peace agreements.”

    For Putin, Merkel’s admission shows that “we did everything right by starting the special military operation. Why? Because it transpired that nobody was going to fulfill these Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leaders also mentioned this, in the words of former President Poroshenko, who said he signed the agreements but was not going to fulfill them.”

    During the news conference following the visit to Kyrgyzstan.
    Putin addressing Merkel’s revelations at press conference following Eurasian Union Summit meeting. [Source: en.kremlin.ru]

    According to Putin, now the issue of “trust is at stake. Trust as such is already close to zero, but after such statements, the issue of trust is coming to the fore. How can we negotiate anything? What can we agree upon? Is it possible to come to terms with anyone, and where are the guarantees? This is, of course, a problem. But eventually we will have to come to terms all the same. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements, we are open. But, naturally, all this makes us wonder with whom we are dealing.”

    Fitting a Larger Pattern of Deception

    A person in a suit talking to another person Description automatically generated with low confidence
    James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow making a false promise. Gorbachev should have known from U.S. history never to trust an American leader. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]

    Western treachery over the Minsk agreements is far from a historical anomaly.

    Following the end of the Cold War, the George H. W. Bush administration promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded one inch eastward in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of Germany and removing troops it had stationed in East Germany.

    But in 1998, the Clinton administration certified NATO expansion into Romania, Poland and Hungary, triggering a new Cold War.

    Decades earlier, the United States had deceived the Soviets by failing to abide by the Yalta agreements when it covertly armed neo-Nazis to try to foment counter-revolutions in pro-communist governments that were being established in Eastern Europe.

    When the U.S. invaded Russia with six other countries in 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson deceived his own commanding General, William S. Graves, who was told that he was going to Russia to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and a Czech military delegation when his real purpose was to support Czarist military officers intent on re-establishing the old order in Russia.4

    American troops in Siberia, 1918. [Source: historycollection.com]

    How the West Brought War to Ukraine

    Benjamin Abelow’s new book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), demonstrates that the official U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine is not only wrong but “the opposite of truth.”

    A lecturer in medicine at Yale University with a degree in European history who lobbied Congress on nuclear weapons policy, Abelow writes that “the underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”5

    How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe by [Benjamin Abelow]
    [Source: amazon.com]

    The key U.S./Western provocations detailed by Abelow are:

    1. The expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a hostile anti-Russian military alliance, over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.
    2. Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the placing of anti-ballistic launch systems that could accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles at Russia, from newly joined NATO countries.
    3. The Obama administration’s laying the groundwork for and possibly directly instigating an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine, which replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one that had four high-ranking members who could be labeled neo-fascist.
    4. The conducting of countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border, including ones with live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.
    5. The assertion that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
    6. Withdrawal by the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, increasing Russia’s vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.
    7. The U.S.’s arming and training of the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and holding of regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine.
    8. Leading the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia.6
    [Source: gordonhahn.com]

    Abelow makes clear that, if the situation were reversed and Russia or China carried out equivalent steps near U.S. territory, the U.S. would surely respond with a preemptive military attack on the aggressors that would be justified as a ‘matter of self-defense.’

    So why should Russia be maligned when it is acting as any country would under similar circumstances? And why is it so hard for Americans to stand against their government’s reckless, deceitful and criminal policies that have greatly heightened the risk of nuclear war?

  • Originally published at CovertAction Magazine.
    1. Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 103.
    2. Russian expert Nicolai Petro noted at the time that there was one major omission to Minsk II—an end to anti-terrorist operations against the East, which would not have passed the Kyiv parliament. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 146.
    3. At this summit, Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko presented proposals to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, including by promoting development of modern industries and subsidizing interest rates on loans for industrial projects. Lukashenko stated: “We need to improve, at all costs, the blood circulatory system of our union…. It is already clear to everyone that the era of dollar dominance is coming to an end. The future belongs to trade blocs, which will be made in national currencies. Belarus and Russia are no longer using the U.S. dollar in their main settlements. It is important that other partners actively join this process.”
    4. Years after Graves came back to the U.S., he wrote a scathing memoir, America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers Inc., 1931) and was accused in turn of being a communist sympathizer.
    5. Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe (Great Barrington, MA: Siland Press, 2022), 7.
    6. Abelow should add that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is to trap Russia into a quagmire and bankrupt the country by ratcheting up sanctions, resulting in the growth of civil unrest and overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who is hated because he restored Russia’s economic sovereignty following the misrule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and tightened Russian economic integration with Germany, threatening to undermine Anglo-American dominance in Central and Eastern Europe. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Repeating ’70s Strategy of Grand Chess-Master Brzezinski: Biden Appears to Have Induced Russian Invasion of Ukraine to Bankrupt Russia’s Economy and Advance Regime Change,” CovertAction Magazine, March 1, 2022; Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War, 3.
    The post Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War with Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Empire Is Built On Our Closed Eyes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They can’t work toward peace in Ukraine because it will serve Putin. They can’t work toward peace in Yemen because it will serve Iran. They can’t end the occupation of Syria because it will serve Assad. They can’t stop military expansionism because it will serve China.

    Or, maybe they’re just warmongers.

    ❖

    It’s actually very concerning that the US empire is now escalating the war in Ukraine by crossing many lines it said it would not cross at the beginning of the war, and justifying those escalations by basically just saying “Yeah well we decided that we want to do that after all.” Recent examples include greenlighting Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, providing Patriot missiles to the Ukrainian military, and the revelation that British marines have been conducting dangerous covert ops on the ground in Ukraine.

    The empire drew a line ruling out these escalations at the beginning of the war due to fears of uncontrollable outcomes in confronting a nuclear superpower. Now it is crossing those lines without really providing any robust explanation for why it is now considered safe to do so.

    ❖

    I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve been finding yourself growing concerned about “communism”, it’s because we’re in a new cold war and that’s what your rulers have been propagandizing you to feel. You’re being manipulated into blaming the problems that are being inflicted upon you by your own rulers (including those you voted for) on a country on the other side of the planet, and on a highly marginalized and completely powerless political ideology in your own country.

    Even if you believe communism is bad, communists are nowhere remotely close to having any sort of power in or over the English-speaking world. It’s like spending your life being terrified of tigers. People are just falling for these four delusions:

    1. Thinking communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the English-speaking world.
    2. Thinking entirely capitalist things like the Democratic Party and the WEF are “communist”.
    3. Thinking China is a threat.
    4. Confusing the concepts of “communism” and “authoritarianism”.

    Absolutely authoritarianism is growing in the west, and it must be opposed. But can’t you see that the growing tyranny in our capitalist countries has nothing to do with communism, and that confusing it as such gets you shaking your fist at China due to oppression being inflicted upon you by your own rulers?

    ❖

    In case you missed it, a recent DC swamp party for US officials, journalists, think tankers and diplomats at the Ukrainian Embassy was officially sponsored by the US arms manufacturers who’ve profited astronomically from the war in Ukraine, with the logos of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney appearing on the actual invitation.

    Are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

    ❖

    One thing to keep in mind about the Twitter Files exposition of the overlap between Silicon Valley and secretive government agencies is that the overlap is almost certainly worse in Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram. Twitter has historically been the least awful major platform when it comes to resisting resisting government influence.

    ❖

    Most forms of spirituality serve only to sedate people and help them hide from reality, others do the opposite and awaken you to reality. The former is the “opiate of the masses” which creates a sedentary populace; the latter is the sort that’s useful in creating a healthy world.

    I used to hang out on spirituality forums focused on enlightenment, and even with a singular emphasis on awakening it was remarkable how many members used spirituality to hide from reality. From their abusive and unsatisfying relationships and lifestyles. From their trauma. From themselves. In exactly the same way, spirituality has always been used to cover up reality, often in power-serving ways. Before it was glorifying poverty, meekness and obedience; now it’s McMindfulness and other practices to mask the sting of oppressive capitalism.

    In the same way most mind-altering drugs serve only to sedate and escape from reality while the psychedelic variety does the opposite, most forms of spirituality facilitate unconsciousness while authentic spirituality facilitates awakening.

    Authentic spirituality doesn’t seek to give you new beliefs, nor to give you spiritual practices to make reality less abrasive and confronting, but to uncover what’s hidden and stare reality right in the face. It means squarely interrogating all our assumptions about what’s true. Authentic spirituality entails no indoctrination, sedation or escapism, but a curious and sincere exploration of one’s own experience. It seeks to discover what’s true: what’s true about one’s conditioning, about consciousness, about the self, about the way life is experienced.

    There are all sorts of ways authentic spirituality can show up, and within all official branches, schools, factions and iterations of spirituality you’ll see some authentic exploration and lots of inauthentic escapism. A sincere dedication to what’s true happens where it happens.

    ❖

    ❖

    You don’t live in a free country. And no, it’s not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don’t live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don’t live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned.

    Westerners think they’re free because they can say whatever they want and vote however they want, but what they want is controlled by mass-scale psychological manipulation. Being able to speak and vote as you wish is meaningless if the powerful control what it is that you wish.

    Westerners think they’re free because they can speak their minds, and sure, it’s pleasant to be able to do that. It would be pleasant to have your body trapped a vat with your brain plugged into a blissful virtual reality world, too — but it wouldn’t be freedom. It would be prison disguised as freedom. And that’s what we have here: prison disguised as freedom. The science of modern propaganda has been developing alongside all the other sciences for over a century, and it has advanced just as much as the others have. And now it’s at a point where it can control our very desires.

    It’s generally harder to recognize psychologically abusive relationships than physically abusive ones, because the abuse isn’t as overt, and because the psychological faculties you would normally use to assess situations have been twisted and warped. That’s what’s happening here: people are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into thinking, speaking and acting in a way that serves the powerful, and their minds have become too propaganda-addled to recognize that this is happening. We’re not free, and most can’t even recognize how unfree we are.

    And that’s our real problem: very few of us understand how profoundly unfree we are. Just how much our minds are being squished down into these teeny tiny boxes to prevent us from expanding and realizing our true power and our true potential, and the kind of world we could have. Our slavery is so pervasive that few can even see the full extent of it. Many will say they don’t feel they live in a free country, but if you ask them to explain why, they might say something about drug laws or government regulations on their business or whatever. The abuse is too big for them to truly perceive how bad the whole thing is.

    So we march along to the drumbeat of our rulers, thinking, speaking, shopping, spending, consuming, scrolling, viewing, listening, voting and behaving exactly how they want us to, and mistaking all this for freedom, because we’ve been manipulated into wanting to do those things.

    We won’t ever know true freedom until we find a way to end this. To un-jack our minds from the propaganda matrix they have built for us and begin perceiving reality clearly. Our world. Our country. Our society. Our own minds. Our own authentic desires, free from manipulation.

    Our task, then, is to help awaken as many people as we can to the reality of how unfree we truly are. To be voices whispering in the matrix, beckoning the dreamers toward the real world in as many varied and creative ways ways as we can come up with. To coax those eyes open.

    If we can get a critical mass of people waking up from their propaganda-induced comas, the primary control mechanism holding our enslavement in place will have been shattered. The primary obstacle to a healthy world will be removed.

    An entire empire has been built upon our closed eyelids. When we finally snap them open, it will have to fall.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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 American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Pixabay.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The gigantic destruction of Ukrainian society

    Russia’s war against Ukraine has had devastating consequences for the country’s economy and society, writes Michael Pröbsting.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • “Nearly Every War Has Been the Result of Media Lies”

    Julian Assange once observed that, ‘Nearly every war has been the result of media lies.’ For daring to publish evidence of US war crimes, Assange now sits in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, at risk of being extradited to the US within the next few weeks. The prospects for a fair trial range from miniscule to zero.

    In a recent interview, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson told US journalist Glenn Greenwald that legal avenues in London to challenge Assange’s unlawful extradition were being exhausted. What is needed now is, not recourse to a legal system that is subservient to power, but a political fight, as Hrafnsson explained:

    In my perception, and I’ve been sitting in on all the proceedings in London, all the extradition proceedings in London have exposed only one thing, and that’s the fact that this is just not going to be won in a court. There’s no justice to be had in court rooms in London. That’s obvious and I don’t have to mention the United States, that’s one of the essences of the defence in fighting the extradition, that he will never be able to get a fair trial there. So, we’re running out of time. We need to push this on a different level and so I decided that we needed to go on a tour to shore up political support, because the only way to fight a political persecution is through political means.

    The Guardian recently joined with the New York Times, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel in publishing an open letter calling on US President Joe Biden to end Assange’s prosecution. It has been ten years since Assange sought refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. After being dragged from the embassy by police in April 2019, Assange has been locked up in the harsh regime of Belmarsh prison, suffering from failing physical and mental health. Indeed, according to then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, Assange is literally a victim of torture. In 2020, the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, published a letter from Doctors for Assange, with 216 signatories from 33 countries, drawing urgent attention to ‘the ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.’

    US political writer Thomas Scripps noted that the open letter from the five newspapers:

    makes clear that Assange has been the victim of a monstrous campaign of state persecution, costing him years of his life and good health, for revealing state criminality, designed to set a chilling example for others.

    But what took them so long to speak out? Scripps observed:

    The conduct of these newspapers over the past decade has been thoroughly reprehensible. Their efforts to poison public opinion against Assange, to give credence to the false claims and accusations made against him, facilitated the American state’s persecution of this principled and courageous journalist.

    Australian journalist John Pilger, who has done so much to raise public awareness of Assange’s plight, was scathing:

    The editors of the Guardian, NY Times etc. finally speak up for Julian #Assange — weasel words and 10 years late. Ten years after the Guardian made public WikiLeaks’ secret password and launched a campaign of vilification against a truthteller.

    He added:

    The Guardian, which has played a major role in the persecution of Julian #Assange, is now scurrying for cover with a call for him to be freed. But even its weasel statement repeats malign fiction about his failure to redact files.

    Pilger was referring to the oft-repeated smear that the WikiLeaks co-founder recklessly endangered the lives of informants when publishing information that exposed US war crimes. In fact, Assange was extremely careful in redacting names, and he was effectively thrown to the wolves by both the Guardian and the New York Times.

    How do we know this? Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis was an eyewitness to the preparation of the Afghan War Logs in 2010 for newspaper publication, documented in Davis’s film, Inside Wikileaks. Davis spoke at a public meeting in Sydney in 2019 and said that he was present alongside Assange in the Guardian’s ‘bunker’ where a team from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel worked on the publication of articles based on, as the NYT put it:

    ‘A six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.’

    Davis attested that, far from being ‘cavalier’ about releasing documents that might endanger lives, it was:

    Guardian journalists [who] neglected and appeared to care little about redacting the documents.’

    Moreover, they had a ‘graveyard humour’ about people being harmed. No one, he stated emphatically, expressed concern about civilian casualties except Assange.

    As Oscar Grenfell explained in a piece for the World Socialist Web Site: ‘David Leigh and Nick Davies, senior Guardian journalists, who worked closely with Assange in the publication of the logs, have repeatedly claimed that Assange was indifferent to the consequences of the publication.’

    These Guardian claims were pivotal in corporate media smears against Assange. They were also crucial in US government claims that publication ‘aided the enemy’.

    However, noted Grenfell:

    In reality, the US and Australian militaries have been compelled to admit that release of the Afghan war logs did not result in a single individual coming to physical harm. [our emphasis]

    As Scripps pointed out, the open letter is evidence that the five newspapers, including the Guardian and NYT, were well aware from the start that Assange ‘was functioning as a journalist, innocent of any crime.’

    Why speak out now in defence of Assange, ten years too late? The likely concern is that a US show trial would expose the newspapers’ own nefarious role in providing cover for US war crimes, as well as in enabling the persecution of Assange.

    There is also another vital element in the timing. As Scripps wrote: ‘This exposure of US war crimes would come at a time when the United States is expanding its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, sold to the public on the grounds that US intervention is necessary to prevent Russian atrocities.’

    ‘The Public Despises the Corporate Media’

    It is vital for state and corporate power that public trust in the news media – a key conduit for carrying and amplifying Western propaganda – does not collapse entirely. In the US, trust in the news has fallen to an historic low. The percentage of Americans who say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers has fallen to 16%. For television news, it is even lower at 11%.

    In response to these findings, Glenn Greenwald was blunt:

    The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

    Here in the UK, in the past year alone, the public has seen reshuffling and defenestration of Tory Prime Ministers, governments and ministers in a kind of bizarre soap opera. This has been reported as serious political drama by mass media outlets, most especially BBC News, that permit no serious scrutiny of state-corporate power; no substantive challenge to the special interests that rule the country for themselves, while the population suffers and the climate emergency worsens.

    As we noted in a media alert earlier this year, the rise of oligarchical politics has seen a great merger of politics and the media that dominates how the UK is run. Yet another example of this phenomenon was highlighted recently by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media:

    Richard Sharp, BBC chairman, was Rishi Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs, donated £400k to the Conservatives, & was once an adviser to Boris Johnson.

    My generation & those younger need to be realistic. Big parts of British public life aren’t democratic. And it’s getting worse.

    In a recent interview with Mark Curtis of Declassified UK, John Pilger exposed the insidious, power-serving nature of the British media. He took particular aim at the BBC: ‘I’ve always found it amusing, bemusing, that so many people in the BBC see themselves as having entered into a Nirvana of objectivity, as if their objectivity and impartiality have been given to them intravenously.’

    He continued:

    Andrew Marr was very good at waxing on lyrically about this. Andrew Marr, the political editor of the BBC, who made a victory speech virtually on behalf of Tony Blair outside Number 10 Downing Street in 2003. […] Tony Blair, he said, tonight as the troops have gone into Iraq, he has been “proved conclusively right”. Conclusively right! And Andrew Marr was absolutely eloquent in talking about the BBC as a national treasure of objectivity. Of course, Orwell called it “doubletalk”.

    Long-time readers will be aware that we have highlighted Marr’s valedictory words from Downing Street, a shameful performance that ought to have ended his career:

    I don’t think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result. (BBC News at Ten, 9 April, 2003)

    Pilger also pointed to the ongoing ‘tsunami of propaganda’ about Ukraine which is ‘something I’ve never seen before’, including even the lies told about Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. When it comes to ‘opposing views or informed views’ on Ukraine, ‘none of them have been allowed in’ by the media, he said.

    As for the Guardian and its coverage of foreign affairs: ‘We have some people now who are an absolute disgrace, especially on the reporting of Ukraine [and] Russia.’

    The Independent carried a rare dose of sanity last week when it permitted a piece by Mary Dejevsky, formerly the newspaper’s foreign correspondent in Moscow. Dejevksy observed that the informed view that ‘Western provocations’ had played a major role in precipitating the Ukraine war is virtually absent from news coverage. Specific factors that are routinely ignored by the BBC and the other major news media include:

    post-Cold War triumphalism, the green light for former East bloc states to join Nato despite what Russia understood to have been promises to the contrary, the 2014 ousting of Ukraine’s democratically elected president – which Russia saw as a US-inspired coup – and the ways the West subsequently drew Ukraine into the Western bloc, with the EU association agreement and Nato military assistance, even as it abrogated Cold War arms control treaties one after one, or allowed them to lapse.

    Consideration of such facts matter, she noted, ‘because without understanding why Russia invaded, there can be no understanding of what will be needed for a lasting peace.’

    Robin Andersen, who teaches media studies at Fordham University in the US, also pointed to the dangers of not permitting a proper understanding of how we got here; not least because it involves heavily nuclear-armed states:

    Without context and accuracy, reasoned discourse and the ability to find solutions or engage in diplomacy are beyond our reach as we approach nuclear Armageddon. Corporate newsframes regularly exclude alternative voices of peace and those who call for an end to war, leaving out an entire discourse that has animated global discussions about conflict resolution for decades.

    Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and foreign policy analyst, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

    I think both sides see that there is no military way out. I’m speaking of NATO and Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other side. This war, like von Clausewitz told us two centuries ago, is politics by other means, or with other means, meaning that there are political issues at stake here, and those are what need to be negotiated.

    Sachs continued:

    Much of this war has been about NATO enlargement, from the beginning. And, in fact, since NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia were put on the table by President George W. Bush Jr. and then carried forward by the U.S. neocons basically for the next 14 years, this issue has been central, and it’s been raised as central. But President Biden, at the end of 2021, refused to negotiate over the NATO issue.

    He pointed out that the urgent need for the war not to escalate, perhaps towards nuclear Armageddon, demands that the issue of NATO expansion be negotiated immediately, adding:

    There are other issues, as well, but the point is, this war needs to end because it’s a disaster for everybody, a threat to the whole world. According to European Union President Ursula von der Leyen last week, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, 20,000 civilians. And the war continues. And so, this is an utter disaster, and we have not searched for the political solution.

    To return to Julian Assange, the need for independent media that serve the public and scrutinise power has thus never been greater. The pattern of the media calling for one war after another, as media analyst Alan MacLeod highlighted in a recent tweet, is persistent and abhorrent:

    ‘Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough’

    ‘Bomb North Korea, Before It’s too Late’

    ‘Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal’

    ‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran’

    On and on it goes. This media-promoted war fever, whose primary beneficiary is the Western military-intelligence-industrial complex, must end; for the sake of humanity.

    Assange put it succinctly:

    If we have a good media environment, then we will also have a peaceful environment.

    The post “Nearly Every War Has Been the Result of Media Lies” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘The time has come’, says Zelensky in fresh appeal to NZ government

    RNZ News

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an address to New Zealand’s Parliament today and the government has pledged an additional $3 million of humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

    Zelensky began with a friendly “kia ora” before saying he would offer New Zealand the opportunity to take the lead in pushing for peace.

    “Today, this anti-war coalition has more than 100 countries, those who support the fundamental principle of international law and the UN Charter,” he said.

    “Those who do everything possible to hold Russia’s war criminals accountable.”

    He said New Zealand was one of the first countries to support Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive invasion and he recognised New Zealand imposed sanctions.

    “Let me offer you one more thing, various dictators and aggressors — they always fail to realise that the strength of the free world is not about someone becoming large or becoming full of missiles but in the fact that everyone knows how to unite and act decisively and make a unique contribution to the common cause.

    “Perhaps the time has come for your country to make such a unique contribution.”


    President Zelensky’s address to the NZ Parliament today. Video: NZ Parliament TV

    Peace plan 10 points
    He said this could be one of the 10 points in the plan he laid out at the G19 Summit in Indonesia:

    • Radiation and nuclear safety
    • Food security
    • Energy security
    • Release of prisoners and deportees
    • Implementation of the UN Charter
    • Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities
    • Justice
    • Ecocide and the protection of the environment
    • Prevention of escalation
    • Confirmation of the end of the war

    “Each of these points can remove one or another of Russia’s aggression … I propose to convene a special summit in the coming months.”

    He called upon New Zealand to support this formula and to start consolidating the world around the eighth point, environmental security, saying many people did not consider the impact of war on the environment and it was one aspect New Zealand society approached wisely.

    “You can’t rebuild destroyed nature, just as you can’t rebuild destroyed lives.”

    “There’s no true peace where the consequences of war could be there in the form of poisoned groundwater that may destroy normal lives in several countries. There’s no true peace where ecocide has taken place and its consequences have not been neutralised.”

    He said to this day, the world had no strong experience in overcoming the destructive impact of war on the environment.

    ‘We will win’
    “We will liberate our land. We will win this war. I am confident that we will return freedom and security to all Ukrainians wherever they live.”

    “Ngā mihi, Slava Ukraini (glory to Ukraine).”

    New Zealand MPs applaud Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky after his address to the Parliament.
    New Zealand MPs applaud Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky after his address to the Parliament today. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

    Zelensky is just the second head of a foreign government to address Parliament after Australia’s Julia Gillard in 2011.

    The Ukrainian leader’s message to New Zealand comes as the government announced new sanctions on Iranian individuals and an entity involved in the manufacture and supply of drones to Russia.

    Those sanctioned today include two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, the Armed Forces General Staff chair Mohammad Hossein Bagheri and drone manufacturer Shahed Aviation Industries.

    He has previously spoken to other parliaments, including in the UK, US, European Union, and Australia, appealing for assistance and support in defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.

    In September, Zelensky addressed world leaders at the United Nations, demanding a special UN tribunal impose “just punishment” on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, including financial penalties and stripping Moscow of its veto power in the Security Council.

    Ardern announces further humanitarian aid
    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in response thanked him on behalf of New Zealand and said taking the time to speak today was a sacrifice when he was leading his people through a crisis “and one we do not take lightly”.

    She hoped he heard loudly and clearly from New Zealand that Ukraine’s was not a forgotten war, and the Parliament on the other side of the world had come together to condemn Russia’s war.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as President Zelensky delivers an address to NZ's Parliament
    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern . . . “our judgment was a simple one: we asked ourselves the question ‘what if it was us’.” Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ

    “Our support for Ukraine was not determined by geography, it was not determined by history or by diplomatic ties or relationships — our judgment was a simple one: we asked ourselves the question ‘what if it was us’.”

    She also referred to the breach of the international rules-based order and “the misuse of multilateral institutions”.

    Running through New Zealand’s commitments to the Ukrainian war effort, she made a further announcement of $3 million of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, through the International Committee of the Red Cross, as the population faces severe hardships over winter.

    This would cover items like medical supplies and equipment, power transformers and generators to cope with blackouts, and essential winter items for vulnerable families in Ukraine, like food, water and sanitation and hygiene items.

    Ardern acknowledged the plan laid out by Zelensky today, and said the war “must not become a gateway to a more polarised and dangerous world for generations to come”.

    Long-term impacts
    She acknowledged Zelensky’s urging to counter the long-term impacts of war including with the environment, saying New Zealand had a long history of reconstruction post-conflict.

    “That includes remediation such as dealing with unexploded ordinances. We will be with you as you seek peace but we will also be with you as you rebuild.”

    She paid a special tribute to Zelensky himself, saying he had been unrelenting in his support of his people and coordinated an international response in support of the rules-based order.

    “Kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui – slava Ukraini.”

    In a statement, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the new contribution “comes as the Russian military has stepped up its deliberate targeting of critical national infrastructure, further deepening the severe humanitarian crisis caused by the illegal invasion.”

    “Russia’s targeting of energy and other civilian infrastructure is deplorable. As Ukraine faces a harsh winter, Putin’s actions have further disrupted electricity supply, and are harming the health, safety and well-being of already vulnerable communities,” the statement said.

    The aid is in addition to almost $8m in humanitarian help already provided, and $48m of military spending including on training deployments, donation of surplus equipment, and procurement of weapons and ammunition.

    Other party leaders speak
    Opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon said it was a great honour and tremendous privilege for the Parliament to hear Zelensky’s address, “and we all appreciate the opportunity to say to you ‘kia kaha’, which in our indigenous Māori language means ‘stay strong’.”

    He said for those nations that valued democracy, national sovereignty and borders, and uphold the international rule of law the choice was simple.

    “New Zealand is one of those countries. Confronted with brutality or diplomacy, autocracy or democracy, darkness or light, there was nothing to discuss except how to individually and collectively to support Ukraine.”

    He said the war was a moral battle that posed an existential threat to Ukraine and it could not lose.

    “You have been our generation’s Winston Churchill, and since those Russian tanks crossed Ukraine’s border, you have been unwavering in your determination that Ukraine will win this war that it did not want and it did not start.

    “Of all the miscalculations Vladimir Putin has made — and there are many — underestimating your resolve and the impact of the strength of your leadership and the words — your words — would have in rallying Ukraine and the world has perhaps been the biggest.”

    He said the death of every single Ukrainian was a tragedy, and the greatest regret of the war would be terrible loss of life that left tens of thousands of families bereft.

    Luxon also spoke of the need for a reconstruction programme, because “the loss of homes and communities and critical infrastructure is also incalculable”. He said he could not imagine circumstances where New Zealand was not a part of that effort.

    Green Party co-leader James Shaw said Russia’s invasion was “as barbaric as it is illegal”.

    “It is apparent that there have been and continues to be a multitude of war crimes perpetuated on the Ukrainian people by the Russian forces.

    “Were President Putin to be successful, the temporary violence of war would morph into the permanent violence of subjugation — perhaps even genocide.”

    He said he applauded the Ukrainians’ efforts to minimise harm to civilians, however he urged that any future calls for military support come before the Parliament — not just the government.

    “As a member of the Green Party I have a fundamental commitment to non-violence … the situation in Ukraine remains impossibly difficult in ways that we in Aotearoa New Zealand cannot possibly imagine.”

    He said there were people on every continent still suffering from violence and subjugation, and emphasised the importance of universal human rights.

    ACT leader David Seymour said he wanted Zelensky and the Ukrainian people “to know that on the other side of the world people care deeply about your struggle against evil”.

    “We understand that a dictator attacking our democracy matters to New Zealand, your people are not just fighting for their lives but for all our freedom and democracy and I want you to know that your leadership and courage inspires us.”

    He spoke of the New Zealanders who had gone to fight in Ukraine on their own initiative, and the funds raised for the defenders.

    “Our donors were particularly pleased to buy luggage tags made from bits of aluminium from downed Russian jets – what great initiative under fire.”

    But his comments also took a more political turn, saying the opposition had pushed for the government to do more.

    “More sanctions, more refugee places, more lethal aid, and we’ll keep pushing them from this side of our Parliament and if our government changes before you win the New Zealand government will do a lot more than the $3 million you saw today.

    “For now, please let me say that you are right and you are fighting against evil for all our freedom, and we back you not only in word but in deed. Slava Ukraini.”

    Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said they supported the kōrero of the Green Party.

    “We have little to say today, all the teachings have been learnt of former occasions of war,” she said, quoting Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi, the prophets from Taranaki.

    “We have been living together quietly, there will be nothing but mate — but death — for generations to come. We are small in numbers but we are strong. We are fighting not for part of peace but for the whole of peace.

    “We today have one role, one role only, and that is to fight for peace.”

    She said that as at Parihaka, Te Pāti Māori would continue to fight to uphold peace and make sure there was no suffering the young and coming generations could be ashamed of.

    She and fellow co-leader Rawiri Waititi, along with other MPs around the House, concluded with a waiata written in World War II.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

    Rawiri Waititi leads a waiata in Parliament for Volodymyr Zelensky.
    Māori Pati co-leader Rawiri Waititi leads a waiata in Parliament for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ News

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.