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Category: Ukraine

  • ‘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.

  • Ukrainian human rights activist Maksym Butkevytch remains a prisoner of war

    Maksym Butkevytch, a well-known Ukrainian journalist, human rights defender and pacifist, is being held as a prisoner of war, after the capture of his Ukrainian army platoon by Russian occupying forces in June. Isabelle Merminod and Tim Baster report.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • NATO Chief Voices Fear Of War With Russia While US Greenlights Drone Strikes On Russian Territory

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    In what Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp describes as “a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged a fear of something going “horribly wrong” and leading to a hot war between the nuclear-armed alliance and Russia.

    In an article titled “‘I fear a full-blown war between the West and Russia’, Nato chief warns,” The Telegraph writes the following:

    “I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between Nato and Russia,” said Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, responding to a question about his greatest fears for the winter in an interview.

     

    He told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Friday that he was confident such a scenario could be avoided but that the threat was there.

     

    “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” he added.

    And things absolutely can go horribly wrong when dealing with an increasingly aggressive standoff between nuclear superpowers, as we have seen from history. The last cold war saw many nuclear close calls as a result of technical malfunctions and misunderstandings, including an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the only thing which prevented a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from deploying its weapon on the US military was one officer refusing to go along with two others who were giving the orders to fire.

    We got a taste of this horror once again last month in the long minutes following erroneous reports that Russia had launched missiles at NATO member Poland. The fact that cooler heads have prevailed up until this point does not mean that nuclear brinkmanship is safe, anymore than a game of Russian roulette not ending after the first couple of trigger pulls would mean that Russian roulette is safe to play.

    So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

    And it’s pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other.

    In an article titled “Pentagon gives Ukraine green light for drone strikes inside Russia,” The Times reports as follows:

    The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

     

    Since daily assaults on civilians began in October, the Pentagon has revised its threat assessment of the war in Ukraine. Crucially, this includes new judgments about whether arms shipments to Kyiv might lead to a military confrontation between Russia and Nato.

     

    This represents a significant development in the nine-month war between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington now likelier to supply Kyiv with longer-range weapons.

    The Times quotes a “US defence source” as saying the following: “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike the Russians [in Russia or Crimea]’. We can’t tell them what to do. It’s up to them how they use their weapons. But when they use the weapons we have supplied, the only thing we insist on is that the Ukrainian military conform to the international laws of war and to the Geneva conventions.”

    “They are the only limitations but that includes no targeting of Russian families and no assassinations. As far as we’re concerned, Ukraine has been in compliance,” the source says, which is a strange assertion given that US intelligence has reportedly concluded Ukraine was behind the assassination of the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin.

    “Ukraine has been careful to use its own drones, not US-supplied weapons, to carry out the strikes,” The Times reports, while also noting that “Pentagon officials have made it clear that requests from Kyiv for longer-range US weapons, including rockets and fighter bombers which could be used for even more effective strikes inside Russia or occupied Crimea, are being seriously considered.”

    This revelation comes days after Ukraine launched its most brazen attack into Russian territory yet, with drone strikes on bases which killed multiple Russian soldiers and damaged two nuclear-capable bombers. Not too long ago the US waging a proxy war that features direct attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces would have been an unthinkably terrifying prospect, yet that’s where we’re at now, and it only seems to be escalating.

    Empire apologists will try to make this a conversation about whether Ukraine has a “right” to attack Russian territory, which is a red herring from the real issue at hand. Obviously Ukraine has a right to attack a nation that is attacking it; that’s not the point. The real issue is the danger of provoking a hot war between nuclear superpowers, which even the NATO Secretary-General is becoming increasingly nervous about.

    The western power alliance continually ramping up aggressions to test how far it could provoke Russia is what led to this conflict in the first place. Now we’re at a point where there isn’t much space for Russia to back up before it’s against the ropes and potentially pressed to do something nobody wants. These people should not be talking about escalation, they should be talking about de-escalation. We need diplomacy, de-escalation and detente, and we need them yesterday.

    _________________

    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.

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    Feature image via NATO (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Australia imposes sanctions on Iran’s morality police and 13 Russians and Iranians

    Penny Wong announces Magnitsky-style sanctions to punish Iran’s violent crackdown on protesters and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

    The Australian government will use human rights sanctions to punish “egregious human rights violations and abuses” by Iranian and Russian perpetrators.

    The Australian foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, announced the Magnitsky-style sanctions (named for the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after exposing corruption in Russia) have been imposed on 13 Russian and Iranian individuals.

    Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

    Continue reading…

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

  • Video: Ukraine, imperialism and the left

    Ecosocialism 2022 session on Ukraine, imperialism and the left featuring Denis Pilash and Sam Wainwright.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Ukraine crisis a test case for new critical infrastructure regime

    The Ukraine crisis and recent significant data breaches have proved to be test cases for Australia’s landmark new critical infrastructure regime. Recent cyber-attacks on Optus and Medibank have highlighted the devastating impact that a breach of a critical infrastructure provider can have.  This was already recognised by the federal government last year, and earlier this…

    The post Ukraine crisis a test case for new critical infrastructure regime appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • The Season Finale Of The Hit Show ‘Proxy War’

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Everyone’s talking about the hit series Proxy War, an astronomically high-budget production based on an actual military conflict whose season finale is set to air this month.

    Promotional materials for the episode hint at a heartwarming season wrap-up that’s sure to make wholesome viewing for the whole family, with series star Volodymyr Zelensky being awarded 2022 Person of the Year by Time Magazine.

    This will cap off a wild first season which has seen our hero appear on the cover of Vogue, deliver speeches for the World Economic Forum, the New York Stock Exchange, the Grammy Awards and numerous film festivals, as well as having high-profile meetings with celebrity actors and rock stars.

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

    TIME's 2022 Person of the Year: Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine #TIMEPOY https://t.co/06Y5fuc0fG pic.twitter.com/i8ZT3d5GDa

    — TIME (@TIME) December 7, 2022

    Proxy War has been a much-needed win for Hollywood, which for years has been largely stuck in a creative rut of meaningless remakes and sequels. A massive PR campaign for a military operation geared toward preserving US imperial hegemony is the biggest thing to hit show business since Spielberg, which is why Zelensky was presented with an Academy Award by actor Sean Penn for his stunning and transcendent performance in the series.

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

    Two-time Academy Award winner #SeanPenn gifted his Oscar to Ukrainian president @ZelenskyyUa as a symbol of strength #Zelenskyy #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar️ pic.twitter.com/8UITVC9y7T

    — CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18News) November 9, 2022

    It was unclear in the beginning if audiences would warm to Proxy War, with some taken aback by the unprecedented media coverage being given to a war that their own government was officially not even involved in. Critics initially panned the practice of ascribing Hollywood action hero-sounding quotes like “I need ammo, not a ride” to Zelensky when he never actually said them, as well as the use of blatant atrocity propaganda full of ham-fisted plotlines like Russians raping babies, and the hackneyed plagiarization of the Libya propaganda narrative that the evil leader of the day is giving his troops Viagra to help them commit mass rape.

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

    Of course the "quote of the year" was invented by an anonymous US officialhttps://t.co/J3MRfAzAPx https://t.co/RtWBm6ESPE

    — Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 11, 2022

    But the numbers are in and it turns out the world is head-over-heels in love with Proxy War’s unique combination of reality TV, inspirational storytelling, mind-crushing internet censorship, and high-octane war propaganda. Naysayers may complain that they are tired of having their intelligence insulted, but as far as John and Jane Q Public are concerned, it can’t get insulted enough.

    Yes sir, western culture may be a stagnant cesspool of plastic performers, empire smut and corporate rimjobs, but boy howdy we can still spin a good yarn when we need to. Stay tuned for Season Two! Will Zelensky finally get a guest spot on Saturday Night Live? Will leading lady Olena Zelenska release that new fashion line? Will rumors prove true of a Muppet movie in Kyiv? Stay tuned and find out soon, right after this short commercial break.

    ________________

    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.

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  • Brittney Griner Comes Home

    The Russian government’s decision to use the WNBA star as a bargaining chip illustrates the weakness of its diplomatic efforts.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • ‘Ukrainians want genuine peace negotiations, not another “ceasefire”’

    Negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine must be aimed at achieving a lasting and just peace. Federico Fuentes reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • NYT, WSJ Look to Hawks for Ukraine Expertise

     

    A crucial function of a free press is to present perspectives that critically examine government actions. In major articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal discussing the escalation of the war in Ukraine, however, such perspectives have been hard to come by—even as the stakes have reached as high as nuclear war.

    In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin escalated the war by announcing a mobilization of up to 300,000 extra troops (CNBC, 9/21/22) and threatened to use “all the means at our disposal” to ensure “the territorial integrity of our motherland” (CNBC, 9/23/22). A month later, a letter endorsed by 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was sent to the White House (and quickly retracted), urging a “proactive diplomatic push” to reach a ceasefire in the war.

    Both of these major incidents could have been an opportunity for the media to ask important questions about US policy in Ukraine, which is—according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22)—to “weaken” Russia. Instead, elite newspapers continue to offer a very narrow range of expert opinion on a US strategy that favors endless war.

    Assessing the threat

    NYT: U.S. and Allies Condemn Putin’s Troop Mobilization and Nuclear Threats

    Aside from Vladimir Putin, this New York Times article (9/21/22) is entirely sourced to “American and other Western officials,” “White House and Pentagon officials,” “Western officials,” the Pentagon press secretary, the British military secretary, President Biden “and other administration officials,” “current and former US military officials,” a National Security Council spokesperson, the director of Russia studies at the Pentagon-funded Center for Naval Analyses, “a former top US Army commander in Europe,” “experts,” a Russian military specialist (and former Marine) at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “American officials and analysts,” “a former supreme allied commander for Europe,” “US intelligence and other security officials,” “officials,” “a senior State Department official” and the head of the US Strategic Command.

    In the two days following Putin’s threats, the New York Times published three pieces assessing them. Of these pieces, expert analysis and commentary was provided by “military analysts” and a “director of Russia studies at the CNA defense research” (9/21/22),  a “French author” and “a former French ambassador to Russia” (9/21/22), and several current and former government officials (9/21/22).

    In these articles, probably the most critical comment was provided by nameless “Western officials” who have “expressed concern that if Mr. Putin felt cornered, he might detonate a tactical nuclear weapon”—though the Times immediately reassured that “they said there was no evidence that he was moving those weapons, or preparing such a strike.” None of the officials or analysts that the Times referenced in these articles explicitly advocated for changing US policy.

    In the same timeframe, the Wall Street Journal ran six articles assessing Putin’s actions, and did not find any space in these articles to criticize US policy.

    Russian public opinion of the war was cited in one piece (9/21/22):

    Public interest in the invasion was initially high in February but has been declining steadily—especially among young people, who would presumably be those asked to serve in the fighting, according to a poll by the independent Levada Center earlier this month. Younger people were also far more likely to favor peace negotiations, the poll results said.

    Strangely, the Journal did not cite US public opinion on peace negotiations in any of its coverage. A poll commissioned by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (9/27/22) found most American likely voters supported the US engaging in peace negotiations. Supporting this, an IPSOS poll has reported that most Americans support the US continuing  “its diplomatic efforts with Russia” (10/6/22).  I did not find a single Journal article that mentioned the Quincy Institute or IPSOS polls. The Journal has done its own polling on American opinion regarding the war (e.g., 11/3/22, 3/11/22); it does not ask for opinions about diplomacy as a strategy.

    The Quincy and IPSOS polls are in line with Americans’ attitudes from a Gallup poll taken prior to the war, which found 73% of Americans “say that good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace” (12/17/19). It seems Americans generally favor diplomacy. A more recent Gallup poll (9/15/22) did not ask about Americans’ support for diplomacy, but whether the US was “doing enough,” which is a vague question that obfuscates whether it refers to military, diplomatic support, or other means. It also asked a question that presented only two approaches for the US to take toward conflict: “support Ukraine in reclaiming territory, even if prolonged conflict” or “end conflict quickly, even if allow Russia to keep territory.” Other diplomatic options, such as those regarding NATO’s ever-expanding footprint in Eastern Europe, were not offered.

    Favoring hawkish perspectives

    Intercept: House Progressives Float Diplomatic Path Toward Ending War in Ukraine, Get Annihilated, Quickly “Clarify”

    Part of the reason it was so easy to make progressives back away from their pro-diplomacy letter (Intercept, 10/25/22) is that the views behind the letter rarely appear in major media.

    The October letter calling on the White House to consider a diplomatic end to the war was signed by 30 members of Congress and endorsed by a number of nonprofit groups, including the Quincy Institute (Intercept, 10/25/22).

    To get a sense of how much tolerance there has been for dissenting expertise on the White House’s stance in the Ukraine war, I searched the Nexis news database for mentions of the Quincy Institute. As a Washington think tank backed by major establishment funders spanning the political spectrum, including both George Soros and Charles Koch (Boston Globe, 6/30/19), journalists should have little reservation in soliciting comments from experts associated with it.

    In a Nexis search as of November 9, the Quincy Institute was mentioned nine times in the New York Times since February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine; five of these were in opinion pieces. Of the four reported pieces, two (7/3/22, 9/27/22) included quotes from members of the Institute that were critical of US military strategy in Ukraine.

    On the website of the Wall Street Journal, which is not fully indexed on Nexis, I turned up a single mention of the Quincy Institute in connection with Ukraine, in a piece (3/23/22) on Ukrainian lobbyists’ influence in the US.

    Pro-war bias

    NYT: NYT Exposes a Favorite Source as War Industry Flack

    Despite exposés that show CSIS literally functions as a PR organ for the weapons industry (Extra!, 10/16), the think continues to be a favorite source of establishment media.

    That lack of coverage is all the more stark in comparison to a hawkish think tank. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), heavily funded by the US government, arms dealers and oil companies, is a consistently pro-war think tank: A FAIR investigation (Extra!, 10/16) of a year’s worth of CSIS op-eds and quotes in the New York Times failed to find any instance of the CSIS advocating for curtailment of US military policy.

    At the Journal, a search for “Center for Strategic and International Studies” in Ukraine stories from February 24 to November 9 yielded 34 results. Four of these results were opinion pieces. For news articles, that’s a 30:1 ratio of the hawkish think tank to the dovish think tank.

    In the same time period, CSIS appeared in the Times 44 times, according to a Nexis search, including five opinion pieces—a news ratio of just under 10:1.

    It should be noted that, just as Quincy sources weren’t always quoted offering criticism of US Ukraine policy, affiliates of CSIS weren’t always advocating for an unrestrained stance in Ukraine. One even warned that “the risk of a widening war is serious right now” (New York Times, 4/27/22). But repeatedly reaching out to and publishing quotes from a well-known pro-war think tank will inevitably produce less critical reporting of a war than turning to the most prominent anti-war think tank in Washington.

    And it’s not that these papers are seeking out “balance” from sources other than Quincy. Seven other nonprofit groups also endorsed the October letter; the New York Times has quoted a representative from one of those groups—Just Foreign Policy—exactly once (3/7/22) since the war began. The Journal has cited none. But considering the stakes at hand, reporters have a responsibility to seek out and publish such critical perspectives in their coverage of Ukraine.

    Research Assistance: Luca GoldMansour

    Featured Image: A US B-2 bomber from the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues page. CSIS receives funding from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Jacobs Engineering and Huntington Ingalls—all companies that profit from the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

    The post NYT, WSJ Look to Hawks for Ukraine Expertise appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NATO Narratives and Corporate Media Are Leading to ‘Doorstep of Doom’

     

    Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War

    Wall Street Journal (4/27/22): “Unless the US prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one.”

    A popular cartoon aptly expresses the political angst provoked by media pundits today as they chatter on about nuclear war: Two people, both a little hunched over, burdened with the world, are walking down a city street. The woman says to the man, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”

    As we slide closer to what was once considered the ultimate insanity—nuclear Armageddon—corporate media seem to be egging on reckless leaders as they make thinly veiled threats across an imaginary nuclear line. On 60 Minutes (9/18/22), in response to the question, “What [would you] say to [Vladimir Putin] if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons?” Joe Biden said, “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. You will change the face of war unlike anything since World War II.” The president was, of course, referencing the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Biden also reiterated the US’s goal of total victory: “Winning the war in Ukraine is to get Russia out of Ukraine completely.” Interviewer Scott Pelley did not point out that this would mean driving Russia out of Crimea—territory that Russia has long promised to defend with nuclear weapons (Diplomat, 7/11/14).

    Two months into the war in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal (4/27/22) proclaimed, “The US Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War.” Gone are the days of rational deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a doctrine based on knowledge of the deadly consequences of nuclear war: Just the threat of using such awesome destruction against an enemy would prevent the enemy’s use of those same weapons.

    ‘Dangerous’ peace deals

    Insider: Putin's nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that's 'dangerous.'

    Insider (10/15/22) argues that “desire to avoid a nuclear war could actually make the world more dangerous.”

    In a moment of sanity, the LA Times (8/15/22) admitted that a nuclear exchange involving only 3% of the world’s stockpiles would kill a third of the global population within two years. And The Nation (10/18/22) admonished the US and Russia both for what it called “playacting nuclear war,” each with its own nuclear games. Consortium News (10/31/22) warned that the US deploying nuclear-capable B-52s to Australia, presumably to threaten China, is “military madness.”

    But other media have engaged in strained linguistic maneuvering to promote the murder of billions of people. One pretzeled headline from Insider (10/15/22): “Putin’s Nuclear Threats Are Pushing People Like Trump and Elon Musk to Press for a Ukraine Peace Deal. A Nuclear Expert Warns That’s ‘Dangerous.’” The article began, “An understandable desire to avoid a nuclear war could actually make the world more dangerous if it means rushing to implement a ‘peace.’”

    Seeking to explain how we’re learning to love to bomb and give up our engagement with reasoned thought, sports writer Robert Lipsyte (TomDispatch, 10/18/22) noted that we’ve been trained to look for something huge, like a big bang or grand slam:

    The dream of the game-changing home run has shaped our approach to so much, from sports to geopolitics. Most significantly, it’s damaged our ability to solve problems through reason and diplomacy.

    When the Bomb is treated as the ultimate home run, the loss of reason and diplomacy lies directly at the feet of war censorship and propaganda, which have permeated corporate news since World War I. The domination of NATO narratives has followed this lead, even as the stakes have become existentially higher.

    Demonize the enemy

    WaPo: When Russia was the villain: How this moment echoes the era of Cold War spy novels and ‘Rocky IV’

    Washington Post (3/10/22): “Perhaps nuance is overrated.”

    There has been no better villain than Vladimir Putin, a point recognized by the Washington Post (3/10/22), which recalled decades of some of the worst movie stereotypes. But it concluded, “Real life provided the foundation for every pop culture depiction of Russia.” In other words, Putin really is a Bond villain.

    He’s an enemy beyond redemption, not part of the human family, an unspeakable monster, an evil Other who cannot be reasoned with (Extra!, 5/14; FAIR.org, 3/30/22, 7/21/22). And this extends from Putin to Putin’s government to Russia itself.

    Many Western news outlets repeated unsourced allegations made by Lyudmila Denisova, Ukrainian commissioner for human rights, of atrocities carried out by Russian troops. An implausible story about how two Russians raped a one-year-old baby to death was repeated in Business Insider, the Daily Beast, the Daily Mail, the Sun, Metro, the Daily Mirror and Yahoo News (Consortium News, 6/1/22).

    Newsweek (4/8/22) promoted another story sourced to Denisova that claimed, “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official.” This story lacked the warning that an earlier Newsweek piece (3/4/22) about rape charges included: “Although rape is common during wars, accusations of rape can also be used as a propaganda tool to vilify the enemy and this tactic has been used in past conflicts.”

    In response to Denisova’s stream of atrocity narratives, Ukrainian journalists and media outlets signed an open letter requesting that reports of rape and sexual assault be “published with caution,” particularly when involving children. The letter criticized Denisova’s reports, many of which were unverified, that went into great detail about the alleged rape of children, some as young as six months old, by Russians. They asked her to “check the facts” and disclose only information with “sufficient evidence.”

    One week later, Denisova was fired from her position (Newsweek, 5/31/22).

    Beyond redemption

    Common Dreams: Corporate Media Accused of 'Cheerleading' for US Escalation in Ukraine

    Common Dreams (3/18/22) reports on a media “a narrative that war is inevitable, diplomacy is exhausted (before it even gets started), and being against militaristic US or NATO solutions to the crisis is unpatriotic at best.”

    While rape and sexual assault are indeed military strategies in war, tales of raping and killing babies have also long served to foster outrage toward official enemies, from World War I German soldiers bayoneting babies to Kuwaiti babies yanked out of their incubators in the first Persian Gulf War.

    But most Americans, especially young people, don’t recognize propaganda, because even when it is exposed at the time, it is not incorporated into the broader narratives of war. Debunked tales have gone down the Orwellian memory hole, and most of the true history of war goes down the same hole. As Bryce Greene pointed out on Counterspin (2/24/22), the roots of the escalations leading up to the war in Ukraine were “completely omitted from the Western media.”

     Because the evil enemy is always solely responsible and beyond redemption, there is no need to include an accurate history, or correct the false claims, or include the reasons for war. As FAIR (3/4/22) pointed out, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is frequently described as “unprovoked.” The explanation for war is simple: It’s good vs evil.

    And the US is always good, even though the country has perpetrated a senseless, expensive and brutal war in the Middle East for the entire 21st century. When corporate media did “explain” the war in Ukraine, it “almost universally gave a pro-Western view of US/Russia relations and the history behind them” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). Common Dreams (3/18/22) observed that journalists were more hawkish at news conferences than Biden’s press secretary, often “cheerleading for US escalation in Ukraine,” with more weapons and no-fly zones.

     Getting to the edge of  doom 

    Real News: The West must stop blocking negotiations between Ukraine and Russia

    Real News (10/28/22): “Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations.”

    Foreign Affairs (9–10/22), citing US officials, reported that in April 2022, two months into the war, “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” in a deal worked out in Turkey. This  deal was scuttled, however, reportedly after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev and told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the West wasn’t ready for a deal, and that there would be no Western security for Ukraine if he signed the accord (Ukrainska Pravda, 5/5/22; see ScheerPost.com, 9/1/22). In public remarks (8/24/22) four months later, Johnson declared that “this is not the time to advance some flimsy plan for negotiation with someone who is simply not interested”:

    You can’t negotiate with a bear while it’s eating your leg, you can’t negotiate with a street robber who has you pinned to the floor, and we don’t need to worry about humiliating Putin any more than we would need to worry about humiliating the bear or the robber.

    The US has likewise continually refused to negotiate the end to the war. The Real News Network (10/28/22) reported that before the war started, the Kremlin told Biden that Russia was interested in “legally fixed guarantees that rule out NATO expansion eastward and the deployment of offensive strike weapons systems in states adjacent to Russia.” The talks were not pursued—in the context of US establishment media offering opinions that a war would hurt Russia, and would therefore be a good thing for the US (FAIR.org, 1/15/22).

    Protests across the country, organized by Code Pink and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition, hit the streets in September to call for an end to the war. The organizers interrogated the ahistorical, one-sided, distorted NATO narrative that leaves out NATO’s role in the conflict. Led by the US, NATO has now expanded from 12 countries to 30. The inclusion of Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Lithuania pushed right up to Russia’s borders (Common Dreams, 9/20/22).

    On a long Twitter thread (2/28/22), commentator Arnaud Bertrand cited over a dozen “top strategic thinkers” who had warned what was coming if NATO continued on the path it was taking. In 1998, George Kennan said NATO expansion would be a “tragic mistake” that would certainly provoke a “bad reaction from Russia.” John Mearsheimer, a leading US geopolitical scholar, warned in 2015 that the West was leading Ukraine down a “primrose path,” and it would result in Ukraine getting “wrecked.” Russia scholar Stephen Cohen told Democracy Now! (4/17/14) that moving NATO toward Russia’s borders would militarize the situation. These arguments are rarely included in corporate news reporting on the Ukraine War.

    Further, the US supported the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and has loaded Ukraine with arms to undermine the 2015 Minsk II peace agreement. Russia and Ukraine signed the accord to end the civil war that followed the coup and left an estimated 14,000 people dead in Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region. Corporate media habitually omit Minsk II, and actively deny the documented history of fighting between the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Russian separatists.

    ‘This isn’t a card game’

    Axios: UN chief calls for end of "nuclear blackmail"

    UN chief António Guterres (Axios, 9/26/22): “Nuclear weapons are the most destructive power ever created…. Their elimination would be the greatest gift we could bestow on future generations.”

    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.

    Karl Grossman (FAIR.org, 8/5/22) reported that talk of nuclear weapons proliferated in US newspapers this year—mentioned 5,243 times between February 24 and August 4, 2022—but calls for an end to the nuclear threat were rare. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which went into effect in 2021, was mentioned only 43 times, mostly in letters to the editor or opinion columns.

    There is a reason that threatening war, and threatening violence against another state, are violations of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter. As Chris Hedges says, war itself is the greatest evil. War itself causes the ultimate humanitarian disasters.   

    Speaking at an event to commemorate the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, UN Secretary-General António Guterres (Axios, 9/26/22) said:

    The era of nuclear blackmail must end. The idea that any country could fight and win a nuclear war is deranged. Any use of a nuclear weapon would incite a humanitarian Armageddon.

    And the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) observed:

    This isn’t a card game, the risk of nuclear war is increasing with every threat. Using nuclear weapons or threatening to use nuclear weapons is unacceptable and this must stop now.

    The number of countries now signed onto the treaty to end nuclear arms has risen to 91. That most of the world is not on the side of the US is information that is absent from big journalism’s reporting. The many entreaties from governments across the globe to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine are not on corporate news agendas.

    Choosing planet over war

    Common Dreams: Peace Talks Essential as War Rages on in Ukraine

    Common Dreams (9/5/22): “The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end.”

    Journalists and peace activists alike have argued that war in general, and the war in Ukraine exacerbate the climate crisis. The Intercept (9/10/22) documented the destructive power of the $40 billion worth of weapons the US has supplied to Ukraine, now up to $50 billion, which is over “four times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency during an existential climate crisis of wildfires, droughts, storms and rising sea levels” (Common Dreams, 9/20/22). And World Beyond War estimates that the enormous fossil fuel footprint of the Department of Defense makes it the largest institutional user of oil in the world.

    Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies (Common Dreams, 9/5/22) warned:

    Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare…. The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end.

    The fact that 30 progressive politicians felt compelled to pull back a letter requesting negotiations to end the war in Ukraine the day after it was delivered to President Biden indicates the severity of the lockdown on public debate about war in the US.

    Today US combat troops remain stationed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, the Philippines and Cyprus, while Washington conducts counterterrorism operations in 61 additional countries around the world. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by US airstrikes alone in the last two decades. US wars are still killing and starving people around the world.

    To date, there has been no accountability for wars’ failures, or for the trillions of dollars unaccounted for, or the atrocities perpetrated on the people of the Middle East. The Real News Network (9/14/21) reported that the total “cost of US militarization since 9/11 is a staggering $21 trillion.” After so much destruction in the Middle East fighting a “war on terror,” the worldwide number of both terrorist attacks and victims are “three to five times higher annually than in 2001” (Brookings, 8/27/21). As the Institute for Policy Studies’ John Cavanagh and Phyllis Bennis (The Nation, 9/10/21) argue, “That money should have been used for healthcare, climate, jobs and education.”

    Big journalism does not tie military spending to the lack of funding for  domestic programs popular with Americans such as Medicare for All, and even left-wing democrats have not found a way to make that case. And the voices for peace are censored by the search algorithms that hide the alternative media and the broader dialogue that can be found there.

    Caitlin Johnstone (4/7/22) has argued that “the US empire has been working to shore up narrative control to strengthen its hegemonic domination of the planet” for some time, and the war in Ukraine has certainly furthered that goal.

    Declassified Australia (9/22/22) detailed a “covert online propaganda operation” promoting “pro-Western narratives” for two decades, operating mostly out of the United States.  Declassified Australia (11/3/22) further revealed that a team of researchers at the University of Adelaide unearthed millions of tweets by fake “bot” accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war. The “anti-Russia propaganda campaign” of automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. Of the more than 5 million tweets studied (both bot and non-bot), 90% came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine.

    Every day we move closer

    DoD News: Stratcom Commander Says U.S. Should Look to 1950s to Regain Competitive Edge

    “The big one is coming,” promises the commander of the US nuclear force (DoD News, 11/3/22).

    Navy Adm. Charles Richard (DoD News, 11/3/22; AntiWar.com, 11/6/22), the commander of US Strategic Command, stated that so far in Ukraine, it’s been “just the warmup.” He warned: “The big one is coming…. We’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

    Recently the US released the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reported that “arms control has been subdued by military rivalry.” The position document affirmed the US doctrine allowing for the first use of nuclear weapons, and identified one use of nuclear weapons as to “achieve US objectives if deterrence fails.”

    As journalist and war critic Ben Norton put it on Twitter (11/6/22), “The US empire really is threatening all life on Earth with potential nuclear apocalypse.”

    Even in the face of the lack of reasoned nuclear war  reporting in corporate media, nearly 60% of Americans support diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine “as soon as possible,” even if that means Ukraine having to make concessions to Russia. As Alfred de Zaya, former UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, tweeted:

    If the US were a functioning democracy, US citizens would be asked whether they want billions of dollars to be given to Ukraine for war, or whether they would prefer promoting mediation with a view to a ceasefire and sustainable peace.

    Corporate media are failing democracy, and failing to disclose our current, stark choice between war on the one hand and life and the planet on the other. They speak in a loud voice that shouts for more war. In doing so, they censor and poison public discourse and position Americans as targets of propaganda—the denizens of empire—instead of citizen participants in a democracy who determine their own fates.

    The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (1/20/22) warned, “The doorstep of doom is no place to loiter.” The sane alternative to war—and the humane thing to d0—would be to close the door on war, lock it, and throw away the key.

    The post NATO Narratives and Corporate Media Are Leading to ‘Doorstep of Doom’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • NATO Exists To Solve The Problems Created By NATO’s Existence

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    NATO has doubled down on its determination to eventually add Ukraine to its membership, renewing its 2008 commitment to that goal in a meeting between the foreign ministers of the alliance in Bucharest, Romania this past Tuesday.

    Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

    The Romanian city was where NATO initially made the promise to Ukraine back in 2008, and at the time, US officials acknowledged that attempting to bring the country into the alliance could spark a war in the region.

     

    “We made the decision in Bucharest in 2008 at the summit,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday. “I was there … representing Norway as Prime Minister. I remember very well the decisions. We stand by those decisions. NATO’s door is open.”

     

    In a joint statement, the NATO foreign ministers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said that they “reaffirm” the decisions that were made at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

    It has become fashionable among the mainstream western commentariat to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion, but as recently explained by Philippe Lemoine for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that’s a completely false narrative that requires snipping past comments made by Putin out of the context in which they were made. Many western experts warned for years in advance that NATO expansion would lead to a conflict like the one we’re seeing today, and they were of course correct.

    The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by “Russian aggression” is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would.

    Other future examples of Sakwa’s fateful geographical paradox are likely to include the push to reconfigure NATO into an alliance dedicated to “restraining” China, which of course means halting China’s rise on the world stage and working to constrict, balkanize and usurp it. A recent Financial Times article titled “Washington steps up pressure on European allies to harden China stance” gives new detail to this agenda:

    The US is pushing European allies to take a harder stance towards Beijing as it tries to leverage its leadership on Ukraine to gain more support from Nato countries for its efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

     

    According to people briefed on conversations between the US and its Nato allies, Washington has in recent weeks lobbied members of the transatlantic alliance to toughen up their language on China and to start working on concrete action to restrain Beijing.

     

    US president Joe Biden identified countering China as his main foreign policy goal at the start of his administration, but his efforts have been complicated by the focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

     

    But with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion in its 10th month, Washington was making a concerted effort to push China back up Nato’s agenda, the people said.

    The “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization added China to its security concerns for the very first time this past June, and ever since it’s seen a mad push from Washington to ramp up aggressions against Beijing. Another Financial Times article titled “Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan” details a meeting between alliance members this past September:

    They also discussed how Nato should make Beijing aware of the potential ramifications of any military action — a debate that has gained significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid questions about whether the west was tough enough in its warnings to Moscow.

     

    The US has been urging allies, particularly in Europe, to focus more on the threat to Taiwan, as concerns mount that Chinese president Xi Jinping may order the use of force against the island.

     

    Senior US military officers and officials have floated several possible timelines for military action, with some eager to increase the sense of urgency to ensure Washington and its allies are prepared.

    Some are noticing that Washington’s eagerness to “increase the sense of urgency” on this front can easily wind up having a provocative effect which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Bloomberg a month ago that Washington’s haste to prepare everyone for another major conflict could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

    “NATO should be renamed ASFP: the Alliance for Self Fulfilling Prophecies,” tweeted commentator Arnaud Bertrand of the alliance’s discussions about Taiwan.

    “A defensive alliance doesn’t look to pick fights with a country on a different continent,” tweeted Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “This is some classic mission creep from NATO – or, more accurately, Washington.”

    When you ignore all the empty narrative fluff and really boil it down to the raw language of actual behavior, NATO’s existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there’d be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO’s actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone, or, if you prefer, a self-licking boot.

    And this is all happening as news comes out that European nations are beginning to notice they’re bearing a lot more of the cost of Washington’s proxy warfare in Ukraine than the US is, while the US reaps all the profits. In an article titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war,” Politico reports:

    Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer.

     

    “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.

     

    The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry.

    Washington is taking extreme risks and angering allies at this time because it’s getting to do-or-die time as far as preserving US unipolar hegemony is concerned. As Antiwar’s Ted Snider explains in a recent article, the US proxy war in Ukraine has never really been about Ukraine, and hasn’t even ultimately been about Russia. In the long run this standoff has always been about China, and about the desperate campaign of the US empire to preserve its unrivaled domination of this planet.

    “The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals,” writes Snider. “It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.”

    “Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony,” Snider says. “Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is ‘bigger than Ukraine,’ in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.”

    “If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China,” Snider writes. “The ‘Russia Problem’ has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened.”

    Snider quotes Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University, who says that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”

    As the world becomes more multipolar and securing total control looks less and less likely, the empire is fighting more and more like a boxer in the later rounds who’s been down on the scorecards the entire fight: taking more risks, throwing wild haymakers, preferring the possibility of a knockout loss over the certainty of losing a decision.

    We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife, or to the world.

    The importance of opposing these megalomaniacs, and their games of nuclear chicken, has never been higher.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • ACTION ALERT: NYT Has Found New Neo-Nazi Troops to Lionize in Ukraine

     

    The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.”

    NYT: On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians

    New York Times (11/21/22): “The Bratstvo battalion has undertaken some of the conflict’s most difficult missions, conducting forward spotting and sabotage along the front lines.”

    Since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it  completely.

    Anti-war outlets, including FAIR (1/28/22, 3/22/22), have repeatedly highlighted this dynamic—particularly regarding corporate media’s lionization of the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia, now sold to the public as a reformed far-right group that gallantly defends the sovereignty of a democratic Ukraine (New York Times, 10/4/22; FAIR.org,  10/6/22).

    That is when Azov’s political orientation is discussed at all, which has become less and less common since Russia launched its invasion in February.

    ‘Christian Taliban’

    Intercept: The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine

    “We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” Dmytro Korchynsky told the Intercept (3/18/15). “The Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.”

    The lesser-known Bratstvo battalion, within which the Times embedded its reporters, is driven by several far-right currents—none of which are mentioned in the article.

    Bratstvo was founded as a political organization in 2004 by Dmytro Korchynsky, who previously led the far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).

    Korchynsky, who now fights in Bratstvo’s paramilitary wing, is a Holocaust denier who falsely blamed Jews for the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, and peddled the lie that “120,000 Jews fought in the Wehrmacht.” He has stated that he sees Bratstvo as a “Christian Taliban” (Intercept, 3/18/15).

    In the 1980s, the Times portrayed the religious extremists of the Afghan mujahideen—who were receiving US training and arms—as a heroic bulwark against Soviet expansionism. We all know how that worked out.

    In an echo of that propaganda campaign, the Times neglected to tell its readers about the neo-Nazi and theocratic politics of the Bratstvo battalion. Why should anyone care who else Bratstvo members would like to see dead, so long as they’re operating in furtherance of US policymakers’ stated aim of weakening Russia?

    Modern-day crusade

    The article’s author, Carlotta Gall, recounted Bratstvo’s Russian-fighting exploits in quasi-religious terms. Indeed, the only instances in which the Times even hinted at the unit’s guiding ideology came in the form of mythologizing the unit’s Christian devotion.

    Of Bratstvo fighters embarking on a mission, Gall wrote, “They recited a prayer together, then loaded up the narrow rubber dinghies and set out, hunched silent figures in the dark.” Referring to battalion commander Oleksiy Serediuk’s wife, who also fights with the unit, Gall extolled, “She has gained an almost mythical renown for surviving close combat with Russian troops.”

    The piece even featured a photograph showing militia members gathered in prayer. Evoking the notion of pious soldiers rather than that of a “Christian Taliban,” the caption read, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”

    The Times also gave voice to some of the loftier aims of Bratstvo’s crusade, quoting Serediuk’s musing that, “We all dream about going to Chechnya, and the Kremlin, and as far as the Ural Mountains.” Nazi racial ideologues have long been enamored by the prospect of reaching the Urals, which they view as the natural barrier separating European culture from the Asiatic hordes.

    While plotting Operation Barbarossa, Hitler identified the Urals as the eastern extent of the Wehrmacht’s planned advance. In 1943, referring to the Nazi scheme that aimed to rid European Russia of Asiatic “untermenschen” so the land could be settled by hundreds of millions of white Europeans, Himmler declared, “We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.”

    ‘Mindset of the 13th century’

    Al Jazeera: ‘Christian Taliban’s’ crusade on Ukraine’s front lines

    Bratstvo commander Oleksiy Serediuk explained to Al Jazeera (4/15/15): “I left the Azov because it was full of pagans. Committed Christians in the Azov were not allowed to stop to pray throughout the day.”

    The only two Bratstvo members named in the piece, meanwhile, are Serediuk and Vitaliy Chorny. While Chorny—who the Times identified as the battalion’s head of intelligence gathering—is quoted, his statements are limited to descriptions of the unit’s fighting strategy. Serediuk’s recorded utterances are similarly lacking in substance.

    Far more illuminating is an Al Jazeera article (4/15/15) titled “‘Christian Taliban’s’ Crusade on Ukraine’s Front Lines,” which quotes both Serediuk and Chorny extensively. Serediuk, Al Jazeera reported, “revels in the Christian Taliban label.” In reference to his decision to leave the Azov battalion, the piece went on to say:

    Serediuk didn’t leave the Azov because of the neo-Nazi connections, however—extreme-right ideology doesn’t bother him. What does irk him, however, is being around fighters who are not zealous in their religious convictions.

    In the same piece, Chorny invoked the violently antisemitic Crusades of the Middle Ages to describe Bratstvo’s ideological foundation:

    The enemy—the forces of darkness—they have all the weapons, they have greater numbers, they have money. But our soldiers are the bringers of European traditions and the Christian mindset of the 13th century.

    To circumvent the Times’ exultant narrative, one has to do a certain amount of supplementary research and analysis. But even the most basic inquiry—searching “Bratstvo battalion” on Google—reveals the far-right underpinnings of the unit with which the Times embedded its reporters.

    The seventh search result is a June 2022 study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which reported, “Another such far-right entity is the so-called Brotherhood (Bratstvo) ‘battalion,’ which includes Belarusian, Danish, Irish and Canadian members.”

    The ninth result is an article from the Washington Free Beacon (4/6/22), which quoted a far-right Canadian volunteer as saying on Telegram that he was “fighting in the neo-Nazi ‘Bratstvo’ Battalion in Kyiv.”

    SS memorabilia

    New York Times depiction of Bratstvo members praying

    The New York Times (11/21/22) captioned this photo, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”

    In a world where journalists actually practiced what they preached, someone at the paper of record surely would have noticed the Nazi insignia appearing in two photos in the piece. In this world, however, the Times either forgot how to use the zoom function—though the paper made extensive use of this capability when reporting on China’s Communist Party Congress the month before (FAIR.org, 11/11/22)—or they simply did not want to report on this ugly and inconvenient discovery.

    Detail from New York Times of Bratstvo unit, showingTotenkopf logo

    Totenkopf insignia worn by Bratstvo member in photo above.

    One soldier is seen wearing an emblem known as a “Totenkopf” in a photo of Bratstvo’s prayer circle. The Totenkopf, which means “death’s head” in German, was used as an insignia by the Totenkopfverbande—an SS unit that participated in Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and guarded the concentration camps where Nazi Germany condemned millions of Jewish men, women and children to death.

    Totenkopf logo as seen on eBay

    Totenkopf emblem on eBay.

    Individuals donning the Totenkopf also took part in the murder of millions of others in these camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, trade unionists, persons with disabilities, homosexuals and Romani people.

    In September, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted—and then quietly deleted—a picture on social media of himself with a number of soldiers, one of whom was wearing a Totenkopf patch similar to that seen in the Times’ photo of Bratstvo’s prayer meeting. One can easily find this particular iteration on Amazon or eBay.

    New York Times photo of Bratstvo members preparing for a mission

    The New York Times described this photo as ““

     

    Totenkopf insignia worn by another member of Bratstvo.

    The Totenkopf insignia can also be seen in this photo.

    Later in the Times article, another photograph of a soldier wearing a slightly different version of the insignia appeared. Here, bathed in the light of an interior room and staring out from the very center of the image, the Totenkopf is even harder to miss. Amazon’s product description for this specific variant reads, “This gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”

    Totenkopf patch available on Amazon.

    Amazon promises that “this gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”

    If the Times simply failed to identify the Totenkopf in two separate photos—both of which were taken by a Times photographer while he was embedded with Bratstvo, and were then featured prominently in the article—that would certainly amount to a journalistic failure.

    The alternative scenario is that the Times did recognize the SS memorabilia worn by the soldiers they chose to embed with, and decided to publish the images anyway without commenting on the matter.

     

    ACTION:

    Please remind the New York Times to clearly identify neo-Nazi forces when they appear in coverage, and to refrain from depicting such movements as heroes.

    CONTACT:

    Letters: letters@nytimes.com

    Readers Center: Feedback

    Twitter: @NYTimes

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Has Found New Neo-Nazi Troops to Lionize in Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A short tale of two peace agreements

    Comparing the conflict in the north of Ireland (late 1960’s – 1998 with the conflict in Donbass (2014 – early 2022):*

    In the north of Ireland, the conflict lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998.

    More than 3,500 people were killed, of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were members of the British security forces and 16% were members of paramilitary groups. Republican paramilitaries were responsible for some 60% of the deaths, loyalists 30% and security forces 10%.

    The area of the north of Ireland is 14,130 km2 and the population around 1.9 million.

    At the end of 1993, the Joint Declaration on Peace, more commonly known as the Downing Street Declaration (between the Irish and British governments) was published. In 1994, the process of achieving peace continued. The Good Friday Agreement was reached in 1998. In between, various initiatives were developed — among them the Mitchell Principles and The Framework Documents – A Framework for Accountable Government In Northern Ireland.

    The US government got directly involved and sent a former US senator, George Mitchell, to oversee the process. US President Bill Clinton put his weight behind the process.

    The outcome of all this attention to developing the peace process was that any participating party to the process (or others outside the process) who tried to scuttle or otherwise block the process was outed and attacked in no uncertain terms. This process was going to be made an agreement and that was all that was to it. And, that is what happened. It could not be allowed to fail and has been variously celebrated and touted as an indispensable example of diplomacy by all and sundry, whether warmonger or peace activist, ever since.

    Meanwhile, the conflict in Donbass lasted from 2014 to early 2022. That war cost more than 14,000 lives on both sides as of February 24, 2022, including more than 3,100 civilian deaths. Most of those deaths occurred on the Donbass side.

    The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) examined the civilian related casualties from 14 April 2014 to 31 December 2021. It recorded a total of 3,106 conflict-related civilian deaths (1,852 men, 1,072 women, 102 boys, 50 girls, and 30 adults whose sex is unknown). Taking into account the 298 deaths on board Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on 17 July 2014, the total death toll of the conflict on civilians has reached at least 3,404. The number of injured civilians is estimated to exceed 7,000.

    The OHCHR estimated the total number of conflict-related casualties in Ukraine from 14 April 2014 to 31 December 2021 to be 51,000 to 54,000. Of those, 14,200 to 14,400 were killed.

    The area of Donbass is 26,517 km2 and the population just over 4 million.

    The peace process related to Donbass involved the Minsk Protocol, 2014 and Minsk 2, 2015. This process was made up of the Minsk Protocol, drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany. Following the complete failure of that protocol, at a summit in Minsk on 11 February 2015, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed to a package of measures to stop the war in Donbass; this package became known as Minsk II.

    In Ireland, the comparison between the attention given to the loss of life and the peace processes is stark. While the Minsk Protocol/Minsk 2 agreements were not implemented (for whatever reasons) this did not appear to be of any interest to the Irish media who had been fully behind the Good Friday Agreement. Nor did it upset the vast majority of politicians with the honourable exception of Members of the European Parliament, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.

    Even the sanctity of life (an issue that the Irish media had so warmly and properly embraced in the north of Ireland), did not interest them in relation to the Donbass/Ukraine conflict. Irish Lives Mattered! Even British Soldiers Lives Mattered! But, not the lives of people in Donbass. Not even the lives of Ukranian soldiers killed in the conflict mattered. That is, until February, 2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    Suddenly, the lives of Ukranian soldiers mattered. Now everything mattered! Wall to wall coverage (propaganda) on every front. But, let’s not go there.

    The argument is that the contrast between the reaction of politicians and the media to the death of people in the north of Ireland and the death of people in Donbass and Ukraine up to February, 2022 stinks of duplicity, hypocrisy and blind observance to anything and everything even vaguely anti-Russian.

    In the Ireland of today, the Ireland of this almost sacred Good Friday Agreement, anyone who calls for peace in Ukraine is blocked out of the media or worse, makes the headlines vilified as uncaring monsters, Putin apologists etc etc etc. Those calling for peace are brutes and those calling for more weapons etc for Ukraine are deep thinkers. Incredible.

    While the Wild West continues its never-ending project to subjugate the rest of the world, another world is emerging. Let us hope that the emerging alternative actually becomes an alternative.

    * This is not intended to be a comprehensive history or description of the two conflicts. The background information is intended to be a backdrop to the fate of both processes.

    The post A short tale of two peace agreements first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 73% of the World’s Population Did Not Call for Russian Reparations to Ukraine

    On November 14, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution (A/ES-11/L.6) calling for Russia to pay war reparations to Ukraine:

                [The General Assembly…]

    1. Reaffirms its commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine and its demand that the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine and that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters;
    2. Recognizes that the Russian Federation must be held to account for any violations of international law in or against Ukraine, including its aggression in violation of the Charter of the United Nations, as well as any violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and that it must bear the legal consequences of all of its internationally wrongful acts, including making reparation for the injury, including any damage, caused by such acts…

    Here was the vote:1

    93 IN FAVOR

    14 AGAINST

    73 ABSTENTION

    12 NOT VOTING

    Western media report these results as vast international support for the resolution. But measured by world population, this resolution, as well as its predecessors, was decisively rejected by the UNGA.2

    First, a minor point: the majority of the world’s countries simply did not support this resolution:

    99 NOT VOTING IN FAVOR (AGAINST, ABSTENTION or NOT VOTING)

    93 IN FAVOR

    Something much more important to notice is that UN General Assembly votes are extremely undemocratic. The UNGA consists of 193 countries representing over eight billion people, each country having a single vote, no matter the size of its population. For example, Tuvalu (population 11,792), Iceland (pop. 341,243), India (pop. 1,380,004,385) and China (pop. 1,439,323,776) each have a one vote. So voting in the UNGA is wildly disproportionate to population.

    We can correct this disproportion by ignoring the country-by-country tally and treating the result as if it were a popular referendum. Here is the tally of percentages of world population represented in the vote:

    IN FAVOR 26.94%

    AGAINST 24.36%

    ABSTENTION 44.92%

    NOT VOTING 3.78%

    Or, simpler:

    NOT VOTING IN FAVOR OF THE RESOLUTION: 73.06%

    VOTING IN FAVOR OF THE RESOLUTION: 26.94%

    By this measure, only 27% of the world’s population supported the resolution; 73% did not. This is a resounding defeat for US/NATO “soft power.” It can only be explained by global antipathy toward the US/NATO side in this war and sympathy for Russia.

    Consider that the US has long used bribes and threats to engineer UNGA votes; it controls the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it imposes illegal unilateral coercive measures (“sanctions”) on a quarter of the world’s population; it is prolific and virtually alone in its constant coups and destabilization campaigns against uncooperative governments around the world. So it is not surprising that the US has mustered as many votes as it has for this and previous Ukraine/Russia resolutions. What is surprising is that it could not get more.

    The UNGA’s previous resolutions condemning Russia show similarly lopsided votes. On March 2, 2002 59% of the world’s population would not support a resolution condemning Russia’s intervention on February 24. On April 7, 2022 76% of the world’s population would not support a resolution to remove Russia from its seat on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). On October 12, 2022 55% of the world’s population would not support a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine. (See fn. 2.)

    To Western eyes, red with Ukraine War fever and alleged Russian atrocities, these results may surprise, but they shouldn’t. For one thing, the Western narrative about the war itself, atrocity allegations against Russia, the history of the conflict since the 2014 Maidan coup (or “revolution” in Western eyes), are not necessarily believed by the rest of the world.3 After all, Western media sources recounting Russian atrocities also report with straight faces accusations that Russia blew up the Nordstream pipelines, and that it repeatedly shelled the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant while simultaneously occupying it.

    More important, to many non-West European countries, this war is not seen in isolation from the history of North American and Western European aggression, exploitation, plunder and genocide, as shown by these quotes from opponents of the resolution speaking in the General Assembly:4

    Cuba: Will Cuba be compensated for the damage accumulated over six decades of an economic, commercial and financial blockade; the lives lost; and the illegal occupation of its national territory? What about Mexico, Viet Nam, the Pacific Islands, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and the State of Palestine?

    Eritrea: States suffering from foreign interference, colonialism, slavery, oppression, unilateral coercive measures, illegal blockades and other internationally wrongful acts also deserve the right for remedy, reparation and justice. As national positions must be respected, the Assembly must play a positive role in ensuring the conflict in Ukraine is resolved through diplomatic efforts and means while avoiding any initiative that might further aggravate the situation on the ground and escalate tensions.

    Syria: [The draft resolution is part of a series of] unbalanced, biased and provocative resolutions pushed by the United States and its Western partners. [I]ts real objective is to pay for the increasing purchases of weapons by Ukraine. … Who will compensate my country for the destruction of the Syrian infrastructure by the so‐called international coalition?

    Nicaragua: The resolution is an example of the hypocrisy and double standards of certain countries. …. [It] ignores the painful history that imperialist countries have left behind. It does not recognize the genocide against the original peoples of countries. [Nicaragua supports its] brethren in the Caribbean and Africa that are seeking reparations for these losses…

    Rich vs. Poor/US vs. the World

    Beyond these denunciations, global rejection of the UNGA resolution has deeper implications. This war is a battle in a far older, longer war of Western European aggression against the poorer nations of the world, the vast majority of humanity. Since World War II, this global war has been largely directed by a single hegemon, the United States. Europe is only one battlefront in this larger war.

    Rich vs. Poor: Core vs. Periphery and Semi-Periphery5

    This vote falls (although imperfectly) along the global divide of “core” nations vs. nations of the “periphery” and “semi-periphery.”

    According to world-systems analysis, “core” countries are those that draw a disproportionate amount of the world’s labor surplus value through possession of monopolized and semi-monopolized high-value production processes. This production is girded by patents, copyrights, and various advantageous economic, military and political arrangements. 6 “Peripheral” and “semi-peripheral” countries, on the other hand, have many fewer of these high-value production processes and rely on the production of commodities and more generic manufactured goods.7  Samir Amin calls this absorption of the surplus value by core countries “imperialist rent” which sums it up nicely.

    In other words, the global class struggle tells in the vote on the reparations resolution: poorer countries that pay imperialist rent tended to reject the resolution, while countries that collect imperialist rent have, with near perfect discipline, supported it.8

    And by the way, Western media often give the misleading impression that China and Russia have economies comparable to the rich countries of the imperial core nations. Not so. China and Russia are peripheral or semi-peripheral countries. While the poverty of the Global South is well known, less well known is the relative poverty of both Russia and China. Nominal GDPs per capita (in US dollars) of the two countries are just fractions of that of the US: US ($69,287.5), Russia($12,172.8), China ($12,556.3). Thus the China-Russia alliance, and their alliance with the Global South generally, is an alliance of commonality.

    The global divide is also racial, since countries of the imperial core are nearly all dominated by whites while the rest are populated largely by people of color.9 This racial imbalance results from the construction of the global system over half a millenium of European colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism, accompanied by ideologies of white ethnic, nationalist, cultural and racial supremacy.

    US vs. The World: A Global Military Occupation

    The geography of the war is not confined to Ukraine. The US asserted that it is waging a war against Russia through Ukraine. Beyond this, the collective West, led entirely by the US, is on one side of the war, and large parts of the East and Global South are on the other, as shown by this UNGA vote plus the overwhelming lack of global support for the sanctions on Russia.

    If from a bird’s eye view we could see the surface of the whole world at once, this war and the global divisions it exposes would be obvious. The US would appear as the primary belligerent since its occupation forces cover the world.

    And the US is quite forthright about its military occupation of the globe. It officially maps the occupation into six zones of US military “command”: Northern (North America); Southern (South America); European; Central (West Asia, aka “Middle East”); Africa; U.S. Indo-Pacific (Asia, Australia and the Pacific).10

    Within each zone US military bases enforce this occupation against friend, vassal, and potential foe alike. 800 to 1,000 of these overseas military bases and installations dot the globe.11 Almost half of these bases are arrayed like a necklace, or garrote, around Russia and China.12

    Ukraine has long been a battlefront in this global occupation. Ukraine’s military integration into NATO began years before the Russian intervention of February 24, 2022. Indeed, Ukraine’s fusion with NATO has been part of the 14-nation, three-decade eastward march of US/NATO toward Russia ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

    Conclusion

    The war in Ukraine is a world war, dividing the world’s nations by wealth, core/periphery status, and race, as revealed in the vote on the November 12th reparations resolution. To prosecute the war the West sends troops, weapons, and money to Ukraine, and sanctions Russsia. Gas pipelines far from the battlefield are blown up to keep Europe under the sanctions regime.13 And the war and sanctions affect the Global South as well as the Global North.14

    The world’s historic failure to contain US aggression has produced the dead, wounded, displaced, and grief-stricken of Ukraine and Russia, and condemned hundreds of millions in the Global South to destitution and hunger. Little wonder that so many around the world see as a tragic necessity Russia’s determined resistance to the US eastward push in Europe.

    1. KEY: (X) = ABSTENTION; (—) = AGAINST; (0) = NOT VOTING. (The 93 countries voting IN FAVOR are not listed here.) The percentage of global population follows each country’s vote symbol. Algeria (X) .56; Angola (X) .42; Antigua-Barbuda (X) .00; Armenia (X) .04; Azerbaijan (0) .13; Bahamas (—) .01; Bahrain (X) .02; Bangladesh (X) 2.11; Barbados (X) .00; Belarus (—) .12; Belize (X) .01; Bhutan (X) .01; Bolivia (X) .15; Botswana (X) .03; Brazil (X) 2.73; Brunei Darussalam (X) .01; Burkina Faso (0) .27; Burundi (X) .15; Cambodia (X) .21; Cameroon (0) .34; Central African Republic (—) .06; China (—) 18.47; Congo (Republic of the Congo [Brazzaville]) (X) .07; Cuba (—) .15; Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea [North Korea] (—) .33; Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC (Kinshasa)] (0) 1.15; Dominica (0) .00; Egypt (X) 1.31; El Salvador (X) .08; Equatorial Guinea (X) .02; Eritrea (—) .05; Eswatini (X) .01; Ethiopia (—) 1.47; Gabon (X) .03; Gambia (X) .03; Grenada (X) .00; Guinea (X) .17; Guinea-Bissau (X) .03; Guyana (X) .01; Haiti (X) .15; Honduras (X) .13; India (X) 17.7; Indonesia (X) 3.51; Iran (—) 1.08; Iraq (X) .52; Israel (X) .11; Jamaica (X) .04; Jordan (X) .13; Kazakhstan (X) .24; Kyrgyzstan (X) .08; Lao People’s Democratic Republic (X) .09; Lebanon (X) .09; Lesotho (X) .03; Libya (X) .09; Madagascar (X) .36; Malaysia (X) .42; Mali (—) .26; Mauritania (X) .06; Mauritius (X) .02; Mongolia (X) .04; Morocco (0) .47; Mozambique (X) .40; Namibia (X) .03; Nepal (X) .37; Nicaragua (—) .08; Nigeria (X) 2.64; Oman (X) .07; Pakistan (X) 2.83; Russian Federation (—) 1.87; Rwanda (X) .17; Saint Kitts-Nevis (X) .00; Saint Lucia (X) .00; Saint Vincent-Grenadines (X) .00; Sao Tome-Principe (0) .00; Saudi Arabia (X) .45; Senegal (0) .21; Serbia (X) .11; Sierra Leone (X) .10; South Africa (X) .76; South Sudan (X) .14; Sri Lanka (X) .27; Sudan (X) .56; Suriname (X) .01; Syrian Arab Republic (—) .22; Tajikistan (X) .12; Thailand (X) .90; Timor-Leste (X) .02; Tonga (0) .00; Trinidad-Tobago (X) .02; Tunisia (X) .15; Turkmenistan (0) .08; Uganda (X) .59; United Arab Emirates (X) .13; United Republic of Tanzania (0) .77; Uzbekistan (X) .43; Venezuela (0) .36; Viet Nam (X) 1.25; Yemen (X) .38; Zimbabwe (—) .19.
    2. “The UN Condemnation of Russia is Endorsed by Countries Run by the Richest, Oldest, Whitest People on Earth But Only 41% of the World’s Population” (March 28, 2022), here, here, or here; “Global Divide: 76% of Humanity (& Nearly All Poorer Nations of Color) Did Not Vote To Kick Russia Off the UN Human Rights Council” (April 25, 2022), here, here, or here; “55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia” (October 21, 2022), here, here, or here.
    3. See these links on the historical background of the war, the killings in Bucha, reports of rapes and viagra, Bucha and Mariupol. On international support for Russia, even Western-aligned sources not sympathetic to Russia have reported some African support for Russia: “Why are people in West Africa waving Russian flags?“; “Why Are Protestors In Ethiopia And Mali Waving Russian Flags?“
    4. The quotes are as reported by the United Nations.
    5. “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20).
    6. According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong [a region of China], Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
    7. See Immanual Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Duke University Press, 2004.
    8. Every core country (see fn. 7) except Israel voted IN FAVOR of the November 14th resolution.
    9. 15% of the world’s population live in “white” countries; 12% of the world’s population live in core countries; all core countries are “white” except for Japan and Singapore, which together have just 1.7% of the world’s population. See “Global Divide: 76% of Humanity (and Nearly All Poorer Nations of Color) Did Not Vote To Kick Russia Off the UN Human Rights Council” (April 25, 2022), here, here, or here.
    10. The World With Commanders’ Areas of Responsibility, Library of Congress. (See attached map of the commands).
    11. “The Pentagon’s New Generation of Secret Military Bases,” David Vine, Mother Jones (7/6/12). (And see attached map of the bases).
    12. Compare, Russia has twenty-five foreign bases and China has one.
    13. “SCOTT RITTER: Pipelines v. USA” Scott Ritter, Consortium News (10/12/22); “Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?” Jonathan Cook, MintpressNews (10/6/22).
    14. “Russia sanctions hurt ‘bystander’ countries, South African President Ramaphosa says” Reuters (5/24/22).
    The post 73% of the World’s Population Did Not Call for Russian Reparations to Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Medium: An Appeal For Support

    On November 15, as 90 Russian cruise missiles struck at Ukraine’s energy network, a companion US-UK propaganda blitz blamed the Russian missiles for the deaths of two workers on a farm in Poland.

    This was a big deal. Poland is a member of Nato and Article 5 of Nato’s treaty reads:

    ‘The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…’

    The fear being, obviously, that treating a Russian attack on a Nato member as an attack on the United States or Britain could lead to rapid escalation and possible nuclear confrontation. Accurate media reporting of events in Poland was therefore vital. On November 16, the headlines said it all.

    The Times:

    ‘Russians blamed for fatal strike on Poland’

    The Telegraph:

    ‘Russian missile strikes Poland’

    The Guardian:

    ‘Russian barrage strikes Ukraine amid claims missiles hit Poland’

    The Daily Mirror:

    ‘RUSSIAN MISSILES HIT POLAND’

    Metro:

    ‘“RUSSIAN MISSILES” HIT POLAND’

    The Daily Express:

    ‘Russian missiles kill 2 in Poland’

    Daily Star:

    ‘Putin bombs NATO’

    Online, Sky News reported:

    ‘Reports Russian missiles have killed two people in Poland…’

    Channel 4 News:

    ‘“Russia missiles” kill two in Nato member Poland claims US official’

    With little known about the explosions and much at stake, the Pentagon’s spokesman Patrick Ryder was more cautious:

    ‘I don’t want to speculate when it comes to our security commitments and Article 5. But we have made it crystal clear that we will protect every inch of NATO territory.’

    In an extraordinary message aimed at President Joe Biden, Anders Aslund of the Atlantic Council said:

    ‘You have promised to defend “every inch of NATO territory.” Are you going to bomb Russia now?’

    Aslund added that Biden’s first move should be to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine before ‘clean[ing] out the Russian Black Sea fleet’.

    Ukraine was also quick to stoke the tension. President Zelensky called it ‘a Russian missile attack on collective security’ and, as such, ‘a very significant escalation’. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said it was ‘a conspiracy theory’ to suggest missiles were part of Ukrainian air defences’.

    In fact, this version of events was rubbished on the same day the front pages appeared. Even the BBC admitted of Zelensky and Kuleba’s comments:

    ‘These claims about Russia subsequently appear unfounded.’

    And:

    ‘Polish President Andrzej Duda has said there are no signs of an intentional attack after a missile strike killed two people on a farm near the western border with Ukraine.

    ‘Earlier, US President Joe Biden said it was “unlikely” the missile had been fired from Russia.’

    After nine months of relentlessly propagandising against Russia and for Ukraine-Nato, the Guardian struggled to adapt to this new situation where it was actually good – because it led away from nuclear war – to blame the Ukrainians. A Guardian news report read:

    ‘Polish village struck by Ukraine war missile struggling with trauma’

    What is a ‘Ukraine war missile’? Is it a Ukrainian missile? Or is it a missile fired by one of the sides fighting the war in Ukraine? Might it, then, have been fired by Russia? The mangled grammar – was the ‘Ukraine war missile’ ‘struggling with trauma’? – suggested editors desperately trying to massage the message.

    Like numerous other media, NBC News reported that the missile was ‘Russian-made’:

    ‘The Polish government said a Russian-made missile killed two of its citizens Tuesday near the border with Ukraine, but U.S. President Joe Biden said that it was “unlikely” that it was launched from Russia.’

    This will surely have bewildered many readers into thinking the missile might well have been fired by Russia. Although it was clear who fired the missile, NBC described the investigation as ‘ongoing’. As Seinfeld once said: ‘It’s a hazy mystery.’

    In fact, Reuters reported on November 16 that Biden had confirmed that the blast in Poland had been ’caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile’.

    Responding to this astonishingly reckless propaganda blitz, Mark Curtis, co-founder and editor of Declassified UK, said it all:

    ‘It’s almost as if the British press sees its primary role as backing the state’s foreign policy rather than accurately informing the public.’

    And that is indeed the key role of the dozen or so major UK newspapers and also other news media ostensibly serving the British public a diet of impartial, balanced fact – their primary task is to promote, defend and whitewash US-UK foreign policy driven by corporate greed for resources, power and profit (especially fossil fuels).

    But what is so fascinating and terrible about this propaganda system – the reason we have continued writing about these issues for more than two decades – is that this is only one of the ‘mainstream’s’ smaller brainwashing functions. The real work goes much deeper.

    A Sad Heart At The Supermarket

    In 1962 – long before the full eruption of the global, 24/7 corporate monoanticulture – poet, literary critic and acutely sensitive soul, Randall Jarrell, captured the truth of ‘mainstream’ media exactly. In his collection of essays, ‘A sad heart at the supermarket’, Jarrell wrote that ‘the media’ should actually be termed the ‘Medium’:

    ‘For all these media – television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, and the rest – are a single medium, in whose depths we are all being cultivated. This Medium is of middle condition or degree, mediocre; it lies in the middle of everything, between a man and his neighbor, his wife, his child, his self; it, more than anything else, is the substance through which the forces of our society act upon us, and make us into what our society needs.’1

    But what does the Medium want?

    ‘Oh, it needs for us to do or be many things: workers, technicians, executives, soldiers, housewives. But first of all, last of all, it needs for us to be buyers; consumers; beings who want much and will want more – who want consistently and insatiably… It is the Medium which casts this spell – which is this spell. As we look at the television set, listen to the radio, read the magazines, the frontier of necessity is always being pushed forward. The Medium shows us what our new needs are – how often, without it, we should not have known! – and it shows us how they can be satisfied: they can be satisfied by buying something. The act of buying something is at the root of our world.’ (p. 66, our emphasis)

    Of course, it is this same Medium on which many of us are relying now to tell the truth about the results of a system that trains us to ‘want consistently and insatiably’. We are relying on the Medium to tell us how the Medium and its consumerism is destroying us. We are hoping for the Medium to urge us to rise up and overthrow… the Medium.

    The classic science fiction movie, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, foresaw our current predicament with astonishing accuracy, with one failing. It assumed that the Medium – and as a consequence, the public – would become more and more concerned, more and more determined to do something in the face of an authentically existential crisis. But the Medium is far too deeply entrenched in greed for that to happen. Ironically, the film’s leading character, Peter Stenning, is a journalist at the Daily Express – filming took place in the newspaper’s actual offices.

    In reality, record-breaking carbon emissions, temperatures, floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, animal and plant extinctions have become the new ‘normal’ for our press, ‘just the way things are’.

    Across Europe, heavily botoxed and surgically enhanced hosts of glitzy TV chat shows are being forced to mention temperature rises so extreme that even weather forecasters look worried, with even members of the public interviewed on beaches no longer smiling. But these are rarely glimpsed moments, quickly drowned out by the celebrity gossip, royal tittle-tattle and sports – the Medium is fundamentally unmoved.

    No surprise, then, that in October the corporate-advertising packed, profit-maximising, warmongering Guardian, reported:

    ‘Concerns about climate change shrank across the world last year, with fewer than half of those questioned in a new survey believing it posed a “very serious threat” to their countries over the next 20 years.

    ‘Only 20% of people in China, the world’s biggest polluter, said they believed that climate change was a very serious threat, down 3 percentage points from the last survey by Gallup World Risk Poll in 2019.

    ‘Globally, the figure fell by 1.5 percentage points to 48.7% in 2021. The survey was based on more than 125,000 interviews in 121 countries.’

    Incredibly, as carbon emissions, temperatures and extreme weather events rise precipitously, concern is falling. But why?

    In September, Media Matters described a typical case of Medium performance:

    ‘In late August a massive, unrelenting heat dome began impacting much of the western United States – breaking numerous temperature records. California is bearing the brunt of the heat, with the state’s power grid stretched to its limit. Climate scientist Daniel Swain called the heat wave in California “essentially the worst September heat wave on record… By some metrics, it might be one of the worst heat waves on record, period, in any month, given its duration and its extreme magnitude.”

    ‘While the size and scope of the heat wave is not being ignored by major national TV news networks – there have been 153 segments and weather reports on the heat and the fires it helped spawn since August 31 – only 18 of the segments (12%) mentioned climate change. Even worse, only 3 of these climate segments mentioned the need for climate action in order to stave off worsening heat waves like this one in the future.’ (Our emphasis)

    Media Matters added:

    ‘This is a pitiful performance by TV news reporters, especially considering the fact that a year ago they mentioned climate change in a collective 38% of segments on a similar record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. There are clear links between the emissions from burning fossil fuels and the growing frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat. This record-breaking heat event occurs alongside a devastating flooding event in Pakistan that has displaced millions and can be seen from space, and after a summer of extreme heat and drought events in both Europe and China. The western U.S. heat wave should thus not be treated as a one-off, freak-of-nature incident, but rather contextualized in the larger global climate emergency.’

    Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who has been repeatedly arrested on direct action protests, commented:

    ‘Just unbelievable the media’s lack of concern about ongoing, intensifying climate and Earth breakdown. It’s all around us now. A few years ago I thought for sure, by this point, these levels of flooding and heat, the media would be sounding the alarm loudly, clearly, skillfully.’

    Kalmus added:

    ‘As a climate scientist trying to sound the alarm for the good of us all, I can’t even tell you how infinitely harder this makes it’

    The Independent’s climate columnist, Donnachadh McCarthy, responded to Kalmus:

    ‘Rather in my experience, uk’s oligarch media have gone in opposite direction on a frenzy attacking all action on climate, since the 40C heatwave set Britain on fire & extreme weather engulfed all continents. Dealing with it in interviews is beyond depressing.’

    As the latest pitiful climate conference, COP27, ground to a halt this week, the BBC reported:

    ‘The final overarching deal did not include commitments to “phase down” or reduce use of fossil fuels.’

    If this was shocking news, economic historian Matthias Schmelzer placed it in astonishing context:

    ‘In 30 years of UN climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating – fossil fuels – has never been mentioned in the decisions, not even in the COP27 in 2022.’

    What on earth has become of us, of humanity? Who are we? How can we be responding like this to the literal destruction of the stable climate on which we depend? Jarrell explained:

    ‘The Medium shows its People what life is, what people are, and its People believe it: expect people to be that, try themselves to be that. Seeing is believing; and if what you see in Life [magazine] is different from what you see in life, which of the two are you to believe? For many people it is what you see in Life (and in the movies, over television, on the radio) that is real life; and everyday existence, mere local or personal variation, is not real in the same sense.’ (p. 78, our emphasis)

    In our lives, we see the parched grass, experience the 40 degrees of heat, the fires and floods, but this is ‘mere local or personal variation’. In Life, as it were, we see car adverts, holiday offers, Black Friday deals on tech. And this genuinely seems more real.

    This is the final truth of why we are unable, most of us, to feel the disaster that is overwhelming us in plain sight:

    ‘The Medium mediates between us and raw reality, and the mediation more and more replaces reality for us.’ (p. 78)

    This is not a struggle between good and evil; it is a struggle between reality and unreality. It is a struggle between human agency and an automatic profit-maximising machine that was built by human beings but which automatically seeks to neutralise any internal or external human opposition. The state-corporate system is a runaway train, a Frankenstein’s monster.

    Ultimately, we are engaged in a struggle between truth and lies. Infinite profit-maximising on a finite planet is a lie; human survival depends on the extent to which enough of us can perceive the truth and act.

    For more than 21 years we have argued that the Medium is the lynch pin, the Achilles’ heel, for anyone hoping to stop this runaway train, to break this spell.

    When Julian Assange tried to challenge this system, the Medium turned on him, crushed his reputation, and thereby crushed the public support that might otherwise have protected him.

    When Jeremy Corbyn challenged the system, the Medium tried and failed with everything, until it threw the ultimately despicable sink, barbarically exploiting the suffering and deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust to crush him.

    Now that the courageous, smart and principled heroes of Just for Oil, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion are trying to save their lives, your lives and our lives by exposing the truth of fossil fuel industry insanity, the Medium is branding them narcissists, traitors, public enemies. Trashy, billionaire-owned, capitalist tabloids are assailing the opponents of runaway capitalism in the name of ordinary working people.

    It’s all very well trying to expose US-UK military crimes, to reform the Labour Party from within, to shine a bright light on climate crisis, but the real battle, the deepest need, is to destroy the credibility of the Medium that controls the public mind and politics through illusions, false allies, false promises and false hopes. We must persuade the public to reject this system and to seek out and support genuinely human, compassionate, rational alternatives not poisoned by limitless greed.

    As Noam Chomsky has commented, corporate propagandists will continue subordinating people and planet to profit until they are up to their necks in climate change floodwater. Our plan is to continue challenging them, refuting them, until that happens.

    1. Randall Jarrell, ‘A sad heart at the supermarket; essays & fables’, Atheneum, 1962, pp. 65-66.
    The post The Medium: An Appeal For Support first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Mineworkers union leader: ‘Please stand with Ukraine and help us win this war’

    Nataliya Levytska is deputy chairperson of the Independent Mineworkers Union of Ukraine. She is in Australia for the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) World Congress, where she spoke to Chloe DS about the situation of Ukrainian trade unions.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • AP Editor Said She “Can’t Imagine” A US Intelligence Official Being Wrong

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.

    As we discussed previously, AP’s anonymously sourced report which said “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people” went viral because of the massive implications of direct hot warfare erupting between Russia and the NATO alliance. AP subsequently retracted its story as the mainstream political/media class came to accept that it was in fact a Ukrainian missile that had struck Poland.

    AP’s firing of reporter James LaPorta looks at this time to be the end point of any accountability for the circulation of this extremely dangerous falsehood. AP spokesperson Lauren Easton says no disciplinary action will be taken against the editors who waved the bogus story through, and to this day the public has been kept in the dark about the identity of the US official who fed such extremely egregious misinformation/disinformation to the public through the mainstream press.

    It is utterly inexcusable for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of a government official who fed them such a profoundly significant falsehood. This didn’t just affect AP staff, it affected the whole world; we deserve to know what happened and who was responsible, and AP has no business obstructing that knowledge from us.

    LaPorta’s firing looks like this is yet another instance where the least powerful person involved in a debacle is being made to take the fall for it. A powerful intelligence official will suffer no consequences for feeding false information to the press — thereby ensuring that it will happen again — and no disciplinary action will be taken against LaPorta’s superiors, despite the absolute buffoonery that subsequent reporting has revealed on their part.

    In an article titled “Associated Press reporter fired over erroneous story on Russian attack,” The Washington Post reports the following (emphasis added):

    Internal AP communications viewed by The Post show some confusion and misunderstanding during the preparations of the erroneous report.

     

    LaPorta shared the U.S. official’s tip in an electronic message around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. An editor immediately asked if AP should issue an alert on his tip, “or would we need confirmation from another source and/or Poland?”

     

    After further discussion, a second editor said she “would vote” for publishing an alert, adding, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.”

    “I can’t imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this.”

    Can you imagine not being able to imagine a US intelligence official being wrong? This would be an unacceptable position for any educated adult to hold, much less a journalist, still less an editor, and still less an editor of one of the most influential news agencies on earth.

    These are the people who publish the news reports we read to find out what’s happening in the world. This is the baby-brained level of thinking these people are serving the public interest with.

    Antiwar commentator Daniel Larison writes the following of the AP editor’s shocking quote:

    Skepticism about official claims should always be the watchword for journalists and analysts. These are claims that need more scrutiny than usual rather than less. If you can’t imagine that an intelligence official could get something important wrong, whether by accident or on purpose, you are taking far too many things for granted that need to be questioned and checked out first.

     

    Intelligence officials of many governments feed information to journalists and have done so practically ever since there was a popular press to feed information to, and that information certainly should not be trusted just because an official source hands it over. It is also always possible for intelligence officials to just get things wrong, whether it is because they are relying on faulty information or because they were too hasty in reaching conclusions about what they think they know.

     

    Whether the AP’s source was feeding them a line or was simply mistaken, a claim as provocative and serious as this one should have been checked out much more thoroughly before it got anywhere near publication. The AP report in this case seems to have been a combination of a story that was “too good to check” and a culture of deference to official sources in which the editors didn’t feel compelled to make the effort to check.

    Indeed, the only reason the press receive such explicit protections in the US Constitution is because they are supposed to hold the powerful to account. If the editors of a wildly influential news agency will just unquestioningly parrot whatever they are fed by government officials while simultaneously protecting those officials with anonymity, they are not holding the powerful to account, and are in fact not meaningfully different from state propagandists.

    They are state propagandists. Which is probably why they are sipping lattes in the AP newsroom while Julian Assange languishes in prison.

    As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observed, this is far from the first time AP has given the cover of anonymity to US government officials circulating bogus claims of potentially dangerous consequence, like the time it reported an official’s evidence-free assertion which later proved false that Iran had carried out an attack on four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, or the time it let another one anonymously claim that “Iran may try to take advantage of America’s troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

    So to recap  —

    • Powerful government official who fed AP a false story: Zero accountability
    • AP editor who asked if a report should immediately be published upon receipt of the story: Zero accountability
    • Second AP editor who says she can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong:  Zero accountability
    • Journalist who wrote the story: Singular accountability

    In a sane society, power and responsibility would go hand in hand. A disaster would be blamed on the most powerful people involved in its occurrence. In our society it’s generally the exact opposite, with the rank-and-file taking all of the responsibility and none of the power.

    Our rulers lie to us, propagandize us, endanger us, impoverish us, destroy journalism, start wars, kill our biosphere and make our world dark and confusing, and they suffer no consequences for it. We cannot allow them to continue holding all of the power and none of the responsibility. This is backwards and must end.

    _____________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Ukraine’s Nazi Problem

    “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Karl Marx. 

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Maligned in Western Media, Donbass Forces are Defending their Future from Ukrainian Shelling and Fascism

    The author with Pyatnashka commanders at outpost near Avdeevka, Donetsk People’s Republic. [ Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]

    America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother

    Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.

    Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.

    But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk II peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.

    Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally invaded Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Special Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.

    Voices From the Frontlines of Eastern Ukraine

    In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbass commanders I spoke with there.

    To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbass.

    From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.

    It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbass forces now controlling it.

    One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbass to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.

    We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.

    There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”

    “Vydra,” a unit commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]

    His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.

    A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbass, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.

    An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.

    A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”

    The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.

    Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.

    “We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian.

    I’ve been involved in sports a lot of time, wrestling. So, I’ve got a lot of friends in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Odessa, Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Transcarpathia.

    I have relatives in western Ukraine, and we still communicate. Yes, they say one thing on the street, but when we talk to each other, they say, ‘Well, you have to, because the SBU is listening.’

    Ukraine shouts about democracy, then puts people in handcuffs for no reason. My aunt got in trouble because they found my photo on her Skype.

    And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]

    He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country.

    When the artillery hit the city of Yenakievo, east of Gorlovka, we were defenseless. We went with hunting rifles and torches to fight them. Most of the weapons we had later were captured from them. We had to go to the battlefield without weapons in order to get the weapons.

    When asked if he was concerned that Ukrainian forces might take Donetsk he replied no, of course not, they didn’t succeed in 2014, they won’t now.

    When asked whether he had a message for soldiers of the Ukrainian army, Vydra replied without hesitating,

    Go home! We’ve been saying that since 2014: Go home. Unequivocally, we don’t want them here, but we don’t want to kill them. I’m not speaking about nationalists, I’m speaking about Ukrainian soldiers, who are drafted or forcefully employed in the Ukrainian army. Guys, go home, either surrender or go. This is our land. We’re not leaving, we’re not going anywhere.

    I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:

    “Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”

    “It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”

    I asked whether he thought friendship between Ukrainians and Russians would be possible.

    “It will take years for any friendship. Take Chechnya, one region of Russia, it was at war. But slowly, slowly…We must all live together. We are one people.” Indeed, now Chechen fighters are one of the most effective forces fighting alongside Donbass and Russian soldiers to liberate Donbass areas from Ukrainian forces.

    He opened a zippered trousers pocket and proudly brandished a small plastic sleeve containing children’s drawings, also containing icons of saints and Christ, and prayers…

    “This is very personal, it’s like my guardian angel. I put it in plastic, I don’t even keep my ID in plastic. I’ve been carrying this one in my pocket since February. I’ve been in all sorts of hot spots. A child drew this, we receive letters from children. It’s very nice to look at them when it’s hard and we are under fire.”

    He read one letter:

    “We are waiting for you. Thank you for risking your lives to defend Donbas. Yulia and Ira.”

    “I don’t even know who are Yulia and Ira,” he said smiling.

    Showing the icons, he said, “This is Saint Ushakov, our great commander. This is Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Protector. This Abkhazi icon was given to me by the guys. This is a prayer book. And here is a prayer,” he said of one page prayer.

    These words are to support when times are very hard. When there is heavy shelling, it can go on for hours. So, while you’re sitting there, you can read this.

    Especially for the younger guys, 22, 23 years old, just finished college. This is new to them.

    Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War

    Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]

    “America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there.

    And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.

    However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.”

    “Kabar,” a commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]

    When asked about his feeling regarding Ukrainians, “Kabar” replied similarly to Vydra.

    We don’t blame the whole Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are our friends, they are our relatives. They’ve been struck by evil, and it’s not their fault, ordinary people are not to blame for this. We will liberate them from fascism, we’ll show them brotherhood, and we’ll make friends.

    This is a good opportunity for us to defeat evil. God has honored us with this right to fight evil.

    Kamaz, when asked why he is fighting, replied that this is his homeland, he was born here, and that he has a son who he doesn’t want to inherit Ukraine’s war on the Donbass.

    I myself am Greek by nationality. Ukrainians are Slavs, they are our brothers, their grandfathers fought together shoulder to shoulder with our grandfathers against Nazism and fascism. We are here to finish it, so that our children live a normal happy life. We are fighting for the future.

    He spoke of America’s continuous need for war.

    We’ve seen it in Syria and Yugoslavia, where they destroyed everything and then set everything up their own way, so the people must submit, almost like slaves.

    I asked whether he thought peace between Ukraine and Russia is possible.

    Yes, possibly, why not? But at the moment, the President of Ukraine said there will be no negotiations.

    Negotiations are possible, but I think not with this president. When he comes to his senses, he will not be able to negotiate, because he took a lot of money.

    Before leaving the outpost, we chatted a bit with the commanders. A puppy sought the attention of a young soldier. Another puppy ran around our feet. The outpost commanders and soldiers take care of the dogs. Their presence added a somewhat surreal touch to the scene: an outpost which is routinely shelled, where life can cease to exist at any moment, and these happy, well-cared for puppies running around like dogs anywhere.

    Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders

    While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbass republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.

    The sacrifices which the people of the Donbass republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense.

    Just as the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army were maligned, so too have Donbass forces have been maligned by Western media, though both are defending their homelands from terrorist forces trained and funded by the West. Terrorists given the freedom to commit endless atrocities against Donbass civilians.

    These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity.

    • First published at CovertAction Magazine

    The post Maligned in Western Media, Donbass Forces are Defending their Future from Ukrainian Shelling and Fascism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia’s Uranium Sales Help Fund Ukraine War, Exiled Environmentalist Says

    We continue our coverage from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with prominent Russian environmentalist Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense and winner of the 2021 Right Livelihood Award for defending the environment and mobilizing grassroots opposition to the coal and nuclear industries in Russia. Slivyak says the Russian war in Ukraine, especially the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, should serve as a warning to immediately transition to renewable energy sources, not nuclear energy, and to stop relying on fossil fuels. “As long as the United States and European Union continue to pay Vladimir Putin for uranium or fossil fuel, that means that this money will be used for the war in Ukraine. That means more people will die in Ukraine,” he adds.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In liberated Kherson, Ukrainians are glimpsing victory after dark days | Nataliya Gumenyuk

    As I report on the aftermath of Russian occupation, there is a new sense that what once seemed impossible can be achieved

    • Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and author

    At Liberty Square in Kherson, residents gather, trying to find wifi near the temporary wireless internet towers and charging points. There is limited phone connection and no internet to read the news and find out what is going on outside this recently liberated region. During their withdrawal after nine months of occupation, Russian forces blew up the TV tower and the power grid, so there is no electricity to charge devices either.

    Yet the mood is celebratory in the square today, as locals wave Ukrainian flags and banners marking the liberation. It has been seven days since Ukrainian troops re-entered the city, but Ukrainian soldiers, police, social services, foreign reporters and anyone who has arrived from outside the city are still greeted warmly.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Video: Kurdistan National Congress’ Nilüfer Koç answers questions on Ukraine, Iran and Rojava

    Nilüfer Koç, spokesperson for the Commission on Foreign Relations of the Kurdistan National Congress, spoke at the Brisbane session of Ecosocialism 2022. In the Q&A after her presentation, she answered questions on Ukraine, Iran and Rojava.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Polish Missile Narrative

    Wars tend to bury facts.  What comes out of them is often a furiously untidy mix of accounts that, when considered later, constitute wisps of fantasy and presumption.  Rarely accepted in the heat of battle is the concept of mistake: that a weapon was wrongly discharged or errantly hit an unintended target; a deployment that went awry; or that the general was drunk when an order was given.  Wars invite ludicrous tall tales and lies with sprinting legs.

    In the Ukraine War, where accurate information has almost ceased to be relevant (unless you believe the sludge from any one side), the latest shock and shudder came in the form of a missile that fell on Polish territory.  As a result, two farmers lost their lives in the village of Przewodów.

    The farmers, as the pencilled in victims of a broader power play, almost ceased to be relevant.  Discussions moved on to a potential violation of Polish territory and the prospect of NATO engagement.  The missile had been “Russian-made”, which tickled those keen to push a widening of the conflict.  Never mind that Ukraine has its own share of Russian and Soviet-era weapons systems.

    The Ukrainian side, ever keen to bring in more military assistance against Moscow, was clear from the outset: it could not have been from their side.  “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a missile of Ukrainian air defense that fell on the Polish theory [sic],” raged the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba.  “Which is not true.  No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages.  This lesson should have been long learnt since the downing of #MH17.”

    The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was also keen to capitalise.  There was little doubt, in his mind, who was responsible.  It could never be a Ukrainian missile battery; never be a deflection arising from the aerial tussle of projectiles.  “I have no doubt that this was not our missile,” he mentioned in televised remarks.  “I believe that this was a Russian missile based on our military reports.”

    Then came a slight qualification, if only one phrased in a typically non-qualified manner.  “Let’s say openly, if, God forbid, some remnant (of Ukraine’s air-defences) killed a person, these people, then we need to apologise.  But first there needs to be a probe, access – we want to get the data you have.”

    But even Ukraine’s allies and sponsors found this a bit salty and impulsive.  Yes, there was much theatre in rushed emergency meetings as the G20 summit broke into a G7 conclave, but a brake seemed to have been brought to bear.  The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was left having to explain that the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russian territory.  The Russian denial of direct responsibility might well be disliked, but it was probably true.  Mistake or not, however, the guilty party for all and sundry was clear: the Polish missile strike was “likely caused by Ukraine but not Ukraine’s fault”.

    Poland’s own leaders also began to release statements suggesting that this was not, in fact, a missile released from Russian territory.  Poland’s President Andrzej Duda made an unreserved observation.  “From the information that we and our allies have, it was a S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union, an old rocket and there is no evidence that it was launched by the Russian side.”

    He also conceded that the missile may have fallen on Polish territory in the course of Ukraine “launching their missiles in various directions”.  There was “nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that it was an intentional attack on Poland.”

    Knowing the political sensitivity of it all, especially if it might cast a poor light on Ukraine’s heroism, he preferred to rationalise the mistake.  Had Russia not attacked Ukraine and initiated the war, there would have been no reason to fire the deviant missile in the first place.  The law of causality dictated its dark tune, and things followed. Moscow bore “the ultimate responsibility, because this would not have happened hadn’t Russia waged a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine.”

    The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, went even further, happy to not bother about what she dismissively called the “facts”.  Such circumstances would “never have happened but for Russia’s needless invasion of Ukraine and its recent missile assaults against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.  The UN Charter is clear.  Ukraine has every right to defend itself against this barrage.”

    The US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson also added to the argument that, even if the lethal result had been from a Ukrainian launch, it was all in the course of self-defence. “[W]hatever the final conclusions may be, it is clear that the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia, which launched a barrage of missiles on Ukraine specifically intended to target civilian infrastructure. Ukraine had – and has – every right to defend itself.”

    The only question now remains how the next misfiring goes.  On this occasion, the reins were pulled just before the precipice.  Facts or no fact, NATO did not want to be engaged – at least for now.  Poland, despite its past bravura to get a hack at the Russian bear, kept a sense of troubled composure.  Ukrainian officials, however, wished to push the matter further, egging on a NATO trigger for deeper, military commitment.  The grounds for a further expansion of the war are evident; the powder keg is ready.

    The post The Polish Missile Narrative first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Empire Views Ukrainians And Russians As Lab Rats For Weapons Testing

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A surprisingly frank article by The New York Times titled “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the US proxy war to test its weapons for future use.

    “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” write’s NYT’s Lara Jakes.

    Jakes writes that “new advances in technology and training in Ukraine are being closely monitored for the ways they are changing the face of the fight.” These new technological advancements include an information system known as Delta, as well as “remote-controlled boats, anti-drone weapons known as SkyWipers and an updated version of an air-defense system built in Germany that the German military itself has yet to use.”

    A former Lithuanian president is quoted as saying, “We’re learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learning how to use our NATO equipment,” adding, “It is shameful for me because Ukrainians are paying with their lives for these exercises for us.”

    Yeah, no shit.

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

    US government mouthpiece the New York Times admits that NATO imperialists are using Ukraine as a laboratory to test new weapons and technology.

    The military-industrial complex makes more and more money while Ukrainians and Russians die https://t.co/m87gyvyl6g

    — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 16, 2022

    At some point The New York Times article was re-titled from “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” to the slightly less obvious “For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test.”

    News that the west is using Ukraine to test weapons systems for future wars aligns with recent comments by the commander of the US nuclear arsenal that the proxy war is a test run for a much bigger conflict that’s on its way.

    “This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said US STRATCOM head Charles Richard at a naval conference earlier this month. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

    So in addition to being used to advance longstanding US geostrategic objectives, apparently this war is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. The US would certainly have an advantage in military test runs over the years in such a conflict.

    As an aside, it’s probably worth noting that all the testing of new western weapons technology would likely explain reports from Ukrainian astronomers that the skies over Kyiv have been “swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The aforementioned New York Times article quotes Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov as saying that the weapons testing he’s seen has convinced him that “the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans.”

    One of the many reasons the US and its complex network of allies, partners and assets are always fighting so many wars is because new weapons technology needs to be tested in battle before it can be deemed effective. What this means in practice is using human bodies as test subjects, the way a scientist uses laboratory rats or guinea pigs.

    The US-centralized empire pretends to care about Ukrainian lives, but in reality it only cares about them to the extent that a researcher cares about his lab rats. And for exactly the same reason.

    What could be more sinister than that? Well, the agendas that they are running those tests in preparation for, I suppose.

    ________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image via Curious Expeditions (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), alterations made

  • Journalistic Responsibility Vanishes When Reporting On US-Targeted Nations

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Two false news reports have gone viral in recent hours due to sloppy sourcing and journalistic malpractice. As usual they both featured bogus claims about US-targeted nations, in this case Russia and Iran.

    An article in Responsible Statecraft titled “How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III” details how the propaganda multiplier news agency published a one-source, one-sentence report claiming that Russia had launched a deadly missile strike at NATO member Poland, despite evidence having already come to light by that point that the missile had probably come from Ukraine. This set off calls for the implementation of a NATO Article 5 response, meaning hot warfare between NATO and Russia in retaliation for a Russian attack on one of the alliance members.

    Mainstream news reports circulated the narrative that Poland had been struck by a “Russian-made” missile, which is at best a highly misleading framing of the fact that the inadvertent strike came from a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile system still used by Ukraine, a former Soviet state. Headlines from the largest and most influential US news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NBC all repeated the misleading “Russian-made” framing, as did AP’s own correction to its false report that Poland was struck by Russia.

    All current evidence indicates that Poland was accidentally hit by one of those missiles while Ukraine was defending itself from Russian missile strikes. President Biden has said it’s “unlikely” that the missile which killed two Poles came from Russia, while Polish president Andrzej Duda and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg both said it looks like it was an accidental strike from Ukrainian air defenses. Russia says its own missile strikes have been no closer than 35 km from the Polish border.

    The only party still adamantly insisting that the strike did come from Russia is Ukraine, leading an exasperated diplomat from a NATO country to anonymously tell Financial Times: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

    It is very sleazy for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of the US official who fed them a lie of such immense significance and potential consequence. They should tell the world who it was who initiated that lie so we can demand explanations and accountability.

    Another false story that went extremely viral was one that Newsweek has been forced to extensively revise and correct that was initially titled “Iran Votes to Execute Protesters, Says Rebels Need ‘Hard Lesson’,” but is now titled “Iran Parliament Chants ‘Death to Seditionists’ in Protest Punishment Call.” The latest correction notice now reads, “This article and headline were updated to remove the reference to the Iranian Parliament voting for death sentences. A majority of the parliament supported a letter to the judiciary calling for harsh punishments of protesters, which could include the death penalty.”

    Moon of Alabama explains how the Newsweek piece was the springboard that launched the viral false claim that the Iranian government had just sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, which was circulated by countless politicians, pundits and celebrities throughout social media. This claim has been debunked by mainstream outlets like NBC News, who explains that “There has been no evidence that 15,000 protesters have been sentenced to death. Two protesters had been sentenced to death as of Tuesday, although they can appeal, according to state news agencies.”

    An article by The Cradle titled “Fact check – Iran has not sentenced ‘15,000’ protesters to death” explains that the Iranian parliament actually just signed a letter urging the Iranian judiciary to issue harsher sentences upon protesters who’ve been demonstrating against Tehran. Those sentences can include the death penalty as noted above, but up to this point have more often entailed prison sentences of five to ten years.

    The Cradle also notes that even the “15,000” figure is suspect, as its sole source is an American organization funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy:

    Further muddying the waters, the figure of 15,000 protesters detained by Iranian authorities originates from the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

    US-based HRANA is the media arm of the Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), a group that receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a CIA soft power front that has for decades funded regime-change efforts across the globe.

    Indeed, it’s public knowledge that NED is funded directly by the US government, and that according to its own cofounder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. It’s possible that the 15,000 figure could be more or less accurate, and it’s possible that a great many more Iranian protesters will be sentenced to death for their actions, but reporting such possibilities as a currently established fact is plainly journalistic malpractice.

    In April of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official.” In May of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Ukraine Official Fired Over Handling of Russian Sexual Assault Claims.” It was the same official. Newsweek made no mention of the fact that its source for its sexual assault story had just been fired for disseminating unevidenced claims about sexual assault. To this day its April report contains no updates or corrections.

    Contrast this complete dereliction of journalistic responsibility with Newsweek’s extreme caution when one of its reporters tried to report on the OPCW scandal which disrupted the US government narrative about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government. Reporter Tareq Haddad was forbidden by his superiors to write about the many leaks coming out exposing malfeasance in the Douma investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, on the basis that NED-funded Bellingcat had disputed the leaks and that other respectable outlets had not reported on them.

    Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has published numerous articles documenting what Adam Johnson calls the North Korea Law of Journalism, which holds that “editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status.” In other words, the more disfavorably a foreign government is viewed by the US empire, the lower the editorial standards for reporting claims about them. Because Russia and Iran are both viewed as enemies of Washington, western news media often feel comfortable just publishing any old claim about them as fact regardless of sourcing or evidence.

    We saw this highlighted during the insanity of Russiagate, where mainstream news outlet after mainstream news outlet was caught publishing unevidenced conspiratorial hogwash that it was often (though not even always) forced to retract. This was possible because when it comes to implicating Russia the evidentiary standards for reporting on something are much lower than they would be for implicating a government that is held in favor by the US.

    And this is the case because the western mainstream media are the propaganda services of the US-centralized empire. They do not exist to tell people the truth, they exist to manipulate the public into hating the official enemies of the empire and into consenting to foreign policy agendas that they would not otherwise consent to.

    Imperial propagandists lower their editorial standards when reporting on official enemies not because they are bad at their job, but because they are very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what we’ve been told.

    ________________

    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, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Western hawks’ sabre-rattling over Poland was nonsense

    After frantic speculation that Russia fired a missile into Poland, it now seems that the missile actually came from Ukraine. Reports on Wednesday 16 November seemed to confirm this. But, that didn’t stop Western warmongers sabre-rattling, anyway.

    Not a Russian missile

    As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said on Wednesday 16 November that it was “very likely” that the deadly missile that struck Przewodow, a Polish border village, was from Ukraine’s air defence. Duda said of the strike, which killed two civilians:

    Absolutely nothing indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland… It’s very likely that it was a rocket used in anti-missile defence, meaning that it was used by Ukraine’s defence forces.

    Russia accused Ukraine of the deadly blast, with Belgium saying it was probably caused by Kyiv’s air defences firing at Moscow’s incoming missiles. The strike immediately sparked concerns that NATO might be drawn directly into Russia’s war against Western-backed Ukraine. However, the situation calmed as officials urged against quick judgement – with a Kremlin spokesperson even praising US president Joe Biden’s response.

    Prior to all this, Western hawks were pushing for war:

    A tweet which reads: "(PS) No one is saying that this will instantly lead to World War III. No one is saying that this was intentional. But NATO exists, Article 5 exists, Biden’s promise to defend “every inch” of NATO soil exists, NATO civilians just died, and this was homicidal recklessness by Putin.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    By 16 November, barely a day later, these people were looking reactionary at best. As the Communist Party of Great Britain tweeted:

    However, for people on the ground in Przewodow, the reality was a world away from geopolitical game playing.

    “Terrified”

    Village resident Joanna Magus is a teacher. She told AFP:

    I’m scared. I didn’t sleep all night…  I hope it was a stray missile because otherwise we’re helpless…

    I heard a huge explosion, a terrible explosion, so I went up to the window and saw a huge cloud of dark smoke… I saw people running… I thought maybe something had happened at the grain dryer, that one of the devices broke and exploded.

    She said her husband was outside at the time, near the scene of the blast. So, she called him and found out he “pretty much saw what happened”:

    He was terrified, said something exploded and that two people were feared dead. It was total panic from there.

    Meanwhile, war still rages in Ukraine – while leaders who are “all as bad as each other” play war games, with others cheering from the side lines.

    Featured image via Sky News – YouTube

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • GEOFOR Interview with Peter Koenig

    GEOFOR:  How do you see the outcome of the elections: is this a victory for the Republicans or a failure for the Democrats?

    Peter Koenig:  So far, to the surprise of most people, there are no clear results yet of the US Midterm Elections. The Republicans have won the House of representatives, where they already had a majority before, but the Senate is not decided yet. In three States, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the ballots are still being counted, or they will head for a run-off on 6 December 2022.

    The results are too close to call a winner. There will be run-off elections on 6 December 2022. It is still possible that the Republicans may win a razor-thin majority in the Senate. That would mean, taking over both Chambers and putting Joe Biden in a “lame duck” position.

    For the past two years the Senate was evenly divided 50:50, with a “majority” for the Dems, because the Vice-President (Democrat) may cast the deciding vote.

    What can clearly be said, there was no “Wave of Red” – Red standing for Republicans, as was expected and was unfailingly indicated by all the predictive polls.

    In that sense – just looking at the surface – the elections were a victory for the Dems.

    But there is more to it. This “victory” is more than surprising. Many serious analysts and particularly Republican politicians, as well as independent media and journalists are talking about voter fraud.

    Former President Trump was the first to express his doubts about fair elections. Frankly, judging by the election preceding polls, they may have a point. Problems with voting equipment have been reported from Arizona and Michigan. Voter intimidation was also reported from several States, including Georgia and Michigan.

    More may surface as time goes by.  It is highly unusual that predictive polls are so far from the actual vote.

    Voter fraud was also an issue in the 2020 Presidential Elections. It is said that President Trump and his lawyers have proof that Trump won by at least 2 million votes. Some put the figures much higher.

    Interestingly, none of the State Courts where Trump’s lawyers attempted to present his case – nor the US Supreme Court — accepted even to look at his documentation. This is more than strange, suspicious.

    Also, the very unusual refusal by a State or even Supreme Court not even looking at a former President’s case, has never been heard of before.

    GEOFOR: What role was played by the administration and personally by President Joe Biden in the defeat of the Democrats?

    PK: That will be an interesting question to answer, when the final results will be in, three weeks from now.

    What can already be said – Biden is a “non-President”. Unfortunately, he is not apt for this position. He is often confused, doesn’t know what he is talking about – and even at this point, with two years into his Presidency, he is hinting at running again in 2024.

    Mind you, this had all been planned. The Globalists, those who believe, or dream, they will eventually run the world under a One World Order (OWO), those even behind and above the Washington Government, needed a hapless Joe Biden, who will do the bidding of those who call the shots.

    Therefore, it would be a miracle, if the run-off elections would favor the Republicans, hence giving both Senate and House of Representatives to the Republicans.

    And that even with a majority of Democrats, of the American public – and European, for that matter – because the vast majority of the people do not agree with an OWO, they do not approve of the tyrannical dictatorship behind Globalism.

    This applies to the entire world.

    Allow me to talk from my experience as a World Bank economist, having worked in many countries around the globe, mostly the Global South, Globalization has done a lot of harm to them, to the majority of people, has indebted them, made them vulnerable for ever-more and ever unfairer deals of exploitation. Globalisation has impoverished people – everywhere – and is hellbent to continue doing so.

    Therefore, the Democrats in the US and the socialists or left-leaning parties around the globe, have all been sold to globalism. As Klaus Schwab, eternal CEO of the WEF proudly says, “with our Young Global Leaders (YGL) Program we were able to infiltrate every Government of the world”.

    Unfortunately, he is right. Take Justin Trudeau, one of Schwab’s darlings, a YGL graduate, was elected under a social-democrat ticket. Look at him today. He is the worst neoliberal tyrant Canada has ever known.

    The same all over Europe. Literally every “leader” of EU member countries, is a YGL graduate. And they, the WEF scholars, will do whatever it takes to avoid a nationalist – usually right-wing, or center-right, in any case not a Globalist, to take over.

    Most of the Social-Democrats in Europe, or the Democrats in the US, have no clue that their party has been hijacked by the Globalists. In essence, there is no longer a “left” or “right”– there are only Globalists and non-Globalists.

    GEOFOR:  The new congressional configuration is unlikely to allow the President to be impeached, which some influential Republicans are talking about. But can the situation of the “lame duck” lead to the voluntary resignation of the incumbent President in order not to create problems for the party in future elections?

    PK:  Never.  President Biden will never be impeached. Even if a majority in Congress would vote for it. Biden is a needed puppet for those who call the shots, who have designed the Great Reset, and the UN Agenda 2030 – and all the dictatorial calamities that go with it.

    Without naming names, it is fair to say that Big, HUGE Capital is behind this absolute and total control of the population, of capital – as well as the entire production apparatus, meaning food, climate, or as the going narrative says, “man-made climate change”, by excessive CO2 emissions.

    Never mind that these are all lies, thick lies, surprisingly that by now a majority of the world populace has not caught up to it, or if they did, they look on and let it happen. COP after COP after COP (COP = Conference of the Parties), the same dialogues, the same promises, the same indecisions, the same non-adherence to their promises.

    It takes another puppet, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres – who sometimes doesn’t know what meeting he is addressing – to spell out the same sloganizing narratives about stopping the world from getting warmer than 1.5 degrees C.

    Isn’t it extremely arrogant of humans, believing they can influence the temperatures of Mother Earth?

    We are now at COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, ongoing, where delegates will talk and celebrate and live in luxury and glamour for two weeks, with execs arriving in private jets – similar to those who talk the same lingo arriving in Davos every January for Klaus Schwab’s despicable “world commanding” event, the World Economic Forum.

    To answer the “lame duck” question – that’s precisely what they want. A leader who doesn’t lead, who doesn’t think much, who is happy with people who think for him, while he bathes in the presidential glory.

    Since the Globalists are determined to never give up and to prevail over the world order, they are not worried about creating problems for the party in future elections.

    GEOFOR:  In an interview with the National Interest magazine Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, made it clear that if the Republicans win, they will reconsider the issue of supporting Kiev. In our opinion, the intention is good.

    However, will the majority of Congress be able to really influence the process of pumping the Ukraine with weapons? After all, the growing workload of the American military-industrial complex is an increase in the number of jobs…

    PK:  Of course, Republicans would reconsider supporting Kiev. Most would stop the “blank checks” giveaways-for-naught immediately.

    They recognized the corrupt scam from day one. They might consider initiating job-creation programs in the US, where poverty is rampant and on the rise.

    So far, between the US and Europe, close to US$ 100 billion have been flowing into Kiev, in weaponry and “budget support” operation (a euphemism for corruption); much of it disappeared into thin air, while Washington and Brussels are just onlooking, or – rather – are closing their eyes.

    In Europe like in the US the majority of people want sovereign countries, with their sovereign governments, culture, education systems, their sovereign autonomous values, their countries – a country that does not have to bend to the orders of some self-imposed supremacy.

    This war was made by Washington and NATO and bought and corrupted European leaders – again – made by the WEF’s academy for YGLs. It was provocation after provocation since 1991, since the collapse by the Soviet Union (to be frank, also bought and corrupted by the west), including the US funded some 20-30 deadly bio-labs in Ukraine.

    President Putin warned them many times, and when they didn’t stop at the Red Line, Putin had to intervene. Avoiding a war would have been easy – by sheer adherence to the German and French sponsored Minsk I and II, especially Minsk II of spring 2015.

    But Kiev knew from the get-go that they would never have to adhere to the Minsk Accords, that Brussels would turn a blind eye and eventually both Brussels and Washington would support them fighting Russia.

    US Republicans and the majority of the western people – and you may say, the majority of the Global South — are non-Globalists. They do not want a war anywhere. Not in Ukraine, not in Syria, not in Yemen, not in Somalia – no war. Period.

    So, yes, for the Washington-NATO war machine and their European vassals, the war in Ukraine is a lucrative win-win situation. Highly profitable weapon-manufacturing, job creation – and even more important, bashing President Putin and weakening Russia.

    Russia is by far the largest and richest country in the world. Controlling Russia, would help the unipolar OWO controlling the world.

    The west needs wars, especially the US, not only because the US GDP depends close to 60% on the conflict cum war machine and associated industries and services, but also because being war-master inflicts fear and obedience.

    Isn’t it telling, under President Trump, the US didn’t start any new war. By contrast, Obama inherited two, and added four more on his own during his two 4-year terms.

    Let’s hope for a miracle – that the Republicans win both Houses of the US Congress on 6 December 2022.

    If they don’t, and voter fraud becomes apparent, the US might risk a civil war.

    See this, just one reference to potential voter fraud.

    • This interview was first published by GEOFOR (Geopolitical Forecast, Russia), in Russian here; in English here, 14 November 2022.

    The post GEOFOR Interview with Peter Koenig first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hanna Perekhoda: Peace in Donbas ‘requires the complete withdrawal of Russian armed forces’

    Ukrainian socialist Hanna Perekhoda discusses Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, the role of language in the conflict and the realities of the Donbas.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Ukraine War Is Driving “a Gold Rush to New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure”

    Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.

    In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.

    The Myth of Universality

    After Russia invaded, the United States and its allies rushed to punish it with a barrage of economic sanctions. They also sought to mobilize a global outcry by charging Putin with trashing what President Biden’s top foreign policy officials like to call the rules-based international order. Their effort has, at best, had minimal success.

    Yes, there was that lopsided vote against Russia in the United Nations General Assembly, the March 2nd resolution on the invasion sponsored by 90 countries. One hundred and forty-one nations voted for it and only five against, while 35 abstained. Beyond that, in the “global south” at least, the response to Moscow’s assault has been tepid at best. None of the key countries there — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to mention four — even issued official statements castigating Russia. Some, including India and South Africa, along with 16 other African countries (and don’t forget China though it may not count as part of the global south), simply abstained from that U.N. resolution. And while Brazil, like Indonesia, voted yes, it also condemned “indiscriminate sanctions” against Russia.

    None of those countries joined the United States and most of the rest of NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia, not even Turkey, a member of that alliance. In fact, Turkey, which last year imported 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, has only further increased energy cooperation with Moscow, including raising its purchases of Russian oil to 200,000 barrels per day — more than twice what it bought in 2021. India, too, ramped up oil purchases from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices from a Moscow squeezed by U.S. and NATO sanctions. Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.

    Despite the risk of facing potential U.S. sanctions thanks to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), India also stuck by its earlier decision to buy Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S-400. The Biden administration eventually threaded that needle by arranging a waiver for India, in part because it’s seen as a major future partner against China with which Washington has become increasingly preoccupied (as witnessed by the new National Security Strategy). The prime concern of the Indian leadership, however, has been to preserve its close ties with Russia, war or no war, given its fear of a growing alignment between that country and China, which India sees as its main adversary.

    What’s more, since the invasion, China’s average monthly trade with Russia has surged by nearly two-thirds, Turkey’s has nearly doubled, and India’s has risen more than threefold, while Russian exports to Brazil have nearly doubled as well. This failure of much of the world to heed Washington’s clarion call to stand up for universal norms stems partly from pique at what’s seen as the West’s presumptuousness. On March 1st, when 20 countries, a number from the European Union, wrote Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan (who visited Putin soon after the war began), imploring him to support an upcoming General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, he all too typically replied: “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… [Do you take for granted] that whatever you say we will do?” Had such a letter, he asked, been sent to India?

    Similarly, Celso Amorim, who served as Brazil’s foreign minister for seven years during the presidency of Luis Inacio “Lula” de Silva (who will soon reclaim his former job), declared that condemning Russia would amount to obeying Washington’s diktat. For his part, Lula claimed Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were partly to blame for the war. They hadn’t worked hard enough to avert it, he opined, by negotiating with Putin. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.

    Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro typically suggested that he wasn’t about to join the sanctions regime because his country’s agriculture depended on imported Russian fertilizer.

    Leaders in the global south were also struck by the contrast between the West’s urgency over Ukraine and its lack of similar fervor when it came to problems in their part of the world. There was, for instance, much commentary about the generosity and speed with which countries like Poland and Hungary (as well as the United States) embraced Ukrainian refugees, having largely shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In June, while not mentioning that particular example, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”

    The West’s less-than-urgent response to two other problems aggravated by the Ukraine crisis that hit the world’s poor countries especially hard bore out Jaishankar’s point of view. The first was soaring food prices sure to worsen malnutrition, if not famine, in the global south. Already in May, the World Food Program warned that 47 million additional people (more than Ukraine’s total population) were going to face “acute food insecurity” thanks to a potential reduction in food exports from both Russia and Ukraine — and that was on top of the 193 million people in 53 countries who had already been in that predicament (or worse) in 2021.

    A July deal brokered between Ukraine and Russia by the U.N. and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, in fact, ensure the resumption of food exports from both countries (though Russia briefly withdrew from it as October ended). Still, only a fifth of the added supply went to low-income and poor countries. While global food prices have fallen for six months straight now, another crisis cannot be ruled out as long as the war in Ukraine drags on.

    The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.

    A more fundamental reason much of the global south wasn’t in a hurry to pillory Russia is that the West has repeatedly defenestrated the very values it declares to be universal. In 1999, for instance, NATO intervened in Kosovo, following Serbia’s repression of the Kosovars, even though it was not authorized to do so, as required, by a U.N. Security Council resolution (which China and Russia would have vetoed). The Security Council did approve the U.S. and European intervention in Libya in 2011 to protect civilians from the security forces of that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gadhafi. That campaign, however, quickly turned into one aimed at toppling his government by assisting the armed opposition and so would be widely criticized in the global south for creating ongoing chaos in that country. After 9/11, the United States offered classically contorted legal explanations for the way the Central Intelligence Agency violated the Convention Against Torture and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions in the name of wiping out terrorism.

    Universal human rights, of course, occupy a prominent place in Washington’s narratives about that rules-based world order it so regularly promotes but in practice frequently ignores, notably in this century in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at regime change against a country that posed no direct threat to Russia and therefore was indeed a violation of the U.N. Charter; but so, too, was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, something few in the global south have forgotten.

    The War and Climate Change

    Worse yet, the divisions Vladimir Putin’s invasion has highlighted have only made it more difficult to take the necessary bold steps to combat the greatest danger all of us face on this planet: climate change. Even before the war, there was no consensus on who bore the most responsibility for the problem, who should make the biggest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, or who should provide funds to countries that simply can’t afford the costs involved in shifting to green energy. Perhaps the only thing on which everyone agrees in this moment of global stress is that not enough has been done to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord target of ideally limiting the increase in global warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade. That’s a valid conclusion. According to a U.N. report published this month, the planet’s warming will reach 2.4 degrees Centigrade by 2100. This is where things stood as the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

    As a start, the $100 billion per year that richer countries pledged to poor ones in 2009 to help move them away from hydrocarbon-based energy hasn’t been met in any year so far and recent disbursements, minimal as they have been, were largely in the form of loans, not grants. The resources the West will now have to spend just to cover Ukraine’s non-military needs for 2023 — $55 billion in budgetary assistance and infrastructure repairs alone, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky — plus soaring inflation and slower growth in Western economies thanks to the war make it doubtful that green commitments to poor countries will be fulfilled in the years to come. (Never mind the pledge, in advance of the November 2021 COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the $100 billion goal would be met in 2023.)

    In the end, the surge in energy costs created by the war, in part because Russia’s natural gas supplies to Europe have been slashed, could prove the shot in the arm needed for some of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and methane to move more quickly toward wind and solar power. That seems especially possible because the price of clean energy technologies has declined so sharply in recent years. The cost of photovoltaic cells for solar power has, for instance, fallen by nearly 90% in the past decade; the cost for lithium-ion batteries, needed for rechargeable electric vehicles, by the same amount during the last 20 years. Optimism about a quicker greening of the planet, now a common refrain, could prove valid in the long run. However, when it comes to progress on climate change, the immediate implications of the war aren’t encouraging.

    According to the International Energy Agency, if the Paris Agreement’s target for limiting global warming and its goal of “net zero” in global emissions by 2050 are to prove feasible, the building of additional fossil-fuel infrastructure must cease immediately. And that’s hardly what’s been happening since the war in Ukraine began. Instead, there has been what one expert calls “a gold rush to new fossil fuel infrastructure.” Following the drastic cuts in Russian gas exports to Europe, new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — more than 20 of them, worth billions of dollars — have either been planned or put on a fast track in Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Group of Seven may even reverse its decision last May to stop public investment in overseas fossil-fuel projects by the end of this year, while its plan to “decarbonize” the energy sectors of member countries by 2035 may also fall by the wayside.

    In June, Germany, desperate to replace that Russian natural gas, announced that mothballed coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of greenhouse-gas producers, would be brought back online. The Federation of German Industry, which opposed shutting them down well before the war started, has indicated that it’s already switching to coal so that natural gas storage tanks can be filled before the winter cold sets in. India, too, has responded to higher energy prices with plans to boost coal production by almost 56 gigawatts through 2032, a 25% increase. Britain has scrapped its decision to prohibit, on environmental grounds, the development of the Jackdaw natural gas field in the North Sea and has already signed new contracts with Shell and other fossil-fuel companies. European countries have concluded several deals for LNG purchases, including with Azerbaijan, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and Qatar (which has demanded 20-year contracts). Then there’s Russia’s response to high energy prices, including a huge Arctic drilling project aimed at adding 100 million tons of oil a year to the global supply by 2035.

    U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres characterized this dash toward yet more hydrocarbon energy use as “madness.” Using a phrase long reserved for nuclear war, he suggested that such an unceasing addiction to fossil fuels could end in “mutually assured destruction.” He has a point: the U.N. Environment Program’s 2022 “Emissions Gap Report” released last month concluded that, in light of the emissions targets of so many states, Earth’s warming in the post-Industrial Revolution era could be in the range of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s nowhere near the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious benchmark of 1.5 degrees on a planet where the average temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees.

    As the Germany-based Perspectives on Climate Group details in a recent study, the Ukraine war has also had direct effects on climate change that will continue even after the fighting ends. As a start, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require countries to report emissions produced by their armed forces, but the war in Ukraine, likely to be a long-drawn-out affair, has already contributed to military carbon emissions in a big way, thanks to fossil-fuel-powered tanks, aircraft, and so much else. Even the rubble created by the bombardment of cities has released more carbon dioxide. So will Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, which its prime minister estimated last month will cost close to $750 billion. And that may be an underestimate considering that the Russian army has taken its wrecking ball (or perhaps wrecking drones, missiles, and artillery) to everything from power plants and waterworks to schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.

    What International Community?

    Leaders regularly implore “the international community” to act in various ways. If such appeals are to be more than verbiage, however, compelling evidence is needed that 195 countries share basic principles of some sort on climate change — that the world is more than the sum of its parts. Evidence is also needed that the most powerful countries on this planet can set aside their short-term interests long enough to act in a concerted fashion and decisively when faced with planet-threatening problems like climate change. The war in Ukraine offers no such evidence. For all the talk of a new dawn that followed the end of the Cold War, we seem stuck in our old ways — just when they need to change more than ever.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.