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Category: Ukraine

  • Scientists Warn Nuclear War Would Make the World Colder, Darker and Hungrier

    Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warns he could use nuclear weapons if he believed Russian (or Russian-seized) territory was threatened, tensions also remain high in other potential nuclear flashpoints from North Korea and Taiwan to border regions of China, India and Pakistan.

    This comes as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has just embarked on its annual nuclear training exercises in Belgium. The U.S. has an estimated 100 non-strategic nuclear weapons deployed at six military bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Russia is expected to hold its own nuclear exercises soon, though U.S. officials say no notification has yet been provided as required under the New START treaty.

    On October 6, President Joe Biden warned that the threat of Armageddon was at its highest point since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. While the world remains focused on the threat of nuclear war, scientists, academics, and other experts are warning how a nuclear conflict would change life on Earth.

    Recent reports coauthored by Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in the department of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, paint a portrait of a post-nuclear war world that is colder, darker and hungrier than is usually described in nuclear reporting.

    In these reports, scientists explain how nuclear weapons, if used in a range of circumstances, could cause firestorms that would release smoke, soot and pollutants into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing a sudden cooling effect long known as “nuclear winter.” Such a disturbance would impact the world’s oceans and dramatically undermine food security, potentially causing a large-scale collapse of agriculture that could lead to global famine.

    In the journal AGU Advances, scientists report that global cooling caused by a nuclear war could disturb ocean and sea ice ecology for decades or even centuries, killing off marine life and disrupting natural systems.

    A second report published in Nature Food illustrates how nuclear weapons, like enormous wildfires, would unleash soot into the stratosphere that could persist for years. Similar to historic massive volcanic eruptions, destruction resulting from the use of nuclear weapons could lead to sudden cooling on a global scale, resulting in widespread crop failure, famine and extreme political instability.

    Under a range of nuclear war scenarios, multiple nuclear detonations between 15 to 100 kilotons could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people in a matter of hours or days. U.S. non-strategic nuclear warheads range from 0.3 kilotons to 170 kilotons. The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were approximately 15 and 21 kilotons respectively.

    In the event of a major nuclear war between Russia and the United States, a resulting nuclear winter could cause as many as 5.3 billion people to die of starvation within two years of such a war.

    With sunlight blocked, staple crops like wheat, maize, rice and soybeans would rapidly fail, leaving the world suddenly short of enough food. Countries in northern latitudes (including nuclear-armed Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and North Korea) would see the greatest decline in calorie production.

    Following a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, calorie reductions may be less severe, but depending on the scenario, other problems like the destruction of infrastructure, radiation poisoning, large-scale death and political upheaval would offer the coldest of comfort.

    The disruption to agriculture and resulting food shortages would not be evenly distributed, suggesting some countries in southern latitudes like Australia and New Zealand could experience relatively less severe climate impacts but would face unprecedented waves of refugees fleeing nuclear and climate-impacted countries.

    The Nature Food study’s authors conclude: “…the reduced light, global cooling and likely trade restrictions after nuclear wars would be a global catastrophe for food security.”

    Speaking with Truthout Robock, who has been studying nuclear winter since 1984, said that while current computer models are more comprehensive, the basic idea that if sunlight is blocked, the Earth’s surface will be colder and darker hasn’t changed since he began studying the threat.

    In the 1980s, after Robock, his colleagues and their Russian counterparts presented similar findings to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russian leaders issued a joint statement declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The same declaration was repeated by the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (P5) with nuclear weapons (Russia, U.S., China, France, U.K.) last January, but their subsequent rhetoric and actions call their commitment to not using nuclear weapons into question.

    Unlike in the 1980s, when massive demonstrations against nuclear weapons pressured leaders to sharply reduce their arsenals, today’s threat of nuclear war has not yet translated into worldwide protests.

    “We’ve calculated [that] even though the number of weapons has gone down, there’s still enough to produce a nuclear winter if Russia and the U.S. have a nuclear war,” Robock says, noting that unlike the other nuclear-armed nations whose arsenals are limited to no more than a few hundred, both the U.S. and Russia still maintain thousands of nuclear warheads.

    “If you wanted to threaten the use of [nuclear weapons] to deter an attack, how many do you have to put on the capital of your enemy? The answer is one,” he says. “Maybe you need two, but a couple hundred is more than enough, so why don’t the U.S. and Russia get down to a couple hundred right now?” Such a reduction in stockpiles, Robock says, would greatly reduce the danger of nuclear winter.

    The climatological effects of a nuclear war, Robock says, are not the same as trying to counter the effects of climate change through methods like stratospheric geoengineering or climate intervention. “This would be instant climate change, not gradual climate change. A nuclear winter would cool down a lot and kill all of our crops.”

    A Medical Disaster

    In February, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) published a report entitled “No Place to Hide: Nuclear Weapons and the Collapse of Health Care Systems” which examined how the detonation of one nuclear bomb could affect 10 major cities. Casualty projections ranged from over 260,000 to more than 1.2 million injured from a single 100-kiloton bomb.

    Hospitals and medical systems in cities like London, Beijing or Washington, D.C. no matter how well-equipped, would be unable to adequately respond to a nuclear bomb. Tens or hundreds of thousands of patients in need of care for severe burns, cuts, broken bones, concussions, radiation poisoning, and other grave injuries would overwhelm doctors and nurses. Hospitals would almost certainly be damaged and destroyed, with health care professionals among the dead and injured. Those needing emergency treatment would likely be far greater than the number of patients seen at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The likely damage to vital communications and transportation infrastructure and other critical technology would make it difficult or impossible to provide even basic care as computers, vehicles, and medical and lab equipment were severely disrupted or rendered inoperable. Essential water, electricity and sewage systems could be cut off and in the near term there would be an immediate shortage of medication and medical supplies. In the long term, supply chains that deliver medicine and equipment would be severely impacted.

    For years, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also warned that no medical system would be able to respond to the use of nuclear weapons of any size or number. In the words of former ICRC President Peter Maurer, “if a nuclear weapon were to detonate in or near a populated area, no state or international body could adequately address the immediate humanitarian emergency nor the long-term consequences, nor provide sufficient assistance to victims.”

    A Civilization-Ending Event

    Ira Helfand, a longtime emergency room physician and co-chair of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Nuclear Weapons Abolition Committee, spoke with Truthout by video call from Massachusetts.

    Helfand likens the current nuclear crisis to a global near-death experience, but says that unless humanity recognizes how close we are to death, we risk failing to take the action needed to reduce the threat and avert a future catastrophe. Without profound change, he worries we will not address the underlying conditions that led to the current crisis.

    Helfand cites the importance of recent scientific reports in helping make the connection between the climate and nuclear crises. He says that not only would a nuclear war cause a climate disaster, at the same time, the climate crisis increases the chance of a nuclear war. As large regions of the planet are rendered unfit for human habitation, global tension will increase, with climate catastrophes creating more refugees.

    “People are talking about the need to relocate perhaps more than a billion people,” says Helfand. “That doesn’t happen smoothly and easily. That generates enormous amounts of conflict.” Ten or 15 years from now when the climate crisis has worsened, the movement of tens or hundreds of millions of people will cause tremendous political instability. If nuclear weapons are “still on the table,” Helfand says, there’s a greater chance they may be used.

    He points to burgeoning climate crises in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia where he fears two nuclear-armed countries — India and Pakistan — are on a collision course, not because of ideology, religion or political doctrine, but because of water. Melting Himalayan glaciers, catastrophic flooding, changing rainfall patterns and control over essential water flow could set the stage for a future conflict between Pakistan, India and China.

    “We’re in a situation where there has to be a totally different way for great powers to interact with each other,” shifting from a model based on competition to one based on cooperation, Helfand says. “If such a crisis reaches its full fruition and becomes a military conflict between two nuclear-armed states, we’re going to have a civilization-ending event.”

    The aftermath of a nuclear war would be chaotic as survivors fought for whatever was left. Any nation that might “come out on top” of a nuclear conflict would have the “ash heap of human civilization” to claim as its own, he says.

    Before such a nightmare scenario occurs, Helfand sees an opportunity to come together if our leaders are honest, courageous, truthful and tell people what needs to be done. A paradigm shift in which nations recognize the need to cooperate is necessary if survival is to remain possible. “This just can’t go on indefinitely,” he warns. “Either we’re going to do something very fundamentally different, or we’re going to have a nuclear war and that needs to be clearly understood by everyone.”

    This May Be the Last Time

    Susi Snyder, financial section coordinator for ICAN, says that even a relatively small nuclear detonation would have a global ripple effect. She points to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how a large-scale disruption’s impact can continue for years.

    When thinking of a nuclear weapon’s aftermath, Snyder says that beyond the death and destruction, there would be associated disruption of transportation, trade, commerce, travel and global markets. The current war in Ukraine has already fueled food and energy crises in multiple countries, and a nuclear war would be far worse. Any use of a nuclear weapon would jar commodity and resource markets, disrupting trade, creating instability and uncertainty, and suddenly driving the need for alternate sources of food, energy and raw materials. Such abrupt shifts could also threaten human rights and the environment in places that were suddenly in demand.

    Depending on how limited or widespread the use of nuclear weapons was, much of what is considered “normal” for most people in developed countries — reliable communications, transportation, the availability of household utilities, food, consumer goods, and even travel and entertainment — could be disrupted or cut off.

    The damage from even a relatively “small” or limited nuclear detonation would likely draw humanitarian aid away from other areas. Even in such a scenario, Snyder says, “every place will be affected in some way.” Because a nuclear threat has the potential to harm every part of the planet, Snyder says countries that are usually left out of the nuclear discussion are becoming more vocal, emphasizing the humanitarian and environmental risks to countries geographically far removed from nuclear-armed nations.

    Post-Cold War notions that the threat of nuclear weapons is a thing of the past have quickly faded and frustration is growing as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has failed to end nuclear arms races or deliver complete nuclear disarmament.

    Recognizing the urgent need to do away with nuclear weapons, 68 countries have adopted and ratified the much more recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force in 2021. Unlike the NPT, the TPNW prohibits the development, testing, production, acquisition, possession, transfer, stockpiling or threat to use nuclear weapons.

    None of the P5 nuclear weapon states or the four other nuclear-armed nations (India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) recognizes the TPNW. Instead, they embrace the theory of deterrence. Nuclear deterrence — the threat to use one’s nuclear weapons against another state — Snyder says, allows for naked conventional weapon aggression without fear of reprisal, as is being demonstrated by Russia in Ukraine today.

    She also notes that there are dozens of multinational corporations which profit from nuclear weapons and have a vested interest in perpetuating their production. She says this raises the question, “Is it ok to incinerate a city in 30 minutes or less? If it’s legitimate, then the pathway is nuclear weapons for everybody. And if it’s not legitimate, then there really is one choice — to end nuclear weapons for everybody.”

    In an age when it only takes 45 minutes to go from the decision to launch a nuclear weapon to a detonation that could abruptly bring about the end of life as we know it, we must deliberately and soberly consider the consequences of using nuclear weapons. The luxury of looking away is gone. People around the world — especially in nuclear armed nations — have a responsibility to pressure politicians to abolish these horrific weapons. Without a sharp increase in vocal and mobilized opposition to the unstable and unsustainable nuclear threat, the danger will continue and eventually, many fear, humanity’s luck will run out. Now is the time for each of us to take whatever action we can — because no one knows if or when nuclear weapons will be used again, very possibly for the final time.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pretending To Seek Peace In An Unwinnable Proxy War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    We should probably talk more about the fact that the US empire is loudly promoting the goal of achieving peace in Ukraine by defeating Russia while quietly acknowledging that this goal is impossible. This is like accelerating toward a brick wall and pretending it’s an open road.

    The narrative that Russia can be defeated by escalating against it makes sense if you believe Russia can be defeated, but the US empire does not believe that Russia can be defeated. It knows these escalations are only going to exponentially ramp up death and devastation.

    “Beat Putin’s ass and make him withdraw” sounds cool and is egoically gratifying, and it’s become the mainstream answer to the problem of the war in Ukraine. But nobody promoting that answer can address the fact that the ones driving this proxy war believe it’s impossible. In fact, all evidence we’re seeing suggests that the US is not trying to deliver Putin a crushing defeat in Ukraine and force him to withdraw, but is rather trying to create another long and costly military quagmire for Moscow, as cold warriors have done repeatedly in instances like Afghanistan and Syria.

    Wanting to weaken Russia and wanting to save lives and establish peace in Ukraine are two completely different goals, so different that in practice they wind up being largely contradictory. Drawing Moscow into a bloody quagmire means many more people dying in a war that lasts years.

    The US does not want peace in Ukraine, it wants to overextend Russia, shore up military and energy dominance over Europe, expand its war machine and enrich the military-industrial complex. It’s posing as Ukraine’s savior while being clearly invested in Ukraine’s destruction.

    It is not legitimate to support this proxy war without squarely addressing this massive contradiction using hard facts and robust argumentation. Nobody ever has.

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    The idea that the US and NATO have no special obligation to help negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine only makes sense if you pretend the US and NATO played no role in causing the war in Ukraine. Which is to say it only makes sense if you believe a silly, infantile fiction. There are plenty of arguments to be made that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is immoral and illegal, but to claim it was unprovoked and exculpate the US-centralized power structure from any responsibility for provoking it is inexcusable fact-free bullshit.

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    Saying “Putin can end this war by withdrawing!” in response to discussions about what the west can do to bring peace to Ukraine is just interrupting serious adult conversations with childish prattle that only serves to cover up your desire for this war to last forever.

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    Westerners demand more nuanced and believable motives from their Marvel movie villains than from the propaganda narratives their media peddle about enemies of the US empire.

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    Imagine living on a dying world where people are brainwashed from birth into mindless consumerism and saturated in propaganda promoting war and status quo kleptocracy and exploitation, and deciding that the real sign of societal deterioration is teenagers using different pronouns. Like okay sure we’re being marched into armageddon and dystopia by mass-scale psychological manipulation that’s so ubiquitous and pervasive that hardly anyone ever notices it or talks about it, but the real sign our civilization is crumbling is my friend’s kid using “they/them”.

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    It is always right and good to criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful government in the world. It is always right and good to demand the west uphold the values it claims to uphold and play by the rules it claims to play by. This is self-evident and requires no defense.

    I’ve long felt like a big part of my job here is just being the voice that says “You’re not crazy. I see it too.” Assuring people they’re not going mad when it looks like everything they were told about the world is a lie and everyone they were trained to trust is deceiving them.

    Because that is the message you will receive when you start asking the important questions and getting the important answers about ruling power structures in our world: people will act like you’re a raving lunatic for talking about US empire malfeasance and western propaganda. Only by mass-scale propaganda brainwashing would it ever appear insane to criticize the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. It’s the most normal, sane and rational thing in the world, but it’s made to look freakish by narrative spin.

    To paraphrase Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be deemed sane in a profoundly insane society.

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    Boss makes a dollar,
    I make a dime,
    boss’s overseas wage slave makes a penny,
    the war victim gets death,
    the factory farmed animal gets torture,
    the biosphere gets mass extinction,
    that’s why I endorse global communism
    and the metamorphosis of human consciousness
    on company time.

    Okay it doesn’t rhyme like the original but I like it anyway.

    __________________

    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.

  • Today: the people of Ukraine win this year’s European Union Prize

    The European Parliament on Wednesday 19 October awarded “the people of Ukraine” its annual Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought amid the ongoing war with Russia. For more on this award and its previous laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/BDE3E41A-8706-42F1-A6C5-ECBBC4CDB449

    “This award is for those Ukrainians fighting on the ground. For those who have been forced to flee. For those who have lost relatives and friends. For all those who stand up and fight for what they believe in. I know that the brave people of Ukraine will not give up and neither will we,” said Roberta Metsola, the European Parliament’s head.

    EU Commission chief Ursula von Der Leyen congratulated the people of Ukraine and said: “Their spirit and determination to fight for the values we hold dear is an inspiration to us all.”

    “At (the EU Council) we’ll focus on continuing our assistance; we will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” European Council President Charles Michel said on Twitter.

    Last year: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/21/alexei-navalny-wins-eus-sakharov-prize/

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20221017IPR43706/the-ukrainian-people-awarded-the-european-parliament-s-2022-sakharov-prize

    https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ukrainian-people-awarded-eus-sakharov-prize-for-freedom-of-thought/2715666

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

  • Putinism’s Defeated Opposition

    In a new collection, Ilya Budraitskis provides a trenchant analysis of the ideological underpinnings of Putin’s Russia and the domestic political groups that have opposed his government.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • The Most Powerful Weapon The West Gave Ukraine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    It’s pretty wild how the US is sending armored vehicles to Haiti to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been actively trying to create in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Hong Kong.

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    The Pentagon is seeking sweeping new powers in preparation for a war with China, the Senate NDAA bill increases proposed military aid to Taiwan from 4.5 to 10 billion dollars, and Tony Blinken is claiming without evidence that Beijing has greatly accelerated its plans to annex Taiwan. This is all as aggressions continue to ramp up against Russia. They really are doing this thing.

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    So it looks like this is what we’ll be doing for the foreseeable future: calling to escalate the war in Ukraine, facilitating the escalation of the war in Ukraine, and then screaming with shock and outrage when the war in Ukraine escalates. That seems to be what we’ve got planned.

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    That's because the threat perception doesn't come from geography but from propaganda. Americans are the single most propagandized population on earth. https://t.co/ATBWPt4OXF

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2022

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    “Maybe my government is actually in the wrong here and is just lying and manipulating to advance its own interests?” should be a much more common thought. It’s a line of inquiry that should be taught to schoolchildren. It is by design that it doesn’t occur to people more often.

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    The most powerful weapon the west has given Ukraine is not the HIMARS, it’s the US propaganda machine.

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    The only people who support western proxy warfare in Ukraine are those who deny the extensively documented ways the western empire has provoked, sustained, manipulated and exploited this war. You can only support what’s being done by lying and/or being lied to.

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    “Calling for de-escalation actually causes escalation” is the single dumbest empire bro talking point yet to emerge from this war.

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    Still laughing about how liberals just spent months amplifying and celebrating a trolling operation founded by a literal Nazi.

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    NAFO founder Kamil Dyszewski (@Kama_Kamilia) is an antisemitic gamer from Poland pic.twitter.com/q5YPmDOFYZ

    — Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 14, 2022

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    If nuclear war erupts it won’t matter whose fault it was. It won’t matter who started it. It won’t matter whether Moscow had legitimate claim to Zaporizhzhia. All that will matter is that it happened. There will be no adjudicating responsibility after the fact. We won’t be here.

    The time to turn away from the trajectory toward nuclear war is now, not later. It’s bizarre how many people I get telling me “Well if nuclear war happens it’ll be Putin’s fault,” like that will be any comfort to them as they hug their family close and wait for a horrific death.

    There’s just so much sloppy thinking about the actual end of the world. People aren’t looking directly at this thing and thinking rigorously about what it would mean. What it would entail. This is understandable; it’s a terrible thing to contemplate. But we do urgently need to.

    People don’t seem to get that nuclear annihilation is the one mistake we could make that we can’t ever fix. There’s this unquestioned assumption that if it happened there’d be some kind of course correction afterward, but there won’t be. No one will be here to do it. No takesies backsies.

    People can’t imagine their own absence. That’s why we make up stories about life after death. It’s also why we’re having a hard time squarely facing the prospect of an Earth with no humans on it. People still assume human inventions like “fault” and “blame” will remain after us.

    People kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge a lot. The few survivors all say that the first thought they had upon free fall was instant regret. They realize in an instant that every problem they have can be solved except for the one they have just given themselves. Imagine having that thought, but it’s all life on Earth that we’ve killed. That’s what nuclear holocaust is. A moment of instant terrible regret followed by the blackness of the void.

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    During the Cuban Missile Crisis the top news story every day was how that whole Cuban Missile Crisis situation is going. During the nuclear brinkmanship crisis of 2022 the top news stories are about Kanye, Trump and Alex Jones. We are sleepwalking toward a cliff’s edge.

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    A sane society would chase off anyone who advocated nuclear brinkmanship and drive them out of human civilization. In our society we give them punditry gigs on mainstream media platforms and lucrative jobs at influential think tanks.

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    There are people among us who dress up their personal suicidal ideations as a world-weary, humble knowing that humans are shit and we need to die. I call these omnicidal ideations, and they are not noble or humble, they are monstrous and at odds with all of life on earth. If you can’t want to live for yourself, then live for your dog. Live for the ladybugs. Live for all the innocents that don’t deserve any of this.

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    This is all completely unnecessary. There’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality saying states need to be waving armageddon weapons at each other. There’s no valid reason not to lay aside these games of global conquest and collaborate together toward a healthy coexistence on this planet.

    We could have such a beautiful world. All the energy we pour into competition and conquest could go toward innovation that benefits us all, making sure everyone has enough, eliminating human suffering and the need for human toil. We’re trading heaven on earth for elite ego games.

    There’s no valid reason we can’t move from models of competition and domination to models of collaboration and care. Collaboration with each other; care for each other. Collaboration with our ecosystem; care for our ecosystem. We’re throwing it away in exchange for senseless misery and peril.

    ___________________

    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

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  • They’re Recycling The Viagra Rape Atrocity Propaganda They Used On Libya

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The west is advancing the claim that Putin is distributing Viagra to his soldiers so that they can more effectively rape Ukrainians, which was a ridiculous propaganda narrative the first time the west used it to manufacture consent for regime change in Libya.

    In a Thursday interview with the French government-owned news agency AFP, a Mauritian-British official from the United Nations named Pramila Patten claimed that Russia has a “military strategy” of mass rape in Ukraine and that Russian soldiers are being “equipped” with the erectile dysfunction medication Viagra in order to facilitate that military strategy.

    “When you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy,” Patten said.

    Because AFP is one of the major propaganda multipliers whose material is republished by news media outlets around the world, Patten’s completely unevidenced claim of weaponized Viagra has been uncritically reported as a real news story by outlets like CNN, The New York Post, Forbes, The Independent, The Hill, and Yahoo News. This claim will now be folded into many rank-and-file mainstream news consumers’ understanding of what is happening in Ukraine, despite its brazenly propagandistic nature.

    The only other time the west has been hammered with a story about marauding Viagra-armed rape brigades like this was in 2011, when the western empire was circulating atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for regime change interventionism in Libya. In March of that year an email later published by WikiLeaks was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by her private advisor Sidney Blumenthal, informing her of an unconfirmed “rumor” that Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi “has adopted a rape policy and has even distributed Viagra to troops.” Blumenthal notes that this claim originated from “the rebel side” of the conflict, which we now know included Al Qaeda, whom Gaddafi had been fighting.

    The following month that “rumor” was repeated before the UN national security council by Susan Rice, another Obama administration official, this time presented not as a rumor but as a reality. Although anonymous US military intelligence officials informed the press the very next day that they had no evidence of Rice’s claim, by June an International Criminal Court investigation was underway with western news media continuing to uncritically report claims of weaponized Viagra in Libya.

    Meanwhile, another UN human rights investigator named Cherif Bassiouni said he’d found those allegations to have arisen from “massive hysteria” and that both sides of the conflict had been making them about the other. Amnesty International failed to turn up any evidence of mass rapes and weaponized Viagra in Libya, and a 2016 report by the British Parliament found that the false “humanitarian intervention” by NATO forces which resulted in Gaddafi’s death had in fact been based on lies.

    This information came far too little, far too late. The case was made for intervention and Libya was plunged into chaos and humanitarian catastrophe by the western empire and its jihadist proxies on the ground, putting a final nail in the coffin of the claim that NATO is a “defensive alliance”.

    Of course we cannot conclusively prove that Putin isn’t giving his soldiers sex drugs to help them rape Ukrainians more efficiently. We cannot conclusively prove that Ukrainian spies aren’t sneaking across the border and injecting Russian babies with HIV either, but we don’t treat bizarre, nonsensical and completely unevidenced claims as true just because they cannot be definitively proven false. Especially when those exact claims have been used to advance depraved power agendas in the past in instances that remain completely unevidenced.

    Earlier this year the western media were uncritically publishing claims made by a single official in the Ukrainian government that Russian soldiers were running around raping Ukrainian babies and children, despite the fact that those claims had no evidence and were accompanied by demands for more western military assistance. Weeks later, that very same official was fired by the Ukrainian parliament for, among other things, circulating unevidenced claims about rapes by Russian soldiers.

    As we’ve discussed previously, the U.S. and its proxies have an extensive history of using atrocity propaganda, for example in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the 1990 false Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War. Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

    Western mass media are proving time and time again that there is no accusation against Russia that they will not promote as factual news reporting, no matter how evidence-free and ridiculous. The fact that they’re going to the well and recycling old atrocity propaganda illustrates this even more lucidly.

    If we were being told the truth about this war, we wouldn’t be hammered with blatant atrocity propaganda by so-called “news” outlets. We wouldn’t be subjected to ever escalating censorship of voices who criticize the western empire’s role in this war. We wouldn’t be swarmed by pro-NATO online trolling operations founded by actual neo-Nazis.

    How are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

    ________________

    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.

  • WaPo Wants US ‘Beacon’ for Ukraine Refugees—but Not for Haitians

     

    The notorious incident in Del Rio, Texas, where US border patrol agents on horseback were photographed apparently wielding long reins as whips against Haitian migrants, prompted widespread public outrage. But where Ukrainians seeking refuge in this country found a strong advocate in the Washington Post editorial board, their Haitian counterparts have received notably different treatment.

    It’s a fair comparison: Migrants from both countries seek protection in the United States because they fear for their lives in their home country. While Ukraine is actively at war, Haiti’s violence and instability have ebbed and flowed for decades, a result largely of foreign exploitation and intervention, compounded in recent years by devastating earthquakes and hurricanes; neither can provide a basic level of safety for their citizens today.

    All have the right under international and US law to seek that protection, including at the US border, where they are required to be given a chance to apply for asylum. Under Title 42—an obscure and “scientifically baseless” public health directive invoked under Donald Trump at the start of the Covid pandemic, and largely extended under Joe Biden’s administration (FAIR.org, 4/22/22)—that right has been violated, as Haitian (and Central American) asylum seekers have been summarily expelled without being screened for asylum eligibility.

    One might imagine that this trampling of rights, more actively nefarious than the foot-dragging on resettling Ukrainian refugees, would prompt more, not less, outrage among media opinion makers. Yet the opposite is true for the Post editorial board, which has written about both situations repeatedly.

    ‘These could be your children’

    WaPo: Why isn’t Biden taking in refugees from Ukraine?

    A Washington Post editorial (3/4/22) in support of Ukrainian refugees calls attention to the fact that “these could be your children.”

    When the Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked a mass exodus of refugees, the board (3/4/22) quickly and passionately urged the Biden administration to “welcome Ukrainians with open arms”:

    The images linger in your mind: Ukrainian children pressed against the windows of a bus or train sobbing or waving goodbye to their fathers and other relatives who remain behind to try to fight off an unjustified Russian war on Ukraine. It’s easy to imagine this could be your family broken apart. These could be your children joining the more than 1 million refugees trying to flee Ukraine in the past week.

    The board argued that accepting Ukrainian refugees would be a “way to truly stand with the brave and industrious Ukrainian people and our allies around the world”—and “also provide more workers for the US economy.”

    Less than two weeks later, the Post (3/16/22) returned to the issue, forcefully demanding that Biden’s inaction on bringing Ukrainian refugees to the US “must change” and suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security “step up” and grant them entry under a humanitarian parole system. “At the moment, it’s hard to think of a cohort of refugees whose reasons are more urgent,” the board wrote.

    A few weeks after Biden’s March 24 announcement that the US would admit 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, the Post (4/19/22) found the idea “heartening,” but called the lack of implementation “an embarrassment to this country.” This was at a time when, as the board noted, most Ukrainians who managed to make it to the US/Mexico border were being allowed entry under the parole system the Post had favored.

    Later, the Post (6/22/22) celebrated that its exhortations had been followed: “The US Door Swings Open to Ukrainian Refugees.” In that editorial, the board explicitly highlighted that the Ukrainians who had thus far entered the US had done so “in nearly all cases legally.” They wrote:

    That tens of thousands of them have successfully sought refuge in this country over about three months, with relatively little fanfare—and even less controversy, considering the toxicity that attends most migration issues—is a reaffirmation of America’s commitment to its values as a beacon to the world’s most desperate people. That commitment must be sustained as the war in Ukraine drags on, which seems likely.

    But the Post board doesn’t want that beacon to shine too brightly for all the world’s most desperate people—such as Haitian asylum seekers.

    ‘Inhumane to incentivize migrants’

    WaPo: Biden’s mixed messaging on immigration brings a surge of Haitian migrants to the Texas border

    A Washington Post editorial (9/20/21) on Haitian refugees takes President Joe Biden to task for suggesting he would “relax the previous administration’s draconian policies” toward Latin American asylum seekers.

    After the Del Rio incident, the board (9/20/21) expressed umbrage that “Haitian migrants, virtually all Black, are being subjected to expulsion on a scale that has not been directed at lighter-skinned Central Americans.”

    Yet this was quickly balanced by the Post‘s indignation at Biden’s “on-the-ground leniency” toward migrants that “led many or most of [the Haitians at Del Rio] toward the border.” The board wrote that Biden had suggested he would “relax the previous administration’s draconian policies” for “others, especially Central American families with children, tens of thousands of whom have been admitted to the United States this year,” thereby encouraging Haitians to come but then expelling them by the thousands. “The policy is inhumane,” the board lamented; “equally, it is inhumane to incentivize migrants to risk the perilous, expensive journey across Central America and Mexico.”

    To be clear, the Biden administration expelled migrants under Title 42 in more than a million encounters in 2021; however, a change in Mexican policy meant the US could no longer expel Central American families with young children (American Immigration Council, 3/4/22). What the board is suggesting here is that the policy of sending away migrants who have a right to seek asylum in the US, and will almost certainly face a dire situation upon arrival in their home country, is equal in its inhumanity to reducing the use of that policy—because that incentivizes more people to exercise their right to seek asylum.

    So what’s the answer to this conundrum? Ultimately the board pinned the blame on “partisanship in Congress” that has “doomed” attempts at comprehensive immigration reform. Setting aside the absurdity of the idea that both parties are equally at fault in stymying immigration reform, that analysis implies that any sort of immediate relief for actual Haitians is not a priority for the Post editorial board, regardless of their suffering.

    After the Del Rio incident, the Biden administration cleared out the migrant camp the Haitians were staying in, and most were flown to Haiti or fled to Mexico to avoid that fate. Many Democrats criticized Biden for the treatment of the Haitian migrants, but the Post (10/13/21), in its next editorial on the subject, argued that those critics “fail[ed] to acknowledge the political, logistical and humanitarian risks of lax border enforcement.”

    The headline of that editorial, “How the Biden Administration Can Help Haitian Migrants Without Sending the Wrong Message,” clearly signaled the board’s priorities; when advocating for helping Ukrainians, the Post never betrayed any concern that such help might send the wrong message.

    While it’s “easy to sympathize with the impulse behind” calls to end Title 42, and to grant Haitian refugees asylum if they are judged to have a “reasonable possibility of fear,” the board wrote, “the trouble is that it would swiftly incentivize huge numbers of new migrants to make the perilous trek toward the southern border.”

    They argued that their concern wasn’t theoretical; it was “proved” by the “surge” of Haitian asylum seekers “driven in large part by the administration’s increasingly sparing use of Title 42″—implying that the human rights of Haitian migrants must be judiciously balanced against the supposed threat of a “surge” of them at the border. The board members concluded that “Americans broadly sympathize with the admission of refugees and asylum seekers, but a precondition of that support is a modicum of order in admissions.” First comes order, then come the Post‘s sympathies.

    Two months later (12/30/21), they argued that the mass expulsion of Haitian migrants was “deeply troubling,” quoting a UN report that Haitians are “living in hell.” And yet they found themselves unable to forcefully condemn the Biden administration’s continued use of Title 42 to prevent Haitians from exercising their right to seek asylum, arguing that the policy is “politically defensible,” since “Americans do not want to encourage a chaotic torrent of illegal immigration.” The strongest umbrage they could muster was to call the situation “worth a policy review, to say the least.”

    ‘Main export is asylum seekers’

    WaPo: As chaos mounts in Haiti, the U.S. takes a tepid stance

    The Washington Post (5/7/22) calls for a “vigorous US policy” to oppose Haiti “chaos.”

    The Post editorial board is clearly very aware of the plight of Haitian refugees. As they pointed out in an editorial (5/7/22) calling for a “concerted, muscular diplomatic push” to address the Haitian government’s lack of legitimacy, they wrote that for those deported to Haiti, their “chances of finding work are abysmal, but the possibility that they will be victimized amid the pervasive criminality is all too real.”

    The board has been vocal (7/7/22) about calling for US policy change toward Haiti to reduce the “human misery”—and the “outflow of refugees”—arguing that “deportation is a poor substitute for policy.” Recently, it has ramped up its rhetoric, even suggesting (8/6/22) the idea of a military intervention in Haiti; in its most recent call for intervention, the board (10/11/22) argued:

    It is unconscionable for the Western Hemisphere’s richest country to saddle the poorest with a stream of migrants amid an economic, humanitarian and security meltdown.

    But it’s the country, not its people, at the center of concern here. At no point in the piece are those people, or the impact of US policy on them, described. (Certainly it’s never suggested that “these could be your children.”) Worse, the board calls Haiti a “failed state whose main export is asylum seekers,” reducing those asylum seekers to objects. (One might add that comparing Black human beings to “exports” shows a callous disregard for Haitian—and US—history.)

    The board wants intervention in Haiti in part to relieve the “humanitarian suffering” in the country (9/22/22)—but it’s not ashamed to put “death and despair” in the same sentence as “a steady or swelling tide of refugees” as the two things the Biden administration should be seeking to prevent via such an intervention.

    The source of the discrepancy between its position on Ukrainian and Haitian refugees seems to be that the Post editorial board sees them as fundamentally different problems. Ukrainians fleeing violence and instability are themselves at risk and need help; Haitians fleeing violence and instability are a risk to the US.

    That framing of the problem was perhaps most clear in their editorial (2/10/21) condemning Biden’s support for Haiti’s “corrupt, autocratic and brutal” then-President Jovenel Moïse:

    As with Central American migrants, the problem of illegal immigrants from Haiti can be mitigated only by a concerted US push to address problems at the source.

    Haitian migrants are, to the Post, more a problem for the US than human beings with problems of their own.

    And the editorial board’s use of the term “illegal immigrant”—a dehumanizing and inaccurate slur the widely-used AP style guide nixed ten years ago—is also telling. The board repeatedly refers in its editorials on Haiti to “illegal border crossings” and “surges.” But as mentioned previously, Haitians, like Ukrainians—and the Central American migrants the Post dreads in the same breath as Haitians—are legally entitled to come to the US border and seek asylum. In fact, to request asylum, migrants are required to present themselves on US soil. The only thing that makes their crossings “illegal” is Title 42, which itself is clearly illegal, despite judicial contortions to keep it in place. Yet it seems the moral (and legal) imperative to offer the opportunity to seek asylum must always be balanced, in the Post‘s view, with their fears of an unruly mob at the border.

    ‘An enduring gift to their new country’

    Early in the Ukraine War, some journalists came under criticism for singling out Ukrainian refugees for sympathy, in either explicit or implicit contrast to refugees from non-white countries (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). CBS‘s Charlie D’Agata (2/25/22), for instance, told viewers that Ukraine

    isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that, it’s going to happen.

    “They seem so like us,” wrote Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph (2/26/22). “That is what makes it so shocking.”

    Both journalists were white; it is perhaps worth noting that nine of the ten members of the Washington Post editorial board are likewise white. (Post opinion columnist Jonathan Capehart, who is Black, is the sole exception.)

    WaPo: Don’t forget the Afghan refugees who need America’s support

    The Washington Post (4/28/22) shows no fear of a “surge” of Afghan refugees.

    And yet the differential treatment it accords migrant groups may go beyond racism or classism for the Post; in April, the board (4/28/22) published an editorial headlined, “Don’t Forget the Afghan Refugees Who Need America’s Support.” In it, the board asked, “Why can’t the administration stand up a program for US-based individuals and groups to sponsor Afghan refugees to come here, as it has done for Ukrainians?”

    Earlier, the board (8/31/21) had argued that Afghan refugees “​​will become as thoroughly American as their native-born peers, and their energy, ambition and pluck will be an enduring gift to their new country.”

    The Afghanistan case illustrates that the Washington Post doles out its sympathy on political, not just racial, terms: Afghans, like Ukrainians, are presented as victims of enemies the Post has devoted considerable energy to vilifying—the Taliban on the one hand, Russia on the other. The plights of Haitians (and Central Americans), by contrast, can in no small part be traced back to US intervention—something the Post has little appetite for castigating.

    And Afghans, for the most part, have not been arriving at the US/Mexico border, which is clearly a site of anxiety for the board, with its fear of “surges” and lawlessness.

    The humanization and sympathy the board offers to both Afghans, and especially the Ukrainians that “could be your children,” is never offered to Haitians. Their circumstances are described, sometimes in dire language, but they themselves—their “pluck,” their “children pressed against the windows of a bus or train sobbing or waving goodbye to their fathers and other relatives who remain behind”—remain invisible and, ultimately, unworthy.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost.

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

    The post WaPo Wants US ‘Beacon’ for Ukraine Refugees—but Not for Haitians appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Militarist trade union moves to drop Corbyn-era military diversification policy

    One of the best ideas to come out of the Corbyn era will be dropped if a new motion from a pro-arms trade union is passed. A 2017 motion to diversify the ‘defence’ sector could be replaced by a much more militarist one proposed by the GMB union. Diversification would see workers reassigned to socially useful jobs, instead of producing arms. But, this is set to be abandoned.

    If approved at the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the motion would see the TUC lobbying for increased defence spending and cancel the 2017 position on diversification. Additionally, the motion instrumentalises the war in Ukraine and makes reference to AUKUS. AUKUS is a much-hyped military alliance between Australia, the UK, and the US.

    Militarist motion

    The precise wording of the motion is as follows:

    Congress believes that the world is becoming less safe and the policy carried in 2017 in favour of diversifying away from defence manufacturing is no longer fit for purpose.

    Congress recognises that defence manufacturing cuts have hindered the UK’s ability to aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime.

    The motion demands that the TUC general council:

    campaign for immediate increases in defence spending.

    It also recognises that:

    there is welcome potential for manufacturing orders under the Aukus agreement.

    Defence policy

    Diversifying the defence economy is a key argument from campaign groups in the UK. However, only under Corbyn’s leadership did it become a firmer policy proposal. As early as 2015, CND lauded Corbyn’s plans to repurpose the nuclear weapons industry:

    As the only anti-Trident leadership contender, Jeremy Corbyn is not only giving a voice to the many Labour members who oppose nuclear weapons but is also setting out practical plans to transition the high-skilled workforce away from nuclear weapons production.

    They added:

    A Britain without nuclear weapons will contribute to a more peaceful world – and one that can build a sustainable, high-skilled economy with secure, socially productive jobs.

    Unions

    A major barrier to greener, more forward-thinking policy has been the synergy between certain trade unions and the military sector. GMB and other some other unions represent workers in the defence sector and, understandably, this is reflected in their resistance to change.

    As Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) points out:

    Employment in local areas heavily dependent on the defence industry is especially vulnerable to downturns in national military spending, or the ending of major contracts for the UK military, or for export abroad.

    This is a critical contradiction at the heart of UK manufacturing. Because of a national commitment to producing weapons, workers and unions are forced into a militarist position. Even though the weapons they produce are often exported to authoritarian regimes which can harm other workers – usually in the Global South.

    Urgent need

    The British arms trade is supported by institutions of all stripes. This includes the nuclear weapons industry and the maintenance of the fleet. Organised workers in that industry are thus forced into a militarist position to protect their interests.

    What should be happening, given the climate crisis, is a move away from skilled engineers and other workers building arms. They should be re-roled to build the ethical and green technologies we need for a just transition.

    This latest motion reflects the problem. The big British trade unions are essentially conservative status quo organisations. It’s a bizarre situation when a trade union is arguing in favour of flooding Ukraine with arms, and for more lobbying for defence spending. This is a major barrier that must be overcome in order to move towards a more equitable and secure world.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Ministry of Defence, cropped to 770 x 403, licenced under Open Government Licence.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary Workers’ Co-op.

  • Red Cross frustrated by lack of access to PoWs in Russian-occupied Donetsk

    ICRC responds to Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticism, saying it being refused entry to notorious Olenivka prison

    The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has gone public with its frustration at being refused entry to a notorious Russian prisoner of war camp after scathing criticism from Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

    In his daily evening address, Ukraine’s president accused the ICRC of a lack of leadership, suggesting that officials were picking up their salaries without doing their jobs.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Logic of Mutual Escalation leads to Nuclear Apocalypse 

    Canada’s obsession with NATO is escalating the conflict in Ukraine and increasing the possibility of nuclear confrontation.

    During a press conference with her US counterpart last week foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly said Canada supported fast tracking Ukraine into NATO. If that transpired, alliance members would be treaty bound to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which commits member states to consider an armed attack against one member an attack against all. It could lead to a formal declaration of war with Russia, which would greatly increase the odds of a nuclear exchange.

    In response to Joly’s comment, John Ivison warned that Canada’s hawkish position increased the chance of nuclear apocalypse. On the front-page of the National Post, Ivison pointed out that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had already placed its Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Fortunately, US officials expressed slightly more caution on NATO. In the same press conference Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused to commit US support for fast tracking Ukraine’s NATO membership.

    While it would ratchet up tension, Ukraine’s adhesion to NATO would largely just formalize its current de-facto status. Since 2015 Canadian forces have trained their Ukrainian counterparts to pave the way for the country to join NATO. “The objective was the modernization of their forces with the aim of one day becoming a member of NATO”, explained Jeffrey Toope, former commander of Canada’s training mission in Ukraine.

    Similarly, invoking Article 5 would to some extent just formalize Canada’s de facto war footing. Canadian special forces are facilitating weapons deliveries and other supports on the ground in Ukraine. The federal government has encouraged former soldiers to travel to Ukraine and Canada has also provided significant amounts of arms and military intelligence. Canadian forces are also training Ukrainian soldiers in the UK.

    The Canadians are operating alongside a larger contingent of US forces. The Intercept recently reported, “clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war.” It added that there was “a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel.”

    Joly’s call to fast-track Ukraine’s NATO membership reflects Ottawa’s aggressive promotion of the nuclear weapons club. According to the Toronto Star, Canadian officials strongly advocated for Finland and Sweden’s recent bid to join the alliance. In early July Ottawa was also the first member of NATO to ratify the two Scandinavian countries membership into an alliance, which defines nuclear weapons as “a fundamental component” of its planning.

    Canada’s decades old promotion of NATO has contributed to the current crisis. Ignoring US/European promises to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand NATO eastward, soon after taking office in 1993 Prime Minister Jean Chretien began promoting Poland’s adhesion to NATO. Without so much as a debate in Parliament, Canada was the first NATO country to formally approve enlargement of the alliance and Ottawa pushed to double the size of the initial expansion.

    Some say establishing NATO in 1949 was a Canadian idea and Canadian officials participated in the initial private meetings to launch the alliance with representatives of the US and UK. Canada has “participated and contributed to every NATO mission, operation and activity since NATO’s founding”, noted Canada’s Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council Kerry Buck in 2018. A decade earlier military historian Jack Granatstein pointed out that NATO is “the alliance to which Canada had devoted perhaps 90 percent of its military effort since 1949.”

    Immediately after its creation, Canada began sending billions of dollars in NATO mutual assistance weaponry to the colonial powers as they suppressed independence movements in Africa and Asia. From the early 1950s to the early 1990s thousands of Canadian troops were stationed in Western Europe on NATO assignments. In 1999 Canadian fighter jets dropped 530 bombs in NATO’s illegal 78-day bombing of Serbia. During the 2000s tens of thousands of Canadian troops fought in a NATO war in Afghanistan. In 2011 a Canadian general led NATO’s attack on Libya in which seven CF-18 fighter jets and two Canadian naval vessels participated. More recently Canadian troops have participated in NATO naval expeditions in Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean as well as missions in Iraq and Poland. For five years Canada has led a NATO battlegroup in Latvia, which borders Russia.

    For Canada there’s never been a plausible defensive element to NATO. Does anyone believe Ukraine, Lithuania or Latvia would defend Canada if it were invaded? It’s ridiculous, as Dimitri Lascaris explains:

    Of course, the Article 5 obligation of collective defence is reciprocal, which means that, if Ukraine were admitted to NATO, Ukraine would have an obligation to defend Canada in the event that Canada is attacked. The geopolitical reality, however, is that Canada, which shares a border with only one country (the United States), and which is separated from Russia by the Arctic Ocean, is far less likely to come under attack than Ukraine

    Also, as the poorest country in Europe, does Ukraine actually have the capacity to come to Canada’s defence in any meaningful way if Canada were attacked?

    Furthermore, would Canada even need Ukraine’s assistance if Russia (or some other hostile state) attacked Canada? The United States, which possesses the world’s most powerful military, would almost certainly act decisively to prevent the entry of hostile forces into Canadian territory. It would do so in its own interests, not in the interests of Canada.… The formidable deterrent of proximity to the United States would continue to exist even if Canada was not a member of NATO. The reality – which no one in the Canadian security establishment dares to acknowledge – is that, from a security perspective, Canada gains essentially nothing from NATO membership, and yet Canada has exposed itself to considerable risk by assuming an obligation of collective defence with respect to European states. For Canada’s security, there is essentially no upside from NATO, only downside, and Ukraine’s admission to NATO would constitute a particularly bad deal for Canadians.

    By pushing to fast-track Ukrainian membership in NATO Ottawa is escalating a conflict that may still draw in more countries. Anatol Lieven recently pointed out that China could respond to escalation by offering Russia weapons. “If the Chinese government becomes convinced that America is in fact waging a war for the complete defeat of Russia and the overthrow of the Russian state, then fears for the effect on their own vital interests seem all too likely to lead them to give the kind of enormous military aid to Russia that America has been giving to Ukraine — at which point the balance of forces could swing back hard against Ukraine”, noted Lieven.

    At the NATO summit in Spain three months ago the alliance released a new strategic concept that for the first-time listed China. It labeled Beijing a challenge to the alliance’s “interests, security and values” and NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared, “China is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, bullying its neighbours, threatening Taiwan ….”

    On Thursday the head of the Canadian military told the House of Commons standing committee on national security that Russia and China believed themselves to be at war with Canada. “Russia and China are not just looking at regime survival but regime expansion. They consider themselves to be at war with the West”, claimed Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre.

    While the militarist National Post warns against Canada’s position on Ukraine joining NATO, few social groups or unions are expressing concern about Ottawa’s role in increasing the odds of nuclear apocalypse. It’s time for peace and antiwar minded Canadians to start demanding restraint in Ottawa’s role of further escalating this conflict.

     

    The post Logic of Mutual Escalation leads to Nuclear Apocalypse  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We’re Being Pushed Toward Nuclear War On A Fiction: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who’s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won’t stop invading and conquering until he’s stopped by force.

    The news media aren’t telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They’re not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won’t listen to reason and only understands violence. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

    To participate in this madness is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fictional version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, if we weren’t being told constantly by the media that this proxy war needs our full support and censoring the voices who dispute this and using giant troll armies to swarm and silence anyone who questions this, we might fall victim to propaganda.”

    ❖

    “You’re not anti-war, you’re just anti-AMERICAN wars,” said the person who is loudly cheerleading America’s proxy war in Ukraine.

    Warmongers don’t like being called warmongers when they support a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US and is being sustained by the funding and facilitation of the US with the explicit goal of weakening a longtime geopolitical rival of the US. They get very upset when you point out the fact that they are doing this, and when people’s opposition to their warmongering is described as “anti-war”:

    They very much prefer to pretend that this time the US is on the good and righteous side of a war, because in that imaginary world they’re the cool anti-fascists standing up to an evil tyrant and those who oppose their warmongering are the real warmongers.

    “This time the US is on the GOOD side of a war! Also, goo goo ga ga I am a little baby with a little baby brain.”

    ❖

    The closer we get to nuclear war the less patience I have for sectarian spats between people who are supposed to be opposing war and militarism. Grow the fuck up and get over yourselves. This is more important than you and your ego.

    ❖

    Don’t let anyone tell you your criticisms of US warmongering make no difference; if they didn’t, the empire wouldn’t work so hard to dissuade you from making them. They work so hard to manufacture public consent for their agendas because they absolutely require that consent.

    An entire globe-spanning empire rests on our closed eyelids. Depends on keeping us in a propaganda-induced coma. Circulating ideas and information which discredit and dispute that propaganda poses a direct threat to that empire. That’s what all the censorship of dissent is about.

    Is your one tweet, video or public demonstration going to bring the empire crashing down? Of course not. But it will spread awareness by that much. And all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness. You’re nudging us all toward awakening to whatever extent you help expand awareness of truth and reality.

    We can’t be the Hollywood hero who single-handedly decapitates the machine, but we can all collectively throw sand in its gears, making it harder and harder for it to function. That’s what disrupting the imperial propaganda machine accomplishes, because that machine depends on propaganda. The weakest part of an empire that’s held together by lies and manipulation is its lies and manipulations; that’s why it’s such an aggressively protected aspect of its power. And it happens to be the one part that anyone with a voice can attack, and attack effectively.

    The nightmare scenario for our rulers is the same as the nightmare scenario for every ruler throughout history: that the masses will get sick of their rule and use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That’s exactly what the propaganda matrix is designed to prevent.

    One aspect of this struggle that is a bit like a Hollywood movie is that it kind of is a struggle between light and darkness, because the empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we’re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That’s why Assange is in prison. It’s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant, and why online discussion is swarmed by astroturf trolling ops. Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.

    _______________________

    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.

  • Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All

    Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images

    On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

    It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.

    On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.

    It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

    President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

    Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.

    In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.

    How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?

    The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?

    And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.

    The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.

    Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.

    But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.

    That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.

    U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.

    On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from The New York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:

    “Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”

    The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”

    A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

    Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.

    As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.

    The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.

    If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.

    The post Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Rejection Of Moscow’s Offer For Peace Talks Is Utterly Inexcusable

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.

    Reuters reports:

    Lavrov said officials, including White House national security spokesman John Kirby, had said the United States was open to talks but that Russia had refused.

     

    “This is a lie,” Lavrov said. “We have not received any serious offers to make contact.”

    Lavrov’s claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia’s recent missile strikes on Kyiv.

    “We see this as posturing,” Price said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression against the people and the state, the Government of Ukraine.”

    This is inexcusable. At a time when our world is at its most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis according to many experts as well as the president of the United States, the US government has no business making the decision not to sit down with Russian officials and work toward de-escalation and peace. They have no business making that call on behalf of every terrestrial organism on this planet whose life is being risked in these games of nuclear brinkmanship. The fact that this war has escalated with missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital makes peace talks more necessary, not less.

    This rejection is made all the more outrageous by new information from The Washington Post that the US government does not believe Ukraine can win this war and refuses to encourage it to negotiate with Moscow.

    “Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table,” WaPo reports. “They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.”

    These two points taken together lend even more credibility an argument I’ve been making from the very beginning of this war: that the US does not want peace in Ukraine, but rather seeks to create a costly military quagmire for Moscow just as US officials have confessed to trying to do in Afghanistan and in Syria. Which would explain why US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the US goal in Ukraine is actually to “weaken” Russia, and also why the empire appears to have actively torpedoed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the conflict.

    This proxy war has no exit strategy. And that is entirely by design.

    Many have been calling for the US to abandon its policy of actively sustaining this war while avoiding peace talks.

    “President Biden’s language, we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told ABC’s This Week on Sunday regarding the president’s recent remark that this conflict could lead to “Armageddon”.

    “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen said, adding, “As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

    “One thing the United States can do is… drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations,” Noam Chomsky argued in a recent appearance on Democracy Now. “Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.”

    “It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control,” said the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe following the Monday missile strikes on Kyiv, calling it “a major escalation in the war” that was bound to “bring the world closer to a direct military collision between Russia and the United States.”

    “The Americans have to come to an agreement with the Russians. And then the war will be over,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at an event on Tuesday, adding that “anyone who thinks that this war will be concluded through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations is not living in this world.”

    It’s absolutely insane that the world’s two nuclear superpowers are accelerating toward direct military confrontation and they aren’t even talking to each other, and it’s even crazier that anyone who says they should be gets called a Kremlin agent and a Chamberlain-like appeaser. Responsible Statecraft’s Harry Kazianis discusses this freakish dynamic in a recent article titled “Talking is not appeasement — it’s avoiding a nuclear armageddon“:

    I have fought more than thirty combat simulations in wargames under my own direction for a private defense contract over the last several months, looking at various aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war, and one thing is clear: the chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes.

     

    In every scenario I tested, the Biden Administration slowly gives Ukraine ever more advanced weapons like ATACMS, F-16s, and other platforms that Russia has consistently warned pose a direct military threat. While each scenario has postulated a different point at which Moscow decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon in order to counter conventional platforms it can’t easily defeat, the chances that Russia uses nukes grow as new and more powerful military capabilities are introduced into the battlefield by the West.

     

    In fact, in 28 of the thirty scenarios I have run since the war began, some sort of nuclear exchange occurs.

     

    The good news is there is a way out of this crisis — however imperfect it may be. In the two scenarios where nuclear war was averted, direct negotiations led to a ceasefire.

    I repeat again that it is absolutely pants-on-head gibbering insanity that these direct negotiations are not already presently underway. Let us petition any and all higher powers we have faith in that this changes very soon. Let us also petition the leaders of our individual nations around the world to exert whatever kind of pressure they can muster upon Washington for these talks to commence. This brinkmanship threatens us all, and the managers of the US empire have no business playing these games with our lives.

    _______________

    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.

  • Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left

    Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he has yet to find the time to throw his weight behind the campaign to free Julian Assange.

    When thousands of supporters poured into London from all over the world at the weekend to besiege the British Parliament, creating a human chain around it, Monbiot, like his newspaper the Guardian, ignored the event.

    Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been rotting in a UK high-security prison for years, as the United States works through a series of lawfare strategies to extradite him and lock him up indefinitely in a maximum-security jail on the other side of the Atlantic.

    Assange’s crime is doing real journalism: he published incontrovertible evidence of US and British war crimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. That kind of journalism has now been reclassified by Washington as espionage and treason, even though Assange is not a US citizen and did none of the work in the US. Plots by the CIA to murder and kidnap Assange have also come to light.

    Should his oppressors succeed, a very clear message will be sent to other journalists around the globe that the US is ready to come after them too if they disclose its crimes. The chilling effect on investigative journalism is already palpable.

    So, you might imagine, even a journalist like Monbiot – one primarily concerned about soil loss and other environmental concerns – should be worried by Assange’s fate. In the circumstances he might consider it worth publicising this threat to the most fundamental of our freedoms: the ability to know what our governments are up to and hold them to account.

    After all, Monbiot’s columns exposing the threats to our soil will be all the poorer if investigative journalism of the kind Assange excelled in before his silencing continues to be snuffed out by the US and UK’s joint terror campaign on whistleblowers and those who offer them a secure platform. How will we ever know what is being done behind our backs by governments and major corporations, or how they are keeping us in the dark about their political and environmental crimes and misdeeds, if fighters for transparency like Assange can simply be disappeared?

    But Monbiot is apparently not persuaded. He is yet to find the space or time for a column on this, the biggest threat to media freedom in our lifetime.

    When the Guardian columnist did take a week off from writing about soil loss and related topics, Assange’s plight, sadly, was still considered of insufficient import. As I have noted before, Monbiot decided it was more important to fill his empty slot in the paper’s commentary pages with denunciations of journalists like John Pilger for failing to be vocal enough in condemning Russia for invading Ukraine.

    Monbiot, it seems, felt he had to prioritise defending journalism from the menace posed by independent journalists on the left over any threat posed by the combined force of the US and British national-security states.

    But maybe the issue for Monbiot really is, as he has openly worried before, that he does not have anything sufficiently interesting to add to the topic because Assange’s persecution is already being detailed so fully by … a handful of independent journalists – those like John Pilger he wishes to bully into silence.

    Monbiot apparently does not need to dedicate a column to Assange, one that might alert millions of Guardian readers to the continuing persecution of a western journalist and the related assault on journalism, because independent left-wing writers – ones being algorithmed into oblivion by social media platforms – are covering the issue already.

    Breaking the rule book

    Those unsure whether Monbiot is arguing in good faith – and whether, aside from matters that touch directly on his environmental brief, he actually represents anything that can be seriously called “the left” – might consider his latest astounding tweet. He issued this one at the weekend, presumably adding so much to the burden of work that he could not find time to express his support for the human chain trying desperately to draw attention to the endless procedural and legal abuses at the heart the Assange case.

    Nonetheless, we should celebrate the fact that Monbiot took time from his busy environmental schedule to watch the first of The Labour Files, Al Jazeera’s explosive four-part documentary. The programmes draw on a huge cache of leaked internal Labour party files that show how the party’s right-wing bureaucracy broke Labour’s own rule book – as well as the law – to surveil, smear, bully and expel members that were seen as left-wing or supporters of Corbyn. Current leader Sir Keir Starmer appears to be colluding with, if not directing, this horror show.

    These Labour officials – who have been regularly termed “whistleblowers” by Monbiot’s employer, the Guardian – worked secretly to sabotage the 2017 election, including by helping to weaponise antisemitism to ensure Corbyn was unelectable, while at the same time demonstrating what looks suspiciously like a deep-seated racism in the treatment of black and Muslim party members, often because the BAME community were seen as stalwart allies of Corbyn, given his long-time activism against racism.

    So how did Monbiot respond to his belated exposure to The Labour Files? He tweeted:

    I’ve just watched Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files: The Crisis, about the handling of anti-semitism allegations. I found it deeply shocking. But I’m very unsure of myself on this issue. Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims? Thank you.

    Very unsure of himself? What surprising modesty and reticence from a journalist more usually ready with an opinion on a diverse range of topics – many concerning issues where he appears not to have read further than the headlines of his paper, the Guardian. Maybe it is too churlish to remember this 2011 Monbiot tweet on Assange, one that has fared badly with the passing of time:

    Why does Assange still have so much uncritical support? Seems to me he’s acting like a tinpot dictator

    Or how about his sudden and unexpected expertise in tripartite extradition law, between the US, Britain and Sweden? In 2012, he confidently observed:

    Harder to extrad[ite] him [Assange] from Sweden than UK, as US wld then have to go through 2 jurisdictions, not one.

    In fact, as people who know a lot more than Monbiot about such matters pointed out at the time, this was nonsense. Nils Melzer, an international law professor and the former United Nations expert on torture, recently wrote a book that set out good reasons why his lawyers would have assessed he was likely to be in far greater jeopardy in Sweden, where the extradition process was even more politicised than in the UK.

    Similarly, Monbiot has regularly chosen to offer his uninformed opinions on events taking place in far-off lands, from Syria to Ukraine. Why then the sudden loss of confidence when it comes to a matter happening on his doorstep, one that played out over seven years on the front pages of the establishment media, including his own newspaper, and whose evidentiary basis had been aired well before The Labour Files, in a leaked Labour internal report and the Forde inquiry’s report into that leak.

    Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files doesn’t cover much new ground. It deepens and enriches the evidence for abuses that were already in the public domain, including the collusion of newspapers like the Guardian with the Labour party bureaucracy in smearing as antisemites Corbyn and his supporters in the party, including many Jewish members.

    There has long been masses of information for Monbiot to get his teeth into, had he chosen to break with the enforced Guardian and media consensus and look into the matter. But like his colleagues, from the Daily Mail to the Guardian, he remained silent or amplified the lies rather than risk the career damage of challenging them as those independent journalists he so excoriates dared to do.

    Following the herd

    In fact, Monbiot’s seeming good-faith request for more evidence to assess the Al Jazeera documentary is treachery of the worst kind. Had he really wished to be better informed, he could have spoken long ago to Jewish Labour party members like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi who have been vilified and purged from Labour because they disputed the confected political and media narrative that Corbyn was an antisemite.

    Rather than show solidarity with them, or question what was happening, Monbiot once again followed the corporate herd; once again he ensured there was no one defending, let alone representing the views of, the British left as it was being defamed in the establishment media; and once again he helped to provide the veneer a supposed bipartisan consensus that Corbyn and his supporters were beyond the pale.

    In 2018, at the height of the antisemitism witch-hunt, Monbiot tweeted:

    It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.

    There is a reason that Monbiot suddenly professes to be interested in questioning whether the rampant, evidence-free antisemitism claims against Corbyn and large swaths of the Labour party were valid. Because, with the broadcasting of the Al-Jazeera documentary, he finds himself increasingly cornered. He looks ever more the charlatan, a journalist who withdrew from the struggle, standing silently by while the only chance to stop Britain’s endless political drift rightwards was eviscerated with lies promoted by the corporate media that pays his salary.

    And he did so, of course, in tandem with the campaign cheer-led by his own newspaper, the Guardian, to demonise the Labour left, as Al Jazeera documents.

    Rather than take a stand against the McCarthyism occurring right under his nose, witch-hunts that destroyed the British left’s chances of making the Labour party a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives’ “free market” zealotry, he focused his guns on left-wing journalists. He misrepresented as apologism for Putin their critiques of western hypocrisy and of Nato’s pursuit of a proxy war in Ukraine.

    Monbiot is a bad-faith actor for a further reason. Here is a reminder of his faux-naïve questions about The Labour Files:

    Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims?

    These hollow concerns should stick in his craw. Monbiot is a journalist. He knows as well as I do that Al Jazeera lawyered its programmes over and over again until it was certain that every part of them could be stood up, knowing that otherwise they would attract law suits like flies to a carcass. The feeding frenzy would have crippled the station.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that if Al Jazeera had made a single solitary slip-up, the BBC, the Guardian and everyone else would be using it to discredit all the other claims in the four programmes. The noise would drown out every other issue raised in the programme.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that the blanket silence from a corporate media deeply implicated in the fabrication of the Labour antisemitism narrative is proof alone that Al Jazeera’s claims are true – as are the deceitful responses from senior Labour politicians who, when challenged, profess not to have watched, or in some cases even heard of, the documentary. One doesn’t need to be a veteran poker player to spot the tell in that conspiracy of silence.

    Monbiot knows all of this. He is playing dumb, in the hope that his followers will fall for his act. In asking his questions, he is not trying to shed light on the Al Jazeera revelations. He is trying to keep those revelations obscured, in deep shadow, for a little longer.

    CIA talking points

    There is a pattern with Monbiot, one that he has been repeating for years. His position on every major issue, aside from his genuine passion for the environment, chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He goes only as far as he is given licence to. He is not on the left, he is not a dissident, he is not even his own man. He is owned. He is a salary man. He is a corporate stooge.

    Even his environmentalism, invaluable as it invariably is, has been cynically weaponised by the Guardian. It provides a hook to draw in leftists who might stray elsewhere – and thereby help fund genuinely independent outlets – were they not offered a sop to keep them loyal to the Guardian corporate brand. Monbiot is the media equivalent of a promotional line to keep a supermarket’s shoppers satisfied.

    On foreign affairs, he promotes CIA talking points, advancing Washington’s ever expanding, ever more lucrative war on terror – wars that ravage the environment he supposedly cares about and constantly deflect our energies and attention from doing anything to tackle the ever more urgent climate crisis.

    He readily castigates anyone who tries to point this out as a Putin apologist, choking off the ability of the left – the one group equipped to challenge establishment propaganda – to air meaningful foreign policy debates.

    At home, he has equivocated on the biggest, most vital issues of our times.

    He indulged the Corbyn smears, even when it meant ushering in a fanatical right-wing government that is driving the destruction of the environment at break-neck speed. Even now, he professes doubts about the latest weighty evidence from Al Jazeera that confirms the earlier, equally weighty evidence that those smears were never rooted in any kind of reality.

    He has whispered his support for Assange, while doing nothing to galvanise the left into fighting not only for Assange’s personal freedom but for the freedoms of other journalists and the whistleblowers they depend on. In doing so, he has stifled efforts to shine a light into the very darkest corners of the machinery of the security state so that the public can know what is being done in its name. And further, in abandoning Assange he has abandoned the only journalist who had built a counter-weight, in Wikileaks, to take on that machinery.

    Far more is at stake here than simply griping about Monbiot’s failings. Just as Monbiot follows the company line set by the Guardian, never daring to stray far from the path laid down for him, so much of the left all too readily follows Monbiot, taking their cues from his take on events even though all too often he is simply regurgitating the consensus of the liberal wing of the establishment in which the Guardian is embedded.

    Monbiot is treated by much of the left as a figurehead, one whose environmentalism earns him credibility and credit with the left on foreign policy issues, from Syria to Ukraine, in which he echoes the same talking points one hears from Keir Starmer to Liz Truss. While on matters at home, like Assange and Corbyn, he sucks the wind out of the left’s sails.

    As the saying goes, if Monbiot did not exist, the establishment would have had to invent him. Their dirty work looks so much cleaner with him onboard.

    The post Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Nuclear War Could Threaten to Erupt

    Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.

    But hold on! As it happens, Ukraine isn’t the only place on the planet where a nuclear conflagration could erupt in the near future. Sad to say, around the island of Taiwan — where U.S. and Chinese forces are engaging in ever more provocative military maneuvers — there is also an increasing risk that such moves by both sides could lead to nuclear escalation.

    While neither American nor Chinese officials have explicitly threatened to use such weaponry, both sides have highlighted possible extreme outcomes there. When Joe Biden last spoke with Xi Jinping by telephone on July 29th, the Chinese president warned him against allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit the island (which she nonetheless did, four days later) or offering any further encouragement to “Taiwan independence forces” there. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” he assured the American president, an ambiguous warning to be sure, but one that nevertheless left open the possible use of nuclear weapons.

    As if to underscore that point, on September 4th, the day after Pelosi met with senior Taiwanese officials in Taipei, China fired 11 Dongfeng-15 (DF-15) ballistic missiles into the waters around that island. Many Western observers believe that the barrage was meant as a demonstration of Beijing’s ability to attack any U.S. naval vessels that might come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion of the island. And the DF-15, with a range of 600 miles, is believed capable of delivering not only a conventional payload, but also a nuclear one.

    In the days that followed, China also sent nuclear-capable H-6 heavy bombers across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a previously respected informal boundary between China and that island. Worse yet, state-owned media displayed images of Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) hypersonic ballistic missiles, also believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons, being moved into positions off Taiwan.

    Washington has not overtly deployed nuclear-capable weaponry in such a brazen fashion near Chinese territory, but it certainly has sent aircraft carriers and guided-missile warships into the area, signaling its ability to launch attacks on the mainland should a war break out. While Pelosi was in Taiwan, for example, the Navy deployed the carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its flotilla of escort vessels in nearby waters. Military officials in both countries are all too aware that should such ships ever attack Chinese territory, those DF-15s and DF-17s would be let loose against them — and, if armed with nuclear warheads, would likely provoke a U.S. nuclear response.

    The implicit message on both sides: a nuclear war might be possible. And although — unlike with Putin’s comments — the American media hasn’t highlighted the way Taiwan might trigger such a conflagration, the potential is all too ominously there.

    “One China” and “Strategic Ambiguity”

    In reality, there’s nothing new about the risk of nuclear war over Taiwan. In both the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954-1955 and 1958, the United States threatened to attack a then-nonnuclear China with such weaponry if it didn’t stop shelling the Taiwanese-controlled islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu), located off that country’s coast. At the time, Washington had no formal relations with the communist regime on the mainland and recognized the Republic of China (ROC) — as Taiwan calls itself — as the government of all China. In the end, however, U.S. leaders found it advantageous to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in place of the ROC and the risk of a nuclear conflict declined precipitously — until recently.

    Credit the new, increasingly perilous situation to Washington’s changing views of Taiwan’s strategic value to America’s dominant position in the Pacific as it faces the challenge of China’s emergence as a great power. When the U.S. officially recognized the PRC in 1978, it severed its formal diplomatic and military relationship with the ROC, while “acknowledg[ing] the Chinese position that there is but one China and [that] Taiwan is part of China.” That stance — what came to be known as the “One China” policy — has, in fact, underwritten peaceful relations between the two countries (and Taiwan’s autonomy) ever since, by allowing Chinese leaders to believe that the island would, in time, join the mainland.

    Taiwan’s safety and autonomy has also been preserved over the years by another key feature of U.S. policy, known as “strategic ambiguity.” It originated with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, a measure passed in the wake of the U.S. decision to recognize the PRC as the legal government of all China. Under the act, still in effect, the U.S. is empowered to supply Taiwan with “defensive” arms, while maintaining only semi-official ties with its leadership. It also says that Washington would view any Chinese attempt to alter Taiwan’s status through violent means as a matter “of grave concern,” but without explicitly stating that the U.S. will come to Taiwan’s aid if that were to occur. Such official ambiguity helped keep the peace, in part by offering Taiwan’s leadership no guarantee that Washington would back them if they declared independence and China invaded, while giving the leaders of the People’s Republic no assurance that Washington would remain on the sidelines if they did.

    Since 1980, both Democratic and Republican administrations have relied on such strategic ambiguity and the One China policy to guide their peaceful relations with the PRC. Over the years, there have been periods of spiking tensions between Washington and Beijing, with Taiwan’s status a persistent irritant, but never a fundamental breach in relations. And that — consider the irony, if you will — has allowed Taiwan to develop into a modern, prosperous quasi-state, while escaping involvement in a major-power confrontation (in part because it just didn’t figure prominently enough in U.S. strategic thinking).

    From 1980 to 2001, America’s top foreign-policy officials were largely focused on defeating the Soviet Union, dealing with the end of the Cold War, and expanding global trade opportunities. Then, from September 11, 2001, to 2018, their attention was diverted to the Global War on Terror. In the early years of the Trump administration, however, senior military officials began switching their focus from the War on Terror to what they termed “great-power competition,” arguing that facing off against “near-peer” adversaries, namely China and Russia, should be the dominant theme in military planning. And only then did Taiwan acquire a different significance.

    The Pentagon’s new strategic outlook was first spelled out in the National Defense Strategy of February 2018 in this way: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia. (And yes, the emphasis was in the original.) China, in particular, was identified as a vital threat to Washington’s continued global dominance. “As China continues its economic and military ascendance,” the document asserted, “it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

    An ominous “new Cold War” era had begun.

    Taiwan’s Strategic Significance Rises

    To prevent China from achieving that most feared of all results, “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony,” Pentagon leaders devised a multipronged strategy, combining an enhanced U.S. military presence in the region with beefed-up, ever more militarized ties with America’s allies there. As that 2018 National Defense Strategy put it, “We will strengthen our alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains.” Initially, that “networked security architecture” was only to involve long-term allies like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Soon enough, however, Taiwan came to be viewed as a crucial part of such an architecture.

    To grasp what this meant, imagine a map of the Western Pacific. In seeking to “contain” China, Washington was relying on a chain of island and peninsular allies stretching from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and Australia. Japan’s southernmost islands, including Okinawa — the site of major American military bases (and a vigorous local anti-base movement) — do reach all the way into the Philippine Sea. Still, there remains a wide gap between them and Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island. Smack in the middle of that gap lies… yep, you guessed it, Taiwan.

    In the view of the top American military and foreign policy officials, for the United States to successfully prevent China from becoming a major regional power, it would have to bottle up that country’s naval forces within what they began calling “the first island chain” — the string of nations stretching from Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia. For China to thrive, as they saw it, that nation’s navy would have to be able to send its ships past that line of islands and reach deep into the Pacific. You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that solidifying U.S. defenses along that very chain became a top Pentagon priority — and, in that context, Taiwan has, ominously enough, come to be viewed as a crucial piece in the strategic puzzle.

    Last December, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner summed up the Pentagon’s new way of thinking about the island’s geopolitical role when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last December. “Taiwan,” he said, “is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

    This new perception of Taiwan’s “critical” significance has led senior policymakers in Washington to reconsider the basics, including their commitment to a One China policy and to strategic ambiguity. While still claiming that One China remains White House policy, President Biden has repeatedly insisted all too unambiguously that the U.S. has an obligation to defend Taiwan if attacked. When asked recently on Sixty Minutes whether “U.S. forces…would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” Biden said, without hesitation, “Yes.” The administration has also upgraded its diplomatic ties with the island and promised it billions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers and other forms of military assistance. In essence, such moves constitute a de facto abandonment of “One China” and its replacement with a “one China, one Taiwan” policy.

    Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities have reacted to such comments and the moves accompanying them with increasing apprehension and anger. As seen from Beijing, they represent the full-scale repudiation of multiple statements acknowledging Taiwan’s indivisible ties to the mainland, as well as a potential military threat of the first order should that island become a formal U.S. ally. For President Xi and his associates, this is simply intolerable.

    “The repeated attempts by the Taiwan authorities to look for U.S. support for their independence agenda as well as the intention of some Americans to use Taiwan to contain China” are deeply troubling, President Xi told Biden during their telephone call in November 2021. “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burned.”

    Since then, Chinese officials have steadily escalated their rhetoric, threatening war in ever more explicit terms. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence,” Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., typically told NPR in January 2022, “it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in military conflict.”

    To demonstrate its seriousness, China has begun conducting regular air and naval exercises in the air- and sea-space surrounding Taiwan. Such maneuvers usually involve the deployment of five or six warships and a dozen or more warplanes, as well as ever greater displays of firepower, clearly with the intention of intimidating the Taiwanese leadership. On August 5th, for example, the Chinese deployed 13 warships and 68 warplanes in areas around Taiwan and two days later, 14 ships and 66 planes.

    Each time, the Taiwanese scramble their own aircraft and deploy coastal defense vessels in response. Accordingly, as China’s maneuvers grow in size and frequency, the risk of an accidental or unintended clash becomes ever more likely. The increasingly frequent deployment of U.S. warships to nearby waters only adds to this explosive mix. Every time an American naval vessel is sent through the Taiwan Strait — something that occurs almost once a month now — China scrambles its own air and sea defenses, producing a comparable risk of unintended violence.

    This was true, for example, when the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through that strait on August 28th. According to Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, China’s military “conducted security tracking and monitoring of the U.S. warships’ passage during their whole course and had all movements of the U.S. warships under control.”

    No Barriers to Escalation?

    If it weren’t for the seemingly never-ending war in Ukraine, the dangers of all of this might be far more apparent and deemed far more newsworthy. Unfortunately, at this point, there are no indications that either Beijing or Washington is prepared to scale back its provocative military maneuvers around Taiwan. That means an accidental or unintended clash could occur at any time, possibly triggering a full-scale conflict.

    Imagine, then, what a decision by Taiwan to declare full independence or by the Biden administration to abandon the One China policy could mean. China would undoubtedly respond aggressively, perhaps with a naval blockade of the island or even a full-scale invasion. Given the increasingly evident lack of interest among the key parties in compromise, a violent outcome appears ever more likely.

    However such a conflict erupts, it may prove difficult to contain the fighting at a “conventional” level. After all, both sides are wary of another war of attrition like the one unfolding in Ukraine and have instead shaped their military forces for rapid, firepower-intensive combat aimed at securing a decisive victory quickly. For Beijing, this could mean firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at U.S. ships and air bases in the region with the aim of eliminating any American capacity to attack its territory. For Washington, it might mean launching missiles at China’s key ports, air bases, radar stations, and command centers. In either case, the results could prove catastrophic. For the U.S., the loss of its carriers and other warships; for China, the loss of its very capacity to make war. Would leaders of the losing side accept such a situation without resorting to nuclear weapons? No one can say for sure, but the temptation to escalate would undoubtedly be great.

    Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no U.S.-China negotiations under way to resolve the Taiwan question, to prevent unintended clashes in the Taiwan Strait, or to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. In fact, China quite publicly cut off all discussion of bilateral issues, ranging from military affairs to climate change, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. So, it’s essential, despite the present focus on escalation risks in Ukraine, to recognize that avoiding a war over Taiwan is no less important — especially given the danger that such a conflict could prove of even greater destructiveness. That’s why it’s so critical that Washington and Beijing put aside their differences long enough to initiate talks focused on preventing such a catastrophe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Evolving Big Brains Only To Go Extinct From Stupidity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s really too bad that anyone who thinks it might be a good idea to stop exponentially escalating this proxy war is an evil Nazi Putin propagandist, because things are getting very very dangerous.

    Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust.

    Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

    Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

    Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

    Fucking lunatics.

    Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least “campist”. It’s just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It’s absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

    A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That’s less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That’s less crazy and backwards.

    This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It’s turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

    ❖

    Maybe it would be wise to stop playing the “Let’s cross Putin’s red lines, I bet he’s bluffing this time” game.

    ❖

    People who aren’t gravely concerned about the rapidly escalating brinkmanship between the US and Russia simply have not spent enough time researching the facts and contemplating the reality of what nuclear war would mean. Their composure comes solely from psychological avoidance.

    ❖

    It is a bit hilarious that humans rapidly evolved these massive brains only to become the first species to go extinct due to stupidity.

    ❖

    FYI you should always be less trusting of your government in times of war, not more.

    ❖

    Analysis of the war in Ukraine which does not account for the western provocations which gave rise to it is not analysis at all. It’s propagandistic children’s literature.

    ❖

    If your proxy war demands nonstop PR spin and mass media propaganda at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, maybe your proxy war is immoral and bad.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only way you can believe Russia is threatening with nuclear weapons in a way the US is not would be to think the US has a No First Use nuclear policy. Which would of course be false and silly.

    ❖

    When one side of the new cold war wants multipolarity where world power is much less centralized and the other side wants unipolar planetary domination where the entire world obeys Washington DC and its puppet masters, it’s not hard to figure out which side is the aggressor.

    ❖

    Be completely dismissive of those who object to your criticisms of western imperial aggression. The one and only reason they expect their dopey opinions to be taken seriously is because their position has been artificially normalized by copious amounts of propaganda. That’s it.

    The one and only thing making your worldview look strange and suspicious and the worldview of empire apologists look normal is the fact that we’ve all been swimming in empire propaganda our entire lives. It’s got nothing to do with the factuality or validity of anyone’s position. In reality, focusing one’s criticisms on the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is the normal thing to do. It’s not strange and suspicious when you do it, it’s strange and suspicious that everyone else does not.

    ______________

    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.

  • Russian Army Fires Old Sparky: US Loses the Electric War in Ukraine

    Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:

    As we could reliably predict, the Western media are self-righteously denouncing Moscow and rending their garments in an orgy of hypocrisy over what they frame as an act of “depraved terror”.  Unfortunately, the hundreds of millions in the captive audience have nowhere to turn (or know how) to find out the truth and the proper historical context for the Ukraine war, the first thing the Western media suppressed even before the war formally began last February.

    It must be noted that this sudden “rain of missiles” is virtually inexplicable if we follow Western media reports. The explanation for this contradiction is given by Moon of Alabama, who, with great irony but with 100% accuracy, headlines its 10 October dispatch, “Russia, Having ‘Run Out Of Missiles’, Launches Barrage On Ukraine,” adding,

    Back in March I had warned that Lies Do Not Win Wars. Here is another practical example.
    After allegedly having ‘run out of missiles’ and, more importantly, patience, the leadership of the Russian Federation decided to de-electrify Ukrainian cities with a ‘barrage of missile strikes’.

    MoA then lists no less than 25 examples of Western media proclaiming with great seriousness that Putin was about to run out of missiles. This pathetic campaign (see a sample from MoA below), one of many strands pushed by the West’s Big Lie ministry, which has been simply totalitarian when “covering” the Ukraine conflict,  went on from March to the present. We expect it to now finally halt, if for sheer decency, which they apparently lack, for no other reason than the impossibility of denying the obvious:

    BUT, since objectivity is for Journalism School chumps and not serious matters like imperial propaganda, the press is wasting no time to milk the latest news for maximum Russophobic effect. Unsurprising then to find CBS, a major US engine of shameless disinformation in the global news machinery, covering the story thusly (we have bolded some of the more revoltingly tendentious passages and terms):

    Russia rains missiles down on Ukraine’s capital and other cities in retaliation for Crimea bridge blast
    / CBS/AFP

    President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday people were killed and injured in multiple missile strikes on cities across Ukraine, including the first bombardment of the capital in months. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata1 said the strikes, which could signal a major escalation in the eight-month-old war, appeared to be entirely punitive — retaliation meant to terrorize Ukrainian civilians2 in densely-populated urban neighborhoods, close to government buildings, with one even hitting a children’s playground.
     
    Ukraine’s national police later said at least 10 people were killed and about 60 others injured by the missile strikes early Monday morning.

     Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin acknowledged the barrage of missiles, which Russia claimed targeted only energy infrastructure, was retaliation for an apparent Ukrainian attack on a key bridge over the weekend. Putin warned Monday that if Ukraine continued to mount “terrorist attacks” on Russia, his regime’s response would be “tough and proportionate to the level of threats.”
     
    “Unfortunately there are dead and wounded. Please do not leave the shelters,” Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s citizens on social media earlier Monday, accusing Russia of wanting to “wipe us from the face of the Earth.”

    APTOPIX Russia Ukraine War

    Rescue workers survey the scene of a Russian attack on Kyiv, Ukraine on Oct. 10, 2022. Several explosions rocked the city early in the morning following months of relative calm in the Ukrainian capital.ADAM SCHRECK / AP

    The explosions in Kyiv and other cities came just a day after Putin blamed Kyiv for a massive explosion on a 12-mile bridge connecting Crimea with Russia. Crimea is a large Ukrainian peninsula that Russia occupied and then unilaterally annexed eight years ago during a previous invasion. The annexation of that territory, like Putin’s recent land grab3 of four Ukrainian regions that he declared Russian soil last week, have been condemned as illegitimate and illegal by Ukraine, the United Nations, the U.S. and other Ukrainian partners.

    The CBS report could not avoid calling the attack a “war crime”, standard appellation for anything done by Russia and Putin in this conflict. They conveniently forget that it is US military doctrine (seen repeatedly in recent Gulf wars, etc.) to attack electricity power grids on the very first day of the onslaught, immediately condemning the country to severe stress due to lack of running water, heat, and the multitude of vital activities that electricity permits in modern society. (See more on this in our attached John Helmer report).The CBS report however grudgingly admitted that Moscow had apparently accomplished its purpose:

    As the European Union condemned Russia’s attack and said the targeting of civilians amounted to “a war crime,” Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the “massive strike with long-range precision weapons.” It claimed the missiles had targeted “objects of the military command and control, communications and energy systems of Ukraine” and that “all assigned objects were hit.”

    (CBS/AFP News, Oct 10, 2022)

    Meantime, Kiev, who, like the West, places great stock on the wiles of hybrid war, virtually acknowledged its hand in the terrorist strike on the Crimea bridge by circulating a stamp that gloated over the incident. The stamp appeared almost immediately after the bridge was blown up.

    By John Helmer, Moscow
    @bears_with

    In the propaganda war the Ukrainian-supplied western media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, have just announced the discovery of a box of gold teeth “in a suspected [sic] Russian torture chamber, prompting claims [sic] they were wrenched from victims [sic] of President Putin’s occupying forces in Kharkov [sic].”

    They are concealing that the Ukrainians of Kharkov whose teeth are fully intact inside their mouths can no longer operate their electric toothbrushes. There’s no electricity. Not for torture. Just enough for the allegations to be fabricated, published, and transmitted on the internet.

    According to Ukrainian sources, about 1,700 cities, towns and villages, with about 1 million consumers, were without power in mid-March; the most seriously affected were the regions of  Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev and Donetsk. On May 3, Ukrainian and western media reported a missile strike against power plants in the western Galicia region capital of Lvov; sub-stations supplying electricity to the railway system in the region were also hit.  The biggest of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity plants was reported in the western press, again quoting Kiev sources, on September 11-12.  Power plants in Kharkov, Sumy, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions were stopped.

    A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued on October 6, confirms there was a sharp fall in consumer demand for electricity following these attacks; this appears as a gap in the data chart between September 11 and 13. Kiev officials claimthat the generating plants were  repaired and power restored.   The IEA report,  which relies upon and repeats data provided by the state utility Ukrenergo,  claims that just before the Russian strikes,  demand was running at 9.07 GW on Saturday, September 10, and that by the following Tuesday it was 13.56 GW.

    According to the IEA, “Ukraine’s electricity demand has fallen by about 40% since Russia’s invasion with no sign of recovery. Demand keeps decreasing slowly every week. The resulting decline in power generation has mainly taken place in nuclear. But coal-fired generation has also decreased.”  An IEA chart of power generation figures shows that from a peak of 21.87 GW on January 25, the production of electricity reported on October 5 had fallen to 11.41 GW – a cut of 48%.
     
    However, the same IEA report claims that since a low point was reached on June 26 of 9.13 GW, Ukrenergo has also been managing to restore output by 25%.
     
    A North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition and salvage, now retired, says these data are being faked by Ukrenergo. “The Russian strikes also interrupt data recording and reporting. The Ukrainians are not too keen to show weakness as they are anxious to be seen as a reliable supplier of electricity.”
     
    Slowly but surely, but also secretly, the war is destroying the electric generation on which the Ukraine depends for everything –  trains, water pumps, sewage treatment, light, heat, mobile telephones, refrigerators, radio and television, not to mention production lines in factories, in abattoirs,  sausage making and other farm and food processing.
     
    However, there remains electricity for the Ukrainian military operations to continue on the eastern front, and for cross-border trains to run into Lvov from Poland with fresh arms,  ammunition, and rotating allied military staff advisers, together with NATO politicians and journalists keen to advertise their support.
     
    In the wake of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the electric war can now be expected to escalate.

    In this Ukrainian report of March 2022,   the “base installed generating capacity” of the country was reported at 56 GW at 2020 —  64% from thermal power plants, 25% nuclear and 10% hydro. The remaining 1%, offset by some hydro storage, was accounted for by solar, wind and other small generators.

    Source:  Olga Sushyk, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Studies at the Educational and Scientific Institute of Law, and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv: “Ukraine’s Power System: Power and War”, published on March 17, 2022.

    Source for enlarged view: file:///D:/Backups/Downloads/

    Source: Lyudmila Vlasenko, Head of Electricity Sector Development Unit, Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and Coal Sector – report titled “Power System of Ukraine: Today and Tomorrow”, July 2013. Since  July of this year DTEK, the generation company owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, has reported that “about 90% of Ukraine’s wind capacity and 30% of solar parks are offline because they are in occupied territories.”

    The Sushyk-Shevchenko report says that “due to damage to the electricity infrastructure, as of March 16, 2022, more than 1,679 Ukrainian localities remained without electricity – that’s about 928,000 consumers. The worst situation with electricity supply is in Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev, Kiev, and Donetsk regions.”

     

    An earlier background briefing paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA), dated 2021, confirms the pre-war details.  Here’s IEA’s backgrounder on Ukrainian electricity generation, apparently as of 2018.

     

    The IEA also publishes daily updated charts of the collapse of Ukrainian electricity production; these are based on data supplied by Ukrenergo. These charts show the losses up to October 9.

    The same source also shows this chart of Ukrainian electricity demand; demand responds to the cutoff of coal, gas and nuclear-fired generating plants by increasing use of domestic electrical heaters and back-up electrical generators.

    Since 2014 Ukraine has lost a third of its energy generation which had been located in the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Another 10 power plants were lost in 2014-2015, and seventeen more in 2022, according to a new assessment published last Friday in Vzglyad of Moscow by Nikolai Storozhenko.

     

    “Zaporozhye NPP [Nuclear Power Plant] stands out among them, of course. But this does not mean that the others are not worth attention. For example, the Zaporozhye thermal power plant (Energodar) has an installed capacity of more than 3,500 MW and can potentially produce 23-25 billion kWh (the annual plan for the NPP for 2022 was 37 billion kWh). In other words, the loss of this energy supply is a hole which, practically, the Ukraine can do nothing to close, and which will largely determine the problems of the Ukrainian winter of 2022/23.”

     

    “Ukraine lost another 4% of electricity generation as a result of the fighting from February to September, according to the assessment of the National Council for the Restoration of Ukraine. However, it is obvious that these data do not take into account the blows to the energy infrastructure  which were inflicted on September 11-12 (Kharkov CHPP-5, Zmievskaya CHPP, Pavlodar CHPP-3, Kremenchug CHPP). In general, the damage and reduction in the capacity of the energy system looks enormous for Ukraine and it is not entirely clear how Zelensky manages to sell electricity to Europe against this background.”
     

    “But, firstly, sales [to Europe] will soon stop, which Zelensky has already warned Europe about, declaring recently: ‘We will not have enough volume to heat our homes, and this time is approaching.’ Secondly, Ukraine’s energy system is losing power simultaneously with a decrease in consumption…Yury Korolchuk, an expert at the Institute of Energy Strategies [Kiev],  is urging consumers to be ready for five to six-hour rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts are not news for Ukraine, but the realities of the last few years. Moreover, this year in the reports on the procurement of fuel for the winter, firewood began to appear…and the mayor of Lvov said in August that the city is buying and stocking wood for fuel.”
     

    “What about gas supply? In the summer, Naftogaz asked for several billion dollars to purchase 5-7 billion cubic meters of gas – to bring reserves to 19 billion cubic meters. But there was no money for this – and to date, only 14 billion cubic meters have been accumulated. On the one hand, the situation for gas is about the same as with electricity: consumption is falling. Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions are either completely written off…, or their supplies will be cut to a minimum. In most cities of Kharkov, Donetsk, Nikolaev,  Sumy, Chernigov regions and Zaporozhye there will be no heating. There will be no gas in winter, there will be light periodically —  such a frightening forecast was published in the Telegram channel…half of this source’s forecasts come true – and they shout loudly about them. The second half does not come true – and no one remembers about them.”
     

    “But in this case, the forecast is not groundless….[Ukrainian state] Naftogaz is delaying the conclusion of gas supply contracts with the gas distribution companies in the Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk regions. At this point, it is worth remembering how, back in early summer, Zelensky’s office directly told the residents of the Donetsk region: go wherever you want, there will be no heating in winter.”
     

    “In other words, the Ukrainian strategy is something like this. There are the combat areas and those adjacent to them. There the population has already dispersed or has greatly decreased; there is a risk of attacks on the facilities themselves and fuel depots. So, it is in these areas that it will be hardest to winter. It will be more comfortable for Kiev which has its own thermal power plants and there is an opportunity to add power from western Ukrainian nuclear power plants, and for the Galician region of western Ukraine [Lvov]. Also, there are about three to four million internally displaced people  in Ukraine who have resettled mainly in these regions. Who should be kept without electricity and gas: the half-empty areas of the Zaporozhye region or Kiev? The choice is obvious.”
     

    This is how the Ukrainian energy experts view their choice from Kiev. The strategic options for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin remain secret, if not undecided.
     
    In the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge attack, Moscow television figures like Vladimir Soloviev have broadcast calls to extend the military campaign westward to Lvov and the Polish border. “It is obvious,” Soloviev said on Saturday, “that the NATO command took part in the development of this [Crimean Bridge] sabotage… What is our plan? Not to follow the enemy’s scenario, but to disrupt their plans, striking unexpected blows in directions where the enemy is not anticipating them. Ukraine should be plunged into dark times. Bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants,  and other infrastructure facilities should be destroyed throughout the territory of Ukraine. There should be no administrative office building operating in both Kiev and Lvov. And not only that.”
     

    Left: a screen shot of a Kharkov substation after the September 11-12 attacks. Centre: Vladimir Soloviev, Moscow broadcaster and advocate for escalation. Russian and Crimean government officials are quieting the tone by announcing that train traffic on the Crimean Bridge has already resumed; that one road span is undamaged and will resume operation shortly; and replacement of the damaged road span will follow.
     
    A combined US and European Union (EU) plan to link the Ukrainian electricity grid to the EU system, and thus provide supply back-up in case the Ukrainian grid was attacked by the Russian Army, has already failed. A US publication headlined the attempt “The Race to Rescue Ukraine’s Power Grid From Russia”; click to read.
     
    “The test was years in the making, one of the final rituals in a drawn-out courtship between the Ukrainian and European power grids known as “synchronization.” But before it could join with Europe, Ukrenergo first had to prove it could keep the lights on without its connections to Belarus and Russia—in ‘island mode.’ The plan was to reconnect with its neighbours after a few days. Then in 2023 it would switch on the links with Europe.”
     
    “That’s not what happened. Instead, on February 24, the same day as the test, Russia invaded. Since noon that day, Ukraine—in coordination with its southern neighbour Moldova—has been powering itself solo. It’s a balancing act. Changing where the power comes from and where it goes means some lines suddenly get clogged with electrons while others dry up. It can be difficult to maintain balance for any length of time. So far, the Ukrainian grid is humming along at a frequency of 50 Hertz—stable, in other words—a Ukrenergo spokesperson told WIRED by email. But it’s risky to continue that way indefinitely, especially during a war. When stuff breaks in the power grid, the whole system has to absorb the shock and rebalance. And right now, a lot is breaking across Ukraine…Last week, Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, said  the group representing the region’s transmission operators, will come to the rescue, potentially within weeks.”
     
    This was wishful thinking on the part of the Latvian official in Brussels. For Simson’s record of faking on the EU’s gas substitution schemes, and the Russian response, read this report from October 2021.
     
    The assessment of the North American expert on military operations against energy infrastructure focuses on the Russian side’s strategy until now, before considering the military options for the future. In addition to covering up the evidence of power generation losses by the Ukrainians which the source reports from Urkrenergo and IEA, he says the Russians have limited their attacks until now to “a form of reconnaissance by force. Their purpose”, he believes, ” has been to determine what generating capacity remains, what can be repaired, how to interdict the human repair logistics, what is irreparably lost, and then to attrite the remaining Ukrainian materiel and human resources as the winter season approaches.”
     
    “It appears to me that the Ukrainians are extremely hard-pressed to maintain and restore their electrical grid, most especially in the eastern regions. They are just as concerned to the point of adding and testing back-up generators at key nodes of the grid, especially in Kiev. By the way, the precedent for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin for destroying a country’s electrical grid was set during the NATO bombing of Serbia and then by the US air bombing of Iraq.”
     
    For a history of US Air Force (USAF) strategy in attacking electric generation and distribution grids, read this USAF University thesis, entitled “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, dated 1994:   “The USAF has long favoured attacking electrical power systems. Electric power has been considered a critical target in every war since World War II, and will likely be nominated in the future… The evidence shows that the only sound reason for attacking electrical power is to affect the production of war materiel in a war of attrition against a self-supporting nation-state without outside assistance.”

    Left: Major Thomas Griffith’s USAF study of 1994. Centre:  Iraqi electric relay unit bombed by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91.   Right:  Serbian generating plant damage after the USAF and European bombing campaign of May 1999.

    The western military source again: “War is war, whether you want to use terms like hybrid war or proxy war. It means destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war.  Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will do just that to the Ukrainians. If they then start to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does  queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound?  This won’t be like the blackouts from US sanctions and attacks in Cuba or Venezuela – there they didn’t  have to worry about freezing to death, the pipes bursting, or irreparable damage being done to billions of dollars’ worth of pumping, electrical,  and other equipment due to freezing.”
     
    “How many people realize that a sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit breaker,  commonly used in electrical substations, requires an electric heating blanket to be functional in sub-zero weather? Most westerners don’t. They are common in high-voltage substations which ultimately feed the grid lines with power. In the Ukrainian case, I suspect  there is a mixture of those and older style oil circuit breakers (OCB), along with oil-filled large power transformers (LPT),  which are essential to electrical distribution. And guess where most of the oil comes from to fill these devices?”
     
    “I suspect that most of Zelensky’s officials and officials in the supporting EU governments have persuaded themselves with their own propaganda. They aren’t daring to think through these questions, any more than they care to understand that the housing of the pumps delivering their water and treating their sewage will freeze and split apart if they are not heated via electrical means. Even if the gas is on — and it won’t be — electricity is needed to ignite, then control, furnaces. How many of these officials understand the long lead times, compounded by manufacturing shutdowns due to high energy costs, which you must have to replace and restore everything?”
     
    “Who then will ‘stand with Ukraine’ when the gas and electricity rationing and unpayable consumer bills  roll over the Ukrainian border and into Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, as they are already doing?”
     
    “The Russians have been hitting the Ukrainian electrical distribution system for months now. As we know, they started with the rail traction power yards which are largely branches of the wider electric grid. Now they have moved to the substations and so-called ‘thermal power’  plants, hitting them in what seems to be pellmell fashion. I expect that the Russians are gathering intelligence now on repair times, re-equipment availability, deliveries, repair crew composition and coordination.”

    Source: https://transformers-magazine.com

    “So let’s imagine this. Winter arrives. The power is cut in Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Pavlovsk, Nikolaev etc. and due to the unavailability of spares, repair crews, respite from attack, or all three, the outlook for the power outage is indefinite. What do people do? They migrate to where there is power, running water, heat etc… For millions this means west. So off they go. And when enough of them get there, bam! the power goes off there too.”

    Source for enlarged view: https://eneken.ieej.or.jp — page 6.

    Reading the grid maps of the Ukraine,  the source says “it is obvious that the real vulnerability, in my estimation, lies in the approximately 88 substations for 330 kV distribution and 33 substations for 220 kV distribution. Note the nodes or junctions. Those are substations connecting the distribution lines which crisscross the Ukraine. These substations contain large power transformers, switchgear, DCS equipment [Distributed Control System] and other power quality and control equipment, spares etc. Widespread coordinated strikes on these substations will quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian ability to effect repairs and re-balance the loads on the generation stations. This will create a cascade effect whereby overloaded power plants and distribution gear will ‘trip out’ over wide swathes of the country – if the protection between the Ukrainian and EU grids does not operate in time, or there is wild voltage/frequency oscillations there could be large interruptions in the EU countries being fed from Ukrainian sources.”
     
    “Any repair efforts will also be severely hampered, if not crippled, if utility yards where spare cables and other gear, as well as vehicles (bucket and line trucks, cranes, etc.), are stored and parked are struck. Personnel losses among the finite number of utility crew members due to follow-up attacks and the inevitable mishaps that come with interacting with damaged or compromised high voltage electrical equipment, will quickly mount. If the attacks are launched during the hard winter months, the impact will be exponential, increasingly unmanageable and catastrophic as the hours go by.”
     
    The above by Editor — John Helmer on Sunday, October 9, 2022.

    1. A professional disinformer, identical to thousands of colleagues who work on Western media to produce and spread lies according to the given script from the State Dept. or other power centers in the Western ruling class.
    2. The pot calling the kettle black. This from a media platform that like the rest of the US-controlled media around the world, ignored and covered up the deliberate shelling of Donbas cities for eight long years by a Nazi-infested Ukrainian army built, trained and directed by NATO. The dead by now amount to more than 14,000. They are almost all civilians,  including many women and children. Throughout this period, Kiev’s military was also engaged in the deliberate shelling of schools, medical facilities and vital infrastructure: water plants, power stations and so on. Tell us, again, who started this nice clambake? Russia or Washington through its color revolutions and many vassal/accomplices?
    3. Yes, tell us about land grabs, please. More glaring examples of double-standard based on US exceptionalism. Since the turn of the 20th century, the US has invaded and occupied many nations, after subjecting them to brutal military attacks and repression. The annexed regions in Donbas were all heavily Russian, historically and culturally, something we can hardly say about the US grabbing the Philippines in the 1900s, or setting itself up for generations in Korea, or illegally occupying one-third of Syria, a nation Washington has been trying to regime-change now for a generation via dirty war using terrorist proxies. We don’t have to mention here in detail the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, two nations that the US and its NATO vassals invaded, occupied and destroyed for at least 30 years, with untold victims, before liberation came to the former thanks to their unrelenting struggle against the “crusader army”, with Iraq still attempting to get rid of the Washington infection. Of course, no mention is made here that these regions rejoined Russia not as a result of some perverse Putin whim, but after a formal referendum, whose validity is certainly no worse and probably a damn sight better than US elections.
    The post Russian Army Fires Old Sparky: US Loses the Electric War in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss

    A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “  I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November.  Unprecedented.  You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.

    We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia.  Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.

    A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.

    There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:

    “Polly wants a war!”  “Polly wants a war.”

    I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing.  Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change.  Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe.  Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:

    The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

    Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people.  They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.

    If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.

    And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably.  The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.

    In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported.  Putin said:

    They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.

    I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.

    The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.

    When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more.  They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith.  The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:

    • Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
    • Mobilizing European NATO members
    • Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
    • Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
    • Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

    I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States.  Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today.  But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters.  And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.

    In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“.  In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.

    Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?

    We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates.  Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance.  Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.

    There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.

    Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.

    To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores?  Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked?  Have you completely lost your ability to think?  Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?

    If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?

    If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger?  My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?

    No.  I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway.  I have lost patience with it.  For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail.  Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.

    I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:

    A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.

    Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’

    The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’

    Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’

    The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’

    The desire for peace and security is a universal dream.  Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.

    It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.

    But I will not stop trying.  Galeano did not.  He left us these words of universal resistance:

    We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.

    We must save the world before it is too late.

    The post The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Khanna and Blumenthal Propose Bill to Cut All Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia

    Rep. Ro Khanna announced Sunday that he is teaming up with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal on a bill to block all U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi-led OPEC’s newly announced decision to slash oil production, driving up gas prices across the globe.

    In an op-ed for Politico, Khanna (D-Calif.), Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld argued that OPEC and Russia’s move to cut oil production by two million barrels per day starting in November will “worsen global inflation, undermine successful efforts in the U.S. to bring down the price of gas, and help fuel Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

    “The Saudi decision was a pointed blow to the U.S., but the U.S. also has a way to respond: It can promptly pause the massive transfer of American warfare technology into the eager hands of the Saudis,” the trio wrote. “That is why we are proposing bicameral legislation in the Senate and House on Tuesday that will immediately halt all U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”

    “For several years now, our colleagues have been considering similar proposals, but those measures haven’t passed,” they added. “Due to intense bipartisan blowback to Saudi’s collusion with Russia, we think this time is different. Based on our conversation with colleagues, our legislation is already garnering bipartisan support in both chambers.”

    According to one estimate, the U.S. agreed to sell roughly $64.1 billion worth of weapons — averaging over $10 billion a year — to Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2020.

    Arms sales to the Saudis, the largest purchaser of U.S. weaponry, have continued under the Biden administration despite its pledges to end the war on Yemen and render the oil kingdom a “pariah” over its assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

    In the wake of OPEC’s announcement of a production cut aimed at propping up oil prices, calls for an end to U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia intensified, with Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leading the chorus.

    “We must end OPEC’s illegal price-fixing cartel, eliminate military assistance to Saudi Arabia, and move aggressively to renewable energy,” Sanders wrote in a social media post on Wednesday.

    The Biden administration and Democratic leaders have said they’re exploring a range of responses to OPEC’s decision, but it’s unclear whether an end to military assistance to the Saudis is actively being discussed at the highest levels.

    In their op-ed on Sunday, Khanna, Blumenthal, and Sonnenfeld noted that some members of Congress are proposing “extending domestic antitrust laws to international commerce” while others are calling for the revival of “a GOP initiative to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia.”

    “A simpler, far more urgent move to fortify U.S. national security would be to pause all U.S. military supplies, sales, and other weapons aid to Saudi Arabia,” Khanna, Blumenthal, and Sonnenfeld argued. “This includes the controversial, new, and hastily planned Red Sands testing facilities in Saudi Arabia.”

    “U.S. military collaboration with the Saudi regime is more extensive than many realize, but that also gives the U.S. significant economic and security leverage over Riyadh,” they added. “Today, Saudi Arabia is hugely dependent on U.S. defense assistance, purchasing the vast majority of its arms from the United States… Saudi can do little to respond to this proposed legislation other than come back to the table and negotiate with the U.S. in good faith.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Good And Righteous Proxy War Wouldn’t Need Such Cartoonish PR

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Star Wars megastar Mark Hamill was recently named an ambassador for United24, the fundraising platform of the Ukrainian government, where according to The Times his attention will center on “the procurement, repair and replacement of drones as well as pilot training.”

    From The Times:

    “In this long and unequal fight, Ukraine needs continuous additional support. That’s why I was honoured President Zelensky asked me to become an ambassador for the Army of Drones,” Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said in a statement. “I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom and the values of the entire democratic world. Right now is the best time for everyone to come together and help Ukraine stand up in this war with the evil empire.”

     

    In a statement thanking Hamill for his support, Zelensky said: “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this. Thank you for taking on this difficult mission of being the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds for the Army of Drones to support our defenders. It is really important!”

     

    Hamill, 71, is among an expanding list of celebrities who have lent their support to United24, which Zelensky launched in May. The website is reported to have raised nearly $188 million in donations, including a recent $5 million contribution from the Pfizer Foundation to support Ukraine’s medical needs.

     

    Last week Barbra Streisand announced that she would also serve as an ambassador, hailing the “capability and courage” of the Ukrainian people as an “inspiration for all those worldwide who promote democracy and fight authoritarianism”.

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

    The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has joined President Zelensky to raise money for drones to fight Russia, which the actor compared to the “evil empire” from the films https://t.co/OZKUHwcf9S

    — The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) September 30, 2022

    So for the record if you were under the impression that this proxy war could not possibly get any more Disneyfied, you were wrong.

    Hamill celebrated his new position by tweeting a graphic showing a Star Wars spaceship wearing the Ukrainian flag colors, which the actor captioned in Polish because Hollywood is brain poison.

    Other recent Twitter PR shenanigans for this proxy war includes the Ukrainian government account talking to its “Crimea” account in the cringiest imitation of viral brand tweets you could possibly imagine.

    “hey @Crimea what’s new?” tweeted the Ukraine account in lowercase letters just like the cool kids do.

    “@Ukraine getting unchained, on my way home,” the Ukrainian government’s “Crimea” account replied.

    Both of these accounts would of course be run by the same person, who would have been hired specifically for their understanding of social media, internet memes, and marketing. Because this is the most phony, PR-intensive proxy war of all time.

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

    That Wendy’s twitter account has brought a scourge upon humanity pic.twitter.com/J27Y6PgHS5

    — Radio Free Amanda 余美娜 (@catcontentonly) October 8, 2022

    The face of this war is after all Volodymyr Zelensky, a well-known Ukrainian actor, who has been drumming up western support for this war by modeling on Vogue, making video appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, the New York Stock Exchange, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2.

    Since this war began the western media have been blanketing the airwaves with astonishingly biased coverage like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Russian media are purged from the airwaves while censorship of dissident voices has drastically escalated online with regard to this war. Social media algorithms artificially boost corrupt propaganda outlets which aggressively push the imperial line. Anti-Russia trolling operations are loudly praised and amplified by corporate media, government agencies, warmongering think tanks funded by western governments and the war industry, and branches of the US military explicitly dedicated to cyberspace operations, despite all we know about the US and UK militaries secretly using trolling operations online.

    This is a proxy war that simply could not happen if it wasn’t backed to the hilt by the most powerful government on earth. And before anyone objects, yes, this is indisputably a proxy war. If it isn’t a proxy war when you’re sending billions of dollars of weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters aided by US military intelligence and US special forces and CIA operatives on the ground, then there has never been a proxy war. That’s why US officials and the mass media have been openly calling it a proxy war.

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

    Cyberscoop: How one group of 'fellas' is winning the meme war in support of Ukraine https://t.co/yfXwg51r0r @CyberScoopNews

    — 780th Military Intelligence Brigade (Cyber) (@780thC) October 6, 2022

    None of this would be happening if this proxy war was as just and righteous as its proponents are pretending. If your proxy war demands nonstop perception management at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, your proxy war is probably immoral and bad. If maintaining public support for a proxy war requires nonstop PR spin, aggressive propaganda from the mainstream news media, banning of Russian media, and giant troll information ops amplified by think tanks and government agencies, it probably shouldn’t have public support.

    If you need to aggressively psychologically manipulate a population to get them to support your agenda, censor their speech, and disrupt their online discourse with astroturf trolling ops, it’s because you know your agenda is not something they’d choose to support on their own. If you need to manipulate people into supporting something, it’s because it’s not worthy of their support, and you know it.

    If people really understood how much is being risked in escalating this proxy war, and at what extraordinary cost, and to no benefit to the common citizen, Washington would be a steaming pile of rubble right now. Nothing could protect our rulers from the rage of the citizenry if they really understood that their bank accounts are being plundered and their lives risked solely to advance the geostrategic goals of a few corrupt imperialists.

    They work to manufacture our consent because they know we wouldn’t give it to them of our own volition. It’s about as despicable a subversion of democracy as you could possibly come up with.

    _____________________

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  • Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?

    The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

    This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

    Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

    Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

    The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

    It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.

    The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.

    Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

    Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.

    Media taboo

    This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

    Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.

    There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

    Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

    That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

    And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.

    Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

    Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.

    Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

    Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.

    Meddling in Ukraine

    US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

    One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

    Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”

    Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

    She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”

    Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.

    It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.

    ‘Thank you, USA’

    One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.

    But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.

    And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.

    That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.

    Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

    Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

    But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.

    Demand for fealty

    If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

    Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.

    In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.

    That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.

    By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.

    Pitiless aggression

    For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

    The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.

    The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

    At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

    • NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
    • Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
    • The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
    • And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

    None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

    Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

    But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.

    The post Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine? 

    In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

    Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, accused the Center for Civil Liberties of embracing the agendas of such problematic international donors as the U.S. Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy supports NATO membership for Ukraine; insists that no negotiations with Russia are possible and shames those who seek compromise; wants the West to impose a dangerous no-fly zone; says that only Putin violates human rights in Ukraine; never criticizes the Ukrainian government for suppressing pro-Russian media, parties, and public figures; never criticizes the Ukrainian army for war crimes and human rights violations, and refuses to stand up for the human right, recognized under international law, to conscientious objection to military service.

    Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

    The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement was founded in 2019 when fighting in the separatist-ruled Donbas region was at a peak and Ukraine was forcing its citizens to participate in the civil war. According to Sheliazhenko, Ukrainian men were “being given military summonses off of the streets, out of night clubs and dormitories, or snatched for military service for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public drunkenness, or casual rudeness to police officers.”

    To make matters worse, when Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine suspended its citizens’ right to conscientious objection and forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country; nevertheless, since February, over 100,000 Ukrainian draft-eligible men managed to flee instead of fight. It’s estimated that several thousand more have been detained while trying to escape.

    International human rights law affirms peoples’ right, due to principled conviction, to refuse to participate in military conflict and conscientious objection has a long and rich history. In 1914, a group of Christians in Europe, hoping to avert the impending war, formed the International Fellowship of Reconciliation to support conscientious objectors. When the U.S. joined WWI, social reformer and women’s rights activist Jane Addams protested. She was harshly criticized at the time but, in 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

    In Russia, hundreds of thousands of young men are refusing to fight. According to a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, within three days of Russia’s announcement that it was drafting 300,000 more recruits, 261,000 men fled the country. Those who could booked flights; others drove, bicycled, and walked across the border.

    Belarusians have also joined the exodus. According to estimates by Connection e.V., a European organization that supports conscientious objectors and deserters, an estimated 22,000 draft-eligible Belarusians have fled their country since the war began.

    The Russian organization Kovcheg, or The Ark, helps Russians fleeing because of anti-war positions, condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and/or persecution they are experiencing in Russia. In Belarus, the organization Nash Dom runs a “NO means NO” campaign to encourage draft-eligible Belarusians not to fight. Despite refusing to fight being a noble and courageous act for peace – the penalty in Russia for refusing the draft is up to ten years in prison and in Ukraine, it is at least up to three years, and likely much higher, with hearings and verdicts closed to the public – neither Kovcheg, Nash Dom nor the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, were announced as Nobel Peace Prize winners yesterday.

    The U.S. government nominally supports Russia’s war resisters. On September 27, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that Russians fleeing the draft were “welcome” in the U.S. and encouraged them to apply for asylum. But as far back as last October, before Russia invaded Ukraine, amid tit-for-tat U.S.-Russia tensions, Washington announced it would henceforth only issue visas to Russians through the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, 750 miles away from Moscow.

    To put a further damper on Russian hopes of refuge in the U.S., on the same day as the White House held its press conference where it encouraged draft-eligible Russians to seek U.S. asylum, the Biden administration announced that it would be continuing into fiscal year 2023 its FY2022 global refugee cap of 125,000.

    You would think that those resisting this war would be able to find refuge in European countries, as Americans fleeing the Vietnam war did in Canada. Indeed, when the Ukraine war was in its early stages, European Council President Charles Michel called on Russian soldiers to desert, promising them protection under EU refugee law. But in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies to reject all Russian emigres. Currently, all non-visa travel from Russia to EU countries is suspended.

    As Russian men fled after Putin’s draft announcement, Latvia closed its border with Russia and Finland said it was likely going to be tightening its visa policy for Russians.

    Had the Nobel Peace Prize awardees been the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian organizations that are supporting war resisters and peacemakers, it would have drawn global attention to the courageous young men taking this stand and perhaps opened more avenues for them to get asylum abroad. It could have also initiated a much-needed conversation about how the U.S. is supplying Ukraine with an endless flow of weapons but not pushing for negotiations to end a war so dangerous that President Biden is warning of “nuclear Armageddon.” It certainly would have been more in line with Alfred Nobel’s desire to bring global recognition to those who have “done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies.”

    The post Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine?  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack

     

    Multiple explosions last week off the coast of Poland damaged both the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, shutting down one and preventing the other from going online. The pipelines, intended to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, are critical infrastructure for Europe’s energy markets.

    The explosions triggered a lopsided “whodunnit” in US media, with commentators almost universally fingering Russia as the culprit, despite the lack of a plausible motive. Official US opposition to the pipeline has been well-established over the years, giving Washington ample motive to destroy the pipelines, but most newsrooms uniformly suppressed this history, and attacked those who raised it.

    WaPo: European leaders blame Russian ‘sabotage’ after Nord Stream explosions

    “Only Russia had the motivation,” the Washington Post (9/27/22) claimed—even as it reported that the pipelines “deepened Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas,” which “many [presumably Western] officials now say was a grave strategic mistake.”

    After the explosions, much of the press dutifully parroted the Western official line. The Washington Post (9/27/22) quickly produced an account: “European Leaders Blame Russian ‘Sabotage’ After Nord Stream Explosions,” citing nothing but EU officials who claimed that while they had no evidence of Russian involvement, “only Russia had the motivation, the submersible equipment and the capability.”

    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.

    The idea that only Russia had the means and motivation is clearly false on both counts. Washington has made it clear for years that it doesn’t want the pipeline, and has taken active measures to stop it from coming online. As for the means, it’s patently absurd to suggest that the US doesn’t have the capability to lay explosives in 200 feet of water.

    Even Max Boot, who agreed in his Washington Post column (9/29/22) that only Russia had the means and motive, contradictorily acknowledged that “the means are easy.”

    A long history of opposition

    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.

    RAND: Extending Russia

    The RAND report (2019) that recommended “Reduc[ing] [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder[ing] Pipeline Expansions” now comes with a warning saying it’s been “mischaracterized” by “Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.”

    A 2019 Pentagon-funded study from the RAND Corporation on how best to exploit “Russia’s economic, political and military vulnerabilities and anxieties” included a recommendation to “Reduce [Russian] Natural Gas Exports and Hinder Pipeline Expansions.” The study noted that a “first step would involve stopping Nord Stream 2,” and that natural gas “from the United States and Australia could provide a substitute.”

    This RAND study also prophetically recommended “providing more US military equipment and advice” to Ukraine in order to “lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it,” even though it acknowledged that “Russia might respond by mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory.”

    The Obama administration opposed the pipeline. As part of the major sanctions package against Russia in 2017, the Trump administration began sanctioning any company doing work on the pipeline. The move generated outrage in Germany, where many saw it as an attempt to meddle with European markets. In 2019, the US implemented more sanctions on the project.

    Upon coming into office, President Joe Biden made opposition to the pipeline one of his administration’s top priorities. 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 State Department reiterated that “any entity involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline risks US sanctions and should immediately abandon work on the pipeline.”

    In July 2021, the sanctions were relaxed only after contentious negotiations with the German government. The New York Times (7/21/21) reported that the administration and Germany still had “profound disagreements” about the project.

    As Russia was gathering troops at Ukraine’s border at the beginning of this year, US administration officials issued threats against the pipeline’s operation in the event of a Russian invasion. In January, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — one of the main players during the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine and wife of Robert Kagan, the founder of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century — issued a stern warning against the pipeline. “If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward.”

    In February, Joe Biden himself told reporters, “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After a reporter asked how the US planned to end a project that was under German control, Biden responded, “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

    On February 22, after Russian troops were given orders to enter the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, Germany suspended the pipeline, in a move that was called “remarkable” at the time (New York Times, 2/22/22).

    In sharp contrast to the US’s antagonism, Russia has taken the opposite approach to the pipeline it spent billions of dollars to complete. As recently as three weeks ago, Putin expressed willingness to supply more gas if the EU would lift the sanctions against the newer pipeline. He said: “If things are so bad, just go ahead and lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2, with its 55 billion cubic meters per year — all they have to do is press the button and they will get going.” Diplomatic sources told the Cradle (9/29/22) that Russia and Germany were in talks about both NS1 and NS2 on the day of the explosion.

    The day after the attack, German government sources leaked to the German daily Der Spiegel (9/28/22) that weeks earlier, the CIA warned Germany of a potential attack on the pipeline. However, sources told CNN (9/29/22) that the warnings were “vague” and that “it was not clear from the warnings who might be responsible for any attacks on the pipelines, or when they might occur.” A high-level source in German intelligence told the Cradle (9/29/22) that they were “furious” because “they were not in the loop.”

    After the attack, Blinken called the bombing a “tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy,” and said that this “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come.” On the other hand, Russia has already announced plans to begin repairing the pipeline.

    So contrary to what nearly the US entire media establishment has presented, the US has had ample motive to destroy the pipeline, and is actively celebrating its demise.

    ‘Thank you, USA’

    One event that fueled speculation of US involvement was a tweet from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Radek Sikorski—a one-time Polish Defense 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 (11/26/12).

    Radosław Sikorski on Twitter: Thank You, USA

    The Washington Post (9/28/22) suggested that by thanking the United States over a picture of the pipeline explosion, Radek Sikorksi may have been “crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas.”

    Sikorski tweeted out 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.

    He later tweeted against the pipeline, noting that “Nord Stream’s only logic was for Putin to be able to blackmail or wage war on Eastern Europe with impunity.” An hour later he elaborated:

    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.

    The last line was a joke about how Russia classifies its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.”

    After these tweets received attention from those who suspected US responsibility, Sikorski deleted them. Business Insider (9/30/22) dishonestly wrote that these latter tweets were actually an “attempt to clarify that the original tweet was a criticism of US support for the pipeline being built in the first place.” Any honest reading of the tweets demonstrates that the opposite is true; presumably this is why Insider didn’t link to any specific text.

    The Washington Post (9/28/22) also offered a twisted interpretation of Sikorski’s tweets:

    His meaning wasn’t entirely clear; it seems possible he was crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas. In later tweets, he seemed actually to point to Russian sabotage.

    For the latter claim, the Post cited Sikorski’s joke about the “special maintenance operation,” but the full tweet shows that this is a preposterous interpretation.

    While certainly not a smoking gun, such a high-profile accusation (or expression of gratitude, such as it was) raises eyebrows, especially given Poland’s strenuous opposition to the pipeline, and the recent completion of a Norway/Poland pipeline designed to “cut dependency on Russia.” The circumstances are even more suspicious, given that Sikorski is the husband of the fervently anti-Russian staff writer at The Atlantic Anne Applebaum, who has been a key media figure advancing the pro-NATO narrative in the West.

    Applebaum even sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (a position she once shared with Victoria Nuland before Nuland moved into the Biden administration), a government-funded conduit for US regime change and destabilization projects that was an important driving force behind the 2014 coup that replaced Ukraine’s pro-Russian government with a Pro-Western one. Since then, the NED has funded English-language Ukrainian media like the Kyiv Independent, which, along with commentators like Applebaum herself, are now shaping coverage of the current war for Western audiences.

    The fact that someone as connected as Sikorski would find it appropriate to publicly thank the US for the attack certainly deserves scrutiny. Some US media brought up the tweet, but dismissed it as unimportant (The Hill, 9/30/22).

    ‘A reminder from Moscow’

    Business Insider: The sabotage of gas pipelines were a 'warning shot' from Putin to the West, and should brace for more subterfuge, Russia experts warn

    Business Insider (10/4/22): If Putin is willing to blow up his own pipelines, just think what he might do to yours!

    US media have all but ignored the critical context above. If a case like that existed for the Russia-did-it theory, you can be sure that it would have been spelled out in detail by everyone. But instead, US media direct attention away from the obvious and are left to grasp at straws to find a potential Russian motive. In fact, many outlets readily acknowledged that there was no obvious motive for Russia to bomb its own pipeline. For example, the New York Times (9/28/22) 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.

    Vox (9/28/22) reported that “experts emphasized…it may be hard to fully know Moscow’s motivation.” NPR (9/28/22) also couldn’t readily answer “the question as to why Russia would attack its own pipelines.”

    Having admitted that Russia has no readily apparent motive, establishment media are left to stretch. They presented a couple of theories for Putin’s potential motivation, but neither holds up to scrutiny. One, per the Times (9/28/22), is that the leaks “may help Russia by pushing energy prices higher,” since “the natural gas market is spooked.” But this logic makes little sense, as Russia has been pushing for Europe to open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline since it was completed. Higher natural gas prices do Russia little good if it’s unable to deliver its gas to market.

    The Times (9/28/22) put forth another theory: that Putin is just teaching the West some kind of lesson:

    The ruptures could also be a reminder from Moscow that if European countries keep up their support for Ukraine, they risk sabotage to vital energy infrastructure.

    The Washington Post (9/27/22), speaking to “security officials,” cited similar theories:

    One official said it might have been a message to NATO: “We are close.” Another said that it could be a threat to other, non-Russian energy infrastructure.

    Business Insider (10/4/22) published a piece hysterically titled: “The Sabotage of Gas Pipelines Were a ‘Warning Shot’ From Putin to the West, and Should Brace for More Subterfuge, Russia Experts Warn.”

    CNN (9/29/22) also found a US official to tell them that “Moscow would likely view [attacking the pipeline] as worth the price if it helped raise the costs of supporting Ukraine for Europe,” and that “sabotaging the pipelines could ‘show what Russia is capable of.’” Vox (9/28/22) found some “experts” to tell them the same story.

    But the reality is that Russia has done its utmost to discourage NATO from further involvement in the war. A Russian attack on the pipeline would all but guarantee greater NATO involvement in Ukraine. Antagonizing Germany to teach the rest of Europe a lesson—which would only work if Russia was understood to be behind the sabotage—would be the opposite of Russia’s interests. This argument amounts to little more than “Putin is evil and hates Europe.”

    As FAIR (3/30/22) has previously written, this cartoon narrative of Putin as Hitler allows for all logic and reasoning to fall by the wayside. The US behavior with regards to the pipeline is objectively more compelling than the case against Russia, yet the media have dismissed it out of hand.

    A crack in the facade

    One of the cracks in the uniform coverage was a segment on Bloomberg TV (10/3/22). Host Tom Keene brought on Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was recently the head of the Lancet’s investigation (9/14/22) into the origin of Covid-19. During the interview, Sachs stated that he “would bet [the attack] was a US action, perhaps US and Poland.”

    Bloomberg host Tom Keene interviewing Jeffrey Sachs

    Bloomberg TV host Tom Keene (10/3/22) takes Jeffrey Sachs to task for questioning the official Nord Stream narrative.

    Keene immediately stopped him and demanded that he lay out evidence for the claim. Sachs cited radar evidence that US helicopters, normally based in Gdansk, had been hovering within the area of the explosion shortly before the attack. This is certainly not a smoking gun, given Western intelligence claims that Russian ships were observed in the area during this same timeframe, though it does add to the case for US responsibility. He also cited the threatening statements from Biden and Blinken as reasons for his suspicion.

    Sachs acknowledged the propaganda system in which he was operating:

    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.

    This was the only time FAIR saw an anchor push back and ask for evidence for guests’ speculation of responsibility—speculation that was usually pointed toward Russia.

    The broken clock

    As illustration of the weirdness that is the US elite’s opportunistic relationship with Russia, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (9/27/22), the white nationalist who hosts the most popular evening talk show in America, was one of the only media figures to go against the dominant narrative. Carlson certainly overstated the case for US involvement in the pipeline attack, but he asked questions no one else in corporate media would touch.

    WaPo: Russian TV is very excited about Такер Карлсон’s Nord Stream theory

    The Washington Post (9/29/22) printed Tucker Carlson’s name in Cyrillic—implying that only a Russian agent would express doubts about the US’s innocence.

    But rather than dissect Carlson’s case factually, most other media relied purely on redbaiting. The Washington Post (9/29/22) wrote Carlson’s name in Cyrillic —”Russian TV Is Very Excited About Такер Карлсон’s Nord Stream Theory”—to play into the McCarthyite fearmongering of the New Cold War.

    The Post brought up the threatening statements from Nuland and Biden, and even the tweet from Sikorski, but only to dismiss them, because they weren’t a “smoking gun.” Of course, the Post refused to acknowledge that the quotes from administration officials demonstrated a clear opposition to the pipeline, and thus an obvious motive for the attack.

    Despite the fact that Carlson repeatedly claimed that “we don’t know what happened,” the Post declared that “he delivered his speculation as if it were fact and invited his viewers to do the same.” While this is a fair assessment of the tone if not the text of the segment, the Post had nothing to say about the certainty with which others in the media accused Russia.

    The Post’s reporting was picked up by MSNBC Katie Phang (10/1/22), who, also eschewing actual investigation, asked her guest, “How dangerous is it for an American media personality with the kind of reach that Tucker Calrson has to be out there spouting a talking point that ends up on Russian state TV?”

    ‘Baseless conspiracy theory’

    ABC: Russians push baseless theory blaming US for burst pipeline

    AP (via ABC, 9/30/22) accused “Kremlin and Russian state media” of “aggressively pushing a baseless conspiracy theory” in “another effort to split the U.S. and its European allies.”

    The Associated Press (9/30/22) wrote a widely republished story, headlined “Russians Push Baseless Theory Blaming US for Burst Pipeline,” that called the idea the US was responsible for the attacks a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

    Like the other coverage, the AP didn’t evaluate any of the evidence, but called the theory “disinformation” designed to “undermine Ukraine’s allies” and, importantly, painted such speculation as beyond legitimate discussion:

    The suggestion that the US caused the damage was circulating on online forums popular with American conservatives and followers of QAnon, a conspiracy theory movement which asserts that Trump is fighting a battle against a Satanic child-trafficking sect that controls world events.

    Bloomberg (reprinted in the Washington Post, 9/27/22) acknowledged Biden’s threats against the pipeline, but writer Javier Blas dismissed them without actually explaining why:

    Conspiracy theorists always see the hand of the CIA in everything. But that’s nonsense. The clear beneficiary of shutting down the Nord Stream pipelines for good is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Yes, the “clear beneficiary” of the destruction of the main method Russia could sell billions of dollars worth of natural gas to Europe was…the Russian president. It doesn’t make more sense if you read the whole article.

    The US press produced an overwhelming chorus of articles (e.g., Business Insider, 9/30/22; Vox, 2/28/22; Newsweek, 10/3/22) that deployed the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit the idea of US culpability. Not one of these pieces adequately explored the credible reasons for the suspicion, simply ignoring the body of evidence presented above.

    The Brookings Institution (where Robert Kagan works) published a long article (10/3/22), complete with graphs and charts, that warned of the dangers of podcasters spreading the idea that the US was culpable in the attacks. It dismissed this possibility on the strength of a link to the New York Times (9/28/22), used to substantiate a claim that “experts broadly agree that Russia is the key suspect.” It did not do any investigation of its own.

    When is a theory a ‘conspiracy theory’?

    Caitlin Johnstone: It’s Only A ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses The US Government

    Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22): “If you think the United States could have any responsibility for this attack at all, you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist and no different from QAnoners who think pedophile Satan worshipers rule the world.”

    This use of the term “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorist,” along with the mention of QAnon, has the effect of associating speculation of US involvement in the attack with a class of people that have largely been discredited (with good reason) in the public mind. Once this link has been made, evaluating the evidence is no longer required. It’s a lazy rhetorical trick to marginalize dissent.

    In his book Conspiracy Theory in America, scholar Lance Dehaven Smith examined the way the term is deployed in establishment media:

    What they actually have in mind are suspicions that simply deviate from conventional opinion about the norms and integrity of US officials. In practice, it is not the form or the object of conspiracy theories, or even the absence of official confirmation, that differentiates them from other (acceptable) beliefs; it is their nonconformity with prevailing opinion.

    Writer Caitlin Johnstone (10/4/22) put it succinctly in a piece on the hysteria surrounding the pipeline attacks: “It’s Only a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses the US Government.” She wrote:

    Over and over again we see the pejorative “conspiracy theory” applied to accusations against one nation but not the other, despite the fact that it’s the exact same accusation. They are both conspiracy theories per definition: They’re theories about an alleged conspiracy to sabotage Russian pipelines. But the Western political/media class consistently applies that label to one and never the other.

    At a meeting of the UN Security Council—hastily called by Russia in the wake of the attacks—US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called the Russian accusations “conspiracy theories,” then went on to accuse Russia of attacking its own pipeline. Reporting on the Security Council meeting, CNN (11/29/22) showed its own conspiratorial thinking, citing US officials who called the meeting itself “suspicious,” because “typically, the official said, Russia isn’t organized enough to move so quickly, suggesting that the maneuver was pre-planned.”

    Of course there are irresponsible, popular conspiracy theories that fail to hold up to scrutiny, and are in fact quite dangerous. The QAnon theory that the world’s elite are harvesting a substance called adrenochrome from trafficked children to gain special abilities and extend their life is absurd. The 2020 election spawned many disproven theories about a stolen Trump victory that ended up leading to the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6. But just as the existence of websites that fabricate pseudo-news reports for profit gave Donald Trump a label to dismiss any journalism he didn’t like as “fake news,” so to are such fanciful theories based on leaps of logic used to disparage well-documented efforts to peer behind the scenes of US official policy.

    To be sure, we still don’t know for certain who was behind the pipeline bombing, but there is a solid prima facie case for US culpability. The explosion is a watershed moment in the escalation toward a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. Media malfeasance on this topic doesn’t just threaten the credibility of the press, but literally imperils the whole of human civilization.

     

    The post US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Human Rights Campaigners in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia

    The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to two human rights groups, the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine and Memorial in Russia, as well as imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised their work criticizing power and protecting fundamental human rights in neighboring countries torn apart by war. We speak to Anna Dobrovolskaya, who served as executive director of Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, part of the Nobel-winning group Memorial, before it was shut down by the Russian government. “People can see this as a common victory for civil society, not just in Russia,” says Dobrovolskaya. We also speak with Ole von Uexküll, executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation; all of Friday’s Nobel winners are also previous Right Livelihood laureates, known informally as the “alternative Nobel Peace Prize.” The hope of these international awards is that Belarus will “immediately release Ales Bialiatski” and that Russia will stop their legal persecution of human rights organizations, says von Uexküll.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    The Norwegian Nobel Committee has announced the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to the imprisoned human rights activist Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, as well as the Russian human rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this year’s Peace Prize winners at a ceremony this morning in Oslo.

    BERIT REISS–ANDERSEN: By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 to Ales Bialiatski, Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honor three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in the neighbor countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Through their consistent efforts in favor of human values, anti-militarism and principles of law, this year’s laureates have revitalized and honored Alfred Nobel’s vision of peace and fraternity between nations — a vision most needed in the world today.

    AMY GOODMAN: After the Nobel Committee’s announcement, Anna Trushova of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine spoke to reporters.

    ANNA TRUSHOVA: [translated] I am happy. I am delighted to be part of the team that is so motivated, that does such wonderful things for our country. We understand that defenders of law are catalysts of changes, and this recognition motivates us even more to introduce these changes into our society. … When the full-scale aggression started, we obviously did not sit idle. We organized a team of defenders of law which actively documented war crimes. We have logged over 20,000 war crimes so far. And this is done in order to punish all perpetrators.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. Joining us from Stockholm, Sweden, is Ole von Uexküll. He’s executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation. All three winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are Right Livelihood laureates. And with us in Moscow is Anna Dobrovolskaya. She is the former executive director of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was part of the group Memorial, which has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her organization was shut down by the Russian government.

    Anna, let’s begin with you. The significance of this announcement? Did you know before the announcement that your group was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize? And what does this mean for what’s happening right now in Russia?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Hello, Amy.

    No, I had no idea that we can be winners this year. Memorial have been nominated several few times before, and some of our staff members have been nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize before. And, of course, it’s a great honor. Though I’m no longer with Memorial, I still keep receiving congratulations from all over the world.

    And people consider this as a common victory for civil society, not just in Russia, because it has some importance in Russia, but it’s extremely important now when there is a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is extremely important now to support organizations in all of those countries, and especially it is important for Ales, who is behind the bars. In Russia, I’m sure it will also have some significant importance, because Memorial keeps facing huge difficulties in continuation of its work, although the legal entities have been shut down. So I’m hoping that Russian authorities will step back. But, unfortunately, as we know, it didn’t help, for example, Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief was awarded the Peace Prize before, so, unfortunately, no bright forecast here.

    AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what Memorial worked on, when it was allowed to function, and what needs to be done right now in Russia.

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: When Memorial was able to function, we did lots of things. We had two major flows of work, so to say. We had a pillar related to historical remembrance, Soviet past, the political repressions during Soviet time and memorialization of those events, and we had this human rights wing, which I was the chair of. We worked with documenting the war crimes in Chechnya. We documented human rights violations all over the country. We helped the victims of political repressions and also provided various legal aid to the victims of human rights violations everywhere.

    Right now this all better be continued, because modern Russia is the place where lots of violations is happening. And actually, the current events is the continuation of the thought that has been promoted by Memorial for a long period of time, that if you have human rights violations within the country which are ignored and where you have impunity instead of putting people responsible for those human rights violations, it means that sooner or later it will go beyond the borders, beyond the national borders of the country. And that’s what we see exactly now with Russia, Ukraine, before with Georgia and with some other countries, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: In March, Democracy Now! spoke to Oleksandra Matviichuk the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, which won the Nobel Peace Prize today. This is what she said then.

    OLEKSANDRA MATVIICHUK: When the war started, I asked myself, “Do I feel a fear?” And I was emotional, but I don’t have fear. I have two main emotions. The first emotion is anger. I really anger, as the millions of Ukrainians, that Russia invades to our country, that Russia try to stop our democratic choice, that Russia try impose the logic of Soviet Union and push us away to the past, which we don’t want to return to. But most big emotion is love. This is a love to my country. This is a love to our people. It’s love to our values. And we will stand for it.

    AMY GOODMAN: And this is Oleksandra Matviichuk speaking in a video produced by the Right Livelihood Foundation. She’s one of this year’s Right Livelihood laureates.

    OLEKSANDRA MATVIICHUK: Now in Ukraine we are going through the difficult times. We are fighting for our freedom in all senses: for a freedom to be independent country; for a freedom to be Ukrainians, with our own language and culture; and for a freedom to have a democratic choice. … We are documenting war crimes in this war with Russia in order to hold war criminals accountable, to provide justice for each victims of these crimes.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ole von Uexküll is the executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden. They produced that video, because the Center for — CCL, the Ukraine human rights group, the Center for Civil Liberties, not only won the Nobel Peace Prize today, but it was just announced they won the Right Livelihood Awards. Can you talk about the significance of the two organizations converging, the Nobel Committee and the Right Livelihood Awards, and just who Oleksandra, CCL, Memorial and the Belarusian group — the Belarusian human rights activist, in prison right now, what this means, Ole?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Thank you, Amy. And congratulations, Anna.

    I am overjoyed. It was amazing for us to hear this morning when we followed the announcement from Oslo and then, as you heard, a first Right Livelihood Award laureate was announced as a Nobel Peace laureate, and then a second one, and then even a third one. And awarding them together, I think, is very significant. It’s a very, very good sign.

    And it’s particularly significant that they received a peace award — they, as defenders of democracy and as defenders of the rule of law, received a peace award — because, as Anna already pointed out, democracy is really a precondition for peace. And we see in their work how they are laying the foundations for post-Soviet societies to be peaceful. And, I mean, that’s something we’ve been hearing from Memorial and from Ales Bialiatski, who have been our laureates for a bit longer, for many years, that the crackdown they experience in their own countries also has to be read and understood as a preparation for war.

    And I think it’s particularly fantastic — I mean, they both, Ales Bialiatski and Memorial, are from — have their roots in the democracy movement of the ’80s. Olexsandra Matviichuk, who we just heard, is a younger generation of democracy activist. I think she’s 38 years now, started her activism already 15 years ago. And this work that she does really shows the alternative to that kind of brutal aggression, the alternative which you can find in international law and accountability.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, Anna, if you can talk about the significance of a Russian group, a Belarusian human rights activist now in prison and CCL in Ukraine winning this award together? In the West, it’s always presented as Russia versus Ukraine, but your perspective as a human rights activist and lawyer?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Yeah, that’s a very good question, actually. A lot of people are now concerned about the words which were said in the Nobel Peace Committee, saying that they were hoping for the peaceful coexistence. And actually, a lot of — for many people of Ukraine, those words about peaceful coexistence were very, very controversial. And some people will also see that building these together, like bringing Ukraine, Belarus and Russia together, is some kind of attempt to stress how that these countries still have the common past, and maybe they still have common future, as that’s what Vladimir Putin and his government is hoping for. So, here, I see some potential contradiction. But at the same time, I know that, and we all know that, there always will be people who are not satisfied or completely happy with these or any other decision.

    Some people in my team in Memorial, they said — I spoke to them this morning, and they said that “We think that we don’t deserve it, because we couldn’t stop the war. We couldn’t be receiving the Peace Prize in this horrible moment, because, yeah, the war is still going. We couldn’t stop the war in Chechnya. There was a war in Georgia. There was a war in Syria and in many other places.” But again, the question is: Would it be different without us? And we most truly know that the world will be probably a worse place without human rights activists in Belarus, in Ukraine and, of course, in Russia.

    And I’m definitely hoping that for Ales Bialiatski, my longtime, esteemed colleague, that this will help to put not just him but many other people, activists and journalists from Belarus out of the bars, because they keep receiving horrible sentences. Just yesterday, a very prominent journalist, Andrei Alexandrov, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, which is absolutely horrible. And I’m just hoping that the demonstration that there is a Peace Prize and that the international community is paying attention to the work of civil society in all the three countries will definitely change the fate not just of the laureates but of everyone.

    AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a couple-minute video produced by the Right Livelihood Foundation when he won in 2020.

    NARRATOR: Ales Bialiatski is a human rights activist in Belarus, leading an almost 30-year campaign for democracy and freedom. In 1996, he founded the human rights center Viasna, which today is the country’s leading organization documenting human rights abuses and monitoring elections.

    Belarus, under the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Elections are rigged, opposition voices are silenced, and civil society is severely restricted.

    Bialiatski has been arrested more than 25 times and spent several years in prison on trumped-up charges as Belarusian authorities have tried to impede him. The government has also frequently targeted Viasna and its members.

    However, Bialiatski and Viasna’s persistent and long-standing efforts to empower the people of Belarus and ensure their democratic rights have rendered them an unstoppable force for freedom. During the recent large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations, Viasna has been playing a leading role in advocating for the freedom of assembly, defending the rights of people arrested for protesting, and documenting human rights abuses.

    Bialiatski and Viasna continue to stand for the multitude of courageous people protesting Lukashenko’s dictatorial reign at high personal risk. Through their commitment to democracy and freedom, Bialiatski and Viasna have laid the foundations of a peaceful and democratic society in Belarus.

    AMY GOODMAN: And let’s hear the imprisoned Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski in his own words. Again, today, it was announced he has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He spoke in Stockholm when he won the 2020 Right Livelihood Award.

    ALES BIALIATSKI: [translated] Dear friends, this year’s Right Livelihood Award to the human rights center Viasna and myself is a very important and exciting moment in our lives. We are receiving the award, popularly called the alternative Nobel Prize, at a time when a peaceful revolution is underway in Belarus. For six months now, the Belarusian society has been engaged in a breathtaking struggle — a fight for human rights, democracy and justice; a fight for the right to “be called people,” as the Belarusian writer Yanka Kupala has said; a fight against Europe’s last dictator and the regime he has built over 26 years.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ales Bialiatski ended his Right Livelihood Award acceptance speech speaking in English. He congratulated his fellow winners, including the leading human rights activist in the United States, Bryan Stevenson, and the Right Livelihood Award winner, the Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who was in prison at the time.

    ALES BIALIATSKI: There, Nasrin is in a terrible situation now. I can imagine how it is for her to be in prison, and even harder to go back. Sometimes I have dreams that I am in prison again, and those are my darkness dreams. My heart and soul are with Nasrin now. Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer, was in prison in 2020. She is home now on medical leave from prison. Ole von Uexküll, I want to go back to you to talk about that moment. I was just texting with Bryan Stevenson, who also won that year. He is calling for Ales’s freedom, for his release from prison, congratulated him winning the Nobel Peace Prize today. He was not able to meet him in person because it was in the midst of the pandemic. I believe Ales was the only one — right? — who came to Sweden for the awards.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Yes.

    AMY GOODMAN: And so you spent time with him.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Yeah, that was really incredible also now to hear his words there again, and very typical for him to always think of others first and think of the international and universal nature of this fight for democracy and for human rights. And he called the prospect of having to go to prison his darkest dream, in what we just heard, and, unfortunately, that is what happened. Last summer, he was arrested again, together with other Viasna colleagues. He just spent his 60th birthday, now a couple of days ago, in prison in very bad conditions that we have also been protesting at the U.N. Human Rights Council.

    So, with this Nobel Peace Prize now, Belarus has to understand that they have to immediately release Ales Bialiatski and all the Viasna staff and other pro-democracy fighters who are in prison. And they also — and Russia has to understand that they have to end their legal prosecution of Memorial. And I hope that will be the effect of this award.

    AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, Democracy Now! spoke to Natallia Satsunkevich. She works with the imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski in their organization, which in English translates into “Spring.” She was speaking to us from Vilnius — this was in March — from Vilnius in Lithuania, talking about her country.

    NATALLIA SATSUNKEVICH: There are more than 1,000 of political prisoners in Belarus. And the conditions where they stay, they are awful. It influences extremely on their health. And there is at least one case when a person died in Belarusian prison, a political prisoner. So, I really call you to keep in focus this topic also, political prisoners in Belarus, and to spread this information, to show your solidarity and to support them by sending letters and postcards of solidarity from all countries, from the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Anna Dobrovolskaya, again, you’re in Moscow, executive director of what was the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow. If you can talk about the role of Belarus right now in Russia’s war on Ukraine?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: It is very hard to describe what is going on, because we have the official position, which is like Belarus has nothing to do with the war, but, unofficially, we of course see that a lot of troops, a lot of weaponry and a lot of, like, logistical flows are made through Belarus. And it was recently reported that there was first a missile issued on Ukrainian territory from Belarus. And Lukashenko is a very close person to Putin. He is like the closest companion maybe of all post-Soviet countries.

    And in terms of civil society, we see that Belarus is like a few steps ahead of us, ahead of Russia. And unfortunately, what is happening in Belarus — what was happening in Belarus before starts happening in Russia like maybe in couple of years. And right now the situation there with the civil society and everything is absolutely horrible. But unfortunately, in the international agenda, people of Belarus, as well as people of Russia, are presented often as those who support the war, which is absolutely not true, and especially for Belarus. It’s a country where almost no protest is possible and where people are being severely beaten up and detained even if they try to do something very, very innocent like, I don’t know, giving money to some opposition groups or something like that. And unfortunately, looking at Belarus, we always see that this is the future of Russia, if nothing changes.

    AMY GOODMAN: Today’s Nobel announcement comes on Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday and also on the 16th anniversary of the assassination of a fierce journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, critic of Putin, a critic of Russia’s war in Chechnya, crusading human rights and anti-corruption reporter. What do we know about her death at this time, Anna?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: I’m not sure about the recent developments, but I think that it was not properly investigated at this moment, as it happened with the death of all other journalists and human rights activists in Russia. There probably are some people who have been imprisoned due to the fact that they have been, like, those who implemented the murder itself. But there was no proper investigation of her death or of the death of Natalya Estemirova, who was a human rights activist from Chechnya and my colleague from Memorial. So, unfortunately, all these crimes are not being — yeah, they’re not being taken care of by the government. Previously, we had the possibility of going to European court if stuff like this happened, but right now it’s not the option again for the Russian human rights defenders.

    So, yeah, her death was a tragedy. It was the first one, followed by, unfortunately, many others. And to this day, she is very well remembered. She has books. People come bringing flowers to the place in Moscow where she lived. And everyone understands that this death, her killing, her murder, was like the point of no return, where it was already clear that Russia is going into some strange direction.

    AMY GOODMAN: Anna, how do you see this war ending?

    ANNA DOBROVOLSKAYA: Oh my god. I would really, really hope — well, it’s really difficult, because a lot of people are hoping that Ukraine will win. I’m hoping that there could be some possible settlement. I definitely think that Russia will pay a lot of money to everything that happened in Ukraine, and that I’m really hoping that there will be some international treaty now against the war criminals, against military criminals, and people who were accountable will be held accountable for the deaths. That’s my hope. Will there be some peace negotiation now or later? That’s just very, very hard to predict. And a lot of people are saying that no peace is possible, and no peace agreement is possible, which is, of course, understandable. I’m just hoping that nobody will die, but, unfortunately, the conflict is still going on.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, Ole von Uexküll, you know, the Right Livelihood Awards are often referred to as the “alternative Nobel Prize.” Now the alternative has merged with the actual Nobel Prize. And if you can talk about what that means, and in the world today, to see human rights activists and groups in Belarus, in Ukraine and Russia all receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, what this could lead to?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Thank you, Amy. Yeah, we’ve been presenting the Right Livelihood Awards since 1980, and there has been an understanding of the importance of civil society activism from the very beginning. And with the Nobel Prizes, sometimes they honor that, but then also they honor people like Abiy of Ethiopia or Barack Obama, with — where there seems to be a totally different kind of understanding of how change should come about in the world. We believe strongly that power lies in people who get organized to fight for important causes like democracy, like peace, like human rights, and that that actually has a huge effect.

    And in this regard, I would say that the three Right Livelihood — now Right Livelihood-Nobel laureates, who won the Nobel Peace Prize today, that’s an incredible message of hope. It’s really a symbol of the weakness of Vladimir Putin and the old-style military aggression, with all its dangers to world peace, right? I’m not doubting that. But it shows the enormous power of the civilized way to handle conflict in international conflicts, to build societies for peace, which is, you know, by rule of law, through mechanisms of democracy. It’s incredible that the CCL, the Center for Civil Liberties — Oleksandra Matviichuk, we heard — they have collected more than 20,000 pieces of evidence for war crimes. So I have no doubt that there is going to be accountability. Putin is going to emerge as the loser, and not through the traditional military means alone, but really be defeated by accountability, by rule of law, by democracy. And that, for me, is the message of hope, which Nobel picked up this year, very much in line with our thinking for more than four decades. And yeah, it’s very significant.

    AMY GOODMAN: Since you seem to be a predictor of those who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, can you talk about who won this year? You just made the announcement for the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, the four winners.

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Right. We also gave an award to Somalia this year, to Ilwad Elman and Fartuun Adan, a mother and daughter who’ve built the Elman Peace Center, which does local peace work with communities, for instance, disarmament of former combatants, working a lot with child soldiers, working against gender-based violence. And for us, it was also very important and a really good message to have this conflict in Somalia, which, unfortunately, for too many around the world, is perceived as more of a forgotten conflict, you know, to have that honored in the same year with Ukraine, which, very rightly so, gets a lot of attention right now — because there are so many parallels in how you work for peace.

    And then, we always have four laureates, so our award also goes to Cecosesola, which is a cooperative — a network of cooperatives in Venezuela that are providing more than 100,000 families for their needs, much more successfully so than the failing economic system, and really shows the power of solidarity economics in times of crisis.

    And we gave an award to the Africa Institute for Energy Governance from Uganda for its work for localized, decentralized renewable energy and their important voice in the campaign against the disastrous East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline and bringing the voices of local people into these international campaigns.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we have been tracking the rise of neofascism in Europe, whether we’re talking about Meloni in Italy, the Brothers of Italy party, to be the new, well, most far-right prime minister since Mussolini, is very proud to embrace Mussolini; Poland’s ruling party; and, of course, what’s happening in Sweden with the Sweden Democrats — might surprise people to hear who the Swedish Democrats are. Is this a concern of yours, Ole, as you speak to us from Stockholm?

    OLE VON UEXKÜLL: Oh, it’s a huge concern. It is terrible. The Sweden Democrats are a party with its roots in fascism. And the conservative and even the Liberal Party now chose to align themselves with the Sweden Democrats just for tactical gain, in order to be able to get the next prime minister elected. And when traditional established parties do something like that, we’ve seen so many times in history, then, obviously, they normalize this kind of hateful discourse, which borders to fascism. And in the process, people then, in the end, vote for the original. So, the conservatives were defeated, but now together with their new ally, the Sweden Democrats, they will probably form the next government.

    And that’s just — it’s a terrible blow to Sweden. It’s not a coincidence that an organization like ours was founded in this country, but it was founded in this country because also of our history, long-standing history here, supporting democracy and rule of law and human rights around the world. And now Sweden will not be able to do that in a credible way any longer. And people don’t seem to realize that that’s going to weaken Sweden a lot. Like what I just said, you know, the power of the universal values of democracy and rule of law, yes, they are under attack, but I think they will prevail, and it’s very sad to see Sweden starting to turn away from this camp.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ole von Uexküll, we thank you so much for being with us, executive director of the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation. The Right Livelihood Awards have gone to all three Nobel Peace Prize winners announced today. And I also want to thank Anna Dobrovolskaya, executive director of, now closed down, Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow. Memorial was just honored by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She was speaking to us from Moscow.

    Coming up, the president, Biden — President Biden pardons thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession. We’ll speak to the Drug Policy Alliance. Stay with us.

  • Peace Groups Urge Biden to Pursue Diplomatic “Off-Ramp” to Avert Nuclear War

    U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that nuclear threats from Russia’s leadership have raised the risk of “Armageddon” to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis, prompting urgent calls for the White House to help bring the world back from the brink by actively pursuing a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine.

    During a speech at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

    “I don’t think there is any such a thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden continued, echoing the assessment of nuclear experts and nonproliferation campaigners.

    The U.S. president’s stark warning came weeks after Putin said in a televised address that it is “not a bluff” when he vows to “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia.”

    Noting the nuclear capabilities of Western powers, Putin declared that Russia “also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries.”

    The U.S. responded with a warning of “catastrophic consequences” for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though the White House said earlier this week that it has not yet seen any “indication that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons.”

    Putin’s remarks were viewed by anti-nuclear campaigners as his most aggressive to date as Russia’s assault on Ukraine drags on and continues to face major setbacks, heightening fears of a sharp escalation in military tactics.

    Peace campaigners have warned since the start of Russia’s invasion that the longer the war persists, the greater the chance of nuclear catastrophe as the U.S. and other NATO countries pour weaponry into Ukraine, increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia each have more than a thousand nuclear warheads deployed and ready to fire.

    Biden said Thursday that he is still attempting to determine Putin’s “off-ramp” in Ukraine, to which the advocacy group Just Foreign Policy responded: “Please tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to immediately ‘figure out’ that ‘off-ramp’ to this war before we ‘end up with Armageddon.’”

    Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy formally submitted an application for NATO membership after Putin signed decrees to annex four Ukrainian territories, developments that threatened to put a diplomatic solution further out of reach.

    Days later, the Pentagon confirmed it will send up to $625 million worth of additional weaponry to Ukraine as the U.S. faced criticism for failing to mount a serious push for peace talks. In an interview late last month, Blinken confirmed that “there are no talks” ongoing, blaming Russia.

    Earlier this week, Zelenskyy signed a decree ruling out negotiations with Russia as long as Putin is president.

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

    “That can’t be right,” Lieven told Jacobin in an interview on Monday. “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 US, the threat of really deep recession in Europe, food shortages in parts of the world.”

    “Of course that gives us a say in trying to bring about a peace settlement,” Lieven said.

    While calls for a diplomatic solution have been relatively muted in the U.S. Congress, some lawmakers have spoken out in recent days amid growing fears of a nuclear attack.

    “Putin launched an unprovoked and unjust war. Standing for Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty is just. We must do that,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted Monday. “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.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nobel Peace Prize 2022 goes to well-recognised human rights defenders

    On 7 September 2022 The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 to one individual and two organisations, who represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens. They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.

    This year’s Peace Prize is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. The first two are well-known and received many important human rights awards.

    Ales Bialiatski was the winner of 11 other awards, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/72682FFF-628F-4A5D-B6B3-52A776FF0E47, while Memorial got 7 awards earlier [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/BD12D9CE-37AA-7A35-9A32-F37A0EA8C407], Oleksandra Matviichuk, the chair of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties received a few days ago the Right livelihood award [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/75690f04-7a51-4591-8e18-0826b93959b3]

    Ales Bialiatski founded the organisation Viasna (Spring) in 1996 in response to the controversial constitutional amendments that gave the president dictatorial powers and that triggered widespread demonstrations. In the years that followed, Viasna evolved into a broad-based human rights organisation that documented and protested against the authorities’ use of torture against political prisoners. Government authorities have repeatedly sought to silence Ales Bialiatski. He was imprisoned from 2011 to 2014. Following large-scale demonstrations against the regime in 2020, he was again arrested. He is still detained without trial. Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/viasna-human-rights-centre/

    The human rights organisation Memorial was established in 1987 by human rights activists in the former Soviet Union who wanted to ensure that the victims of the communist regime’s oppression would never be forgotten. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and human rights advocate Svetlana Gannushkina were among the founders. Memorial is based on the notion that confronting past crimes is essential in preventing new ones. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Memorial grew to become the largest human rights organisation in Russia. In addition to establishing a centre of documentation on victims of the Stalinist era, Memorial compiled and systematised information on political oppression and human rights violations in Russia. Memorial became the most authoritative source of information on political prisoners in Russian detention facilities. The organisation has also been standing at the forefront of efforts to combat militarism and promote human rights and government based on rule of law. During the Chechen wars, Memorial gathered and verified information on abuses and war crimes perpetrated on the civilian population by Russian and pro-Russian forces. In 2009, the head of Memorial’s branch in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was killed because of this work. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/07/15/ngos-remember-10th-anniversary-of-natalia-estemirovas-murder/]

    Civil society actors in Russia have been subjected to threats, imprisonment, disappearance and murder for many years. As part of the government’s harassment of Memorial, the organisation was stamped early on as a “foreign agent”. In December 2021, the authorities decided that Memorial was to be forcibly liquidated and the documentation centre was to be closed permanently. The closures became effective in the following months, but the people behind Memorial refuse to be shut down. In a comment on the forced dissolution, chairman Yan Rachinsky stated, “Nobody plans to give up.” [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/12/29/russias-supreme-court-orders-closure-emblematic-memorial/]

    The Center for Civil Liberties was founded in Kyiv in 2007 for the purpose of advancing human rights and democracy in Ukraine. The center has taken a stand to strengthen Ukrainian civil society and pressure the authorities to make Ukraine a full-fledged democracy. To develop Ukraine into a state governed by rule of law, Center for Civil Liberties has actively advocated that Ukraine become affiliated with the International Criminal Court. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Center for Civil Liberties has engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population. In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a pioneering role with a view to holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

    By awarding this Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 the Norwegian Nobel Committee is honouring outstanding champions of human rights and consistent efforts in favour of humanist values, anti-militarism and principles of law.

    https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2022/press-release/

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

  • Nobel committee calls for release of peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski – video

    The jailed Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski has won the 2022 Nobel peace prize along with the Russian and Ukrainian human rights organisations Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties. The chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, called for the release of Bialiatski, who was detained last year. While the prize will be seen by many as condemnation of Vladimir Putin, who is celebrating his 70th birthday on Friday, Reiss-Andersen denied it was an anti-Putin award 

    Continue reading…

  • ACTION ALERT: NYT Celebrates Neo-Nazi Azov Unit

     

    Three years ago, describing an Australian white supremacist charged with massacring 49 people in New Zealand, the New York Times (3/15/19) wrote: “On his flak jacket was a symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.”

    NYT: Released Azov commanders have an emotional reunion with family members in Turkey.

    The New York Times (10/4/22) shares a “handout photo” from a paramilitary organization that was founded to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

    What a difference a war makes! A Times story (10/4/22) in the paper’s Ukraine War news roundup began:

    Commanders of Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion have held an emotional reunion with their families in Turkey, Ukrainian officials said, honoring the fighters released from Russian confinement last month as part of the largest prisoner swap since the start of the war.

    “Celebrated” is an odd word to describe a group whose founder urged Ukraine to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen (subhumans)” (Guardian, 3/13/18). Its official logo features the Wolfsangel, a runic icon adopted by the SS that’s become “a symbol of choice for neo-Nazis in Europe and the United States,” according to the ADL. (To dispel any doubt about what the symbol means, Azov used to superimpose it on a Black Sun, a Nordic design beloved by Heinrich Himmler.)

    The Azov movement has linked up with other far-right groups across Europe and in the United States, including the Rise Above Movement, a violently racist group based in Southern California (New Republic, 7/9/19). Azov is “believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations,” according to an FBI report (RFE/RL, 11/14/18).

    But Times reporter Enjoli Liston indeed went on to celebrate the group:

    The group’s defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol—the southern port city decimated by Russian forces in the first months of the war—has become a powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted by Russia and the resistance mounted by Ukraine.

    The story’s headline: “Released Azov Commanders Have an Emotional Reunion With Family Members in Turkey.” The accompanying photo shows the fascistic unit’s commander sharing a joyful hug with his wife.

    Not a word in the eight-paragraph story gives any hint about the ugly far-right politics of the unit, incorporated since 2014 into Ukraine’s military structure (when it was rebranded as the Azov Regiment). The Times did, however, find space to convey to the Azov fighters, from Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, “Thanks from Ukraine, from the president and all the people for whom they are fighting.”

    ACTION:

    Please tell the New York Times not to treat neo-Nazis as heroes.

    CONTACT:

    Letters: letters@nytimes.com

    Readers Center: Feedback

    Twitter: @NYTimes

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

    Featured image: Emblem of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (left) compared with those of the Azov Battalion (center) and Azov Regiment (right).

    The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Celebrates Neo-Nazi Azov Unit appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • We Survived The Last Nuclear Standoff Through Compromise And De-Escalation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Vladimir Putin has signed documents finalizing the Russian annexation of four regions in eastern Ukraine, meaning there’s now a western-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive underway to recapture what Russia officially considers parts of its homeland.

    Moscow has made it clear that it will use all weapons systems at its disposal to defend against attacks on territories it claims as its own, which could include nuclear weapons. Depending on if and how that happens and what kind of day all the relevant decision makers are having when it does, there is a distinct possibility that a chain of events could follow which leads to the end of the world.

    This happens as Ukraine’s President Zelensky signs a decree officially ruling out the possibility of any peace talks with Putin, who recently publicly requested such talks. The US empire, which has been driving this proxy war from the beginning, is also not currently engaged in peace talks with Moscow. Things are accelerating faster and faster toward the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen, and as far as we know nobody’s got a foot anywhere near the brake pedal.

    Meanwhile, everyone has gone insane. The propaganda blanket has been laid on so thick since this war started that it has become the mainstream position that only continual escalation is acceptable. Public calls for de-escalation and detente are met with accusations of Kremlin loyalty, as we just saw with the vitriolic responses to Elon Musk’s online proposal of possible terms to end the war.

    There’s a popular post going around Twitter right now by a pro-Kyiv pundit named Thomas Theiner which sums up the delusional sentiments we’ve been seeing on this front.

    “I grew up during the Cold War. I studied the Cold War,” Theiner writes. “When the russians/Soviets say: ‘We will use nuclear weapons!’, the only answer must be: ‘Try and die.’ All else is seen as weakness by the kremlin and will lead to the russians using nukes.”

    Theiner is wrong, and has made no serious study of the cold war (or to be more precise the last cold war, since we’re in another one now). The only reason we survived the most dangerous part of that era was because of compromise and a sincere commitment to de-escalation, not because anyone was yelling “Try and die” at Moscow.

    Back in 2013 The Atlantic published a solid article titled “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” subtitled “Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.” Its author Benjamin Schwartz details how the crisis was peacefully resolved not because JFK was on the phone yelling “Try and die” at Nikita Khrushchev, but because he secretly cut a deal to remove the Jupiter missiles the US had stationed in Italy and Turkey which provoked the 1962 incident in the first place.

    Moscow perceived that the only reason why that type of midrange weapon would be placed in such a way would be if the US was planning a nuclear first strike to disarm Russia, and Schwartz writes that that suspicion was entirely well-founded: the Kennedy administration had indeed strongly contemplated such a strike during the Berlin crisis of 1961. In response to this threat, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev moved ballistic missiles to Cuba, whose discovery led to the tense standoff which brought us far closer to nuclear annihilation than most of us care to contemplate. A secret deal was struck whose nature wouldn’t become public knowledge until decades later, resulting in both sides removing their offending missile placements.

    You and I are alive today because Kennedy backed down from the brink and struck a compromise (as well as our sheer dumb luck at having one cool-headed Soviet officer on a nuclear-armed submarine refuse to deploy the weapon while being bombarded by the US navy during the standoff between JFK and Khrushchev). Kennedy conditioned his acquiescence to Moscow’s demands on assurances that his doing so would be kept secret, because then, as now, there were tremendous political pressures not to be seen as “backing down” and “looking weak” before the enemy.

    But as history tells us, it’s not caveman chest-thumping that has allowed us to remain alive on a planet full of stockpiled armageddon weapons. It’s the sensibility to know when to compromise and relent rather than pushing continuously toward the edge.

    Detente used to be a household term. It was a routine subject of mainstream political discourse; mainstream politicians were expected to have a clear and articulate position on the diplomatic easing of tensions with the USSR. Now people don’t even know detente is a thing. I say that word to people and it’s clearly the first time they’ve ever encountered it, and the concept itself is completely alien to them. People I talk to tend to believe the only options on the table are either (A) continuing to escalate this insane game of nuclear chicken with Russia, or (B) giving Putin everything he wants. They’re completely unaware that a third option of negotiation, compromise and de-escalation exists, much less that it has historically been viable and successful.

    This is entirely by design. People don’t know that detente is an option because the political/media class virtually never mentions it anymore. The news media are supposedly responsible for helping to create an informed populace, but because their real job is propaganda they generally end up doing the exact opposite. If the public were permitted to become widely aware that these games of nuclear brinkmanship are not a necessity but a choice that is being made on their behalf, and that their leaders are rolling the dice on their lives and the lives of everyone they know and love for no other reason than to work toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony, they would no longer consent to this madness.

    If people really understood how much is being risked here, and how little it benefits them, Washington DC would be on fire right now. That’s why their understanding is continually manipulated and obscured by the managers of empire.

    _________________

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

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    Feature image via the JFK Library and Museum.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda

    It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so.  It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match.  The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia,” the Biden administration and their media lackeys

    … will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

    Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have  made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous.  The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology.  It is nothing new.

    I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate.  For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits.  The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers.  The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.”

    For years, the U.S.- run NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well.  We know what the U.S. response would be, but when President Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.

    In 2014, when the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine, bringing into power neo-Nazi elements, and Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.

    For years the U.S. has supported the Ukrainian killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbass region, the Russian government had had enough and sent troops into the region to defend this area.  Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring.  Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine.  And now a full-fledged U.S. war against Russia is out in the open and it will become more dangerous as it continues.  Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Biden administration continues to push the envelope.

    There will be no end to the war in Ukraine because the U.S. is intent on doing everything in its power to try to bring Russia to its knees.  It is madness on its face, but then insane people are in charge. In this process, everyone is expendable, friends, foes, and anyone who stands in its way, including the U.S.’s supposed European allies whose leaders seem intent on destroying their own countries.

    Perhaps ironically – but I think not, as a knowledge of history confirms – the volte-face of the American liberal class with its promotion of the new Cold War, censorship, the CIA, and FBI and the so-called progressive Democratic politicians in the U.S congress, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, embracing and voting for war with Russia via Ukraine, should be no great surprise. These people, and their Republican counterparts, with rare exceptions here and there, live on desolation row and flip when so ordered.  But “nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row,” in Dylan’s words, because it’s the social disease we inhabit, and like fish in water, many know nothing else.

    On a similar note, Ray McGovern has also recently reminded those who pay attention to him that The New York Times, as is its tradition, is promoting the U.S. war against Russia just as it did with the Vietnam War in the 1960s.  Little changes is his theme, no apologies are ever offered, and the readers of the most famous American newspaper and CIA conduit are asked to swallow daily doses of propaganda that are so egregiously obvious that only children would be fooled.  Sadly, the United States has become a country of children, Babes in Toyland who never realize that at the end of the plot the gun is reversed and is aimed at them.  And it’s not funny.

    A century ago in the years before World War I, American progressive intellectuals, as Stuart Ewen writes in PR: A Social History of Spin:

    … had espoused the Enlightenment dictum that people – at least middle-class people – were essentially rational, capable of evaluating information and then making intelligent decisions.  In the context of the CPI [the U.S, Committee on Public Information, a large propaganda apparatus set up in April 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson to sell the American entry into the war against Germany as necessary to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ whose members included Edward Bernays, the propagandist and so-called father of public relations] ‘public opinion’ became something to be mobilized and managed; the ‘public mind’ was now seen as an entity to be manufactured, not reasoned with.

    Faith in reason was abandoned in favor of psychological manipulation of emotion and the use of unreason – the “night mind” – which became the template for future propaganda and the application of psychological techniques, a forerunner of the CIA’s MKUltra and Operation Mockingbird.  As the crackdown on dissent increased with passage of the 1917 Espionage Act (under which Julian Assange is falsely charged today) and then the Sedition Act in 1918, many so-called progressives embraced the authoritarian imposition of state controls on dissent, just as they do today.  An important exception was Randolph Bourne, who in 1917 castigated these turncoats in his blistering essay, “War and the Intellectuals.”  “Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, [and] practitioners of literature,” he wrote, “had assumed the iniquitous task of ‘riveting the war mind on a hundred million of the world’s people.’”  Today such people debate whether they should be called liberal or progressive.  I say, call them warmongers of the lowest order.

    I remember when I was an impressionable child and television had only a few channels.  This was in the years between the Korean War and the one against Vietnam. There was a movie that was repeated on television regularly: Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring the amazing performer Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, the Irish-American composer/lyricist/playwright, who, in the years before WW I was known as the man who owned Broadway and whose statue stands in Times Square in New York City.

    Child that I was, I saw the film many times and was mesmerized.  My emotions rose with every viewing.  My heart strings vibrated to the tunes of “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”  I marched proudly to WW I with Cagney/Cohan.  This was a movie that appeared in 1942 to promote the WW II war effort by using the lies about WW I to do it.  But, oh, what fun!  And the stirring songs – fodder for a child.  And this was before the CIA completely owned Hollywood.

    Yet I grew up.  I am no longer a child.  I have studied and seen through the propaganda of The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Fox News, The Guardian, Hollywood, etc.

    Many of those I know have not.  They believe in the unbelievable. They still live in what Jim Garrison called the “Doll’s House” and accept what Harold Pinter termed “a vast tapestry of lies.”  Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel address what has not changed an iota since about the U.S.’s murderous foreign policy:

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    When I was a child, I was hypnotized by Yankee Doodle Dandy.

    I’ve grown a bit.  McGovern and Pinter are right; little has changed – Vietnam, WW I, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, China, etc.  And, of course, Russia, always Russia, at whose heart the weapons are always aimed, fiendish Russia that must be destroyed to make the world safe for the predators that pose as lovers of democracy and international law.

    When President Kennedy, deeply chastened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, spoke about real peace and democracy at American University on June 10, 1963, he was the last American leader to recognize that international relations had to undergo a radical change, especially in the nuclear age.  Demonizing other countries had to give way to dialogue and mutual respect.  He said:

    What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

    Five months later the CIA made sure his voice was stilled.  Such sentiments have been verboten ever since.

    Only children still believe the America propaganda and its war machine.

    The post Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.