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Category: Ukraine

  • 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.

  • Exiled Russian Activist Challenges Pacifist Approach to Ending War on Ukraine

    Russia’s war in Ukraine is intensifying. In response to victories on the battlefield won by Ukrainians this fall, Russia has responded by launching a wave of missile and drone attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure throughout the country. As a result, over 15,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed or injured by early October, and another 1,043 by early November. Despite this state terrorism, Ukraine has continued to put up a valiant resistance to invasion and occupation.

    Faced with a failing war, Vladimir Putin’s regime has conscripted hundreds of thousands of men into his armed forces and deployed them to his frontlines. That, in turn, has triggered a rise in antiwar resistance in Russia. In an exclusive for Truthout, Ashley Smith interviews Lolja Nordic from the Russian activist organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance about the movement against Putin’s regime and its imperialist invasion of Ukraine.

    Lolja Nordic is anarcho ecofeminist, antiwar activist and artist from Saint Petersburg, where until recently she organized for gender equality, human rights and climate justice. She is a co-coordinator of Feminist Anti-War Resistance, a group created in February 2022 to protest the war in Ukraine. Since January 2021 Lolja has been facing political repression, arrest and threats for her activism. In March 2022 she had to flee Russia and continue her work in exile after becoming a suspect in a “phone terrorism” criminal case, which was fabricated by the Russian secret police to put pressure on several antiwar activists.

    Ashley Smith: What is the nature and roots of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Why did he launch it and what are his war aims?

    Lolja Nordic: Putin actually started the war back in 2014 when he annexed Crimea. He just escalated it in February. His reasons are clear, and he has repeated them over and over. He has a very colonial mindset; he opposes any country in the post-Soviet space gaining its independence. He has ambitions to rebuild the old empire.

    He considers Ukraine to be a part of Russia and will not allow it to exist as an independent country. He denies it is a nation, rejects its right to self-determination, and refuses to acknowledge Ukrainians’ agency and subjectivity.

    After Ukraine’s Maidan uprising in 2013-2014 that drove Russia’s corrupt ally, Viktor Yanukovych, from power, Putin feared that the country was slipping out of his control. So, over the last eight years he has deployed troops to Ukraine, backed up the so-called People’s Republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, and plotted to carry out the colonial seizure of the whole country.

    Putin’s imperialism flows from his abusive, toxic and patriarchal worldview. You can hear this in how he speaks about Ukraine. His language is identical to how rapists and abusers talk about their victims.

    The Ukrainian resistance has scored a wave of victories and forced Putin to conscript hundreds of thousands of people. What impact has Russia’s military defeats and the mobilization had on Russian society?

    The defeats and mobilization have forced the war into the middle of Russian society. Men are being called up and deployed in large numbers and against their will. Almost every family in Russia has a loved one that could be forced to fight in Ukraine.

    This has triggered broader questioning of the war. Before the mobilization, conservative Russians could believe Putin’s claim that it would not affect your life. They had supported Putin for years based on his promise of stability and his claim that without his rule there would be chaos.

    That is no longer credible. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country to avoid conscription and repression, others have gone into hiding; some conscripted men even committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances at the training camps; large numbers have been deployed in battle, and many are already dying at the front. People are beginning to realize that Putin’s regime is the source of instability and chaos.

    That does not mean everyone who is against the war or mobilization has become an antiwar activist. Putin retains a base, especially in the elite but also among broader sections of the population. But now there is much more questioning and that has given space for more resistance to Putin and his war.

    In February and March there were daily antiwar protests in cities all over Russia. The regime crushed them with harsh repression, arresting more than 16,000 people by June. By October this number had risen to 19,000. Many activists were tortured and some even raped.

    Putin immediately criminalized all expressions of antiwar opposition. You can get arrested for posting the word “war” or even for wearing clothing with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. This repression drove protests for the most part off the streets.

    Most Russian people are not wealthy, many are struggling on low wages and find it difficult to meet their basic needs. So, they are reluctant to risk the safety of their families or lose their jobs by openly opposing the war when faced with possible, arrest, fines and torture.

    But the mobilization triggered another wave of protests. The most significant ones were in Republics like Dagestan and Sakha (Yakutia) where women led marches against conscription. This took incredible bravery, because in regions like Dagestan protesters face even more severe repression than people do in cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg. For over a decade, Russia has carried out mass repression and counter-insurgency to impose its rule in Dagestan.

    But protests are not the only form of antiwar resistance. Thousands of Russians are involved in the grassroots networks to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians who have been abducted and forcefully relocated from Ukraine to Russia. Those networks also help them flee from Russia across the border back to Ukraine or into Europe.

    There is also a large partisan movement made up mostly of anarchists. They have been disabling railway lines to disrupt the transport of military vehicles and weaponry to the front. They have thrown Molotov cocktails to set fire to military offices all over the country on weekends when no one was inside with the aim of slowing conscription.

    What has your organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance been doing to build opposition to the war? What specifically feminist arguments do you stress in your organizing?

    For feminists worldwide, war is one of our central issues. We see how all kinds of violence are interconnected, including militaristic violence. War has its roots in patriarchal culture, its oppressive structures, and systemic violence. So, when Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, we decided to unite different feminist groups from all over Russia and from other countries to form Feminist Antiwar Resistance.

    It is a horizontal network with groups and activists both inside and outside Russia. We have a lot of different campaigns to confront the regime and weaken Russia’s war machine. We have organized many street protests and actions since February 24. When the mobilization was announced, we worked with a youth-led democracy group, Vesna (Spring), to call demonstrations throughout the country.

    Together with Anti-job and Antivoenny Bolnichny (Antiwar Sick Leave) — two organizations which fight for labor rights in Russia — we built a project called Anti–War Fund that provides help to workers whose labor rights were violated because of their antiwar activism. This is important because many people are threatened with getting fired illegally for being spotted at protests or just posting antiwar content online. To build a sustainable antiwar movement we need to support these kinds of workers with free legal help and protection, so it would be more difficult for the bosses and companies to pressure and silence them.

    We built our own network of volunteers providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees in Russia. We started a hotline where antiwar activists can get urgent, free psychological help. We provide counseling and advice to people who face all sorts of risks. We organize help to political prisoners and help activists find temporary hiding to escape repression.

    One of our goals is to break through the regime’s propaganda both online and offline. We have established Feminist Antiwar Resistance social media on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as a form of digital resistance and launched a printed newspaper that exposes the reality of this horrific imperialist war.

    We produce a newspaper called Zhenskaya Pravda (Women’s Truth). It looks like an ordinary local free newspaper, but it’s filled with antiwar articles. We disguise it like that so it could be spread widely in different public spaces in Russia. Anybody can print it at home and spread it secretly at campuses, malls, community buildings, etc.

    Often, we design our posts as memes or jokes to go viral, reach a broader, conservative, or apolitical audience. But once you dig into them you can find the information and arguments against the regime and the invasion.

    One of our most important new initiatives is collaborating with different decolonial antiwar movements organized by Russia’s ethnic minorities and Indigenous people. They have been fighting to protect their culture and fight for their independence. We are working with them to give them a platform to give voice to their struggle.

    Russian forces in the occupation have suffered enormous casualties. Is there any resistance to the war developing in the Russian troops?

    There are signs of this beginning. A lot of people who were conscripted are really angry. They were not adequately trained, did not have adequate equipment, and were just sent to the front lines. Many of them posted videos expressing anger over these conditions. Some groups of conscripted soldiers have staged protests and sabotage at the training camps.

    At this point, we don’t know if this is leading to large-scale resistance within the Russian troops. There is no transparency of what is happening at the front inside the Russian army and soldiers who try to sabotage or desert face the risk of being executed at the front by their own commanders.

    But we do know that people are sabotaging Russia’s war just by refusing conscription either by fleeing the country or going into hiding. Some people don’t look at it that way, but I do.

    Anything that weakens the Russian army is helping Ukraine win. People refusing conscription deprives Russian imperialism of foot soldiers. However, conscious or not, that is part of the antiwar resistance.

    Given the setbacks Russia has suffered, Putin has turned to state terrorist attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure to break Ukraine’s will to fight. What is Putin’s strategy now?

    It’s really hard to get inside Putin’s head. To be honest, his assessment of the war and therefore his strategy is a bit delusional. He does not get accurate reports from his underlings.

    So, he can’t really come up with an effective strategy. Everything about this war demonstrates his strategic incompetence from the initial failed siege of Kyiv to the defeats Russian forces are experiencing now.

    Faced with these setbacks, Putin is now using tactics he used in Chechnya and Syria — massacring civilians, blowing up apartment buildings, and destroying civilian infrastructure like water and electric plants. He doesn’t care about human lives in Ukraine or in Russia. He’s sacrificing us all for his imperialist ambitions.

    We endured this in Russia through his 22-year reign. He’s launched war after war from Chechnya to Georgia to Syria and now Ukraine. None of this has benefitted anyone but his regime and its cronies. Ordinary Russians and Putin’s international victims have paid the price with their lives and livelihoods. His regime is a terrorist state.

    But the governments in Europe that now denounce Putin are hypocrites. Many of them up until February met with him at summits, shook his hand, and some, especially among the far right elite, spoke about him as a strong leader and somehow part of the opposition to the U.S. They did this while they knew that he was murdering independent journalists, killing his political opponents, and jailing and torturing Russian activists.

    European activists and leftists, as well as those in the U.S., have to criticize their own governments for enabling this regime to rule. European states, even now in the midst of this war, are still financing Putin’s military machine with every payment for Russia’s fossil fuel exports.

    In the West, many pacificists have argued for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement. What are the problems with such calls?

    It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It’s the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians?

    Our task is to stop the aggressor. That means first and foremost building solidarity with Ukraine and its people. They have been screaming for help for months. They don’t have enough weapons to fight against Russian aggression. They don’t have defensive weapons to protect their citizens from missile attacks. They deserve all the military and financial help to liberate their country.

    Instead of putting demands on Ukraine to stop fighting, we should be focused on doing all we can to weaken Russia’s war machine. If we are disturbed by global militarization, we should be first of all focused not on the question of whether it’s good to provide weapons to Ukraine, but on how to demilitarize and weaken the Russian army, how to put pressure on those countries that have been providing weapons to Russian soldiers or equipment to Russian police to beat and arrest protesters. To begin with, countries should stop financing Putin’s war and reinforcing the Russian military by buying Russian fossil fuels.

    Where do you think the war and the resistance to it are headed? What should we expect in the short, medium and long term?

    It is very difficult to predict. There are just too many variables. What I do know is that we have to keep building the resistance to the regime in Russia and it is a lot of work. We need to build and enlarge grassroots horizontal networks of resistance to cover the whole country, provide mutual aid and sustain it.

    We need to expand the number of people who are aware, ready to act, and trained to co-organize so we are prepared to act fast in critical moments. We need international solidarity with Ukraine against this war. We need international solidarity with people who are fighting Putin’s regime in Russia.

    In Russia, we are fighting for a future free of Putin and his oligarchs and their militarism. That future will be one where women, queer people, ethnic minorities, Indigenous people and working people can all live together in peace and with equal rights.

  • Zelensky And Bush To Give Joint Pro-War Presentation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.

    CNN reports:

    Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

    The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.

    “Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”

    The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

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    NEW: President George W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will participate in the Bush Institute’s Nov. 16 event on advancing freedom.

    More from @kylieatwood @CNN: https://t.co/cGvBylur7G

    — George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) November 10, 2022

    To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.

    Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the US empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.

    Also appearing with Bush will be the leader who’s slated to become the face of the US empire’s next proxy war, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. CNN writes:

    Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will also take part in the event next week. She will deliver a recorded message, in which she is expected to underscore that the struggle for freedom is a global challenge.

    And sure, why not. If you’re going to manufacture consent for proxy warfare against multiple powers as your empire flails around frantically scrambling to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, you may as well save time and promote them all on the same ticket.

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    Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX

    — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022

    Many people who support the US proxy war in Ukraine now recognize that the Iraq war was a horrific disaster, but Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war. Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed by the propaganda of today. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda.

    It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.

    It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    __________________

    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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  • Ukrainian feminists: ‘We stand in solidarity with the Iranian uprising’

    Various Ukrainian feminist activist groups and NGOs have signed a statement expressing their solidarity with the Iranian uprising.

  • No Such Thing As An Objective Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.

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    It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

    Look at this scumbag:

    Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.

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    There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.

    The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.

    Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It’s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.

    Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you’ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.

    Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It’s not even sane. But because it’s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.

    The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world’s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That’s the one and only reason. It’s not the moderate perspective, it’s just the most funded and marketed perspective.

    All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It’s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.

    The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.

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    There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.

    There’s no such thing as an objective journalist.

    There’s no such thing as a moral billionaire.

    There’s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.

    There’s no such thing as an honest war.

    People should learn all this in grade school.

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    Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.

    Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.

    This is the source of most problems.

    ❖

    Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform’s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they’re not equal, and they’re not similar.

    You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.

    There’s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It’s unhelpful to conflate the two.

    And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It’s important to be aware of these obfuscations.

    There’s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don’t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They’re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it’s punching down.

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    Nobody’s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the west’s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?

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    Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.

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    If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.

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    It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.

    And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.

    ❖

     

    One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it’s not enough to tell people what you think, you’ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you’re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.

    People are very distrusting in today’s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you’re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.

    I can’t promise that I’ll always get everything right or that I’ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I’m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.

    __________________

    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.

  • Dealing with a ‘bloody messy’ world – the urgent foreign policy challenges facing NZ

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    Since Jacinda Ardern described the state of world affairs as “bloody messy” earlier this year there have been few, if any, signs of improvement. Ukraine, China, nuclear proliferation and the lasting impacts of a global pandemic all present urgent, unresolved challenges.

    For a small country in an increasingly lawless world this is both dangerous and confronting.

    Without the military or economic scale to influence events directly, New Zealand relies on its voice and ability to persuade.

    But by placing its faith in a rules-based order and United Nations processes, New Zealand also has to work with — and sometimes around — highly imperfect systems. In some areas of international law and policy the machinery is failing. It’s unclear what the next best step might be.

    Given these uncertainties, then, where has New Zealand done well on the international stage, and where might it need to find a louder voice or more constructive proposals?

    Confronting Russia
    Strength and clarity have been most evident in New Zealand’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. There has been no hint of joining the abstainers or waverers at crucial UN votes condemning Russia’s actions.

    While it can be argued New Zealand could do more in terms of sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military, the government has made good use of the available international forums.

    Joining the International Court of Justice case against “Russia’s spurious attempt to justify its invasion under international law” and supporting the International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine are both excellent initiatives.

    Unfortunately, similar avenues have been blocked when it comes to other critical issues New Zealand has a vested interest in seeing resolved properly.

    China and human rights
    This has been especially apparent in the debate about human rights abuses in China, and allegations of genocide made by some countries over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

    New Zealand and some other countries correctly avoided using the word “genocide”, which has a precise legal meaning best applied by UN experts, not domestic politicians. Instead, the government called on China to provide meaningful and unfettered access to UN and other independent observers.

    While not perfect, the visit went ahead. The eventual report by outgoing UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet concluded that China had committed serious human rights violations, which could amount to crimes against humanity.

    This should have forced the international community to act. Instead, 19 countries voted with China to block a debate at the UN Human Rights Council (17 wanted the debate, 11 abstained). The upshot was that China succeeded in driving the issue into a diplomatic dead-end.

    Allowing an organisation designed to protect victims to be controlled by alleged perpetrators isn’t something New Zealand should accept. The government should make it a diplomatic priority to become a member of the council, and it should use every opportunity to speak out and keep the issue in the global spotlight.

    Arms control
    Elsewhere, New Zealand’s foreign policy can arguably be found wanting — most evidently, perhaps, in the area of nuclear arms regulation.

    Advocating for the complete prohibition of all nuclear weapons, as the prime minister did at the UN in September, might be inspiring and also good domestic politics, but it doesn’t make the world safer.

    With the risk of nuclear conflagration at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis, a better immediate goal would be improving the regulation, rather than prohibition, of nuclear weapons. This would entail convincing nuclear states to take their weapons off “hair-trigger alert”.

    The other goals should be the adoption of a no-first-use policy by all nuclear powers (only China has made such a commitment so far), and a push for regional arms control in the Indo-Pacific to rein in India, Pakistan and China.

    Pandemic preparedness
    Finally, there is the danger of vital law and policy not just failing, but not even being born. This is the case with the World Health Organisation’s so-called “pandemic treaty”, designed to better prevent, prepare for and respond to the next global pandemic.

    New Zealand set out some admirable goals in its submission in April, but these have been watered down or are missing from the first working draft of the proposed agreement.

    This shouldn’t be accepted lightly given the lessons of the past two-and-a-half years. Transparency by governments, a precautionary approach and the meaningful involvement of non-state actors will be essential.

    Similarly, improved oversight of the 59 laboratories spread across 23 countries that work with the most dangerous pathogens is critical. Currently, only a quarter of these labs score highly on safety. The proposed treaty does little to demand the kind of biosecurity protocols and robust regulatory systems required to better protect present and future generations.

    As with the other urgent and difficult issues mentioned here, New Zealand’s future is directly connected to what happens elsewhere in the world. The challenge now is to keep adapting to this changing global order while being an effective voice for reason and the rule of law.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • The Farther People Are From The Fighting In Ukraine, The More They Oppose Peace Talks

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    A new article for The Irish Times by Virginia Tech professor Gerard Toal, titled “Ukraine risks being locked into endless war in bid for perfect peace,” contains a very interesting paragraph:

    Ordinary Ukrainians on the front lines are divided on a ceasefire and negotiations. My Ukrainian colleague Karina Korostelina and I surveyed the attitudes of both residents and displaced persons in three Ukrainian cities close to the southeast battlefields this summer. Almost half agreed it was imperative to seek a ceasefire to stop Russians killing Ukraine’s young men. Slightly more supported negotiations with Russia on a complete ceasefire, with a quarter totally against and a fifth declaring themselves neutral. Respondents were torn when considering whether saving lives or territorial unity were more important to them. Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.

    It’s the third from the last paragraph in the article, whose overall content cannot be remotely construed as sympathetic toward Moscow, but it’s very important information.

    “Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”

    Those two simple sentences sum up so much of the attitude we are seeing toward this war, and it applies as much to those cheerleading continual escalation and bloodshed from the comfort of their homes on the other side of the world.

    “Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.”

    Remember this as you watch pundits and politicians calling for escalations in Ukraine from Washington DC, Los Angeles and London.

    Remember this as you watch armchair warriors and NAFO neckbeards dogpiling anyone who advocates peace talks.

    Remember this as you watch progressives on Capitol Hill pressured into walking back even the mildest support for potential ceasefire negotiations at some point.

    Remember this as more and more information comes out about the way bot swarms and astroturf trolling operations have been used to shout down and silence anyone who advocates peace online.

    War is the single most horrific thing in the world. It is the most insane thing that humans do, by far. The most destructive. The least sustainable. The most conducive to human suffering. If people could spend even one hour in the cortisol-soaked mind of a mother trying to bring up her kids in the middle of the conflict, grieving people you’ve lost, worried about losing more, working out how to stretch the food and the fuel, trying to keep things as normal as possible for your stressed out children, jumping at every noise, trying to forget the things you have seen, peace would be achieved within that hour. Everyone and everything would be mobilized to stop this hell on earth as soon as humanly possible. It would be clear to all that the tragedy that is unfolding right now is not just causing enormous suffering in this moment, but every minute it goes on trauma is burning itself deeper into the subconscious of every single person going through it which will torment them and their descendents for generations to come.

    But because we are primates who evolved in small social groups, humans often have trouble feeling empathy for that suffering until it enters into our own immediate circle. Our own city. Our own house. Our own sons, brothers and fathers going out to fight and never coming home.

    So this war has become like a game for people. A vehicle from which to promote their political ideologies and masturbate their propaganda-induced Good Guys vs Bad Guys fantasies. A team sport where they can cheer on the total recapture of all annexed territories in eastern Ukraine from anonymous Shiba avatar accounts online to pass time in their meaningless lives.

    The passive team sports cheerleading spirit that this war has brought on is made all the more obnoxious by the fact that Ukraine is still accepting volunteers to fight on the front lines. If you think this war is good and should continue, the morally coherent thing to do would be to go fight in it, rather than sitting at home eating cheese puffs with one hand and tweeting with the other acting as a pro bono Pentagon propagandist between visits to Pornhub while other people die for your cause.

    But that isn’t happening. People are happy to sit in the comfort of their own home and watch their remote war movie unfold on CNN.

    This isn’t a game. This is a war the US empire provoked to advance its own strategic agendas and therefore has a responsibility to help end, but instead we’re being hammered by that empire with propaganda, censorship, bot armies and troll farms dedicated to convincing everyone that nuclear brinkmanship is safety and peace talks are danger.

    Don’t help them do this. Don’t help manufacture consent for a proxy war whose continuation has less and less support the closer and closer you get to the actual killing. Find some other way to pass your time and scratch your itch for conflict and egoic gratification, one which doesn’t involve spending real people’s lives like video game money. Get a healthier hobby for God’s sake.

    ______________

    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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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Ukrainian socialist Denys Pilash: ‘Russia will only negotiate if it suffers some defeats’

    Speaking from Kyiv, Denys Pilash — a political scientist and activist with the Ukrainian democratic socialist organisation Social Movement — addressed Green Left’s Ecosocialism 2022 conference.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • You’re Doing Great And Your Voice Makes A Difference

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    2022 is an insane year to be a critic of the empire. People are being censored for disputing official narratives about a war. Those who aren’t censored are being mobbed by astroturf trolling operations. A frenetic propaganda push is turning our friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances into brainwashed empire automatons who despise our heretical rejection of official imperial doctrine about Russia and Ukraine.

    And this is just a quick note to say thank you for holding the line anyway, and to note that your opposition to nuclear brinkmanship, US warmongering and propaganda makes a difference.

    If our rulers did not require the consent of the public, they would not work so hard to manufacture that consent. While the empire managers work hard to keep us from noticing that there a whole lot more of us than there are of them, this is a reality that our rulers are at all times acutely aware of. It gives them nightmares to contemplate the possibility of people growing tired of being impoverished and endangered by the economic warfare and nuclear brinkmanship our rulers are inflicting upon us in order to advance their unipolarist agendas of global domination. They are never not afraid of the possibility that we might begin to collectively push back in large numbers.

    That is why we are being continually inundated by ever-rising levels of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulations and empire trolls. And that’s why there are increasing artificially created pressures to shun, silence and shut down anyone who speaks out against the madness we are witnessing.

    As the US-centralized empire ramps up cold war aggressions against not one but two powerful nations in China and Russia, manipulating public thought at mass scale to go along with those reckless and costly aggressions becomes more and more essential. What that means is that anyone who is voicing opposition to those agendas is a significant thorn in the side of the power structure that’s advancing them.

    As I keep repeating, all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Whether you’re talking about positive changes in individual behavior or collective behavior, it always arises from an increase in awareness of something where there previously was less awareness. Self-destructive behavior patterns change when the individual becomes more conscious of the internal forces which drive them. Social injustices change when the collective becomes more conscious of how unwholesome they are. Abuses of power change when investigative journalism and whistleblowers bring awareness to those abuses.

    By vocally opposing the madness our world is descending into, you are helping to expand consciousness. To whatever extent you draw more attention and awareness to the lies, manipulations and malfeasance that is being inflicted upon our world in facilitation of the agendas of oligarchy and empire, you are expanding consciousness by that much. You are bringing collective human behavior that much closer to real change, whether you’re talking to people in person, making videos, holding demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, tweeting, blogging, spray painting the truth on an overpass or yelling it at a street corner.

    Which is why you meet up with so much opposition when you do. Just as there are forces within us which resist being seen in order to remain unconscious, there are forces in the world which work to shut down attempts to shine the light of truth on them. That’s all you’re ever meeting up with when people try to stop you from speaking out, and it deserves no more respect than that.

    So keep speaking. Keep pushing for a sane and peaceful world. You’re doing great, and your voice makes a difference, and don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise. If our voices made no difference, the most powerful people in the world wouldn’t be trying to shut us down.

    _________________

    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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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Westerners live in denial, convinced they’re the good guys

    No one took responsibility for the explosion over the weekend that ripped through a section of the Kerch Bridge that links Russia to Crimea and was built by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula back in 2014.

    But it was not just Kyiv’s gleeful celebrations that indicated the main suspect. Within hours, the Ukrainian authorities had released a set of commemorative stamps depicting the destruction.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin was under no illusions either. On Monday, he struck out with a torrent of missiles that hit major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Lviv. It was a pale, Slavic echo of Israel’s intermittent bombardments of Gaza, which are expressly intended to send the Palestinian enclave “back to the Stone Age“.

    If the scenes looked familiar – an attack by one party, followed by a massive retaliatory strike from the other – the mood and language that greeted the Ukrainian attack and the Russian counter-attack felt noticeably different from what passes for normal western commentary about Israel and Palestine.

    The blast on the Kerch Bridge was welcomed with barely concealed excitement from western journalists, politicians and analysts, while Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv were uniformly denounced as Russian brutality and state terrorism. That is not the way things work when Israel and Palestinian factions engage in their own rounds of fighting.

    Had the Palestinians openly celebrated blowing up a bridge in East Jerusalem, a territory illegally annexed by Israel in the 1960s, and killed Israeli civilians as collateral damage in the process, who can really imagine western media reports being similarly supportive?

    Nor would western academics have lined up, as they did for Ukraine, to explain in detail why destroying a bridge was a proportionate act and fully in accordance with the rights in international law of a people under belligerent occupation to resist.

    Instead, there would have been thunderous denunciations of Palestinian savagery and “terrorism”.

    In reality, Palestinian resistance nowadays is far more modest – and yet still receives western censure. Palestinians need only to fire a home-made rocket, or launch an “incendiary balloon”, usually ineffectually out of their cage in Gaza – where they have been besieged for years by their Israeli persecutors – to incur the wrath of Israel and the western powers that claim to constitute the “international community”.

    Even more perversely, when Palestinians solely target Israeli soldiers, as they are unambiguously entitled to do under international law, they are similarly reviled as criminals.

    Regular rampages

    But the double standards do not end there. Western media and politicians were unreservedly appalled by Moscow’s retaliatory strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Despite the media’s emphasis on Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, the number of civilians killed across Ukraine by the wave of missile hits on Monday was reported to be low.

    Western media are far less horrified when it comes to Israel’s regular rampages across Gaza – even when Israel “retaliates” after much less provocation and when its strikes inflict far greater suffering and damage.

    And, of course, it is not just Israel that is benefiting from this hypocrisy. The United States’ “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that initiated the war on Iraq in 2003 – and so impressed western commentators – killed many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Russia’s strikes on Kyiv pale in comparison.

    There are other glaring inconsistencies. After Russia’s missile strikes, Ukraine is gaining an even more receptive ear in western capitals to its demands for additional weaponry to help regain the eastern territories Moscow has annexed.

    By contrast, no one in the West is suggesting that the Palestinians should be armed to help them fight off decades of Israeli occupation and siege. Quite the reverse. It is invariably western weapons that rain down on Gaza, supplied to the belligerent Israeli occupier by the very parties now condemning Russia.

    And in stark contrast to Britain’s whole-hearted support as Ukraine battles to stop Russia’s annexation of its eastern territories, the UK’s prime minister Liz Truss stated only last month that she may reward Israel for its illegal annexation of Jerusalem by moving the British embassy there.

    Whereas Palestinians are constantly inveigled to postpone their liberation struggle and wait for their occupier to agree to peace talks, even when Israel openly scorns engagement, Ukrainians are pushed by the West to do the exact opposite. They are expected to delay any negotiations with Russia and focus on the battlefield.

    Similarly, those who promote talks between Israel and Palestine that are never going to take place are praised as peacemakers. Those who advocate for talks between Ukraine and Russia – when Moscow has expressed a repeated willingness to negotiate, even if its overtures are disparaged by the West – are rounded on as appeasers.

    Russia, meanwhile, faces sustained and comprehensive sanctions imposed by western states to bring it to heel.

    By contrast, those proposing a far weaker tool – grassroots boycotts – to pressure Israel to loosen its choke-hold on Gaza are smeared as antisemites and face legislation to outlaw their activities by the same western states sanctioning Moscow.

    It is almost as if the “freedom-loving” West has an entirely inconsistent agenda when it comes to the plights of Ukraine and Palestine. Israel’s hold on Palestine is unfortunate but justified; Russia’s over Ukraine is emphatically not.

    Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s “unprovoked aggression” is heroic. Palestinian resistance to Israel’s violence – invariably presented as self-defence – is terrorism.

    Double standards

    Western news at the moment is a litany of these double standards and legal and ethical contradictions – and yet barely anyone seems to notice.

    Westerners, for example, are currently cheering the protests in Iran, where women and girls have taken to the streets and created mass disturbances in schools. Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was taken into custody for wearing her hijab head covering too loosely.

    Western media celebrate these young women casting aside the hijab in defiance of the unaccountable clerics who rule over them. The West bewails the beatings and attacks they receive from a tyrannous, patriarchal Iranian theocracy.

    And yet there is no comparable solidarity with Palestinians when they collectively defy an unaccountable Israeli occupation army that rules over them. When they turn out to protest at the fence Israel has built all around Gaza to imprison them, preventing them from leaving for work or to see family overseas, or to reach hospitals much better equipped than their own that have been under Israeli blockade for years, they are shot down by Israeli snipers.

    Where is the applause for those brave Palestinian protesters standing up to their oppressors? Where are the denunciations of Israel for compelling Palestinians to endure a tyrannous, apartheid-enforcing Israeli military?

    Why is it entirely unremarkable that Palestinians – young and old, men and women – are regularly beaten or killed by Israel, while the death of a single Iranian woman is enough to reduce the western media to paroxysms of outrage?

    And why, just as pertinently, does the West care so much about the lives of young Iranian women and their hijab protests when it appears not to give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions? Those restrictions have plunged parts of Iranian society into deep and sustained poverty that puts Iranian lives at risk.

    Such is the reflexive hypocrisy that Israeli women who have shown no solidarity with Palestinian women abused and killed by the Israeli army turned out last week to cut their hair in a public act of sisterhood with Iranian women.

    Western dictates

    There is nothing new about these double standards. They are entrenched in western thinking, based on a profoundly racist, colonial worldview – one that sees “the West” as the good guys and everyone else as morally compromised, or irredeemably evil, if they refuse to bow to western dictates.

    That is highlighted by the current battle of an 88-year-old Palestinian businessman, Munib al-Masri, to win an apology from Britain.

    At his instruction, two eminent lawyers – Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and Ben Emmerson, a former United Nations expert on human rights – have been reviewing evidence of crimes committed by British forces in the years before 1948, when the UK ruled Palestine under a mandate.

    When Britain withdrew, it effectively allowed Zionist institutions to take its place and create a self-declared Jewish state of Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

    The evidence documented by Ocampo and Emmerson – which they describe as “shocking” – includes crimes such as arbitrary killings and detentions, torture, use of human shields, and home demolitions weaponised as collective punishment.

    If that all sounds familiar, it should. Israel has been terrorising Palestinians with these same exact policies over the past 74 years. That is because Israel incorporated the British mandate’s “emergency regulations” permitting such crimes into its legal and administrative codes. It simply continued what Britain had started.

    Masri hopes to present the 300-page dossier to the UK government later this year. According to the media, it will be “reviewed thoroughly” by the Ministry of Defence. But do not hold your breath waiting for an apology.

    The reality is that Ocampo and Emmerson did not need to conduct their research. Nothing they tell the UK government will be a revelation. British officials already know about these crimes. And there is no remorse – as demonstrated by, if nothing else, the fact that Britain continues to back Israel to the hilt even while the Israeli military continues the same reign of state terror.

    Israel’s task was to rebrand as a “western-style democracy” the British mandate’s brutal colonial rule over the Palestinian population. It is the reason Israel receives billions of dollars in aid from the US every year, and why it never faces consequences for any of the crimes it commits.

    The ugly truth is that westerners dwell permanently inside their own bubble of disinformation, one puffed up by their leaders and the media, that allows them to imagine themselves as the good guys – whatever the evidence actually proves.

    The double standards in the West’s treatment of Ukraine compared to Palestine should be a moment when that harsh realisation finally dawns. Sadly, western publics just seem to sink ever deeper into the comforting illusion of self-righteousness.

    The post Westerners live in denial, convinced they’re the good guys first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, 1925

    When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit.  Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.

    When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me.  A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.”  He meant it as a complement.  I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.

    Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start.  Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack.  This was clearly false.  Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have.  My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.

    Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss.  In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence”  and elicits anger or dismissal.

    Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits.  They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.

    But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to.  José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit.  While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.

    For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past.  It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it.  Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying  more than their appearances present.

    It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not.  For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”

    Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place.  As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand.  “It is based on slow, constant impregnation.  It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.”  Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.

    Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the U.S. government.  It is more than a century old.  Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution.  Today’s U.S. war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.

    Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert.  For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent.  The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders.  Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.

    Take the U.S. government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum.  Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the U.S. government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.

    Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks.  They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks.  This propaganda supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the U.S. war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance.  All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control.  Their minds cluttered with lies.

    Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced  the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today.  Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health.  Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.

    In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves. Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago, “… in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”

    Ellul describes the modern person thus:

    Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy.  It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.

    And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill.  To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves.  As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown.  Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.

    It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:

    One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …

    Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda.  They tend to be addictive.  Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example.  Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda.  Few can give them up.  And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited.  There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought.  Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”

    Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.

    But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

    It may end with a bang while many just whimper.

     

    The post Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Iran to hold public trials for up to 2,000 detained in protests

    The country’s judiciary says those marching against the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini will be tried

    Iran’s judiciary has announced that it will hold public trials for as many as 1,000 people detained during recent protests in Tehran alone – and more than a thousand others outside the capital – as international concern grew over Iran’s response to the protests that began with the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after her arrest.

    The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was shocked by the number of innocent protesters who were being illegally and violently arrested. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has already announced that she is to ask the European Union to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.

    Continue reading…

  • House Progressives Pushed Negotiations With Russia, Then Buckled Under Pressure

    On October 24, 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus signed a letter to President Joe Biden calling for “direct talks with Russia” to end the war in Ukraine. But in an alarming about-face, they withdrew the letter the next day.

    The letter urged Biden “to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire.” It raised the possibility of “incentives to end hostilities, including some form of sanctions relief.”

    Since Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, 6,374 civilians are estimated to have been killed, including 402 children, and 9,776 people have been reported injured. The war has impacted the global economy and caused inflation, recession, and food and gas shortages.

    In the letter, the congress members cited “the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, which only increase the longer this war continues.” Calling themselves “legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict,” they wrote that they believed “such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues, including direct engagement with Russia, to reduce harm and support Ukraine in achieving a peaceful settlement.”

    The letter was endorsed by Just Foreign Policy; MoveOn; Peace Action; Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security; the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Win Without War; Friends Committee on National Legislation; and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

    But the outcry following its publication, mainly from other Democrats, was so intense that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the caucus, retracted the letter on October 25.

    The retraction followed a Washington Post article written by Yasmeen Abutaleb, who characterized the letter as “urging President Biden to dramatically shift his strategy on the Ukraine war and pursue direct negotiations with Russia, the first time prominent members of his own party have pushed him to change his approach to Ukraine.” The Democratic congress members who signed the letter did not want to be tarred with the same brush as Republicans calling for a halt to U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed interest in a direct dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, though it’s not clear what the terms of these discussions would be. But the White House stated on October 26 that it envisions no current possibilities for negotiations to stop the bloodshed.

    Although Biden has warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increased the risk of “Armageddon,” the Biden administration’s newly released 2022 Nuclear Posture Review frighteningly allows the “first-use” of nuclear weapons, which violates international law.

    On October 27, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he does not intend to use nuclear weapons, stating, “There is no point in that, neither political nor military.” That position, however, could change as the war progresses.

    In the statement of retraction, Jayapal wrote, “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting. As Chair of the Caucus, I accept responsibility for this.” She added, “Because of the timing, our message is being conflated by some as being equivalent to the recent statement by Republican Leader McCarthy threatening an end to aid to Ukraine if Republicans take over. The proximity of these statements created the unfortunate appearance that Democrats, who have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people, are somehow aligned with Republicans who seek to pull the plug on American support for President Zelensky and the Ukrainian forces.”

    The October 24 letter was not pro-Putin by any means. It referred to “Russia’s war of aggression” and its “outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine.” And it mentioned Ukraine’s right of “self-defense” as an “independent, sovereign and democratic state.”

    Yet signatories to the letter, including Rep. Mark Takano (D-California), Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Illinois), Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), distanced themselves from the mild statements in it.

    Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who also signed the letter, stood firm against withdrawing it, calling the letter “common sense” in an interview with CNN. “All the letter said is that we, at the same time that we stand with Ukraine, need to make sure that we’re reducing the risk for nuclear war, that we’re engaging in talks with the Russians to make sure that the conflict doesn’t escalate,” he said.

    Khanna tweeted, “We must also pursue every avenue of diplomacy to seek an end to the war. That is not a sign of appeasement, but effective diplomacy and statesmanship to save lives.”

    Even Barack Obama has raised the importance of talking to the Kremlin. “Probably the thing that I’m most concerned about is that lines of communication between the White House and the Kremlin are probably as weak as they have been in a very long time,” he said on October 15. Moreover, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, ret. Adm. Mike Mullen, has advocated the use of diplomacy in this war, stating that Secretary of State Tony Blinken and other diplomats need “to figure out a way to get both [Ukrainian President Volodmyr] Zelenskyy and Putin to the table.”

    Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, took aim at the Biden administration’s view that “negotiations for peace or ceasefire are purely a matter for the Ukrainians.”

    Lieven told Jacobin, “That can’t be right. The United States is massively arming Ukraine, funding Ukraine, and running great risks for the sake of Ukraine — nuclear war, but also if you look at global conditions, the threat of recession, inflation in the U.S., the threat of really deep recession in Europe, food shortages in parts of the world.” He added, “Of course that gives us a say in trying to bring about a peace settlement.”

    The United States has appropriated more than $60 billion in assistance to Ukraine.

    Advocating diplomacy to end Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a radical concept. Indeed, international law requires that countries pursue diplomatic means to resolve international conflicts.

    The United Nations Charter says in Article 2, “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

    Article 33 of the charter states, “The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”

    According to a recent Data for Progress poll, public opinion also supports the pursuit of a diplomatic solution. “A majority (57 percent) of Americans support U.S. negotiations to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine making some compromises with Russia,” Jessica Rosenblum wrote for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

    Five thousand people have signed a petition circulated by CODEPINK and addressed to Biden, NATO Commander Jens Stoltenberg and EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen. It says, “As peace-loving citizens of the world, we urge you to support an immediate ceasefire and negotiated peace in Ukraine.” The petition states that Russia and Ukraine “can negotiate an end to this disastrous war — provided the U.S. and NATO do not torpedo the negotiations with promises of more and more weapons and talk of weakening Russia for regime change.”

    This war affects all of us and the threat of nuclear conflagration looms large. House progressives signed a letter that encouraged negotiations to end the bloodshed. But they quickly buckled under pressure and retracted it. The stakes of prolonged war are high but diplomacy remains ephemeral. Until the Biden administration pursues a peaceful settlement with Russia, the war in Ukraine will likely continue to take its toll around the world.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Official Narrative On Ukraine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

    The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

    If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

    Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

    If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.

    Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation“. Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.

    If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

    The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.

    If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation. Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.

    Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy. So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.

    ________________

    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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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Boy Who Cried Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Criticizing your government is propaganda.

    Disagreeing with neocons is supporting fascism.

    Opposing an empire is defending tyranny.

    Seeking de-escalation causes escalation.

    Nuclear brinkmanship is safety.

    Diplomacy is appeasement.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

    ❖

    Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.

    ❖

    They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people.

    ❖

    Comparisons of Putin to Hitler only sound profound and relevant if you only just began paying attention to US foreign policy and are therefore unaware that literally every single US enemy is always copiously compared to Hitler. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except there is no wolf, and the boy just keeps crying “Wolf!” over and over again, and the villagers never learn their lesson and never stop believing him.

    Because mainstream westerners ignored all wars until Ukraine, they don’t know we’ve seen all these tricks before. They don’t know the war propaganda is airing reruns. They think it’s new to compare today’s Official Enemy to Hitler. They never question the atrocity narratives. They don’t know the US always lies about every war. They think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to suggest that the actions and motives of their government isn’t what they’ve been told. They say “Uh, hello? PUTIN is the one who invaded!” like that obvious fact somehow makes it impossible to be lied to about the other aspects of the war.

    Because they weren’t paying attention to all the empire’s tricks leading up to this, they don’t see the same old patterns rolling themselves out yet again, often by the same old voices as before. They don’t know what patterns to watch for, so they don’t see or recognize them. That’s the only reason their eyes don’t reflexively roll when they’re told today’s Official Enemy invaded completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, or that the US is defending its friends the Ukrainians because it wants to protect freedom and democracy.

    If you only just started paying attention and don’t know the US power alliance literally always lies about every war it’s involved in, the war propaganda slides down their throats with zero gag reflex, because they don’t recognize it as propaganda. It’s unfamiliar to them.

    ❖

    Criticizing the extensively documented western aggressions that led to this war is not the same as saying the invasion is good or that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person. If this isn’t obvious to you, it’s because US propaganda has turned your brain into soup.

    It’s absolutely insane how literally any criticism of the indisputable well-documented western provocations in Ukraine gets shouted down and raged at. You’re only allowed to say this war is completely unprovoked and began solely because Vladimir Putin is evil and hates freedom.

    If discussing facts and criticizing the foreign aggressions of the most powerful government in the world is taboo, you might be ruled by tyrants and surrounded by their brainwashed human livestock. If you spend your time raging and yelling at those who advocate peace, you might just be pro-war.

    ❖

    I gotta hand it to the war propagandists on Ukraine, it’s truly impressive how they’ve managed to convince everyone that the real “anti-war” position on this issue is the one being promoted by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo.

    ❖

    Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade, the US empire is responsible for the mountains of well-documented aggressions which provoked that decision. This isn’t complicated.

    I can respect arguments which assign blame to both the US and Russia. I can respect arguments which place more blame on Russia than on the US empire’s provocations. But the mainstream narrative does neither: it completely exonerates the US from even the tiniest bit of responsibility. Which is just a joke; there is no valid basis on which to claim this war was unprovoked. None. The only people who claim this are the propagandists and those they have propagandized.

    But that’s pretty much everyone I wind up arguing with about Ukraine: those who adamantly insist that the most powerful empire that has ever existed bears exactly zero percent of the responsibility for this war. That sycophantic, bootlicking mind virus is what I am always pushing back on.

    If you believe the US empire bears zero responsibility for starting this war, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain. But this is most people. It’s the mainstream perspective on this war.

    That demands pushback. Herculean pushback. The fact that the most powerful and belligerent power structure on the face of this earth is predominantly viewed as having no responsibility for the extremely dangerous war it deliberately provoked demands aggressive opposition.

    The US deliberately provoked this war. The US is keeping this war going. The US is using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Europe and Asia. These are facts. When facts are taboo, you are living in a world of lies.

    ❖

    The Assange case is resonating with so many people because it’s personal. It’s asking each of us what kind of world we want to live in: one where journalists are allowed to tell the truth about the powerful, or one where they are not? It’s a question that demands an answer.

    ❖

    I speak in a forceful and unmitigated way because that’s how you get people to listen to you, and because it is the right thing to do. If empire critics don’t speak in a forceful and unmitigated way, the only ones speaking in a forceful and unmitigated way will be the imperial pundits and politicians.

    It often enrages empire apologists that I speak this way, because they’re not used to criticism of the US empire being voiced like this, but it also sometimes confuses people who agree with me for the same reason. Socialists and anti-imperialists usually mitigate their voices. I don’t, because that’s just a bad habit. If you’re right, you should speak like you’re right. If we don’t, the only ones speaking like they’re right will be those who are wrong. And then those who are wrong are the only ones who will be listened to.

    And that’s exactly what’s happening: those with the most influential voices are those who defend the most depraved impulses of the most powerful people in the world. Those are the people who are being listened to right now. So speak like you know you’re right and they’re wrong, because that is indeed the case.

    ❖

    Fredric Jameson says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Adyashanti says spiritual people are often more afraid of life than they are of death. These two points seem related. Armageddon feels less scary than sorting our shit out as a species.

    The idea of finally turning towards each other and coming into enough intimacy to move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones feels more intimidating than the end of the world, so people start hoping for the end because at least that way it’ll be over with. For the same reason people who can’t imagine going on living get suicidal ideations, people who can’t imagine humanity transcending its self-destructive pattering get omnicidal ideations.

    This is a major obstacle. Humans need to overcome their fear of life.

    _______________

    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

    Feature image via Amaury Laporte (CC BY 2.0), formatted for size.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Wicked Leaks, Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage

    Last week, Alex Nunns, author of The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power and former Corbyn speechwriter, described the current assault on democracy within the Labour Party:

    ‘What’s happening in the Labour Party is new. The Labour right, having had the shock of their lives in 2015, are now intent on eradicating the left entirely. This isn’t how their predecessors thought. It’s a new departure in Labour history that’ll have long term consequences.’

    So why the change?

    ‘Previous generations of Labour right bureaucrats accommodated the left not because they were nicer than the current lot but because 1) the left was part of a power bloc which they needed to advance their own ends & 2) they were confident in containing the left within that bloc.

    ‘This generation of Labour right bureaucrats acts differently because 2) has changed, but 1) hasn’t. Their predecessors weren’t all stupid, so there will be a long-term cost.’

    In other words, the Labour right is ‘eradicating the left entirely’ because, as the Corbyn near-miss in 2017 showed, the level of public support for left policies is now so high that it threatens to surge uncontrollably through any window of opportunity.

    This rings true, and not just for the Labour Party. What we have often called the ‘corporate media’, but which in truth is a state-corporate media system, has followed essentially the same path for the same reasons.

    Where once the likes of John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Peter Oborne were granted regular columns in national newspaper and magazines, and even space for prime-time documentaries, their brand of rational, compassionate dissent has been all but banished. Pilger commented recently:

    ‘In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.’

    In October 2019, Peter Oborne published an article on ‘the way Boris Johnson was debauching Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news’.1. The media response:

    ‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement…

    ‘The mainstream British press and media is to all intents and purposes barred to me.’ (p. 132 and p. 133)

    As with the Labour Party, the reason is that the game – and it always was a game – has changed. In the age of internet-based citizen journalism – heavily filtered by algorithms and ‘shadow-banning’ though it is – elite interests can no longer be sure that the truth can be contained by the ‘free press’ and its obedient ranks of ‘client journalists’.

    In our media alert of 26 July 2002, we wrote:

    ‘This does not mean that there is no dissent in the mainstream; on the contrary the system strongly requires the appearance of openness. In an ostensibly democratic society, a propaganda system must incorporate occasional instances of dissent. Like vaccines, these small doses of truth inoculate the public against awareness of the rigid limits of media freedom.’

    That was true two decades ago when we started Media Lens. But, now, the state-corporate media system relies less on inoculation and more on quarantine: inconvenient facts, indeed whole issues, are simply kept from public awareness. We have moved far closer to a totalitarian system depending on outright censorship.

    An example was provided by a remarkable leading article in the Observer, titled, ‘The Observer view on the global escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine’. The title notwithstanding, this October 9 article made no mention at all of the terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines just two weeks earlier, on September 26. But why?

    The pipelines are multi-national projects operated by Swiss-based Nord Stream AG, with each intended to supply around 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Russia to Europe through pipelines laid beneath the Baltic Sea connecting to a German hub. Completed a decade ago, Russian gas giant, Gazprom, has a 51 percent stake in the project that cost around $15 billion to build. US media watch site, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), made the key point:

    ‘Any serious coverage of the Nord Stream attack should acknowledge that opposition to the pipeline has been a centerpiece of the US grand strategy in Europe. The long-term goal has been to keep Russia isolated and disjointed from Europe, and to keep the countries of Europe tied to US markets. Ever since German and Russian energy companies signed a deal to begin development on Nord Stream 2, the entire machinery of Washington has been working overtime to scuttle it.’

    The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. For example, FAIR noted that during his confirmation hearings in 2021, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress he was ‘determined to do whatever I can to prevent’ Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Months later, the US State Department reiterated that ‘any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline’.

    If that doesn’t make US hostility to the pipelines clear enough, President Joe Biden told reporters in February:

    ‘If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’

    Asked by a reporter how the US intended to end a project that was, after all, under German control, Biden responded:

    ‘I promise you, we will be able to do that.’

    No surprise, then, that, following the attack, Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as a ‘tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,’ adding that this ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come’.

    Former UN weapons inspector and political analyst Scott Ritter commented:

    ‘Intent, motive and means: People serving life sentences in U.S. prisons have been convicted on weaker grounds than the circumstantial evidence against Washington for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.’

    In a rare moment of ‘mainstream’ dissent echoing Ritter’s conclusion, Columbia University economist, Jeffrey Sachs, surprised his interviewer by saying:

    ‘I know it runs counter to our narrative, you’re not allowed to say these things in the West, but the fact of the matter is, all over the world when I talk to people, they think the US did it. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me, “Of course [the US is responsible],” but it doesn’t show up in our media.’

    Sachs added: ‘there’s direct radar evidence that US helicopters, military helicopters that are normally based in Gdansk were circling over this area’.

    Despite all of this, FAIR reported of US corporate media coverage:

    ‘Much of the media cast their suspicions towards Russia, including Bloomberg (9/27/22), Vox (9/29/22), Associated Press (9/30/22) and much of cable news. With few exceptions, speculation on US involvement has seemingly been deemed an intellectual no-fly-zone.’

    Thus, the possibility of US involvement has been intellectually quarantined. Instead, US media have been tying themselves in knots trying to find alternative explanations. The New York Times wrote:

    ‘It is unclear why Moscow would seek to damage installations that cost Gazprom billions of dollars to build and maintain. The leaks are expected to delay any possibility of receiving revenue from fuel going through the pipes.’

    In Britain, the Guardian affected similar confusion:

    ‘Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.’

    If not ‘immediately clear’, it surely becomes clear after a moment’s honest reflection. Another Guardian report commented:

    ‘Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states and the US – including its former president Donald Trump – have been fierce critics of the Nord Stream pipeline, and Germany has announced its intention to wean itself off Russian gas completely and Gazprom has wound down deliveries to almost zero.

    ‘For a Nato ally to have carried out an act of sabotage on a piece of infrastructure part-owned by European companies would have meant much political risk for little gain, but for Russia to destroy its own material and political asset would also seem to defy logic.’

    The risk is not, in fact, that great in a world where politicians and media like the Guardian refuse to point the finger of blame at the world’s sole superpower. As we have seen, the assertion that an attack by a Nato ally would be ‘for little gain’ was publicly contradicted by Blinken’s own comment that the destruction of the pipelines ‘offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.’

    The Guardian added:

    ‘Some European politicians suggested Russia could have carried out the blasts with the aim of causing further havoc with gas prices or demonstrating its ability to damage Europe’s energy infrastructure.’

    But as the Guardian acknowledged, this ‘logic’ seemed ‘to defy logic’ and suggested journalists were burying their heads in the sand at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. A further Guardian report noted:

    ‘A senior Ukrainian official also called it a Russian attack to destabilise Europe, without giving proof.’

    Or any reasoning. The report continued:

    ‘British sources said they believed it may not be possible to determine what occurred with certainty.’

    How convenient. The Telegraph reported:

    ‘Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said that if it was confirmed it was an act of sabotage by Russia it would be “in nobody’s interest”.’

    Again, a statement directly contradicted by Blinken himself. His ‘in nobody’s interest’ comment was the main focus of most media coverage.

    FAIR discussed a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski – a one-time Polish defence minister as well as a former American Enterprise Institute fellow, who was named one of the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’ in 2012 by Foreign Policy. FAIR reported:

    ‘Sikorski tweeted a picture of the methane leak in the ocean, along with the caption, “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy.” He later tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” with the same picture.’

    These comments were occasionally reported in the UK press, but Sikorski later tweeted against the pipeline, noting:

    ‘Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.’

    He added:

    ‘Now $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea, another cost to Russia of its criminal decision to invade Ukraine. Someone…did a special maintenance operation.’

    This was clearly an ironic reference to the term ‘special military operation’ used by Russia to describe its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

    Significantly, the Telegraph reported some but not all of this:

    ‘Sikorski posted a photo of the Nord Stream methane bubbling to the Baltic’s surface, with the brief message: “Thank you, USA.”

    ‘Sikorski has since deleted his tweet, and has not since elaborated on it… [but] it was widely seized upon by pro-Russian media seeking to make the case for American sabotage.’

    But as we have seen, Sikorski certainly had elaborated on it; and media didn’t need to be ‘pro-Russian’ to believe the comments pointed towards Western sabotage.

    The Daily Mail also struggled to understand:

    ‘On Twitter Radoslaw Sikorski posted a picture of a massive methane gas spill on the surface of the Baltic Sea with the comment: “Thank You USA”. The hawkish MEP later tweeted that if Russia wants to continue supplying gas to Europe it must “talk to the countries controlling the gas pipelines”.

    ‘Whatever did he mean?’

    In fact, Sikorski had been very clear about what he meant.

    In a single, casual comment in the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens may be the only ‘mainstream’ journalist to actually affirm the likely significance of Sikorski’s comments:

    ‘Radek Sikorski may have given the game away. First, he tweeted “Thank you, USA” with a picture of the gas bubbling up into the Baltic. Then, when lots of people noticed, he deleted it. That made me think he was on to something.’ 2

    Curiously, non-corporate journalists like Jonathan Cook, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Bryce Green, even hippy Russell Brand, were able to find all the evidence and arguments omitted by ‘mainstream’ journalists supported by far greater resources.

    And this makes the point with which we began this alert: there is now so much high-quality journalism exposing the establishment outside the state-corporate ‘mainstream’, that the task of the ‘mainstream’ now is to protect the establishment by acting as a buffer blocking citizen journalism from public awareness.

    The Observer editorial which failed to even mention this major terror attack on civilian infrastructure talked of a ‘Putin plague’, describing the Russian leader as ‘a pestilence whose spread threatens the entire world. Ukraine is not its only victim’. That’s the Bad Guy. So who are the Good Guys in this fairy-tale? The editors added:

    ‘In this developing confrontation, much more is at stake than Ukraine’s sovereignty. On life support, it seems, is the entire postwar consensus underpinning global security, nuclear non-proliferation, free trade and international law.’

    It is easy to understand why the Observer would prefer to quarantine the possibility of US involvement in a terror attack that would make a nonsense of the editors’ lofty rhetoric about a ‘postwar consensus’ based on ‘international law’.

    Also no surprise, the Observer once again found answers in the favoured, fix-all solution beloved of the Western press – regime change:

    ‘If the Putin plague is ever to be eradicated, if the war is ever to end, such developments inside Russia, presaging a change of leadership, full military withdrawal from Ukraine and a fresh start, represent the best hope of a cure.’

    • Part 2 to follow shortly.

    1. Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth, Simon & Schuster, 2021, p. 130
    2. Hitchens, ‘How could I know…’ Mail on Sunday, 2 October 2022.
    The post Wicked Leaks, Part 1: How The Media Quarantined Evidence On Nord Stream Sabotage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Worthless House Progressives Retract Mild Peace Advocacy Under Pressure From Warmongers

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Congressional Progressive Caucus has retracted an extremely mild, toothless letter its members had written to President Biden politely asking him to consider adding a little diplomacy into the mix to help end the conflict in Ukraine. The retraction followed a deluge of public outrage against their slight deviation from the official imperial narrative.

    If you actually read the original letter signed by House progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman and Ro Khanna, you will quickly see that it’s as innocuous and anodyne as any statement could possibly be while still containing words. It opens with effusive praise for Biden’s interventionism in Ukraine and condemns the Russian government unequivocally throughout, offering only the humble suggestion that he “pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” Its authors make it abundantly clear that they support making sure such diplomacy is agreeable to Ukraine at every step of the way.

    This impotent nothing salad was bizarrely spun by The Washington Post as a call on Biden to “dramatically shift his strategy on the Ukraine war,” despite nothing that could be remotely construed as “dramatic” existing anywhere in the body of the text. The letter received backlash from warmongers in both parties, including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was personally slammed by Bernie Sanders, the pope of American progressivism. Trolls and warmongers swarmed the social media notifications of every account which posted the letter in an official capacity, mindlessly bleating the words “appeasement” and “Chamberlain” in unison.

    In a statement on the retraction of the letter, CPC chair Pramila Jayapal says she accepts responsibility for the publication of the offending act of peacemongering while in the same breath blaming its publication on her staff.

    “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting. As Chair of the Caucus, I accept responsibility for this,” Jayapal said.

    “Every war ends with diplomacy, and this one will too after Ukrainian victory,” the statement reads, ignoring mainstream reports that US officials quietly believe Ukraine stands no chance at outright victory in this war. “The letter sent yesterday, although restating that basic principle, has been conflated with GOP opposition to support for the Ukrainians’ just defense of their national sovereignty. As such, it is a distraction at this time and we withdraw the letter.”

    Empire critics were quick to highlight the obsequious nature of this retraction.

    “For progressives, I didn’t think it could get more pathetic than voting for a disastrous proxy war that the US provoked and prolonged, handing billions to arms makers in the process. In retracting their tepid call for diplomacy and blaming staffers for it, they somehow surpassed it,” tweeted Aaron Maté.

    “Certainly speaks to the insanely hawkish atmosphere in Washington that pressured the progressive caucus to withdrawal a totally reasonable, responsible and necessary call for diplomacy in a conflict that risks escalating to nuclear armageddon,” tweeted Rania Khalek.

    “Imagine being elected to Congress based on promises of challenging ‘the establishment’ or whatever, then being so petrified of anger from bipartisan DC establishment mavens that you can’t even wait 24 hours before meekly retracting the only mild dissent you’ve expressed,” tweeted Glenn Greenwald.

    I don’t know what pressures were the ultimate deciding factor in the CPC’s decision to retract its feeble advocacy for a bit more diplomacy, or how much of that pressure was brought to bear behind the scenes by bigger political monsters in the Beltway swamp, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. The important take-home from this lesson, once again, is that progressive Democrats are worse than worthless at opposing the mechanisms of oligarchy and empire.

    In fact if you look at their actions it’s not even really accurate to describe them as “progressive Democrats” as though they are a faction that has meaningful differences with the rest of that party. Aside from the occasional empty soundbyte about healthcare or debt forgiveness, they’re not doing anything to advance progressive agendas which make American lives better, and they’re certainly doing nothing to impede the expansion of the US war machine.

    The progressive Democrat is a myth, like the good billionaire or the righteous American war. “The Squad” is nothing more than the social media-savvy branch of the Democratic establishment. The United States has two warmongering oligarchic parties, and a tremendous amount of narrative management goes into manipulating, cajoling and coercing Americans into staying psychologically plugged in to that fraudulent political paradigm.

    This comes at the same time the defense minister of Romania was forced to resign for saying peace talks were necessary to achieve peace in Ukraine. It just reveals so much about where we’re at and where we’re headed that the most incendiary and outrageous thing you can say in our society is that we should probably attempt to diplomatically de-escalate hostilities between nuclear superpowers. The fact that the Overton window of acceptable political discourse has already been dragged that far in the direction of warmongering insanity prevents peace from ever having any space to get a word in edgewise.

    ______________

    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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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Thirty Progressive Democrats Break Rank, Calling for a Ceasefire in Ukraine

    Reps. Pramila Jayapal and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus at a recent news conference outside the U.S. Capitol. (Credit: The Washington Post)

    In a dramatic break with the Biden administration on the eve of the midterm elections, 30 House Democrats sent a letter to President Biden urging him to engage in direct talks with Russian President Vladmir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. In addition to bilateral talks, signatories to the letter, initiated by Progressive Caucus Chair Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, urge the White House to support a mutual ceasefire and diplomatic efforts to avoid a protracted war that threatens more human suffering and spiraling global inflation, as well as nuclear war through intention or miscalculation.

    Despite President Biden’s recent acknowledgement that we have never been closer to nuclear Armageddon since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Biden has not met with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, and he recently told the press he will refuse to meet with Putin next month when the two attend the G-20 Summit in Bali.

    In addition to Congresswoman Jayapal (D-WA), the Democratic signers of the letter are Representatives Adams (NC), Blumenauer (OR), Bowman (NY, Bush (MO), Carson (IN), Clarke (D-NY), De Fazio (D-OR), DeSaulnier (CA), Garcia (IL), Grijalva (AZ), Jackson Lee (TX), Jacobs (CA), Johnson (GA), Jones (NY), Khanna (CA), Lee (CA), Moore (WI), Newman (IL), Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Omar (MN), Paine (NJ), Pingree (ME), Pocan (WI), Pressley(MA), Raskin (MD), Takano (CA), Tlaib (MI), Velazquez (NY) and Watson Coleman (NJ).

    Expressing praise for Biden’s “commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression,” the letter dodges the question of whether the United States should continue to arm Ukraine with medium-range rockets, ammunition, drones, tanks and other weapons.

    The letter reads “…. we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” The key words here are “has provided” as opposed to “will provide,” leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will oppose future weapons transfers.

    Back in May, not a single Democrat voted against the eye-popping $40 billion Ukraine package, much of it earmarked for weapons, intelligence, and combat training. On September 30, Congress passed the “Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act,” giving another $12.35 billion of our tax dollars for training, equipment, weapons, and direct financial aid for Ukraine–without so much as a whisper of dissent from Democrats.

    So far, the only congressional opposition to arming Ukraine has come from far right Republicans. Despite Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s enthusiastic support for the $40 billion package, 57 House Republicans and 11 GOP Senators voted against it. Some objected because they thought the U.S. military should focus on China or on the U.S.-Mexico border, but others cited concerns over the lack of oversight, unmet domestic needs and runaway spending.

    One of the most prominent critics of Biden’s handling of the war is former President Donald Trump. Never mind that Trump reversed his predecessor President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from sending offensive weapons to Ukraine and failed to negotiate the continuation of two vital arms control treaties with Russia—the Open Skies Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear-Range Forces Treaty (INF). Trump is now using his public appearances and the media, including his social media platform Truth Social, to call for peace talks.

    “Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW,” he wrote online. At an Arizona rally, Trump boomed, “With potentially hundreds of thousands of people dying, we must demand the immediate negotiation of the peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet.”

    Trump has also insisted that if he were president, the war in Ukraine would not have happened because unlike Biden, he would have met with Putin: “I’d talk to him; I’d meet with him. There is no communication between him and Biden.” Trump volunteered himself as a possible negotiator. “I will head up group???” he wrote on TruthSocial.

    Also calling for negotiations is far right Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Carlson says that the nuclear threat “is enough for any responsible person to say, ‘now we stop,’ especially if that person is the leader of the United States, the country which is funding this war and that could end this war tonight by calling Ukraine to the table.”

    Tesla’s Elon Musk, now backing Republicans, told his 107 million Twitter followers that “the probability of nuclear war is rising rapidly” and suggested a very rational peace deal in which Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine affirms neutrality from NATO and the UN oversees referendums in the Donbass.

    Another newly minted Republican now condemning U.S. support for the war is former 2020 Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, once a supporter of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. Gabbard announced that she is quitting the party in power, saying: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers.”

    Political observers might surmise that Gabbard is positioning herself for another presidential run, but whether or not that’s the case, her sharp criticism of Democrats is finding an audience among millions of Fox viewers.

    If Republicans take over the House in November, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warns they may turn off the money spigot for Ukraine. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

    McCarthy’s comment caused such panic on Capitol Hill that according to NBC News, leaders in both parties are considering passing legislation in the lame duck session to send Ukraine $50 billion more in weapons, military training and economic aid, bringing the total U.S. tab since the Russian invasion to over $100 billion, which exceeds the budget of the entire U.S. State Department.

    It will be telling to see if any Democrats, including those who signed the Jayapal letter, will vote against more weapons. As inflation worsens and voters seek leaders to address their economic needs instead of endless war in Ukraine, Democrats, especially those who call themselves progressives, should not cede the peace position to Donald Trump and Tea Party Republicans bent on repealing voting rights, deregulating environmental protections and banning abortion.

    The future of their Democratic Party is at stake – and the human race, too.

    The post Thirty Progressive Democrats Break Rank, Calling for a Ceasefire in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • House Progressives Call on Biden to Pursue Diplomatic Talks to End Ukraine War

    Noting the pain and suffering of the Ukraine people and the risk of nuclear war that threatens the entire world, progressive U.S. lawmakers on Monday called on President Joe Biden to make a decisive shift in his approach to the conflict by initiating a “proactive democratic push” with the goal of seeking “a realistic framework for a ceasefire” through direct negotiations with Russia.

    Led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the lawmakers said the U.S. must lead efforts to end the war as peacefully as possible in addition to providing the Ukrainians with economic and military aid, which now totals $60 billion.

    “If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine,” wrote the lawmakers. “The alternative to diplomacy is protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks.”

    The letter was sent to the White House exactly eight months after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has counted at least 6,374 civilian deaths, including more than 400 children, and nearly 10,000 civilian injuries. The war has also displaced an estimated 13 million people.

    Putin escalated the war by illegally annexing four occupied regions last month, as well as issuing his latest nuclear threat, saying his military “will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”

    In their letter Monday, progressives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) noted that Biden himself has said Putin “doesn’t have a way out” and that “there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement” to end the war.

    Beyond casualties in Ukraine, they noted, “the conflict threatens an additional tens of millions more worldwide, as skyrocketing prices in wheat, fertilizer, and fuel spark acute crises in global hunger and poverty,” in addition to elevating the risk for a nuclear strike.

    “The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the greater the risk of escalation — to widespread, devastating effect,” Jayapal told The Washington Post.

    Marcus Stanley, advocacy director for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the progressives’ leadership “is crucial and welcome.”

    “This letter marks the first time prominent Democratic elected officials have publicly called on the administration to pair support for Ukraine’s self-defense with a strong diplomatic effort to seek an end to the fighting,” said Stanley. “Without diplomacy the war risks turning into an extended, bloody stalemate with ongoing and increasing damage to the world economy and to Ukraine itself. Even worse, it could easily escalate into a broader or even a nuclear conflict.”

    While stating their agreement with the White House’s consistent statements that Ukraine must be included in any diplomatic discussions about the conflict and the country’s fate, the progressives urged the administration to reconsider its position that the U.S. will fund Ukraine’s military resistance for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia.

    “We agree with the administration’s perspective that it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions,” the lawmakers wrote, adding: “We believe such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues, including direct engagement with Russia, to reduce harm and support Ukraine in achieving a peaceful settlement.”

    Despite Zelenskyy stating that Putin’s recent annexation makes peace talks impossible in the moment, the letter from the U.S. lawmakers notes that the Ukrainian president has previously acknowledged that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy.”

    In an op-ed for Common Dreams on Monday, Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd of CodePink called the letter “a start” on the path to a negotiated settlement for a ceasefire.

    Until now, the pair noted, most lawmakers speaking out against the White House’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine have been right-wing Republicans, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said earlier this month that if Republicans win control of Congress in November they will not approve more aid for Ukraine.

    “Democrats, especially those who call themselves progressives,” wrote Benjamin and Winograd, “should not cede the peace position to Donald Trump and Tea Party Republicans bent on repealing voting rights, deregulating environmental protections, and banning abortion.”

    The letter was sent a day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s most recent discussion with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and comes a month after a poll commissioned by the Quincy Institute showed that nearly half of U.S. voters believe the administration should do more to push for diplomatic talks to end the war.

    “We urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority,” wrote the lawmakers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Terror to elation: Ukrainian woman’s journey from Azovstal to PoW to freedom

    Exclusive: Guardian hears of ordeal in first major interview given by any of the women freed in last week’s prisoner swap

    It was like something from the cold war. After five months in the most notorious jail in occupied Ukraine, Alina Panina, 25, had found herself, without explanation, at the foot of a bridge over a river in no man’s land with 107 fellow female Ukrainian prisoners of war.

    Behind Panina lay Russian-occupied territory and her experiences of the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the subsequent surrender and then captivity in Olenivka prison in Donetsk. There she was witness to the aftermath of an explosion that killed 53 male prisoners, a blast said by Kyiv to have been engineered by Moscow to silence the victims of torture.

    Continue reading…

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

  • BBC at 100: the future for global news and challenges facing the World Service

    ANALYSIS: By Simon Potter, University of Bristol

    The BBC celebrated its 100th birthday last Tuesday. It came as the institution faces increasing competition for audiences from global entertainment providers, anxieties about the sustainability of its funding and a highly competitive global news market.

    Its international broadcasting operation, the BBC World Service, is only a little younger, established 90 years ago.

    Delivering news and programmes in 40 languages across the continents, it faces similar, significant questions about financing, purpose and its ability to deliver in a world of increased social media and online news consumption.

    Currently the BBC’s international services are mostly funded by British people who pay a television licence fee, with a third of the total cost covered by the UK government.

    The BBC claimed that, as of November 2021, the World Service reached a global audience of 364 million people each week.

    The role of radio
    Radio is still clearly a key means to extend the reach of the World Service and a core part of the BBC’s global news package. It is highly adaptable and reasonably affordable.

    It also gives people in parts of the world where access to media can be difficult relatively easy access to news. Short-wave radio, the traditional means of broadcasting over very long distances, is also difficult for hostile regimes to block.

    Recently, fears that Russia would target Ukraine’s internet infrastructure and erect firewalls to prevent its own citizens’ accessing western media sources, led the BBC to reactivate shortwave radio news services for listeners in both countries. UK government funding of £4.1 million supported this.

    Current thinking about the World Service has been shaped by a 2010 decision of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s government to withdraw Foreign and Commonwealth Office funding for BBC international operations from 2014. This seemed to end a 60 years-long era when the BBC was the key subcontractor for British global “soft power” (using cultural resources and information to promote British interests overseas).

    The plan was that British TV licence-fee payers would fund the World Service, seemingly as an act of international benevolence, free of government ties. However, this seemed unlikely to be sustainable at a time when BBC income was being progressively squeezed.

    A person in Western Sahara with a radio set.
    Access to radio news is much easier than other forms of media in some parts of the world. Image: Saharaland/Shutterstock/The Conversation

    In 2015, World Service revenues were boosted by a major grant from the UK’s Official Development Assistance fund, covering around a third of the World Service’s running costs.

    One anonymous BBC insider was quoted by The Guardian saying that this would sustain the corporation’s “strong commitment to uphold global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news”.

    Even before the Second World War, the BBC claimed it only broadcast truthful and objective news. Policy makers recognised this as a crucial asset for promoting British interests overseas, and seldom sought to challenge (openly at least) the “editorial independence” of the BBC.

    The BBC’s 2016 royal charter further entrenched this thinking, stating that news for overseas audiences should be “firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness”. The idea that a truthful approach to news was a core “British value” that could help promote democracy around the world became part of the BBC’s basic mission statement.

    In 2017, the BBC established 17 new foreign-language radio and online services. To maximise possibilities for listening it purchased FM transmitter time in major cities around the world, and deployed internet radio, increasingly accessible to many users via mobile devices.

    The focus was on Africa and Asia. However, the World Service also strengthened its Arabic and Russian provision to serve those who “sorely need reliable information”.

    Fake news factor
    The World Service’s rationale has been strengthened by growing concerns about “fake news”: distorted and untrue reports designed to serve the commercial or geopolitical interests of those who manufacture it.

    The BBC has, in response, further emphasised its historic role as a truthful broadcaster. In its trusted news initiative it has worked with other global media outlets to tackle disinformation, hosting debate and discussion, and sharing intelligence about the most misleading campaigns.

    Claims for continued relevance also rest on a drive to bring news to an ever larger audience. The BBC’s stated aim is to reach 500 million people this year, and a billion within another decade.

    In 2021 the BBC claimed to be on course to realise this goal, reaching a global audience of 489 million. The audience for the World Service accounted for the single largest component of this global figure.

    What then should we make of the BBC’s announcement in September 2022 that 400 jobs would have to go at the World Service due to the freezing of the licence fee and rapidly rising costs?

    Radio services in languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Chinese will disappear, and programme production for the English-language radio service will be pared down. Certainly, these cuts will reduce the BBC’s impact overseas.

    But they should also be understood as part of a longstanding and ongoing transition from shortwave radio to web radio.

    Similarly, cutting back on World Service non-news programming might not be a major cause for concern. In an age of global streaming services and social media, audiences can receive programmes from providers from across the globe.

    The World Service would find it hard to compete with many of these services. However, the BBC remains in a pre-eminent position to offer trusted news.

    By focusing on providing news online, the World Service is putting its resources where it can best promote British soft power and international influence, thereby improving prospects for its own continued existence.

    However, abandoning radio entirely would be a mistake. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, radio remains a crucial way to reach audiences who might find their access to trusted news via the internet suddenly cut off.The Conversation

    Dr Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • A Crimean “Bridge too Far”?

    This is a war between Russia and the United States.
    — Jeffrey Sachs, talking with The Grayzone, October 9, 2022

    We’re now 8 months (or 8 years and 8 months) into the Ukrainian conflict, and the “dogs of war” are still barking it up, and their bark has become increasingly “nuclear” in tone.  Take Joe Biden’s recent “Armageddon” reference at a fundraiser, where he compared the current situation to the nuclear-tipped danger of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.  Well, what a bizarre comparison, since Russia would be in the position of the “United States” in the analogy, but maybe Biden’s really that “strategically confused.”  Nevertheless, Biden’s “gaffe” did serve to raise anxiety levels, and Lord Fauci knows we all need some more of that, ever since the Covid kind of receded into the background noise we always knew it was.  Of course, “Apocalypse” Joe may have really been suggesting that we should be sending more Bibles than Bombs to Ukraine, but no available evidence, unfortunately, supports this theory.

    By weird coincidence, perhaps, a few days after Biden’s Biblical end-of-times invocation, Russia made Sergei Surovikin commander of their Ukraine operation.  Surovikin’s nickname:  “General Armageddon.”  At the very least, then, we can say that “Armageddon’s” trending this October and — Just in time for Halloween!

    Of course, the threat of nuclear war has been baked into the blue-and-yellow cake of this entirely avoidable conflict from the beginning, and, even immediately prior to Russia launching its “Special Military Operation” on February 24; indeed, Ukrainian comedian president Zelensky had made some smelly nuclear noises at the Munich Security conference some days before that may have triggered the invasion.  Chernobyl quickly became a symbol of the conflict in its opening phase, with western corporate media insisting that Putin was trying to cause “Chernobyl 2: the Sequel.”

    Somehow, the “Chernobyl story” has gone quiet since Russian forces decided that Kiev (or Kyiv) would not fall in 3 days.  Nevertheless, the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant has risen in the South of “We-don’t-know-what-country!” to take Chernobyl’s place, and to keep the idea of a radiological catastrophe in — or at least hovering around — the news cycle.  Russian forces have had control of the plant, apparently Europe’s largest, for months.  By many accounts, the Zaporozhia nuclear plant has been subjected to frequent shelling, often attributed in the western press to the very same Russians who are in possession of it. Well, one supposes that, by the same illogic, the Russians also scuttled their Nord Stream pipelines in NATO-side Baltic Sea waters just to spite — themselves.  One does not have to be a Scuba Team Sabotage Specialist to see the absurdity of this accusation.

    Which brings us to the Kerch Bridge sabotage event of October 8, which was instantly celebrated in Kiev (or Kyiv), with a blown-up (pun not necessarily unintended) postage stamp of the blown-up section of the burning bridge as a downtown sidewalk billboard with folks taking smiling selfies in front of it.  One suspects that these selfie-takers were not taking selfies in front of the blown-up SBU building in downtown Kiev (or Kyiv) two days later.  SBU is the Ukrainian equivalent of the CIA or MI6, both of which Intel agencies no doubt had offices inside.  No word, predictably, upon the extent of the destruction of this Ukrainian intel HQ building. Instead, western media pretended that Russia’s missile barrage was primarily aimed at children’s playgrounds all over Ukraine.  Even Democracy Now! pushed this Russophobic narrative by showcasing a 5-year old Ukrainian boy to explain the initial wave of Russian missile strikes, as if that “progressive” news outfit couldn’t find an adult correspondent:  Talk about child exploitation!

    Of course, central to the AmericaNATOstani’s Ukraine script is the talking point that “Villaindimir” Putin is threatening the use of nuclear weapons, and his provocative speech of September 30 is cited, quite hysterically, as “Exhibit A!”  In that speech, “Mad Vlad” was recognizing the validity of the referenda in the 4 breakaway regions of southern and eastern Ukraine, which all voted to join Russia.  In fact, Putin never mentioned nuclear weapons, but he did refer to the collective West as being “anti-democratic, totalitarian, and satanic.”  He also declared, in no uncertain terms, that 4 centuries of Western global hegemony are over (paraphrase).  Pretty bold statement there, Mr Putin!  The non-TransAtlantican World may not approve of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, but certainly are not too upset by it.  Clearly, there is a new world system emerging, and the traditional arbiters of Power, the Imperial West, will have to get used to watching the Show, which they used to direct, from the “cheap seats.”

    Ironically, perhaps, Putin is a “westerner,” even though western media, at the behest of western intel agencies, of which they are merely speaking tube apparatuses, wants everyone to believe that he’s the latest incarnation of the “brutal dictator” we’ve been taking down all of these Made-for-TV episodes, or decades:  the “Villain with the Thousand Faces.”  But, truth be told, all slips of slithery tongues aside:  It’s the crazy Bidenite Regime pushing the “Armageddon” button, the Apocalypse envelope — not Putin.

    To that end (The End?), it was widely reported this morning, the 10th “22” of 2022, that the U.$. Army’s 101st Airborne Division has been conducting “live fire exercises” in Romania, next door to Ukraine.  The 101st, or “Screaming Eagles” as they are colloquially known, have not been deployed to Europe since World War 2.  One wonders:  What’s up with that?  Operation “Save the Day”?  Another “Charge of the Light Brigade”?  Yet the Sun is inexorably setting on Western power, hegemony, call it what you will.  The West is like a long spoiled child that the rest of the World is sending back to its room; unfortunately, this spoiled child has many nuclear “toys” at its disposal as it tries to tantrum its way out of the inevitable.

    Interestingly enough, Armageddon is mentioned only once in the Bible’s last “official” book, the Book of Revelation, 16:16.  Perhaps “Smoke-Signaler-in-Chief” Biden was merely blowing some slippery smoke by invoking “Armageddon,” like:  “It’ll be Armageddon, folks, if you don’t donate, and donate like you mean it!  Hey Fat, you know…the Thing!”  There’s a midterm election coming up.  Some say it’ll be a “game changer,” if only because people like to repeat the talking point phrase “game changer.”  With any luck, it will be an Armageddon Stopper…”Strategic confusion, folks, nothing but strategic confusion!”

    The post A Crimean “Bridge too Far”? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Always Opposing The Last War But Not The Current One: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they’re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.

    Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to “move to Russia”, even though we’re the ones advocating the supposed “western values” they claim to support while they’re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.

    ❖

    ❖

    Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.

    It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.

    The US indisputably deliberately provoked this war. The US is indisputably keeping this war going. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he wrote the following:

    The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That’s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of “everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.”

     

    Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.

    It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    ❖

    ❖

    The fact that the White House is weighing a national security review of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase because he’s perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance” is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.

    ❖

    There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes “disinformation” or “misinformation” on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.

    This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of “fact checking” and “counter-disinformation” is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices have ties to status quo power.

    The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.

    Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We’ve managed. It’s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.

    ❖

     

    ❖

    Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.

    If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.

    It’s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we’ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.

    A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn’t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

    Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we’ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won’t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.

    _______________________

    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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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • COVID, UKRAINE, INFLATION, FLOODS

    Life is tougher at this point in time than it usually is. There are many reasons for this, but four stand out as cornerstones of perils that impact our lives. First of all, we have COVID. It hit us without warning and dominated our lives for two years. We had no previous experience upon which …

    Continue reading COVID, UKRAINE, INFLATION, FLOODS

    The post COVID, UKRAINE, INFLATION, FLOODS appeared first on Everald Compton.

  • 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia

    On October 12, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine.

    The resolution is titled, “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It reads, in part:

    [The UNGA] Declares that the unlawful actions of the Russian Federation with regard to the illegal so-called referendums held from 23 to 27 September 2022 in parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, and the subsequent attempted illegal annexation of these regions, have no validity under international law and do not form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine…

    A majority of the 193 countries of the UNGA voted IN FAVOR of the resolution. Here was the final tally:

    143 In Favor

    5 Against

    35 Abstentions

    10 Not Voting

    Let’s call the votes in the last three categories: NO, ABSTENTION and NOT VOTING, or NAN for short. The tally then looks like this:

    143 In Favor

    50 Nan

    From this result it appears the resolution won overwhelming support, just as Western media reports. But voting in the UNGA is undemocratic in the extreme. For example, Tuvalu (population 12,000), Principality of Liechtenstein (population 38,128) and China (population 1,439,323,776) each get one vote in the UNGA. 1 That is why the vote tally looks very different when measured by world population:

    54.56% of world population: Nan

    45.44% of world population: In Favor

    If the vote were measured by population, then this resolution failed decisively. The Western press casually and routinely buries this obvious fact. But that’s the least of the deceptive reporting of the vote. When it comes to the October 12 resolution, and this year’s other UNGA resolutions condemning Russia, the press has also avoided reporting that these votes are consistently marked by the global divide of race, wealth, and position in the world economic order: the whitest, richest, most powerful and imperial countries support these resolutions, and the poorer, weaker countries of color, in general, tend not to.

    As you might expect, just as with the UNGA resolutions condemning Russia on March 2 and April 7 of this year, the NAN vote includes the world’s most socialist-leaning and redistributive governments, as well as the leading anti-imperialist countries in the US crosshairs, such as China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Viet Nam. 2

    Statistics on the race/wealth divide in the March 2 and April 7 UNGA votes can be found in two articles, here and here. 3 But take just the racial split in the March 2 vote, since that result was very like the result for the October 12 vote. On March 2 the UNGA voted to condemn the Russian intervention of February 24. That condemnation won the support of only 41% of the world’s population. The racial split in the vote was plain. Although “white” countries account for roughly 14% of the world’s population they made up one-third of the vote IN FAVOR of the March 2 resolution, and only 3% of the recorded NAN vote.

    Before comparing the March 2 and October 12 votes, note that whiteness is closely associated with the richest countries, as well as a central, or “core,” position in the world order, according to world-systems analysis.4  In that analysis, the “core” states of the world-system are the countries of North America and Western Europe, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan and Singapore, while all other countries belong to the “periphery” or “semi-periphery” of the world-system.5

    With that in mind, compare the March 2 vote to the October 12 vote. The October 12 anti-Russia resolution won slightly more support than the March 2 resolution (45% on October 12 vs. 41% on March 2). 6  Yet the breakdown of the two votes by wealth, color and core/periphery status of the countries was virtually identical.7  Which means that by population, the majority of countries of color, poorer countries, and countries of the global periphery have for eight months maintained their refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

    This is remarkable given the world-historic events in Ukraine. Eight months of the war have now passed, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, with many more severely injured and millions displaced. The Western press has been relentless in its uncritical support of the US/NATO effort in Ukraine, including near daily accounts of Russian atrocities while ignoring all reports that refute them, and ignoring as well many reports of Ukrainian atrocities and war crimes. The US and the EU have placed severe sanctions on Russia, which, curiously, seem to be harming Western Europeans and the people of the Global South more than the ostensible target.8

    Most important, perhaps, for the nations of the UNGA, is that the October 12 resolution concerns the most significant events in Ukraine since February 24: the accession to Russia of Ukrainian territory. This is presumably a much more serious violation of the UN Charter than the assumed violation Russia committed with its February 24 intervention. And yet a majority of the world’s population still refuses to condemn the territorial acquisitions.

    Just as notable is the opposite phenomenon: the unbroken unity of the wealthy, almost entirely white, nations of the imperial core. Every single one of these countries voted IN FAVOR of the October 12 resolution. In the face of world-shaking events stemming from the war, this privileged voting block has proved unbreakable in its animosity toward Russia.

    But UNGA resolutions are not the only measure of this global divide on Russia/Ukraine. If support for the West’s sanctions regime against Russia is any indication, the split is perhaps more dramatic. As Gfoeller and Rundell wrote in Newsweek (9/15/22), “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87% of the world’s population has declined to follow us.” And note that countries agreeing to the sanctions on Russia are nearly all countries of the imperial core.

    Racialized imperial relations are different than personal racism. Russia is a white country, though it is not among the rich nations and belongs to the periphery of the world-system. Japan and Singapore are rich, core countries, even though they are countries of color. Yet Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has aligned politically with the Global South. This is especially true now, with regard to Syria, Iran, China and the Left governments of Latin America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This earns Russia a special racialized status in the Western press and the global order. 9  On the other hand, Japan and Singapore have long been given a national status comparable to one that existed for some individuals in apartheid South Africa, that of “honorary whites.” Neither fact belies the racism of the global system. On the contrary, it becomes more obvious. People of the Global South seem to recognize this when they watch Russia confront the global hegemon in Europe.

    And so, just as with previous UNGA votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Western press, with maximum duplicity, continues to treat the October 12th vote as a resounding world condemnation of Russia, when, in fact, it is proof of the world majority’s refusal to condemn Russian actions in Ukraine.

    Ukraine is now the tragic battlefield of the Global North, but the vote on this UNGA resolution and world rejection of sanctions against Russia reveal a deeper, global conflict drenched in the blood of centuries of imperialism and white supremacy.

    1. For world population figures in this article, see world population; population by country; population of India.
    2. Abstention on such resolutions should not be read as silence. For example, the NAN vote includes the abstention of China, which recently expressed support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “On Russia’s core interests and major issues of concern, China expresses its understanding and full support for Russia. On the Ukraine issue, for example, the United States and NATO are expanding directly on Russia’s doorstep, threatening Russia’s national security and the lives of Russian citizens. Given the circumstances, Russia has taken necessary measures. China understands, and we are coordinating on various aspects. I believe Russia was cornered. In this case, to protect the core interests of the country, Russia gave a resolute response.” (Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, September 8, 2022).
    3. “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.
    4. World-systems theory puts the global wealth split into relief, dividing the nations of the world into the “core” and “periphery” of the global system. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately from the periphery to the core: “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).
    5. According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
    6. The slight difference between the March 2 and October 12 votes is accounted for by a reshuffling of the votes of five countries which voted IN FAVOR in March and NAN in October, and seven countries that voted NAN in March and IN FAVOR in October. The first group includes Djibouti, Honduras, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, and Thailand. The second group includes Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Madagascar, Morocco, and Senegal.
    7. See fn. 3.
    8. The United Nations reported on statements at October 12 session considering the resolution: “India joined several other speakers in expressing deep worry that the people of the global South were feeling pain from a food, fuel and fertilizer shortage, and sky-high price increases, as a result of the war.”
    9. Occasionally the animus is stated boldly. Here is Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2017: “…the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever…”
    The post 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia

    On October 12, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine.

    The resolution is titled, “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It reads, in part:

    [The UNGA] Declares that the unlawful actions of the Russian Federation with regard to the illegal so-called referendums held from 23 to 27 September 2022 in parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, and the subsequent attempted illegal annexation of these regions, have no validity under international law and do not form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine…

    A majority of the 193 countries of the UNGA voted IN FAVOR of the resolution. Here was the final tally:

    143 IN FAVOR

    5 AGAINST

    35 ABSTENTIONS

    10 NOT VOTING

    Let’s call the votes in the last three categories: NO, ABSTENTION and NOT VOTING, or NAN for short. The tally then looks like this:

    143 IN FAVOR

    50 NAN

    From this result it appears the resolution won overwhelming support, just as Western media reports. But voting in the UNGA is undemocratic in the extreme. For example, Tuvalu (population 12,000), Principality of Liechtenstein (population 38,128) and China (population 1,439,323,776) each get one vote in the UNGA.1 That is why the vote tally looks very different when measured by world population:

    54.56% of world population: NAN

    45.44% of world population: IN FAVOR

    If the vote were measured by population, then this resolution failed decisively. The Western press casually and routinely buries this obvious fact. But that’s the least of the deceptive reporting of the vote. When it comes to the October 12 resolution, and this year’s other UNGA resolutions condemning Russia, the press has also avoided reporting that these votes are consistently marked by the global divide of race, wealth, and position in the world economic order: the whitest, richest, most powerful and imperial countries support these resolutions, and the poorer, weaker countries of color, in general, tend not to.

    As you might expect, just as with the UNGA resolutions condemning Russia on March 2 and April 7 of this year, the NAN vote includes the world’s most socialist-leaning and redistributive governments, as well as the leading anti-imperialist countries in the US crosshairs, such as China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Viet Nam.2

    Statistics on the race/wealth divide in the March 2 and April 7 UNGA votes can be found in two articles, here and here.3 But take just the racial split in the March 2 vote, since that result was very like the result for the October 12 vote. On March 2 the UNGA voted to condemn the Russian intervention of February 24. That condemnation won the support of only 41% of the world’s population. The racial split in the vote was plain. Although “white” countries account for roughly 14% of the world’s population they made up one-third of the vote IN FAVOR of the March 2 resolution, and only 3% of the recorded NAN vote.

    Before comparing the March 2 and October 12 votes, note that whiteness is closely associated with the richest countries, as well as a central, or “core,” position in the world order, according to world-systems analysis.4 In that analysis, the “core” states of the world-system are the countries of North America and Western Europe, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan and Singapore, while all other countries belong to the “periphery” or “semi-periphery” of the world-system.5 


    With that in mind, compare the March 2 vote to the October 12 vote. The October 12 anti-Russia resolution won slightly more support than the March 2 resolution (45% on October 12 vs. 41% on March 2).6 Yet the breakdown of the two votes by wealth, color and core/periphery status of the countries was virtually identical.3 Which means that by population, the majority of countries of color, poorer countries, and countries of the global periphery have for eight months maintained their refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

    This is remarkable given the world-historic events in Ukraine. Eight months of the war have now passed, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, with many more severely injured and millions displaced. The Western press has been relentless in its uncritical support of the US/NATO effort in Ukraine, including near daily accounts of Russian atrocities while ignoring all reports that refute them, and ignoring as well many reports of Ukrainian atrocities and war crimes. The US and the EU have placed severe sanctions on Russia, which, curiously, seem to be harming Western Europeans and the people of the Global South more than the ostensible target.7

    Most important, perhaps, for the nations of the UNGA, is that the October 12 resolution concerns the most significant events in Ukraine since February 24: the accession to Russia of Ukrainian territory. This is presumably a much more serious violation of the UN Charter than the assumed violation Russia committed with its February 24 intervention. And yet a majority of the world’s population still refuses to condemn the territorial acquisitions.

    Just as notable is the opposite phenomenon: the unbroken unity of the wealthy, almost entirely white, nations of the imperial core. Every single one of these countries voted IN FAVOR of the October 12 resolution. In the face of world-shaking events stemming from the war, this privileged voting block has proved unbreakable in its animosity toward Russia.

    But UNGA resolutions are not the only measure of this global divide on Russia/Ukraine. If support for the West’s sanctions regime against Russia is any indication, the split is perhaps more dramatic. As Gfoeller and Rundell wrote in Newsweek (9/15/22), “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87% of the world’s population has declined to follow us.” And note that countries agreeing to the sanctions on Russia are nearly all countries of the imperial core.

    Racialized imperial relations are different than personal racism. Russia is a white country, though it is not among the rich nations and belongs to the periphery of the world-system. Japan and Singapore are rich, core countries, even though they are countries of color. Yet Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has aligned politically with the Global South. This is especially true now, with regard to Syria, Iran, China and the Left governments of Latin America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This earns Russia a special racialized status in the Western press and the global order.8 On the other hand, Japan and Singapore have long been given a national status comparable to one that existed for some individuals in apartheid South Africa, that of “honorary whites.” Neither fact belies the racism of the global system. On the contrary, it becomes more obvious. People of the Global South seem to recognize this when they watch Russia confront the global hegemon in Europe.

    And so, just as with previous UNGA votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Western press, with maximum duplicity, continues to treat the October 12th vote as an resounding world condemnation of Russia, when in fact it is proof of the world majority’s refusal to condemn Russian actions in Ukraine.

    1. Ukraine is now the tragic battlefield of the Global North, but the vote on this UNGA resolution and world rejection of sanctions against Russia reveal a deeper, global conflict drenched in the blood of centuries of imperialism and white supremacy.
      For world population figures in this article, see world population; population by country; population of India.)
    2. Abstention on such resolutions should not be read as silence. For example, the NAN vote includes the abstention of China, which recently expressed support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “On Russia’s core interests and major issues of concern, China expresses its understanding and full support for Russia. On the Ukraine issue, for example, the United States and NATO are expanding directly on Russia’s doorstep, threatening Russia’s national security and the lives of Russian citizens. Given the circumstances, Russia has taken necessary measures. China understands, and we are coordinating on various aspects. I believe Russia was cornered. In this case, to protect the core interests of the country, Russia gave a resolute response.” (Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, September 8, 2022)
    3. “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.
    4. World-systems theory puts the global wealth split into relief, dividing the nations of the world into the “core” and “periphery” of the global system. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately from the periphery to the core: “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)
    5. According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
    6. The slight difference between the March 2 and October 12 votes is accounted for by a reshuffling of the votes of five countries which voted IN FAVOR in March and NAN in October, and seven countries that voted NAN in March and IN FAVOR in October. The first group includes Djibouti, Honduras, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, and Thailand. The second group includes Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Madagascar, Morocco, and Senegal.
    7. The United Nations reported on statements at October 12 session considering the resolution: “India joined several other speakers in expressing deep worry that the people of the global South were feeling pain from a food, fuel and fertilizer shortage, and sky-high price increases, as a result of the war.”
    8. Occasionally the animus is stated boldly. Here is Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2017: “…the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever…”
    The post 55% of Humanity Does Not Reject the Accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • British PM Liz Truss Exits

    After just six weeks in Office, the UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss – a Tory – quits. The shortest ever PM in British history. Rumors have it that Boris Johnson, her immediate predecessor – may also be the favored candidate as her successor.

    Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Composite: PA/Getty images

    Could well be.

    It would be a little-veiled game.

    And as usual, no coincidence; not that Boris resigned, not that Liz Truss entered, nor that she resigned after only a short period. And it will not be coincidence if Boris is reelected and stays as British PM up to, or close to, 5 years.

    The opposition – Labor – would like to call for new General Elections, but they will be overruled by the Tories’ almost two-thirds majority in Parliament.

    Boris Johnson was ideal for the tandem Washington-London on a rampage intent on demolishing Europe via the Russian war with Ukraine. Johnson was the brain, Biden and his hintermen the executioners. And as they were working on dismembering Europe, they also were, with NATO aid, simultaneously attempting to crush Russia.

    The illusion of arrogance has no limits.

    Britain’s exit from the EU was no coincidence either. It was part of the plan – the plan to act relatively undisturbed outside the EU on the very EU’s destruction. They have Germans, who do the same from inside – Ms. Ursula von der Leyen, (unelected, but appointed) President of the European Commission, former German Defense Minister; and Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany. Among his many high-ranking former political positions, he was Vice Chancellor under Angela Merkel, Minister of Finance and Mayor of Hamburg.

    They are both involved from within, destroying Europe economically and socially.

    Boris Johnson first lost popularity with the long-drawn-out EU-exit; then with his floppy handling of the “covid crisis” – and a number of intended or not, other crises: An enormous budget deficit, a national debt of about 95% of GDP in 2022, the highest since 1960. An infamously decaying infrastructure throughout the country – as well as other plunders, including a sex-scandal of a senior lawmaker in Johnson’s Government.

    When some 50 parliamentarians resigned within 48 hours in protest of the sex-scandal, Johnson resigned in July 2022, in what was considered a non-confidence manifestation.

    British General Elections would have been due in January 2025, in a bit over two years. With Boris’ popularity in free fall, even within his own party, the Tories would have had next to no chance to win the elections. The Conservatives have currently about a 3 to 2 majority over Labor.

    The British exit from the EU looks increasingly like the precursor to the plan currently being executed. Destroy Europe and “contain” Russia for the benefit of the big One World Order (OWO).

    Remember – nothing is coincidence. It fits all into the Great Reset and – interalia – into the UN Agenda 2030. The European Union, a block of 27 countries and half a billion population, would be too unwieldy to control, and does not fit into the OWO’s Command Center.

    So, in response to the British crises earlier this year, better get Boris out and replace him temporarily with a “caretaker”. Ms. Liz Truss was a perfect fit for the scheme. She knew exactly what her role was, and she played it as good as she could.

    Ms. Truss knew what to do as an immediate measure to earn immediate countrywide criticism, namely reducing taxes for the rich.

    The British economy is in a sharp down-turn, losing in August 2022 unexpectedly 0.3% in output, driven by a sharp decline in manufacturing and a small contraction in services, according to the Office for National Statistics recent assessment.

    Ms. Truss also knew that under such somber circumstances, certain measures like tax cuts for the rich, are a no-go. She did it anyway – to draw the ire of the public and of her own Parliament, even her Tory colleagues.

    Her then newly appointed finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, reversed the decision on the tax cuts for the rich and said that the government will prioritize help for the most vulnerable, referring also to the high inflation of 10.1% in September and projected to rise further until the end of the year. A British recession is in the making.

    With all that self-made circus, the time had come for Liz Truss to go. Most media and political analysts predicting on Wednesday 19 October, that her ouster or resignation was not even a “question of days, but of hours”.

    Yesterday, 20 October, Liz Truss resigned, “as planned”, leaving the field open for the new – old PM, Boris Johnson. After the Liz Truss disaster, he has gained new popularity. A socio-psychological trick. A majority of Tories want him back. And since the Tories will be Kingmakers – again – Johnson’s re-election is almost assured.

    See this.

    That means the Washington-London-NATO Trio will be intact again, and able to continue their war game – with economic catastrophes for Europe, and by and large the global north. The key players US, EU and Germany are well aware and play the self-destructive game, as long as they can – or as long as they are allowed to do so by their still slumbering populace.

    The visible people on top are following orders, coming silently down through the WEF – instrument of the gigantic Financial-IT Complex (FITC), running the world. Up to end 2019, they did it more or less clandestinely. Since 2020, the beginning of the dictatorial worldwide implementation of the insane covid fear – paralleled by the deadly vaxx-tyranny – this Cult of the Riches has become increasingly visible, hiding behind just a thin “veil of shame”.

    If re-elected as PM, Boris and his party’s two-third’s majority would have a good chance to last through another 5 years. Enough time to drive the Elite’s Agenda forward. The proxy-war with Russia could be dragged on for several years – always with an “immediate threat” of turning nuclear. Initiated by Russia, of course.

    The UN Agenda 2030 is in full implementation. All behind the curtain of war. Bothing is coincidence. The dots connect. One just has to see them.

    The media love to play right along with the propaganda song, keeping people around the (western) globe on their toes, diverted with fear from whatever else is going on behind the scene – in an attempt of completing the Great Cult Reset, including with the WEF’s planned 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and the consequential transhumanization.

    To 4IR and transhumanization is intimately linked to the rapidly expanding construction of 5G-antennas throughout the western world. Both 4IR and transhumanization depend on a 5G seamless and flawless coverage. The antenna proliferation is hardly visible and even less talked about. Construction often happens at night.

    The duo, Biden/Johnson, representing the old but faltering British Empire, supported by an ever-expanding NATO, are hoping to prevail and revive the Empire’s Dream back to reality.

    It won’t happen. The Boris tactic of resigning to be re-elected is a clever ploy. But far from enough to face the dawning new world in the East – an era of collaboration and Peace – an era of cooperation and development. Development, as in seeking social balance and equity.

    The future is in the East, where the sun rises. The East encompasses already about half the world’s population and a number of existing and emerging associations, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS-plus, ASEAN, Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and many more.

    The British-American Empire is on its last leg. Never mind the last-ditch Biden/Johnson efforts with NATO backing. Their economy is fake and broke. The economy of the emerging East is solid and real.

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