Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an utter disaster for Ukraine, and the war is not going well for the Russian forces who are experiencing heavy losses and may be running low on both supplies and morale. Perhaps this is the reason why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also encouraged by the support that Ukraine has received from Western countries, claimed a few days ago on the Greek state-run broadcaster ERT that “the war will end when Ukraine wins.”
In this exclusive interview, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky considers the implications of Ukraine’s heroic stance to fight the Russian invaders till the end, and why the U.S. is not eager to see an end to the conflict.
Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: After months of fighting, it’s obvious that the invasion is not going according to the Kremlin’s plans, hopes and expectations. NATO figures have claimed that Russian forces have already suffered as many deaths as they did during the entire duration of the Afghan war, and the position of the Zelenskyy government now seems to be “peace with victory.” Obviously, the West’s support for Ukraine is key to what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions. Indeed, there is no clear path to peace, and the Kremlin has stated that it is not seeking to end the war by May 9 (known as Victory Day, which marks the Soviets’ role in defeating Nazi Germany). Don’t Ukrainians have the right to fight to death before surrendering any territory to Russia, if they choose to do so?
Noam Chomsky: To my knowledge, no one has suggested that Ukrainians don’t have that right. Islamic Jihad also has the abstract right to fight to the death before surrendering any territory to Israel. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s their right.
Do Ukrainians want that? Perhaps now in the midst of a devastating war, but not in the recent past.
President Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 with an overwhelming mandate for peace. He immediately moved to carry it out, with great courage. He had to confront violent right-wing militias who threatened to kill him if he tried to reach a peaceful settlement along the lines of the Minsk II formula. Historian of Russia Stephen Cohen points out that if Zelenskyy had been backed by the U.S., he could have persisted, perhaps solving the problem with no horrendous invasion. The U.S. refused, preferring its policy of integrating Ukraine within NATO. Washington continued to dismiss Russia’s red lines and the warnings of a host of top-level U.S. diplomats and government advisers as it has been doing since Clinton’s abrogation of Bush’s firm and unambiguous promise to Gorbachev that in return for German reunification within NATO, NATO would not expand one inch beyond Germany.
Zelenskyy also sensibly proposed putting the very different Crimea issue on a back burner, to be addressed later, after the war ends.
Minsk II would have meant some kind of federal arrangement, with considerable autonomy for the Donbass region, optimally in a manner to be determined by an internationally supervised referendum. Prospects have of course diminished after the Russian invasion. How much we don’t know. There is only one way to find out: to agree to facilitate diplomacy instead of undermining it, as the U.S. continues to do.
It’s true that “the West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of diplomatic solutions,” though I would suggest a slight rephrasing: The West’s support for Ukraine is key into what’s happening on the ground, both militarily and in terms of undermining instead of facilitating diplomatic solutions that might end the horror.
Congress, including congressional Democrats, are acting as if they prefer the exhortation by Democratic Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee of Intelligence Adam Schiff that we have to aid Ukraine “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Schiff’s warning is nothing new. It is reminiscent of Reagan’s calling a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army is only two days marching time from Harlingen, Texas, about to overwhelm us. Or LBJ’s plaintive plea that we have to stop them in Vietnam or they will “sweep over the United States and take what we have.”
That’s been the permanent plight of the U.S., constantly threatened with annihilation. Best to stop them over there.
The U.S. has been a leading provider of security assistance to Ukraine since 2014. And last week, President Biden asked Congress to approve $33 billion to Ukraine, which is more than double what Washington has already committed since the start of the war. Isn’t it therefore safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine?
Since the relevant facts are virtually unspeakable here, it’s worth reviewing them.
Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.) has “provided significant support with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg).
I’ve already mentioned Washington’s refusal to back newly elected President Zelenskyy when his courageous effort to implement his mandate to pursue peace was blocked by right-wing militias, and the U.S. refused to back him, preferring to continue its policy of integrating Ukraine into NATO, dismissing Russia’s red lines.
As we’ve discussed earlier, that commitment was stepped up with the official U.S. policy statement of September 2021 calling for sending more advanced military equipment to Ukraine while continuing “our robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.” The policy was given further formal status in the November 10 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The State Department has acknowledged that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO.”
So matters continued after Putin’s criminal aggression. Once again, what happened has been reviewed accurately by Anatol Lieven:
A U.S. strategy of using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia is also of course completely incompatible with the search for a ceasefire and even a provisional peace settlement. It would require Washington to oppose any such settlement and to keep the war going. And indeed, when in late March the Ukrainian government put forward a very reasonable set of peace proposals, the lack of public U.S. support for them was extremely striking.
Apart from anything else, a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality (as proposed by President Zelensky) is an absolutely inescapable part of any settlement — but weakening Russia involves maintaining Ukraine as a de facto U.S. ally. U.S. strategy as indicated by [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would risk Washington becoming involved in backing Ukrainian nationalist hardliners against President Zelensky himself.
With this in mind, we can turn to the question. The answer seems plain: judging by U.S. actions and formal pronouncements, it is “safe to conclude that Washington has a lot riding on the way the war ends in Ukraine.” More specifically, it is fair to conclude that in order to “weaken Russia,” the U.S. is dedicated to the grotesque experiment that we have discussed earlier; avoid any way of ending the conflict through diplomacy and see whether Putin will slink away quietly in defeat or will use the capacity, which of course he has, to destroy Ukraine and set the stage for terminal war.
We learn a lot about the reigning culture from the fact that the grotesque experiment is considered highly praiseworthy, and that any effort to question it is either relegated to the margins or bitterly castigated with an impressive flow of lies and deceit.
As President Biden seeks $33 billion more for Ukraine, we look at the dangers of U.S. military escalation with Medea Benjamin of CodePink and George Beebe of the Quincy Institute. He is the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA and a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. The massive spending in Ukraine that outweighs public funding to combat the coronavirus pandemic shows that “there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia, and I don’t think that accords, actually, with the priorities of the American people,” says Beebe. “To support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, ‘Negotiations now,’” says Benjamin.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for the strongest possible military response against Russia. Pelosi made the comments in Poland Monday after she became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine. During a meeting there with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Pelosi vowed the United States would keep backing Ukraine militarily “until the fight is done.”
SPEAKERNANCYPELOSI: We believe that we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom, that we are on a frontier of freedom and that your fight is a fight for everyone. And so our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.
AMYGOODMAN: Pelosi’s surprise trip to Ukraine came just days after President Biden asked Congress for an additional $33 billion for Ukraine. This comes as evidence grows that the war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a proxy war between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. wants to see Russia, quote, “weakened.” Over the weekend, Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. and NATO should stop arming Ukraine if they’re really interested in resolving the Ukraine crisis.
Well, we’re joined now by two guests. Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the antiwar group CodePink. We usually speak to her in Washington, D.C. Now she’s in Havana, Cuba. George Beebe is also with us. He’s grand strategy director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His recent piece is headlined “Tell us how this war in Ukraine ends.” He’s the former director of Russia analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency and was special adviser on Russia to Vice President Cheney from 2002 to 2004. He’s the author of the 2019 book The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe.
George Beebe, let’s begin with you. You wrote the piece, “Tell us how this war in Ukraine ends.” So, why don’t you tell us? The latest news is that it may well be that the Russian President Vladimir Putin will announce the war on Ukraine on May 9th, Victory Day in Russia, when they beat the Nazis in 1945.
GEORGEBEEBE: Well, I think that’s quite possible. Russians have been speculating for quite some time that Putin might take the step of moving from what he has called a “special operation” in Ukraine into a full-fledged and declared war, which would mean a national mobilization, widespread conscription of Russian soldiers and their use in the battle in Ukraine. So, what that would mean would be that Russia would be gearing up for all-out war in Ukraine.
And the context of this, of course, would be that Putin would argue that this is not actually a war between Russia and Ukraine, that this is a much larger war between Russia and the United States and NATO. That’s how Russian elites and Putin had been depicting this conflict, actually, for many years, well before Russia’s actual invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. They think that Ukraine is simply a pawn in this much bigger geopolitical game, and they think the stakes are astronomically high for Russia. They think that this is a fight for Russia’s survival, that the stakes are existential. So, if you’re looking at this war and asking how does this end and when does it end, that’s a very bad sign, because it suggests that the Russians are gearing up for a very long-term conflict here.
And the same thing, I think, is going on on the American side, as well. What we’ve seen in the last few weeks is rhetoric which more and more openly discusses our goal being victory over Russia, Russia’s strategic defeat, the weakening of its military, the marginalization of Russia as a player in the world. And some U.S. officials, including President Biden, have even alluded to the possibility of Putin leaving power, regime change.
So, what we’re seeing, I think, on both sides is escalation, escalation in the objectives, I think, that they’re seeking. And with that escalation of objectives, I think the likelihood that this turns into a direct military clash between the United States and Russia goes up. So this is a very dangerous moment, I think.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, George Beebe, I’d like to ask you — in terms of this new call for $33 billion in aid that President Biden has made to Congress for Ukraine, this is an astounding amount of money. And, you know, I looked at — for instance, U.S. foreign aid to the entire Latin America and Caribbean region has averaged, over the last 60 years, about $3 billion annually. And yet many Americans are so worried about the increasing flight of so many people from Latin America across the U.S. border, but yet we’re giving so little aid to the countries there, and yet somehow we come up with $33 billion. Is this a — what is the signal that the Biden administration is sending by such a huge request, a big portion of it being military aid, but also direct foreign aid to Ukraine?
GEORGEBEEBE: Well, budgets, of course, are reflections of a government’s priorities. You can’t do everything. We don’t have infinite resources, so you have to make choices about what’s more important and what’s less important. And this is an enormous sum of money that the Biden administration is requesting. It comes on top of a lot of money that’s already been spent on this effort in Ukraine, not just in the United States but on the part of our NATO allies, as well. So this is a very big effort, but it also says something about where the Biden administration’s priorities really are on this. And I think it’s fair to say, if you look at the numbers, that there are very few things that the Biden administration thinks are more important right now than defeating Russia. And I don’t think that that accords actually with the priorities of the American people. But I think that’s up for them to decide.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring Medea Benjamin into the discussion. Oh, I’m sorry — well, I wanted to ask you further — there had been a prior attempt, obviously, at reaching a peace accord in Ukraine, the Minsk Accords. Could you talk about what happened, why those Minsk accords failed?
GEORGEBEEBE: Well, the Minsk accords go back to the outbreak of this war in Ukraine back in 2014. That had its origins in a tug-of-war between the European Union and, to some degree, NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand. And it was really about Ukraine’s geopolitical fate.
The European Union had been negotiating with the Ukrainian government for many months about an association accord. And that would, I think, allow greater trade and commerce and interaction between Ukraine and the EU, and that held the prospect of a very bright economic future for Ukrainians, and a lot of Ukrainians felt that that was a wonderful thing. There are few populations in the world that don’t look forward to greater economic prosperity. But the terms of that association agreement essentially said to Ukraine, “You’ve got to make a choice: Either you have a very close and deepening trade relationship with the EU or with Russia, but not both. You can’t have the same depth of trading with both Russia and the EU at the same time.”
Now, the Russians objected to that, because, of course, they had long-standing relationships with Ukraine, very deep economic relationships but also cultural and personal. And looming behind this was the threat that Ukraine would essentially move into NATO and the West at the expense of cordial relations with Russia. And for all kinds of reasons, the Russians found that profoundly threatening, including to Russia’s vital security interests.
Now, this tug-of-war over Ukraine tore the Ukrainian country apart, because there were people in the western regions of Ukraine that were very, very European culturally and in their political orientation; there were parts of the eastern parts of Ukraine that were largely Russian-speaking and culturally Russian and were more oriented toward relationships with Russia. And as the people in the western parts of Ukraine urged that Ukraine turn westward, the people in the east felt threatened, and they objected.
This eventually broke out into an actual civil war. Violence erupted. And the great powers, of course, got involved — the United States, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other hand. And fighting broke out. The Russians intervened covertly. They announced they would be annexing Crimea, which had been part of Russia up until the 1950s, when then-Soviet Premier Khrushchev gifted Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union. And the Russians took it back. And this, of course, collapsed into this years-long war, and the West tried to find a way to end that fighting.
And that ultimately resulted in the Minsk accords, which were an attempt to try to find a settlement inside Ukraine that allowed the regions in Ukraine’s east greater autonomy. It provided for the withdrawal of Russian forces, the holding of elections in the east, the guarantees of language rights in the eastern parts of Ukraine. The Russian speakers felt that Ukrainian nationalists were violating their linguistic rights.
This was never implemented, largely because the Ukrainian nationalists were concerned that this was ultimately a formula to allow Russia to use the greater weight of the eastern regions within the Ukrainian state to veto any membership of Ukraine in NATO over time. And I think they were right. That was exactly why the Russians found the Minsk accords appealing, that this was a way of guaranteeing that Ukraine would not join NATO over Russian objections. And that, you know, essentially fell apart as a result. The Ukrainians never were willing to implement it. The Russians were never willing to compromise on their insistence on those terms. And, you know, that played a big role in producing where we are today.
AMYGOODMAN: In addition to George Beebe, we do now have Medea Benjamin on the line with us. She’s actually in Havana, Cuba, right now, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink. Medea, we’re speaking to you in the week when President Biden has asked for $33 billion more for mainly military aid, military weapons to Ukraine. Contrast that with the $22 billion asked for for all of the U.S. dealing with COVID, and that has been summarily rejected by the Republicans and some Democrats, far less than the $33 billion. But I wanted to ask you about that and the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin talking about W and W — weakening Russia and winning, Ukraine winning — and, overall, what you think needs to happen right now.
MEDEABENJAMIN: I think it’s terrible that the U.S., on all levels, from the White House to Congress, are pushing this as either regime change or a winnable war, when we know there is no winning in this. I want to hear them talking about what compromises are they willing to make. I want to hear them saying they’re going to put their efforts into negotiations. I want to hear them say they’re going to separate humanitarian aid and military support for Ukraine and get that humanitarian aid approved.
And I want to see that the people of the United States understand that to support the people of Ukraine and stop the fighting, we need not to pour billions of dollars of more weapons in, but to say, “Negotiations now.” And that’s why we’re calling people to come out this weekend, next weekend, the following weekend, have rallies, download our flyers, get people to sign petitions, saying we need to end this war and not allow it to keep spreading and turn into a nuclear holocaust. People can go to PeaceInUkraine.org to find more information.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Medea, how would you see the prospects for a settlement, for an agreement? And what might that entail?
MEDEABENJAMIN: Well, certainly, they’ve been outlined by Zelensky himself and by the Russians. I think the United States is one of the greatest obstacles to negotiations. We have to recognize a neutral Ukraine, non-expansion of NATO and demilitarization of the region.
And I want to add one other thing, Juan, which is we’re coming to the 40-year anniversary of the 1 million people out in Central Park saying no to nuclear weapons in 1982. We in the United States have to work with the people inside Russia, not only to end this war in Ukraine but also to get serious about banning nuclear weapons, like the U.N. treaty calls on the world to do.
AMYGOODMAN: Let me ask George Beebe — you have written that “the advent of the cyber age has made the chances of escalation into direct East-West conflict much greater than during the Cold War, while doing [very] little to reduce its potential destructiveness.” Can you explain this, and also just acknowledging that today President Biden is in Alabama at a Lockheed Martin plant, at a weapons plant?
GEORGEBEEBE: Well, I think the advent of the digital era has changed things in a couple of important ways. One is the information sphere, the media sphere. It’s become increasingly segmented. And social media, Twitter and other platforms, I think, encourage outrage. That’s what gets attention online, not people who are saying, you know, “Look, we have to look at this in a balanced way. It’s complicated. We need to understand the dynamics of all of this.” It doesn’t tend to lend itself toward that kind of complexity and reasoned evidence. The people that get attention are the ones that scream the loudest and provoke the most outrage. That actually makes the political context in which you can try to aim toward diplomatic settlements of things like that more difficult, not less. So that’s one part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is the blurring of things that used to be relatively clearly delineated — espionage and warfare, for example, sabotage and strategic attacks. It used to be, in the old days, that it was clear, when you’re gathering intelligence information, you know, you’re using human agents, or you’re taking photographs from satellites or airplanes, or you’re eavesdropping on phone calls of various kinds, the person who was on the other end of those intelligence collection efforts knew that that was intelligence collection.
AMYGOODMAN: We have five seconds.
GEORGEBEEBE: OK. Today, if you intrude on someone’s computer network, you can not only gather information, but you can destroy that network. You can sabotage it. And when you think about all the things that are connected to the internet, that becomes very dangerous in a crisis.
AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there, George Beebe of the Quincy Institute and Medea Benjamin of CodePink. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.
Many Kyiv Independent Journalists Come From Suspect Backgrounds, Including Individuals Who Previously Worked For NATO Think Tank The Atlantic Council, The U.S. Embassy In Ukraine, Or For The Council On Foreign Relations.
Americans are fervently cheering for Ukraine in a war that many believe is a decisive struggle for human freedom. The intensity of our infatuation makes it easy to assume that everyone in the world shares it. They don’t.
The impassioned American reaction is matched only in Europe, Canada, and the handful of U.S. allies in East Asia. For many people in the rest of the world, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is just another pointless Western war in which they have no stake.
The two biggest countries in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, have refused to impose sanctions on Russia or to curtail trade. South Africa, the economic powerhouse of the African continent, has done the same. Asia, though, is where the resistance to joining the pro-Ukraine bloc appears most deliberate and widespread. This has alarmed Washington. To fight back, the United States is cracking its whip over several Asian nations.
For Ukrainian refugees in Berlin, like those in Warsaw, Chisinau, and elsewhere, this war isn’t about support for Zelensky or NATO, writes Marcel Cartier. It is about defending their identity as Ukrainians.
While international news headlines remain largely focused on the war in Ukraine, little attention is given to the horrific consequences of the war which are felt in many regions around the world. Even when these repercussions are discussed, disproportionate coverage is allocated to European countries, like Germany and Austria, due to their heavy reliance on Russian energy sources.
The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere. Countries like Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Ghana and numerous others, are facing serious food shortages in the short, medium and long term.
The World Bank is warning of a “human catastrophe” as a result of a burgeoning food crisis, itself resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war. The World Bank President, David Malpass, told the BBC that his institution estimates a “huge” jump in food prices, reaching as high as 37%, which would mean that the poorest of people would be forced to “eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling.”
This foreboding crisis is now compounding an existing global food crisis, resulting from major disruptions in the global supply chains, as a direct outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as pre-existing problems, resulting from wars and civil unrest, corruption, economic mismanagement, social inequality and more.
Even prior to the war in Ukraine, the world was already getting hungrier. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an estimated 811 million people in the world “faced hunger in 2020”, with a massive jump of 118 million compared to the previous year. Considering the continued deterioration of global economies, especially in the developing world, and the subsequent and unprecedented inflation worldwide, the number must have made several large jumps since the publishing of FAO’s report in July 2021, reporting on the previous year.
Indeed, inflation is now a global phenomenon. The consumer price index in the United States has increased by 8.5% from a year earlier, according to the financial media company, Bloomberg. In Europe, “inflation (reached) record 7.5%”, according to the latest data released by Eurostat. As troubling as these numbers are, western societies with relatively healthy economies and potential room for government subsidies, are more likely to weather the inflation storm, if compared to countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and many parts of Asia.
The war in Ukraine has immediately impacted food supplies to many parts of the world. Russia and Ukraine combined contribute 30% of global wheat exports. Millions of tons of these exports find their way to food-import-dependent countries in the Global South – mainly the regions of South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Considering that some of these regions, comprising some of the poorest countries in the world, have already been struggling under the weight of pre-existing food crises, it is safe to say that tens of millions of people already are, or are likely to go, hungry in the coming months and years.
Another factor resulting from the war is the severe US-led western sanctions on Russia. The harm of these sanctions is likely to be felt more in other countries than in Russia itself, due to the fact that the latter is largely food and energy independent.
Although the overall size of the Russian economy is comparatively smaller than that of leading global economic powers like the US and China, its contributions to the world economy makes it absolutely critical. For example, Russia accounts for a quarter of the world’s natural gas exports, according to the World Bank, and 18% of coal and wheat exports, 14% of fertilizers and platinum shipments, and 11% of crude oil. Cutting off the world from such a massive wealth of natural resources while it is desperately trying to recover from the horrendous impact of the pandemic is equivalent to an act of economic self-mutilation.
Of course, some are likely to suffer more than others. While economic growth is estimated to shrink by a large margin – up to 50% in some cases – in countries that fuel regional and international growth such as Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia, the crisis is expected to be much more severe in countries that aim for mere economic subsistence, including many African countries.
An April report published by the humanitarian group, Oxfam, citing an alert issued by 11 international humanitarian organizations, warned that “West Africa is hit by its worst food crisis in a decade.” Currently, there are 27 million people going hungry in that region, a number that may rise to 38 million in June if nothing is done to stave off the crisis. According to the report, this number would represent “a new historic level”, as it would be an increase by more than a third compared to last year. Like other struggling regions, the massive food shortage is a result of the war in Ukraine, in addition to pre-existing problems, lead amongst them the pandemic and climate change.
While the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia are yet to achieve any of their intended purpose, it is poor countries that are already feeling the burden of the war, sanctions and geopolitical tussle between great powers. As the west is busy dealing with its own economic woes, little heed is being paid to those suffering most. And as the world is forced to transition to a new global economic order, it will take years for small economies to successfully make that adjustment.
While it is important that we acknowledge the vast changes to the world’s geopolitical map, let us not forget that millions of people are going hungry, paying the price for a global conflict of which they are not part.
Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public declaration that the US goal is to “weaken Russia” and Joe Biden’s request for another $33 billion in “emergency” military and economic aid (half of what Russia spent on its military in 2021) for Ukraine?
The same cabal of generals and politicians that drained the state of trillions of dollars in the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia and learned nothing from the nightmare of Vietnam, revel in the illusion of their omnipotence. They have no interest in a diplomatic solution. There are billions in profits to be made in arms sales. There is political posturing to be done. There are generals itching to pull the trigger. Why have all these high-priced and technologically advanced weapons systems if you can’t use them? Why not show the world this time around that the US still dominates the globe?
The CIA, capitalism’s invisible army, is an amoral leviathan. It isn’t doing illegal things so the minimum wage in Ukraine will go up, or so that bankers will be more careful about selling mortgages to people who can’t afford them. They’re in cahoots with the bankers, many of whom are on the CIA “take” themselves.
They want Ukrainians putting their money in American banks and brokerage firms. They want to suck the life out of Ukrainians. That is what the CIA and the predatory NGOs are there for, and they are very circumspect about whom they recruit to achieve their evil hegemonic goals.
Amid global calls for focused diplomacy to end the Russian war on Ukraine, U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Sunday introduced a measure that would give congressional authorization for President Joe Biden to intervene militarily if Russia uses biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
The outgoing Republican congressman from Illinois announced the Authorization for Use of Military Force to Defend America’s Allies Resolution of 2022 on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” more than two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the long-anticipated invasion.
“I don’t think we need to be using force in Ukraine right now. I just introduced an AUMF, an authorization for the use of military force, giving the president basically congressional leverage or permission to use it if WMDs, nuclear, biological, or chemical are used in Ukraine,” he said on the show, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
Kinzinger added in a statement that “Putin must be stopped” and Biden, “the commander in chief to the world’s greatest military, should have the authority and means to take the necessary actions to do so.”
The Biden administration has significantly stepped up security aid to Ukraine since February but stopped short of taking any military action, even denying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s request for a no-fly zone. While sending arms to Ukraine has been met with mixed responses — some anti-war voices warn it just escalates the conflict — peace advocates and foreign policy experts have praised the U.S. president for not getting involved militarily.
“The Biden administration has wisely ruled out such intervention, whether in the form of a ‘no-fly zone’ or some other military operation, recognizing that it would mean a war with Russia that could quite conceivably escalate into nuclear conflict,” George Beebe and Anatol Lieven recently wrote for Responsible Statecraft.
“Crudely put,” they continued, “mounting an intervention meant to save Ukrainians, only to see them and millions of others incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, would hardly amount to sound moral arithmetic.”
Appearing beside Zelenskyy earlier this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres pledged to boost humanitarian support in Ukraine and “help find the path of peace.”
“This war must end, and peace must be established, in line [with] the charter of the United Nations and international law. Many leaders have made many good efforts to stop the fighting, though these efforts, so far, have not succeeded,” Guterres said. “I am here to say to you, Mr. President, and to the people of Ukraine: We will not give up.”
In Kyiv on Saturday, Zelenskyy met with a congressional delegation led by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said in a statement Sunday that the meeting began with the Ukrainian president “thanking the United States for the substantial assistance that we have provided.”
“He conveyed the clear need for continued security, economic, and humanitarian assistance from the United States to address the devastating human toll taken on the Ukrainian people by Putin’s diabolic invasion—and our delegation proudly delivered the message that additional American support is on the way, as we work to transform President Biden’s strong funding request into a legislative package,” she added. “Our delegation conveyed our respect and gratitude to President Zelenskyy for his leadership and our admiration of the Ukrainian people for their courage in the fight against Russia’s oppression.”
Pelosi’s delegation notably includes Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who was famously the only member of Congress to vote against what she has called “an ill-defined and open-ended” AUMF in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. That authorization has been used by multiple administrations to justify “counterterrorism” operations all around the world.
Transnistria is de facto independent with many state-like attibutes and calls itself officially the Moldovian Republic of Dniestr. However, no other state, including the Russian Federation has recognized it as an independent state. There are, however, some 1500 Russian military permanently present in Transnistria. Transnistria had some 706, 000 inhabitants in 1991 at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Today, there are some 450,000 – probably less. Many, especially young people, have left to study or work abroad. Many in Transnistria have Russian passports in order to travel. The Transnistrian economy is in the hands of a small number of persons closely linked to the government.
The US-centralized empire’s use of propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation is the single most urgent issue of our time, because it’s what prevents attention from being drawn to all other issues. And all signs indicate it’s set to get much, much worse.
I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we’re seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we’ve seen before. There’s no pretense that it’s done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it’s just “We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war.”
Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what’s true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they’re just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war.
When Russia does it it's lies and disinformation. When Ukraine does it it's folklore. pic.twitter.com/XbXuceePdc
You didn’t know that you were granting government and tech institutions authority to decide what’s true and false on your behalf when you agreed that it’s fine for them to work together to censor and sanctify Official Narratives about Covid, but it turns out that’s what was happening.
It looks pretty obvious in retrospect now though, doesn’t it? You can’t regulate “disinformation” and “misinformation” without first determining what it is, and you can’t determine what it is without assigning someone the authority to make those distinctions. There are no benefecent, impartial and omniscient entities who can be trusted to become objective arbiters of absolute reality on our behalf. There are only flawed human beings who act in their own interest, which is why we’re now being censored and propagandized about a war.
In literally the very next instant after being given the authority to decide what’s true and false on our behalf regarding Covid, those same government, media and tech institutions launched into World War II levels of propaganda and censorship over a war we’re not even officially in. It was like they all said “Oh good, we get to do that now, finally.” The consensus that it was fine to launch into a shocking information lockdown about Ukraine was already formed and prepped for roll-out the day Russia invaded. It was taken as a given that they had that authority.
Over the last two years you’d get called an “anti-vaxxer” and worse if you said you didn’t think government-tied monopolistic megacorporations should be restricting speech about Covid measures that affect everyone, but it turns out those who issued these warnings were 100 percent correct.
It is clear now, as we see what we are becoming, that granting these powerful institutions authority to sort out fact from fiction on our behalf is far more dangerous than misinformation about a virus ever was. Now here we are, with the empire setting up “disinformation” boards while it escalates aggressions with Russia by the day and prepares to do the same with China in the not-too distant future. Our whole civilization is being organized around winning US propaganda wars.
PayPal is just openly conducting politically motivated financial censorship of indie media now. First @MintPressNews and @calebmaupin, now Consortium News. Silicon Valley is the censorship arm of the US empire. https://t.co/LAMEG029DW
Censorship is bad because free speech is how society orients itself toward truth, course-corrects when it’s going astray, and holds power to account. This is true whether censorship is by the government or by tech oligarchs. Only morons act like this is some weird right wing thing.
People say, “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach!”
And the answer to this is always, yes it does you idiot. If people who support status quo power have access to all the largest voice amplification platforms while critics of status quo power don’t, this kills the very purpose of free speech protections. Free speech protections are enshrined exactly because unrestricted speech puts a check on power. If critics of status quo power structures are being banned from the platforms where people get their voices heard, this function has been nullified.
You can’t say your society has free speech if critics of status quo orthodoxies aren’t free to speak where they will be heard, for exactly the same reason you can’t say people have free speech in Saudi Arabia as long as nobody hears their criticisms of the government.
This is getting so unbelievable cringey. I have a feeling I'd be sick of this guy even if I fully bought into the empire's Ukraine narratives. pic.twitter.com/d3hMLO4KT9
Because free speech is designed to put a check on status quo power, it is exactly the voices who criticize the status quo that must be protected. Some of these voices will be unpalatable, but the alternative is permitting a Ministry of Truth to decide what dissent is permissible, an authority that’s certain to be abused.
Speech isn’t free if it isn’t free in all the areas where people congregate to speak. If only mainstream supporters of the status quo have free access to all platforms, then free speech isn’t happening, and power has a lot more ability to do what it likes unchecked by the public. Saying it’s fine because people are still free to go to Gab or Truth Social to voice their criticisms of establishment Ukraine narratives or whatever is the same as saying it’s fine because people can still speak their criticisms of the government into a hole in the ground. Free speech is not happening.
Consent for this was given when we allowed these powers to assume complete narrative authority over what constitutes “misinformation”. It’s never too late to revoke consent, though. It just means the fight to pry our voices out of the hands of our rulers is going to be a tough slog.
___________________
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, 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.
In 1999, the United States and the 56 other participating states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) signed a charter in Istanbul that is another intentionally ignored key to understanding the war in Ukraine.
The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security organization . It claims to engage in political dialogue – that is, a forum for political dialogue on a wide range of security issues. There are 57 OSCE member states that cover three continents – North America, Europe and Asia. The policies the OSCE deliberates over include security issues such as arms control, terrorism, good governance, energy security, human trafficking, democratization, media freedom, and the rights of national minorities that affect more than a billion people. This is what they say they do, anyway.
But the 1999 Istanbul Charter signed by all the member states says that countries should be free to choose their own security arrangements and alliances but specifies that, in doing so, countries “will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.”
Authorities in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa have set a 24-hour curfew from May 1-3 to prevent protests commemorating the burning alive on May 2, 2014 of 48 people who had rejected the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev earlier that year.
The city, which is “(under the control of Ukrainian troops) announced the introduction of a ‘curfew’ in the city from 22-00 on May 1 to 5-00 on May 3. For the duration of the ‘curfew’ Odessans are not allowed to leave their homes,” said the group Repression of the Left and Dissenters in Ukraine in a Telegram post. “Obviously, this decision of the authorities is due to the fact that May 2 is a very important date for the inhabitants of Odessa.”
A Ukrainian blacklist claims to source some of its intelligence from Britain’s MI5. And it even includes a file on former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters. The aims of the blacklist appear to be the suppression and elimination of voices critical of the Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, there are those on the radical left – anarchists – who are fighting as partisans or alongside government forces, determined to crush the Russian invaders.
According to a 2019 Al Jazeera article, the database contained more than 130,000 persons, including Russian military and pro-Russia separatists. The Mirror believes the total number of names on the blacklist is now around 187,000.
Al Jazeerareported in 2019 that the database also included “4,000 international journalists accredited by separatist authorities”. And it currently includes a link to a list of more than 600 Russian FSB (successor to KGB) officers “involved in the criminal activities of the aggressor country in Europe”.
British musician on blacklist
Peacemaker also includes a file on former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters. An English translation of that file shows Waters is accused of:
Anti-Ukrainian propaganda. An attempt on the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Participation in attempts to legalize the annexation of Crimea by Russia.
It also includes a zip file with a list of websites that purport to back up these allegations. And the source of the Waters file is given as ‘SBU’.
Former Swiss strategic intelligence member Jacques Baud claims the Peacemaker database is used as a means of harassing or eliminating those in favour of a deal with Russia:
In the Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor. The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia.
Clampdown on the left
Meanwhile, an article by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy in the Grayzone claims that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has “outlawed his opposition, ordered his rivals’ arrest, and presided over the disappearance and assassination of dissidents across the country”.
They add:
In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine. They included the For Life Party, the Left Opposition, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Left Forces, Socialists, the Party of Shariy, Ours, State, Opposition Bloc and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.
One blogger referred to in the article provides a list of those who “fell foul of the Ukrainian government and its policies”. The article also includes numerous accounts of alleged torture carried out by Ukrainian military against Russians and pro-Russians.
From the frontline
There’s also another side to this conflict.
Le Monde Libertaireinterviewed a member of the mainly Ukrainian anti-authoritarian Resistance Committee regarding what’s happening in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The anonymous interviewee – we will call her ‘Yulia’ – explains that anarchists and anti-fascists have joined with units of the Territorial Defence Forces (TDF). And they are mostly active in the Kyiv region and Kharkiv.
Yulia adds:
While we had always opposed the Ukrainian state, we understand that Russian autocracy is much worse. If the Russian army occupied Ukraine, there would be absolutely no political freedom, activists would be imprisoned or killed.
As for Putin, she adds:
[He] himself had said many times before that his favourite philosopher was Ivan Ilyin – a far-right thinker exiled by the Bolsheviks, who later supported the Italian Fascists and German Nazis as they rose to power , who had also repeatedly spoken out against the Ukrainians as a threat to Russia. Not to mention Putin’s ties and financial support to various far-right parties and Western politicians – like Marine le Pen, Eric Zemmour in France, Victor Orban in Hungary,
Yulia also provides an excellent insight into how anarchists and left libertarians are organising with government forces. She adds how the TDF have “defended some cities against Russian regular troops and became partisans”. However, ” in other cases they fight alongside the army”.
It’s all about survival:
While some might argue that anarchists should have no cooperation with the state military, for all Ukrainian anarchists it is clear that this is a battle for our survival. The Russian army has already committed numerous war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, including the indiscriminate destruction of cities, the bombing of hospitals, the execution of men of conscription age, as well as mass arrests of pro activists- Ukrainians in various cities under occupation. If Russia won, such crimes would continue throughout Ukraine. This is why all Ukrainian anarchists decided to resist Russian aggression – like those anarchists who joined the Free French Army to fight against German Nazism.
Daily reports on the fight by the libertarian left against the Russian aggressors are provided by Operation Solidarity and published by Le Monde Libertaire.
What is it good for?
War inevitably results in atrocities and war crimes. And in Ukraine, it’s important to question the ultimate aim and scope of the Peacemaker blacklist, particularly if Baud’s claim that Peacemaker’s militia carried out an assassination is correct.
War also sees the often inevitable crackdown on those critical of the government line. We see that in Russia, with the banning of independent news media and blocking of social media. But, as pointed out in the article by Blumenthal and Krishnaswamy, it appears to be happening in Ukraine too, with the clampdown on opposition. The authors also point out that the Ukrainian government has combined all TV news channels into a single channel, which can be a form of censorship.
In any war, independent journalism has an important role to play to report on all of these aspects. Even if, for some readers, that makes for uncomfortable reading.
The topic of the discussions centered on the two-months long Russian military intervention in Ukraine which has been fueled by the imposition of unprecedented sanctions by the United States and the European Union (EU) alongside the massive transferal of weapons to the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky by key member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Two distinct positions were articulated during one-on-one talks between Putin and Guterres which were broadcast internationally. Later there was a press conference held featuring Foreign Minister Lavrov and Secretary General Guterres where differences over the Ukraine situation were aired publicly.
After leaving Moscow, Guterres travelled to the capital of Ukraine where he reviewed damage from the war which has killed untold numbers of people and dislocated millions.
It’s workers’ day, working people’s day, working people’s international solidarity day. All divisive, sectarian, supremacist ideology and politics is opposed by the working people all around the world. On this day, this position is reiterated by the working people.
Today, this task – oppose divisive, sectarian, supremacist politics – is much urgent, much immediate, as imperialism is making onslaught in many forms, in direct and indirect ways, in concealed methods and forms, in lands after lands. Imperialism is today pushing one part of the people to oppose other parts. Imperialism is carrying out its nefarious act with nice slogans telling about its freedom and its democracy, slogans that hide class struggle, the struggle between the exploited and the exploiters. Imperialism is doing this dirty work by hiding the struggle between labor and capital.
But, the working people can’t be hoodwinked, can’t be confused, can’t be made pawn to capital; the working people can’t be pulled to the camp of capital; and today, imperialism, as the highest form, the most dangerous form of capital, can’t be ally of the working classes in no country. With long experience, expertise, enormous resources, command over natural and social sciences and over technology, owning the most powerful political-military-diplomatic-propaganda machine, having worldwide networks in many forms, imperialism today stands as the most dangerous class-force against all the peoples, all the working people of the world.
Today’s May Day, therefore, is the day to raise this slogan: Down with imperialism, oppose imperialism, oppose imperialist political-geopolitical-war machinations and acts, its war plans and wars in all forms: direct invasion and aggression, proxy war, subversion, psychological-ideological-political acts.
Opposing imperialism by the working class is an imperative, as this is the leading and most powerful class-force (i) defending the exploitative world order, and the exploitative political-economic systems in countries, (ii) subjugating and destructing life and ecological systems on the entire planet, (iii) backing exploiting-reactionary classes all over the world, (iv) expropriating all resources-all the commons that peoples own in continents and oceans, (v) waging wars in many forms, wasting resources by waging imperialist wars while peoples in lands pass deprived life, and pay for imperialism’s wars. Imperialism is the leading and guiding global political force opposing the working classes, and subjugating and slaughtering the working classes in different forms including the wars imperialism organizes in lands. Imperialism is the leading and guiding political force that organizes, backs and carries on conspiracies, provocations and activities against all political struggles the working peoples in lands organize for emancipation.
So, on this May Day, one of the slogans is: Down with imperialism, oppose all imperialist wars and machinations.
Today, with the background of imperialist war in Ukraine, war-residues and encumbrances over Europe and countries across oceans, with possibilities of expanding of fire-spewing war to countries in Europe, even spreading to some other continents, opposing imperialism, opposing imperialist war-armaments activities is one of the immediate and urgent tasks of the working people all over the world, as a dark cloud of continents-wide imperialist war is spreading its wings. The war-cloud is getting dense and darker, as imperialists are making full-throttled war preparation, which began much earlier than the Russian forces stepped into Ukraine, as imperialist legislative documents show.
Already peoples in countries have begun making payment for the on-going imperialist war in Ukraine. Now, the people of Europe are making the most of this payment. The war-payment by peoples is widening gradually. Imperialism is socializing the war-cost – putting the burden of war on entire societies. Report by The New York Times “Governments tighten grip on global food stocks, sending prices higher” (April 30, 2022), and the World Bank’s April Commodity Markets Outlook report are only two among a number of international reports on the issue released over the last few weeks that tell the looming precarious situation. The WB warns: Global energy prices are projected to rise dramatically, culminating in the biggest price jump in commodities in nearly half a century. Global energy prices that already have seen a dramatic surge due to the pandemic lockdowns in China and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, are expected to surge by 50.5% in 2022. Indermit Gill, the WB’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, said in a statement accompanying the report: “This amounts to the largest commodity shock we’ve experienced since the 1970s. As was the case then, the shock is being aggravated by a surge in restrictions in trade of food, fuel and fertilizers. A recent estimate by the Food and Agricultural Organization has found: The Ukraine crisis would push up to 12 million people into hunger worldwide. This is in part because, as the FAO estimates, one‑third of Ukraine’s crops and agricultural land may not be harvested or cultivated this year, which will lead to a loss of one fifth of Ukraine’s wheat supply. Future harvests are in jeopardy also, as next season’s crop is unlikely to be planted amidst war-conditions. Simultaneously, sanctions on Russia, the world’s largest producer of wheat, have further reduced global supplies.
The question is: Who has imposed this war in Ukraine? Who has organized this war? Who is fuelling this war by supplying arms to the Ukraine proxy soldiers? Who is organizing trainings in other countries for the Ukraine foot soldiers? Since when was this war organized? No plan for such a war can be organized overnight.
On the opposite, the war industry is making profit. Armaments of billions of dollars have already been spent, and billions of dollars are in the pipeline. The war is now a daily business of the imperialist powers. The Frontier (Kolkata, India) comment “Arms Merchants’ Boon Day” is a small part of the full info on arms business backed by the Ukraine War: “Arms merchants are super-happy with a boon day while a NATO proxy – the ruling regime in Kiev – is playing a bloody game of war in Ukraine.” Lockheed Martin’s stock prices surged 25% since beginning of 2022, and Raytheon’s 17%. Alessandro Profumo, Chief Executive of Italian defence group Leonardo, said in March its free cash flow would be more than double this year compared with 2021. Profumo expects NATO countries to ramp up military spending to reach 2% of GDP over time. This means increased profit.
Sanctions, now being used without precedent in the world history, by the imperialist camp are taking its toll from the peoples in countries the warring imperialist capitals control. It’s the people that will pay most, pay first in this sanction-war, which is itself a nullifying act of the market mechanism that the dominating capitals propagate, utter as its hymn.
The on-going imperialist fire-spewing war in Europe is being expanded gradually, and it’s apprehended that it’ll be expanded – geographically, and in terms of intensity, which means a more bloody war, a more destructive war, which is people are going to pay with more blood and life, livelihood. The New York Times report “Fears are mounting that Ukraine War will spill across borders” (April 28, 2022) is not a single report expressing this hunch of spill over of the war. A few more analyses having similar dread are there also. The NYT report said: “Now, the fear in Washington and European capitals is that the conflict may soon escalate into a wider war — spreading to neighboring states, to cyberspace and to NATO countries suddenly facing a Russian cutoff of gas. Over the long term, such an expansion could evolve into a more direct conflict between Washington and Moscow reminiscent of the Cold War, as each seeks to sap the other’s power.”
In ultimate analysis, it’s the working classes, it’s the labor that makes the payment, as only labor produces surplus value, and that value is appropriated first from labor.
Here, today, on this May Day, the working people’s slogan is: No to imperialist war; oppose all war activities, oppose all war allocations, oppose all sanctions, oppose all propaganda war.
Imperialism’s war venture is pushing behind the working peoples’ fundamental questions of wage, democratic rights, access to info., participation in all areas of planning and decision-making. There are attempts to organize imperialist war-jingoism.
The questions of wage, democratic rights, access to info., participation in all areas of planning and decision-making are political questions; and political questions are to be resolved with political struggles, not with adventurism, anarchism and terrorism. It shouldn’t be forgotten that adventurism, anarchism and terrorism are ultimately capitals’ ally, serve capital, serve powers of exploiting class dominance. Today’s May Day reminds the working classes to organize these political struggles for rights and wages.
This May Day reminds not to forget class struggle. The working classes have to intensify class struggle, and sharpen tools of class struggle, wherever possible – organize strikes, stoppages, mobilizations, publicity and press, discussions. Intensifying class struggle with the gathering cloud of continents-wide imperialist war in the background is a difficult and complex task; but, there’s no scope to forget and ignore this task; there’s no scope to ignore the dominating warring classes cheating and blooding peoples in countries.
Immortal martyrs of May, martyrs from the ranks of the working classes, martyrs from the people’s camp remain alive forever with these struggles against capital, against imperialist capital, against exploitation.
The war in Ukraine would test even the most hardened political operator: millions forced to flee their homes, thousands (including many civilians) killed or injured, evidence of Russian war crimes mounting.
Yet Volodomyr Zelenskyy, a relative novice head of state, has not just risen to the challenge, he has been widely praised and admired for his exemplary crisis leadership. So, what explains this prowess?
Zelenskyy’s acting experience has been credited with his ability to connect powerfully with different audiences, using facts and emotions to build support for the Ukrainian cause.
His commitment to serve his people has been called pivotal. He has been described as charismatic — although this alone is no guarantee of success, given charismatic leaders can still lead their nations to destruction.
And it’s Zelenskyy’s repeated displays of courage that seem to really strike a chord with many. This leads us into the territory of character virtues, which we argue hold the key to Zelenskyy’s abilities as a crisis leader.
Dressed in trademark fatigues, President Zelenskyy arrives for a press conference in late April. Image: The Conversation/GettyImages
Ancient wisdom for today’s world Aristotle is credited with first proposing that virtues play a central role in forging a strength of character that can navigate and weather life’s challenges with moral fortitude and integrity.
Recently, we drew on this knowledge to examine crisis leadership and how character virtues guided 12 heads of state through that first, tumultuous wave of covid-19. We’ve used the same approach to analyse Zelenskyy’s leadership.
We closely examined an extended filmed interview with Zelenksyy by The Economist. Being unscripted and more spontaneous than his pre-prepared speeches, it offered a clearer insight into his character.
We found all seven of the key character virtues — humanity, temperance, justice, courage, transcendence, wisdom and prudence — evident in Zelenskyy’s responses to the interviewers’ questions.
The Economist interview with President Zelenskyy.
Character virtues in action The virtue of humanity relates to care, compassion, empathy and respect for others. Zelenskyy demonstrates this primarily through his focus on protecting Ukrainians from Russian aggression, but it even extends to his enemy’s suffering.
Zelenskyy expresses concern that Putin is “throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a train’s furnace”, and laments that the Russian dead are neither mourned nor buried by their own side.
This refusal to simply give way to hate and anger when speaking of his enemies also reflects a second virtue, temperance — the ability to exercise emotional control.
Zelenskyy’s modesty also reflects this virtue — in the interview he shrugs off praise for being an inspirational hero, preferring to keep to the main issues. Temperance serves to maintain emotional equilibrium, thus enabling Zelenskyy to make difficult decisions in a level-headed manner.
The virtue of justice means acting responsibly and ensuring people are treated fairly. It involves citizenship, teamwork, loyalty and accountability. Zelenskyy speaks of his “duty to protect” Ukrainians and to “signal” with his own conduct how others should act. By remaining in Ukraine, he becomes a role model of this virtue while simultaneously demonstrating the virtue of courage.
Zelenskyy’s own courage has been widely noted, but we observed that he also repeatedly acknowledges that of his fellow citizens, thereby encouraging them to act with virtue.
Humanity as virtue … President Zelenskyy visits a hospital in Kyiv in late March. Image: The Conversation/GettyImages
A formidable opponent By expressing the seemingly unshakeable hope that Ukrainians will secure victory because of their courage, Zelenskyy demonstrates the virtue of transcendence — the optimism and faith that a cause is meaningful, noble and will prevail.
Zelenskyy’s views about what motivates other countries display his wisdom. In the interview he demonstrates a broad strategic perspective and insight into the varying interests that shape other nations’ responses to the war. This helps him craft his appeals to allies, and to Russia, which then have a greater chance of resonating.
The final virtue, prudence, complements that wisdom. It involves an ability to gauge what is the right thing to do and is something of a meta-virtue, guiding the choice of which other virtues are needed from moment to moment. We found repeated instances of Zelenskyy demonstrating just that, weaving together multiple virtues in his responses to questions.
Our analysis of his leadership indicates Zelenskyy possesses strength of character and emotional, intellectual and moral clarity about what is at stake. This explains his effective crisis leadership to date. Despite the clear military mismatch between Russia and Ukraine, Putin has taken on a formidable opponent.
According to the daily reports of Russia’s Ministry of Defense the Ukraine is losing several hundred soldiers and some 30 armored vehicles per day, most of them to artillery. A flood of gruel pictures posted on Telegram by both sides confirm this. Several Ukrainian attempts to counterattack Russian forces have failed.
‘Western’ propagandists are noting that their side is losing. The typical U.S. reaction to losing is to double down. As Michael Hudson explains (vid), the economic consequences of this war will be catastrophic for many countries and people. But the neocons who are running the war do not care about those. They have a plan to profit from it. They want to stay the unipolar power of the globe. To them it is a game and their main motives include an ingrained hatred towards Russia.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Saturday slammed the fossil fuel industry for trying to use Russia’s war on Ukraine to boost polluters’ profits at the expense of the global climate and all life on Earth.
“Fossil fuel interests are now cynically using the war in Ukraine to try to lock in a high carbon future,” Guterres tweeted. “A shift to renewables is crucial to mending our broken global energy mix and offering hope to millions suffering climate impacts today.”
Climate action advocates welcomed the U.N. chief’s message — including American author and activist Bill McKibben, who said that Guterres “may understand this moment better than any other official on the planet. And this may be the most important tweet of the spring.”
Guterres’ tweet followed his Thursday trip to sites of alleged war crimes in Ukraine. During the tour, he said that “the war is evil,” emphasized the need for “a thorough investigation and accountability,” and urged Russia to cooperate with the International Criminal Court — which opened a probe after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion in February.
Putin’s war has not only impacted Russians and Ukrainians; it has also disrupted the global supply of food and fuel. Western governments have responded to the invasion by arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia — a key exporter of oil and gas.
U.S. President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last month announced a joint task force intended “to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels and strengthen European energy security.” In a letter to the pair earlier this month, over 200 groups called for ramping up the clean energy transition rather than boosting fossil fuel shipments from the United States to Europe.
“Any expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure will further reliance on fossil fuels, which is incompatible with climate science, justice, as well as U.S. and E.U. commitments to climate leadership,” the groups wrote. “We must also stress that new fossil fuel infrastructure will harm communities near fracking wells, pipelines, power plants, and LNG infrastructure.”
“LNG infrastructure can take three years or more to come online, diverting resources away from the infrastructure investments that will actually help rapidly reduce demand for gas,” they noted. “Redirecting existing LNG exports, combined with energy efficiency measures and an all-out mobilization to renewable energy, could immediately address Europe’s current reliance on Russian gas.”
The ongoing war coincides with the early April release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report — which led Guterres to declare that the world, but particularly rich nations most responsible for pollution, “must triple the speed of the shift to renewable energy.”
“That means moving investments and subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables — now,” he said at the time. “In most cases, renewables are already far cheaper. It means governments ending the funding of coal, not just abroad, but at home.”
Climate campaigners and progressive U.S. lawmakers have accused fossil fuel giants of using the war to price gouge consumers while filling the pockets of top executives and shareholders. Members of Congress are weighing a windfall profits tax intended to prevent such behavior by companies while providing relief via rebates to people facing high prices at the pump.
As Common Dreamsreported Friday, Chevron and ExxonMobil announced that their profits soared during the first quarter of this year — to $6.3 billion and $5.5 billion, respectively — bolstering demands for a windfall tax.
“This is robbery,” asserted Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, calling on Congress to pass a tax bill. “Big Oil is intentionally profiteering off the war in Ukraine — a crisis they helped create by working with Putin for decades to expand Russian oil and gas production.”
During World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries together—the emerging imperial giant (the United States), the declining capitalist power (Great Britain), and the first socialist state (the Soviet Union)—was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe. Rhetorically, the high point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, three months before the German armies were defeated.
At Yalta, the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war against Japan.
A comedic actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in the Trump impeachment theater. But when Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Zelensky was suddenly transformed to an A-list celebrity in US media. American news consumers were bombarded with images of a man who appeared overcome by the tragic events, possibly in over his head, but ultimately sympathetic. It didn’t take long for that image to evolve into the khaki-clad, tireless hero governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the barbarians of autocracy from the east.
Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it, they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.
2014 saw two pivotal events that led to the current conflict in Ukraine.
The first, familiar to all, was the coup in Ukraine in which a democratically elected government was overthrown at the direction of the United States and with the assistance of neo-Nazi elements which Ukraine has long harbored.
Shortly thereafter the first shots in the present war were fired on the Russian-sympathetic Donbass region by the newly installed Ukrainian government. The shelling of the Donbass which claimed 14,000 lives, has continued for 8 years, despite attempts at a cease-fire under the Minsk accords which Russia, France and Germany agreed upon but Ukraine backed by the US refused to implement. On February 24, 2022, Russia finally responded to the slaughter in Donbass and the threat of NATO on its doorstep.
Russia Turns to the East – China Provides an Alternative Economic Powerhouse
The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and, in fact, rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media. In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP). (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA. Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.) One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South. This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end. As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured.
Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable U.S. sanctions poured onto Russia. China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia. This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime.
The World Majority Refuses to Back U.S. Sanctions
But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime. And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India. India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up. India did not budge.
India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era. India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by U.S. threats. India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange. In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of U.S. diktat. Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly? Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction? What’s the world’s first most important relationship?
India is but one example of the shift in power. Out of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia. That means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the sanctions. Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s population. Most of Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil), East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of Taiwan) have refused. (India and China alone represent 35% of humanity.)
Add to that fact that 40 different countries are now the targets of US sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish economic tactics of the U.S.
Finally, at the recent G-20 Summit a walkout led by the US when the Russia delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20 countries, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join! Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting later in the year in Bali was rebuffed by Indonesia which currently holds the G-20 Presidency.
Nations Taking Russia’s side are no longer poor as in Cold War 1.0.
These dissenting countries of the Global South are no longer as poor as they were during the Cold War. Of the top 10 countries in PPP-GDP, 5 do not support the sanctions. And these include China (number one) and India (number 3). So the first and third most powerful economies stand against the US on this matter. (Russia is number 6 on that list about equal to Germany, number 5, the two being close to equal, belying the idea that Russia’s economy is negligible.)
These stands are vastly more significant than any UN vote. Such votes can be coerced by a great power and little attention is paid to them in the world. But the economic interests of a nation and its view of the main danger in the world are important determinants of how it reacts economically – for example, to sanctions. A “no” to US sanctions is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.
We in the West hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of the crisis in Ukraine. If one is speaking about the Eurovassal states and the Anglosphere, that is true. But considering humanity as a whole and among the rising economies of the world, it is the US that stands isolated. And even in Europe, cracks are emerging. Hungary and Serbia have not joined the sanctions regime and, of course, most European countries will not and indeed cannot turn away from Russian energy imports crucial to their economies. It appears that the grand scheme of U.S. global hegemony to be brought about by the US move to WWII Redux, both Cold and Hot, has hit a mighty snag.
For those who look forward to a multipolar world, this is a welcome turn of events emerging out of the cruel tragedy of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. The possibility of a saner, more prosperous multipolar world lies ahead – if we can get there.
On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretaries Blinken and Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion.
The top priority of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine has been to destroy as many of these weapons as possible before they reach the front lines of the war, so it is not clear how militarily effective these massive arms shipments really are. The other leg of U.S. “support” for Ukraine is its economic and financial sanctions against Russia, whose effectiveness is also highly uncertain.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is visiting Moscow and Kyiv to try to kick start negotiations for a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Since hopes for earlier peace negotiations in Belarus and Turkey have been washed away in a tide of military escalation, hostile rhetoric and politicized war crimes accusations, Secretary General Guterres’ mission may now be the best hope for peace in Ukraine.
This pattern of early hopes for a diplomatic resolution that are quickly dashed by a war psychosis is not unusual. Data on how wars end from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) make it clear that the first month of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace agreement. That window has now passed for Ukraine.
An analysis of the UCDP data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that 44% of wars that end within a month end in a ceasefire and peace agreement rather than the decisive defeat of either side, while that decreases to 24% in wars that last between a month and a year. Once wars rage on into a second year, they become even more intractable and usually last more than ten years.
CSIS fellow Benjamin Jensen, who analyzed the UCDP data, concluded:
The time for diplomacy is now. The longer a war lasts absent concessions by both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted conflict… In addition to punishment, Russian officials need a viable diplomatic off-ramp that addresses the concerns of all parties.
To be successful, diplomacy leading to a peace agreement must meet five basic conditions:
First, all sides must gain benefits from the peace agreement that outweigh what they think they can gain by war.
U.S. and allied officials are waging an information war to promote the idea that Russia is losing the war and that Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia, even as some officials admit that that could take several years.
In reality, neither side will benefit from a protracted war that lasts for many months or years. The lives of millions of Ukrainians will be lost and ruined, while Russia will be mired in the kind of military quagmire that both the U.S.S.R. and the United States already experienced in Afghanistan, and that most recent U.S. wars have turned into.
In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a peace agreement already exist. They are: withdrawal of Russian forces; Ukrainian neutrality between NATO and Russia; self-determination for all Ukrainians (including in Crimea and Donbas); and a regional security agreement that protects everyone and prevents new wars.
Both sides are essentially fighting to strengthen their hand in an eventual agreement along those lines. So how many people must die before the details can be worked out across a negotiating table instead of over the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?
Second, mediators must be impartial and trusted by both sides.
The United States has monopolized the role of mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for decades, even as it openly backs and arms one side and abuses its UN veto to prevent international action. This has been a transparent model for endless war.
Turkey has so far acted as the principal mediator between Russia and Ukraine, but it is a NATO member that has supplied drones, weapons and military training to Ukraine. Both sides have accepted Turkey’s mediation, but can Turkey really be an honest broker?
The UN could play a legitimate role, as it is doing in Yemen, where the two sides are finally observing a two-month ceasefire. But even with the UN’s best efforts, it has taken years to negotiate this fragile pause in the war.
Third, the agreement must address the main concerns of all parties to the war.
In 2014, the U.S.-backed coup and the massacre of anti-coup protesters in Odessa led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The first Minsk Protocol agreement in September 2014 failed to end the ensuing civil war in Eastern Ukraine. A critical difference in the Minsk II agreement in February 2015 was that DPR and LPR representatives were included in the negotiations, and it succeeded in ending the worst fighting and preventing a major new outbreak of war for 7 years.
There is another party that was largely absent from the negotiations in Belarus and Turkey, people who make up half the population of Russia and Ukraine: the women of both countries. While some of them are fighting, many more can speak as victims, civilian casualties and refugees from a war unleashed mainly by men. The voices of women at the table would be a constant reminder of the human costs of war and the lives of women and children that are at stake.
Even when one side militarily wins a war, the grievances of the losers and unresolved political and strategic issues often sow the seeds of new outbreaks of war in the future. As Benjamin Jensen of CSIS suggested, the desires of U.S. and Western politicians to punish and gain strategic advantage over Russia must not be allowed to prevent a comprehensive resolution that addresses the concerns of all sides and ensures a lasting peace.
Fourth, there must be a step-by-step roadmap to a stable and lasting peace that all sides are committed to.
The Minsk II agreement led to a fragile ceasefire and established a roadmap to a political solution. But the Ukrainian government and parliament, under Presidents Poroshenko and then Zelensky, failed to take the next steps that Poroshenko agreed to in Minsk in 2015: to pass laws and constitutional changes to permit independent, internationally-supervised elections in the DPR and LPR, and to grant them autonomy within a federalized Ukrainian state.
Now that these failures have led to Russian recognition of the DPR and LPR’s independence, a new peace agreement must revisit and resolve their status, and that of Crimea, in ways that all sides will be committed to, whether that is through the autonomy promised in Minsk II or formal, recognized independence from Ukraine.
A sticking point in the peace negotiations in Turkey was Ukraine’s need for solid security guarantees to ensure that Russia won’t invade it again. The UN Charter formally protects all countries from international aggression, but it has repeatedly failed to do so when the aggressor, usually the United States, wields a Security Council veto. So how can a neutral Ukraine be reassured that it will be safe from attack in the future? And how can all parties be sure that the others will stick to the agreement this time?
Fifth, outside powers must not undermine the negotiation or implementation of a peace agreement.
Although the United States and its NATO allies are not active warring parties in Ukraine, their role in provoking this crisis through NATO expansion and the 2014 coup, then supporting Kyiv’s abandonment of the Minsk II agreement and flooding Ukraine with weapons, make them an “elephant in the room” that will cast a long shadow over the negotiating table, wherever that is.
In April 2012, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan drew up a six-point plan for a UN-monitored ceasefire and political transition in Syria. But at the very moment that the Annan plan took effect and UN ceasefire monitors were in place, the United States, NATO and their Arab monarchist allies held three “Friends of Syria” conferences, where they pledged virtually unlimited financial and military aid to the Al Qaeda-linked rebels they were backing to overthrow the Syrian government. This encouraged the rebels to ignore the ceasefire, and led to another decade of war for the people of Syria.
The fragile nature of peace negotiations over Ukraine make success highly vulnerable to such powerful external influences. The United States backed Ukraine in a confrontational approach to the civil war in Donbas instead of supporting the terms of the Minsk II agreement, and this has led to war with Russia. Now Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavosoglu, has toldCNN Turk that unnamed NATO members “want the war to continue,” in order to keep weakening Russia.
Conclusion
How the United States and its NATO allies act now and in the coming months will be crucial in determining whether Ukraine is destroyed by years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, or whether this war ends quickly through a diplomatic process that brings peace, security and stability to the people of Russia, Ukraine and their neighbors.
If the United States wants to help restore peace in Ukraine, it must diplomatically support peace negotiations, and make it clear to its ally, Ukraine, that it will support any concessions that Ukrainian negotiators believe are necessary to clinch a peace agreement with Russia.
Whatever mediator Russia and Ukraine agree to work with to try to resolve this crisis, the United States must give the diplomatic process its full, unreserved support, both in public and behind closed doors. It must also ensure that its own actions do not undermine the peace process in Ukraine as they did the Annan plan in Syria in 2012.
One of the most critical steps that U.S. and NATO leaders can take to provide an incentive for Russia to agree to a negotiated peace is to commit to lifting their sanctions if and when Russia complies with a withdrawal agreement. Without such a commitment, the sanctions will quickly lose any moral or practical value as leverage over Russia, and will be only an arbitrary form of collective punishment against its people, and against poor people everywhere who can no longer afford food to feed their families. As the de facto leader of the NATO military alliance, the U.S. position on this question will be crucial.
So policy decisions by the United States will have a critical impact on whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war. The test for U.S. policymakers, and for Americans who care about the people of Ukraine, must be to ask which of these outcomes U.S. policy choices are likely to lead to.
Now I’m interested to read — so many interesting things in the papers these days, providing you read beyond the American dailies — that Ursula von der Leyen spent two days in New Delhi this week. The dull, ineffectual president of the European Commission was peddling two items: European weaponry — surprise, surprise — and Western sanctions against Russia. Apart from the material agreements New Delhi and Moscow signed in December, the Modi government has declined to condemn the Russian intervention in Ukraine and is not participating in the sanctions regime.
What are we looking at here? Two matters are worth noting.
Since power equals force times speed… Thus, a smaller man who can swing faster may hit as hard or as far as the heavier man who swings slowly.
— Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Vladimir Putin has won one of the amazing strategic military victories in history.
The Ukrainians had an army of over 300,000, led by 50,000 to 100,000 fascist fanatics, with hi-tech weapons provided by NATO and with training by the best American, British and Canadian military advisors. They were confident that they could blitz what was left of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and finish their campaign of ethnic cleansing.
But the lightning attack they planned for this Spring was not to happen.
The Russians struck first — fielding a must smaller force, perhaps just 100,000 strong, punching through Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) defenses and cutting them off from support — kettling them in Eastern Ukraine where they were vulnerable to artillery and airstrikes. Bruce Lee would have been proud.
Fencing Without A Sword
Lee described Jeet Kune Do as “fencing without a sword”, hence his characteristic stance and use of distance, quite unlike the Wing Chun he learned from Yip Man. Feint, thrust, riposte — these are basics — which in Jeet are done almost simultaneously.
These are also what Putin did — feint, thrust, and riposte. Like Lee, he is a learner.
By contrast, Americans rely on brute force, usually in gangs — umm… “alliances”.
The tactics of the NATO gang inevitably involves “shock and awe”, indiscriminate bombing with B52s, the use of uranium munitions, — with the attempt to preserve the lives of one’s own soldiers at expense of women and children in the communities under attack. For every combatant killed about 9 or 10 women and children die.
Indiscriminate bombing with B52s flatten infrastructure and deprive people of the necessities of life. The use of uranium munitions poisons the environment leading to massive increases in cancer later. The result is both social and environmental disaster. “Shock and awe” is “scorched earth” rebranded Hollywood style. Check out the video game.
But shock and awe is usually preceded by or accompanies by economic warfare that end up condemning millions to death through starvation and disease. Think: Iraq. Think: Afghanistan.
Putin’s Psychology
Way back when, before Joe Biden and his corrupt son Hunter, had probably ever heard of Kiev, Putin had planned to retire in favor of Medvedev. He never really wanted to be a politician. Then Medvedev showed his colors as an Atlanticist, by not opposing the Libya War of 2011. Putin changed his mind. He was, according to all reports, genuinely shocked at the manner of Gaddafi’s death , sodomized with a bayonet. He had done a lot for Russia but if he left the country in the hands of the Atlanticists, it was as doomed as Libya.
The Internet is full of psychologizing about Putin. He is supposedly a narcissist, a psychopath, and various other things, totally lacking in empathy due to early childhood adversity, living in a single apartment with two other families. What is not mentioned is that those two other families — both Jewish — and his Jewish mother gave him a lot of love, and people throughout his life stepped in to mentor and help him. Putin has a lot to give back, or “pay forward”.
“He took us to a very famous museum in St. Petersburg,” Rourke said of meeting Putin. “And then later he took me to a children’s cancer hospital. And we went in there and visited the really, really sick, little, tiny, tiny kids. I looked over at him and I saw him and, nobody’s going to want to hear this, but I saw a man with empathy and who was really moved by what these children are going through.“
Contrast that with Hillary Clinton cackling like the Wicked Witch which she is about Gaddafi’s death — or Obama boasting about how good he was at killing by drone — 90% women and children of course.
OK but CNN will tell you that Putin is a psychopath. Madeline Albright, who didn’t blink an eye at murdering half a million children describes him as “reptilian”.
If this is a psychpath, we need more like him.
The Tao of Russian Strategy
In Jeet Kune Do, unlike Wing Chun, distance and positioning are very important. This is because Jeet is both offensive and defensive, whereas Wing chun emphasizes close-in defense in confined quarters.
As with Musashi Miyamoto, Bruce Lee always emphasized pre-knowledge of what an opponent may do, to attack pre-emptively — which, of course, what Putin did.
In 2014, however, the situation was murky to say the least.
“When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one.”
— Sun Tzu, “III. Attack by Stratagem” in The Art of War
Putin knew that he did not know.
He who knows not, knows not, he knows not, he is a fool shun him.
He who knows not and he knows not, he is simple teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows, he is asleep, awaken him.
He who knows and knows that he knows, he is wise, follow him.
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune
I would add this: He who knows he knows not, knows to know.
Russia had to learn. I had to know.
Certainly, Russia was not strong enough in 2014 to take on the Ukraine AND NATO — not without using tactical nukes. But what were the West’s real intentions? Could they be persuaded to adopt a different path? Putin couldn’t know.
But he soon found out.
Failure to implement the Minsk accords, the MH117 and Skripal false flags, CIA sponsored chemical false flag attacks in Syria and the like — and especially sanctions on both Russia and China — showed him that this new version of “the Great Game” was no game at all. More like the Hunger Games.
If you grow up on the streets, as Putin did, you learn to avoid gangs and fights — except when there is no choice — but to be vigilant and plan countermeasures in advance. So Putin continued to develop military technologies, notably hypersonic missiles, the kalibr missile and supersonic torpedoes that gave Russia the edge.
Subduing the whale
It is clear that in 2022, the Ukrainians thought they could rely on the support of NATO, if not NATO intervention, as they had after the CIA coup in 2014. As fascists, they saw Russia’s consistent efforts to resolve the issues diplomatically as weakness.
War was coming one way or the other. And, as both Bruce Lee and Musashi Miyamoto would advise, it is best to attack first in such a case.
The Russians had done what it could to resolve the crisis diplomatically despite the Ukrainian fascists occupying more than half of Eastern Ukraine and killing about 15,000 people, mostly civilians. But now it was going to full-on ethnic cleansing, with maximum loss of life— aka genocide.
Russian intelligence gave prior warning of the Ukraine’s nuclear intentions as well as the existence of biolabs possibly developing pathogens tuned to specific DNA sets, which could, in theory, result in bioweapons targeting certain ethnic groups. The punitive sanctions against both Russia and China amounting to economic war and increasing bellicosity signified that the US wanted to takeover where Hitler and Japan had left off, the domination of Eurasia, even without slave camps and mass murder.
By this time, Putin had reformed and developed the Russian military, explored new tactics and weapons in Syria, and re-imagined the FSB as something that KGB people in his day could only dream about and that the CIA might aspire to, if it could move beyond bias confirmation.
American Advantages as Disadvantages
Ah…, but what about the US’s huge array of hi-tech weapons?
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
— Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Putin focused Russia’s efforts on developing just a few, really effective kicks (as it were). The Kalibr missile system, hypersonic weapons, the S500 and advanced S200 systems. UAVs. The old SU27 family became the advanced SU30 and SU34 systems. Most of these weapons were tested in Syria. The focus was on practicality.
“Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.”
— Miyamoto Musashi, precept of the Dokkodo
While in Russia, weapons companies serve the State, in the US the State serves the weapons companies — so enormous amounts of money go to developing ever more expensive and technologically complex weapons systems such as the F35, the most expensive fighter program in history that is in most respects is already obsolete. Aircraft carriers cost billions of dollars and are, like Japan’s Yamamoto battleship, just large, vulnerable, and now indefensible targets.
Musashi subduing the whale
Yes, the US is the whale. And Putin therefore is Musashi.
And how much of American weapons tech works?
The Americans have recently claimed that Russia suffers a 60% misfire rate. But where do they get these numbers — the Russians obviously don’t say!
Those statistics come from the Ukrainians who use obsolete Soviet missiles, which indeed frequently blow up, and from the American Tomahawk missiles, not to mention from the US’s many failed attempts at hypersonic weapons.
With sanctions, Russia doesn’t have the money to waste and it puts the needs of its people first.
The US puts the needs of the Military Industrial Complex first — by beggaring healthcare, education and infrastructure.
Feint, Thrust, Riposte
Putin was able to leverage good intelligence of his enemies’ intentions with highly trained mobile forces that could be literally everywhere from Donbass in the south to Chernobyl in the north.
Aware that the genocidal lunatic fringe running the Ukraine cared nothing about the country’s people, only their own ethnic kin — having already made the Ukraine one of the world’s greatest economic disasters and prompting an huge exodus of economic refugees — Putin immediately secured nuclear facilities and biolabs to prevent the “neo-Nazi” lunatic fanatic fringe running from creating dirty bombs or releasing pathogens.
The war was really won in the first week.
Of course, Russia lost men and about 200 tanks that first week but saved lives in subsequent weeks. Since that devastating first punch, Russia has lost very few tanks, moving more slowly, using laser detectors, UAVS, satellite imagery and human intelligence to prevent sneak attacks. The UAF has not been able to mount a single successful counterattack and the government will likely soon abandon Kiev.
The Russians are not afraid to take casualties — they are fighting an existential war and every Russian has a relative who died in the Great Patriotic War. Putin, therefore, has enormous support, except among the Atlanticists, the elitist carpetbaggers left over from the Yeltsin kleptocracy.
Americans haven’t fought an existential war — since the Civil War. They don’t like casualties, even the paltry 55,000 or so that ended the Vietnam War. For them, war is a video game.
Let us remember that the US has not won a war against a more or less equal opponent since the Pacific War. In fact, it has lost almost every war since against less capable opponents — notably Vietnam and Afghanistan.
They will lose this one too.
Note:
For the record, I have studied judo, jiu jitsu, karate, shorinji (Japanese Shaolin), and aikido, with some knowledge of ninjutsu. Not that I am good at any of them — but I know something of the zen and tao principles that apply. Putin studied combat Sambo when he was young to deal with bullies. Combat Sambo (as distinct from Sport Sambo) is similar to jiu jutsu — from which judo evolved, and it is, in some respects, similar to Lee’s Jeet. Putin went on to study judo, which is not really useful for combat but whose training inculcates oriental world views. More recently, Putin became interested in Kung Fu and took an exhausting trip to the Shaolin Monastery, with which he has maintained ties ever since, with both his daughters trained in Shaolin. Shaolin is also a “way”, as all Chinese martial arts are and reflects the teachings of Taoist masters.
The Biden administration participated in a prisoner swap with Russia this week, freeing a Russian pilot who was jailed in Connecticut on drug charges in return for a Marine veteran imprisoned in Russia since 2019. Meanwhile, the fate of jailed basketball player Brittney Griner remains unclear. The Phoenix Mercury center is one of the biggest stars of the WNBA, but both the league and the Biden administration have said little about her case since she was arrested at a Russian airport on February 17 on allegations of carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. “There are signs that this is clearly politically motivated from the start, but the White House and the State Department seem to be giving the WNBA this advice to remain silent,” says journalist Maya Goldberg-Safir, who wrote about the lack of public attention on Griner’s case in a recent article for Jacobin. “We know that in order to get Brittney Griner home, the White House will need to intervene.” Goldberg-Safir also notes that Griner, like many WNBA players, plays abroad during the off-season for extra income, and her arrest highlights the gender pay gap in professional sports that may have placed her at additional risk.
Since World War I, propaganda has played a crucial role in warfare. Propaganda is used to increase support for the war among citizens of the nation that is waging it. National governments also use targeted propaganda campaigns in an attempt to influence public opinion and behavior in the countries they are at war with, as well as to influence international opinion. Essentially, propaganda, whether circulated through state-controlled or private media, refers to techniques of public opinion manipulation based on incomplete or misleading information, lies and deception. During World War II, both the Nazis and the Allies invested heavily in propaganda operations as part of each side’s overall effort to win the war.
The war in Ukraine is no different. Both Russian and Ukrainian leaders have undertaken a campaign of systematic dissemination of warfare information that can easily be designated as propaganda. Other parties with a stake in the conflict, such as the United States and China, are also engaged in propaganda operations, which work in tandem with their apparent lack of interest in diplomatic undertakings to end the war.
In the interview that follows, leading scholar and dissident Noam Chomsky, who, along with Edward Herman, constructed the concept of the “propaganda model,” looks at the question of who is winning the propaganda war in Ukraine. Additionally, he discusses how social media shape political reality today, analyzes whether the “propaganda model” still works, and dissects the role of the use of “whataboutism.” Lastly, he shares his thoughts on the case of Julian Assange and what his now almost certain extradition to the United States for having committed the “crime” of releasing public information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq says about U.S. democratic principles.
Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive. His intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, as his work has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs. He is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: Wartime propaganda has become in the modern world a powerful weapon in garnering public support for war and providing a moral justification for it, usually by highlighting the “evil” nature of the enemy. It’s also used in order to break down the will of the enemy forces to fight. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda seems so far to be working inside Russia and dominating Chinese social media, but it looks like Ukraine is winning the information war in the global arena, especially in the West. Do you agree with this assessment? Any significant lies or war-myths around the Russia-Ukraine conflict worth pointing out?
Noam Chomsky: Wartime propaganda has been a powerful weapon for a long time, I suspect as far back as we can trace the historical record. And often a weapon with long-term consequences, which merit attention and thought.
Just to keep to modern times, in 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sank in Havana harbor, probably from an internal explosion. The Hearst press succeeded in arousing a wave of popular hysteria about the evil nature of Spain. That provided the needed background for an invasion of Cuba that is called here “the liberation of Cuba.” Or, as it should be called, the prevention of Cuba’s self-liberation from Spain, turning Cuba into a virtual U.S. colony. So it remained until 1959, when Cuba was indeed liberated, and the U.S., almost at once, undertook a vicious campaign of terror and sanctions to end Cuba’s “successful defiance” of the 150-year-old U.S. policy of dominating the hemisphere, as the State Department explained 50 years ago.
Whipping up war myths can have long-term consequences.
A few years later, in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected president with the slogan “Peace without Victory.” That was quickly transmuted to Victory without Peace. A flood of war myths quickly turned a pacifist population to one consumed with hatred for all things German. The propaganda at first emanated from the British Ministry of Information; we know what that means. American intellectuals of the liberal Dewey circle lapped it up enthusiastically, declaring themselves to be the leaders of the campaign to liberate the world. For the first time in history, they soberly explained, war was not initiated by military or political elites, but by the thoughtful intellectuals — them — who had carefully studied the situation and after careful deliberation, rationally determined the right course of action: to enter the war, to bring liberty and freedom to the world, and to end the Hun atrocities concocted by the British Ministry of Information.
One consequence of the very effective Hate Germany campaigns was imposition of a victor’s peace, with harsh treatment of defeated Germany. Some strongly objected, notably John Maynard Keynes. They were ignored. That gave us Hitler.
In a previous interview, we discussed how Ambassador Chas Freeman compared the postwar Hate Germany settlement with a triumph of statesmanship (not by nice people): The Congress of Vienna, 1815. The Congress sought to establish a European order after Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Europe had been overcome. Judiciously, the Congress incorporated defeated France. That led to a century of relative peace in Europe.
There are some lessons.
Not to be outdone by the British, President Wilson established his own propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information (Creel Commission), which performed its own services.
These exercises also had a long-term effect. Among the members of the Commission were Walter Lippmann, who went on to become the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, and Edward Bernays, who became a prime founder of the modern public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda agency, dedicated to undermining markets by creating uninformed consumers making irrational choices — the opposite of what one learns about markets in Econ 101. By stimulating rampant consumerism, the industry is also driving the world to disaster, another topic.
Both Lippmann and Bernays credited the Creel Commission for demonstrating the power of propaganda in “manufacturing consent” (Lippmann) and “engineering of consent” (Bernays). This “new art in the practice of democracy,” Lippmann explained, could be used to keep the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” — the general public — passive and obedient while the self-designated “responsible men” will attend to important matters, free from the “trampling and roar of a bewildered herd.” Bernays expressed similar views. They were not alone.
Lippmann and Bernays were Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals. The conception of democracy they elaborated was quite in accord with dominant liberal conceptions, then and since.
The ideas extend broadly to the more free societies, where “unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force,” as George Orwell put the matter in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm on “literary censorship” in England.
So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.
It often works, quite spectacularly. In today’s Russia, according to reports, a large majority accept the doctrine that in Ukraine, Russia is defending itself against a Nazi onslaught reminiscent of World War II, when Ukraine was, in fact, collaborating in the aggression that came close to destroying Russia while exacting a horrific toll.
The propaganda is as nonsensical as war myths generally, but like others, it relies on shreds of truth, and has, it seems, been effective domestically in manufacturing consent.
We cannot really be sure because of the rigid censorship now in force, a hallmark of U.S. political culture from far back: the “bewildered herd” must be protected from the “wrong ideas.” Accordingly, Americans must be “protected” from propaganda which, we are told, is so ludicrous that only the most fully brainwashed could possibly keep from laughing.
According to this view, to punish Vladimir Putin, all material emanating from Russia must be rigorously barred from American ears. That includes the work of outstanding U.S. journalists and political commentators, like Chris Hedges, whose long record of courageous journalism includes his service as TheNew York Times Middle East and Balkans bureau chief, and astute and perceptive commentary since. Americans must be protected from his evil influence, because his reports appear on RT. They have now been expunged. Americans are “saved” from reading them.
Take that, Mr. Putin.
As we would expect in a free society, it is possible, with some effort, to learn something about Russia’s official position on the war — or as Russia calls it, “special military operation.” For example, via India, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a long interview with India Today TV on April 19.
We constantly witness instructive effects of this rigid indoctrination. One is that it is de rigueur to refer to Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine as his “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” A Google search for this phrase finds “About 2,430,000 results” (in 0.42 seconds).
Out of curiosity, we might search for “unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” The search yields “About 11,700 results” (in 0.35 seconds) — apparently from antiwar sources, a brief search suggests.
The example is interesting not only in itself, but because of its sharp reversal of the facts. The Iraq War was totally unprovoked: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had to struggle hard, even to resort to torture, to try to find some particle of evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The famous disappearing weapons of mass destruction wouldn’t have been a provocation for aggression even if there had been some reason to believe that they existed.
In contrast, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was most definitely provoked — though in today’s climate, it is necessary to add the truism that provocation provides no justification for the invasion.
A host of high-level U.S. diplomats and policy analysts have been warning Washington for 30 years that it was reckless and needlessly provocative to ignore Russia’s security concerns, particularly its red lines: No NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland.
In full understanding of what it was doing, since 2014, NATO (meaning basically the U.S.), has “provided significant support [to Ukraine] with equipment, with training, 10s of 1000s of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained, and then when we saw the intelligence indicating a highly likely invasion Allies stepped up last autumn and this winter,” before the invasion, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
The U.S. commitment to integrate Ukraine within the NATO command was also stepped up in fall 2021 with the official policy statements we have already discussed — kept from the bewildered herd by the “free press,” but surely read carefully by Russian intelligence. Russian intelligence did not have to be informed that “prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO,” as the State Department conceded, with little notice here.
Without going into any further details, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked. That is exactly the opposite of standard commentary and reporting. But it is also exactly the norm of wartime propaganda, not just in the U.S., though it is more instructive to observe the process in free societies.
Many feel that it is wrong to bring up such matters, even a form of pro-Putin propaganda: we should, rather, focus laser-like on Russia’s ongoing crimes. Contrary to their beliefs, that stand does not help Ukrainians. It harms them. If we are barred, by dictate, from learning about ourselves, we will not be able to develop policies that will benefit others, Ukrainians among them. That seems elementary.
Further analysis yields many other instructive examples. We discussed Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe’s praise for President George W. Bush’s decision in 2003 to “aid the Iraqi people” by seizing “Iraqi funds sitting in American banks” — and, incidentally, invading and destroying the country, too unimportant to mention. More fully, the funds were seized “to aid the Iraqi people and to compensate victims of terrorism,” for which the Iraqi people bore no responsibility.
We didn’t go on to ask how the Iraqi people were to be aided. It is a fair guess that it is not compensation for U.S. pre-invasion “genocide” in Iraq.
“Genocide” is not my term. Rather, it is the term used by the distinguished international diplomats who administered the “Oil-for-Food program,” the soft side of President Bill Clinton’s sanctions (technically, via the UN). The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest because he regarded the sanctions as “genocidal.” He was replaced by Hans von Sponeck, who not only resigned in protest with the same charge, but also wrote a very important book providing extensive details of the shocking torture of Iraqis by Clinton’s sanctions, A Different Kind of War.
Americans are not entirely protected from such unpleasant revelations. Though von Sponeck’s book was never reviewed, as far as I can determine, it can be purchased from Amazon (for $95) by anyone who has happened to hear about it. And the small publisher that released the English edition was even able to collect two blurbs: from John Pilger and me, suitably remote from the mainstream.
There is, of course, a flood of commentary about “genocide.” By the standards used, the U.S. and its allies are guilty of the charge over and over, but voluntary censorship prevents any acknowledgment of this, just as it protects Americans from international Gallup polls showing that the U.S. is regarded as by far the greatest threat to world peace, or that world public opinion overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (also “unprovoked,” if we pay attention), and other improper information.
I don’t think there are “significant lies” in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.
That pattern is also normal. We are very scrupulous in unearthing details about crimes of others. There are, to be sure, sometimes fabrications, sometimes reaching the level of comedy, matters that the late Edward Herman and I documented in extensive detail. But when enemy crimes can be observed directly, on the ground, journalists typically do a fine job reporting and exposing them. And they are explored further in scholarship and extensive investigations.
As we’ve discussed, on the very rare occasions when U.S. crimes are so blatant that they can’t be dismissed or ignored, they may also be reported, but in such a way as to conceal the far greater crimes to which they are a small footnote. The My Lai massacre, for example.
On Ukraine winning the information war, the qualification “in the West” is accurate. The U.S. has always been enthusiastic and rigorous in exposing crimes of its enemies, and in the current case, Europe is going along. But outside of U.S.-Europe, the picture is more ambiguous. In the Global South, the home of most of the world’s population, the invasion is denounced but the U.S. propaganda framework is not uncritically adopted, a fact that has led to considerable puzzlement here as to why they are “out of step.”
That’s quite normal too. The traditional victims of brutal violence and repression often see the world rather differently from those who are used to holding the whip.
Even in Australia, there’s a measure of insubordination. In the international affairs journal Arena, editor Stanley Cooper reviews and deplores the rigid censorship and intolerance of even mild dissent in U.S. liberal media. He concludes, reasonably enough, that, “This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine.”
No help to suffering Ukrainians, of course.
That’s also nothing new. That has been a dominant pattern for a long time, notably during World War I. There were a few who didn’t simply conform to the orthodoxy established after Wilson joined the war. The country’s leading labor leader, Eugene Debs, was jailed for daring to suggest to workers that they should think for themselves. He was so detested by the liberal Wilson administration that he was excluded from Wilson’s postwar amnesty. In the liberal Deweyite intellectual circles, there were also some who were disobedient. The most famous was Randolph Bourne. He was not imprisoned but was barred from liberal journals so that he could not spread his subversive message that “war is the health of the state.”
I should mention that a few years later, much to his credit, Dewey himself sharply reversed his stand.
It is understandable that liberals should be particularly excited when there is an opportunity to condemn enemy crimes. For once, they are on the side of power. The crimes are real, and they can march in the parade that is rightly condemning them and be praised for their (quite proper) conformity. That is very tempting for those who sometimes, even if timidly, condemn crimes for which we share responsibility and are therefore castigated for adherence to elementary moral principles.
Has the spread of social media made it more or less difficult to get an accurate picture of political reality?
Hard to say. Particularly hard for me to say because I avoid social media and only have limited information. My impression is that it is a mixed story.
Social media provide opportunities to hear a variety of perspectives and analyses, and to find information that is often unavailable in the mainstream. On the other hand, it is not clear how well these opportunities are exploited. There has been a good deal of commentary — confirmed by my own limited experience — arguing that many tend to gravitate to self-reinforcing bubbles, hearing little beyond their own beliefs and attitudes, and worse, entrenching these more firmly and in more intense and extreme forms.
That aside, the basic news sources remain pretty much as they were: the mainstream press, which has reporters and bureaus on the ground. The internet offers opportunities to sample a much wider range of such media, but my impression, again, is that these opportunities are little used.
One harmful consequence of the rapid proliferation of social media is the sharp decline of mainstream media. Not long ago, there were many fine local media in the U.S. Mostly gone. Few even have Washington bureaus, let alone elsewhere, as many did not long ago. During Ronald Reagan’s Central America wars, which reached extremes of sadism, some of the finest reporting was done by reporters of the Boston Globe, some close personal friends. That has all virtually disappeared.
The basic reason is advertiser reliance, one of the curses of the capitalist system. The founding fathers had a different vision. They favored a truly independent press and fostered it. The Post Office was largely established for this purpose, providing cheap access to an independent press.
In keeping with the fact that it is to an unusual extent a business-run society, the U.S. is also unusual in that it has virtually no public media: nothing like the BBC, for example. Efforts to develop public service media — first in radio, later in TV — were beaten back by intense business lobbying.
There’s excellent scholarly work on this topic, which extends also to serious activist initiatives to overcome these serious infringements on democracy, particularly by Robert McChesney and Victor Pickard.
Nearly 35 years ago, you and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book introduced the “propaganda model” of communication which operates through five filters: ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy. Has the digital age changed the “propaganda” model?” Does it still work?
Unfortunately, Edward — the prime author — is no longer with us. Sorely missed. I think he would agree with me that the digital age hasn’t changed much, beyond what I just described. What survives of mainstream media in a largely business-run society still remains the main source of information and is subject to the same kinds of pressures as before.
There have been important changes apart from what I briefly mentioned. Much like other institutions, even including the corporate sector, the media have been influenced by the civilizing effects of the popular movements of the ‘60s and their aftermath. It is quite illuminating to see what passed for appropriate commentary and reporting in earlier years. Many journalists have themselves gone through these liberating experiences.
Naturally, there is a huge backlash, including passionate denunciations of “woke” culture that recognizes that there are human beings with rights apart from white Christian males. Since Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” the GOP leadership has understood that since they cannot possibly win votes on their economic policies of service to great wealth and corporate power, they must try to direct attention to “cultural issues”: the false idea of a “Great Replacement,” or guns, or indeed anything to obscure the fact that we’re working hard to stab you in the back. Donald Trump was a master of this technique, sometimes called the “thief, thief” technique: when you’re caught with your hand in someone’s pocket, shout “thief, thief” and point somewhere else.
Despite these efforts, the media have improved in this regard, reflecting changes in the general society. That’s by no means unimportant.
What do you make of “whataboutism,” which is stirring up quite a controversy these days on account of the ongoing war in Ukraine?
Here again there’s a long history. In the early postwar period [World War II], independent thought could be silenced by charges of comsymp: you’re an apologist for Stalin’s crimes. It’s sometimes condemned as McCarthyism, but that was only the vulgar tip of the iceberg. What is now denounced as “cancel culture” was rampant and remained so.
That technique lost some of its power as the country began to awaken from dogmatic slumber in the ‘60s. In the early ‘80s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a major Reaganite foreign policy intellectual, devised another technique: moral equivalence. If you reveal and criticize the atrocities that she was supporting in the Reagan administration, you’re guilty of “moral equivalence.” You’re claiming that Reagan is no different than Stalin or Hitler. That served for a time to subdue dissent from the party line.
Whataboutism is a new variant, hardly different from its predecessors.
For the true totalitarian mentality, none of this is enough. GOP leaders are working hard to cleanse the schools of anything that is “divisive” or that causes “discomfort.” That includes virtually all of history apart from patriotic slogans approved by Trump’s 1776 Commission, or whatever will be devised by GOP leaders when they take command and are in a position to impose stricter discipline. We see many signs of it today, and there’s every reason to expect more to come.
It’s important to remember how rigid doctrinal controls have been in the U.S. — perhaps a reflection of the fact that it is a very free society by comparative standards, hence posing problems to the doctrinal managers, who must be ever alert to signs of deviation.
By now, after many years, it’s possible to utter the word “socialist,” meaning moderately social democrat. In that respect, the U.S. has finally broken out of the company of totalitarian dictatorships. Go back 60 years and even the words “capitalism” and “imperialism” were too radical to voice. Students for a Democratic Society President Paul Potter, in 1965, summoned the courage to “name the system” in his presidential address, but couldn’t manage to produce the words.
There were some breakthroughs in the ‘60s, a matter of deep concern to American liberals, who warned of a “crisis of democracy” as too many sectors of the population tried to enter the political arena to defend their rights. They counseled more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity and obedience, and they condemned the institutions responsible for “indoctrination of the young” for failing to perform their duties.
The doors have been opened more widely since, which only calls for more urgent measures to impose discipline.
If GOP authoritarians are able to destroy democracy sufficiently to establish permanent rule by a white supremacist Christian nationalist caste subservient to extreme wealth and private power, we are likely to enjoy the antics of such figures as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who banned 40 percent of children’s math texts in Florida because of “references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” according to the official directive. Under pressure, the State released some terrifying examples, such as an educational objective that, “Students build proficiency with social awareness as they practice with empathizing with classmates.”
If the country as a whole ascends to the heights of GOP aspirations, it will be unnecessary to resort to such devices as “moral equivalence” and “whataboutism” to stifle independent thought.
One final question. A U.K. judge has formally approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S. despite deep concerns that such a move would put him at risk of “serious human rights violations,” as Agnès Callamard, former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, had warned a couple of years ago. In the event that Assange is indeed extradited to the U.S., which is pretty close to certain now, he faces up to 175 years in prison for releasing public information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you comment on the case of Julian Assange, the law used to prosecute him, what his persecution says about freedom of speech and the state of U.S. democracy?
Assange has been held for years under conditions that amount to torture. That’s fairly evident to anyone who was able to visit him (I was, once) and was confirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture [and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment] Nils Melzer in May 2019.
A few days later, Assange was indicted by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act of 1917, the same act that President Wilson employed to imprison Eugene Debs (among other state crimes committed using the Act).
Legalistic shenanigans aside, the basic reasons for the torture and indictment of Assange are that he committed a cardinal sin: he released to the public information about U.S. crimes that the government, of course, would prefer to see concealed. That is particularly offensive to authoritarian extremists like Trump and Mike Pompeo, who initiated the proceedings under the Espionage Act.
Their concerns are understandable. They were explained years ago by the Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. He observed that, “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
That is a crucial principle of statecraft. It extends to private power as well. That is why manufacture/engineering of consent is a prime concern of systems of power, state and private.
This is no novel insight. In one of the first works in what is now called political science, 350 years ago, his “First Principles of Government,” David Hume wrote that,
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
Force is indeed on the side of the governed, particularly in the more free societies. And they’d better not realize it, or the structures of illegitimate authority will crumble, state and private.
These ideas have been developed over the years, importantly by Antonio Gramsci. The Mussolini dictatorship understood well the threat he posed. When he was imprisoned, the prosecutor announced that, “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”
We have advanced considerably since fascist Italy. The Trump-Pompeo indictment seeks to silence Assange for 175 years, and the U.S. and U.K. governments have already imposed years of torture on the criminal who dared to expose power to the sunlight.
