Every day that passes in Russia’s war on Ukraine, another mall or theater or maternity hospital is vaporized. Cities are under siege. Each day inches closer to a breaking strain, a point that — once crossed — risks a plunge into global nuclear confrontation.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are deploying economic sanctions, hoping they will convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters that it is time to go home. By any metric, the sanctions that have been levied against Russia, Putin and the ruling oligarchs are massive. Nations, banks, businesses, whole currencies have been denied them across the board, and more are still in the offing if this thing grinds on.
Before an emergency NATO summit in Brussels today, President Joe Biden is widely expected to announce a new round of sanctions, along with a tightening of the current ones. Meanwhile, a bipartisan clutch of senators is working with the Treasury Department to lock down more than $130 billion in Russian gold reserves.
There are three main perils to levying such ruinous sanctions, two that are well known and a third hardly discussed. The first is the danger of Putin deciding the economic damage being done to his country amounts to an existential threat, which then motivates him to menace the world with his nuclear arsenal to make them stop. A NATO move to further stymie Russia’s petroleum industry could elicit such a response, which is why the issue is being handled like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.
The second is the bitter harm done to the Russian people, who are largely innocent of Putin’s crime beyond some being duped into supporting it by his state media. Putin does not seem to care if Russians starve in the darkness he has brought down upon them; his yacht-hiding pals on speed-dial with 12 numbers to the left of the decimal on their bank accounts are his primary, secondary and tertiary concern.
The wrenching effect of those sanctions must therefore be our concern, for they are deeply concerning. Are they having the desired effect? Are they putting pressure on Putin’s allies, or are they merely damaging broad swaths of the Russian population? “The experience of U.S. sanctions’ impacts around the world is important,” writes Khury Petersen-Smith for Truthout, “especially because Washington and other Western capitals hold up sanctions as an alternative to war. We should understand them instead, however, as a weapon of war. Their devastating impact results in widespread suffering that may be quieter or less visible to most in the U.S. than an invasion or airstrikes are, but that is no less deadly.”
On paper, at least, Putin’s pals are taking it in the chops. The truth, however, brings us to the third peril: the fiction of economic hardship, which is playing out among Russia’s wealthy elite even now.
“Let us first recall that the freezing of assets held by Putin and his relatives is already part of the arsenal of sanctions that have been tried for several years,” explains economist and author Thomas Piketty. “The problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people, and can be circumvented by using nominees, especially as nothing has been done to systematically measure and cross-reference the real estate and financial portfolios held by each of them.”
It always seems to come back to real estate, to land. Once upon a time, land ownership granted one the right to vote. Later, real estate became the preferred playground for money laundering. Now, in the age of the kleptocratic oligarch, land serves to hide assets while allowing the asset-holder to dodge international sanctions levied against their home country.
These sanctions are supposed to be cramping the style of Putin’s oligarchs to such a degree that they gather the will to drag him back from the abyss … but this tactic will only succeed if the oligarchs — and Putin, himself a billionaire many times over — are the ones who are truly impacted.
This is not happening; ordinary people are suffering in their place, and that suffering only promises to grow. The solution, according to Piketty, is to deploy sanctions that are far more specifically targeted than those currently in use. It would be the difference between using a scalpel and using a broadsword.
“To bring the Russian state to heel, we must focus sanctions on the thin social layer of multimillionaires upon which the regime relies: a group much larger than a few dozen people, but much narrower than the Russian population in general,” argues Piketty. “To give you an idea, one could target the people who hold over €10m ($11m) in real estate and financial assets, or about 20,000 people, according to the latest available data. This represents 0.02% of the Russian adult population (currently 110 million)…. To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a ‘global financial registry’ or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries.”
Unfortunately, such measures will be exceedingly difficult to impose, and for one reason: Russia’s billionaires are sustained and protected by the same financial system that sustains and protects Western and Chinese billionaires. The latter group will not willingly abandon these self-serving rules of capitalism, even if it means allowing Putin and his allies to remain largely untouched amid the suffering of the people.
Do these Western wealthy elites support Putin and his war? Perhaps, but not nearly as much as they support the mechanisms of capitalism that build their fortunes. If those mechanisms are dismantled in order to punish the Russians, they will no longer serve the billionaire class as a whole, and that is not to be tolerated, no matter how high the bodies pile up. “So why has no progress still not been made in this direction?” asks Piketty. “For one simple reason: western wealthy people fear that such transparency will ultimately harm them.”
Wealth must be extracted, wealth must be protected: These are the only two laws that really matter to that sub-segment of the global populace. As Jacob Broom was once noted to say, “Control the coinage and the courts; let the rabble have the rest.”
That all this plays out beneath the shroud of war is the cruelest of ironies, for what is war but capitalism at its most robust, the most lucrative of all human endeavors? Every war lines the pockets of those who peddle the weapons, and among the peddlers in this war are more than a few of Putin’s friends. Try to imagine convincing the Carlyle Group to make George W. Bush back down from his Iraq invasion. Never in hell would that happen; the money was too good.
At the barest minimum, we need to do better than the current sanctions, and we need to do so now. Piketty offers a blueprint for that endeavor, but there are surely others to consider as well. We need to knock down the financial barricades that separate the billionaires from even the notion of justice. More than that, we need to disenthrall ourselves from the shameful use of mass sanctions and collective punishment. Every day that passes inches us closer to Armageddon, and not even an oligarch can survive a nuke. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked strong reactions across the world, from empathetic solidarity with the Ukrainian people to crass anti-Russian bigotry. Looking to ride the wave of both sentiments is a domestic foreign policy establishment that is eager to restore the U.S.’s global standing and sense of historic purpose — and perhaps their own soiled reputations after two decades of a disastrous “global war on terror.”
“The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us,” declared the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”
For the veteran foreign affairs reporter George Packer, Vladimir Putin’s war should jolt Americans out of the melancholy “realism” of a declining superpower and remind us of “a truth we didn’t want to see: that our core interests lie in the defense of [democratic and liberal] values.”
Then there is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who revealed more than he intended when he declared that “Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ended Americans’ 30-year holiday from history.”
Only a Pentagon bureaucrat could so easily dismiss the epochal events of recent years: a pandemic, an economic meltdown, an uprising for Black lives, and the acceleration of rising temperatures that threaten to destroy this era of human civilization. Sure, you can picture Gates saying, that stuff is kind of important, but a land war in Eurasia? Now that’s real history.
But there’s a common and depressing framework shared by Gates, Packer and even Rhodes, who once memorably described the Beltway foreign relations officialdom as “the Blob” which the rest of the Obama administration was trying to disrupt.
The U.S. has had ample opportunities in recent years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, to lead the way in defending liberal values and taking the moral high ground on such pivotal issues around the world as vaccine access, migrant rights and renewable energy conversion. Yet these centrist Democrats only seem to envision U.S. global leadership in the 21st century being restored through a revived 20th-century Cold War with Russia — and probably China.
Foreign policy elites might be especially eager to restore the U.S. to its former position of global strength because they are the ones who did so much to destroy it. Gates, Packer, and almost every other Washington insider initially supported the 2003 Iraq War, another shockingly brazen invasion that rested on legal fictions and false delusions of instant success.
The failures of that war, along with the Afghanistan war and “counterterror activities” in 83 other countries, have drained the U.S. treasury of an astounding $8 trillion, mortally wounded Washington’s global credibility, and contributed to the rising authoritarianism at home that helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016. Now “the Blob” is saying we can undo America’s decline … through another endless war.
Far from marking a break with the mistakes of its imperial adventures 20 years ago, this sudden consensus that we are in a new Cold War echoes the post-9/11 talk from the Bush administration about a “generational conflict” that would last decades and extend the fight against “terrorism” into countries across the globe.
Instead, the primary form of U.S. assistance has been an “unprecedented” flow of weaponry into the country. That’s because the Blob is looking to make Ukraine a costly and bloody battlefield for its Russian invaders.
Hillary Clinton was typically clumsy when she cited U.S. aid to Afghan militants fighting Russia in the 1980s as a potential model for what to do now in Ukraine. But while most American officials have the savvy to avoid proposing a repeat of the course of actions that ultimately led to the formation of al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic points out that many U.S. officials share Clinton’s interest in turning Ukraine into a Russian quagmire.
Fortunately, the Biden administration (for now) has clearly ruled out imposing a no-fly zone that could lead to a catastrophic and possibly nuclear U.S.-Russia war (despite the protestations of an alarmingly hawkish White House press corps). But we should be clear that Washington regards Ukrainians as a propaganda tool for restoring the U.S.’s reputation, rather than 40 million people whose lives will be further devastated if their country becomes the site of a protracted war.
To be clear, the surge of enthusiasm for confronting Russia is being driven by the Putin government’s belligerent actions, which have already caused thousands of deaths, created 3 million refugees, and unraveled what were already frayed relations among the U.S., Russia, China and Western Europe.
People around the world should oppose the invasion and build solidarity with Ukraine, not through a new Cold War but by echoing the demands coming from Ukrainian and global activists to welcome refugees, abolish Ukraine’s debt, revive global disarmament talks and negotiate an immediate end to the war.
For anyone concerned that these measures don’t do enough to punish Vladimir Putin, there is an obvious and globally beneficial strategy for countering an autocratic government whose economy rests on oil exports. If wealthy governments had spent the last decade converting their economies to renewable energy sources, writes Naomi Klein, “Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons.”
Instead, the Biden administration is looking to counter the loss of Russian fossil fuels by increasing global and domestic oil production. Like Russia, U.S. politics is a declining empire that has been captured by oil companies and other oligarchs; our democracy is so broken that a single West Virginia coal baron has held his entire party’s program hostage for the past year.
More generally, the U.S. has been on a slow-motion path (OK, maybe a little faster during the Trump years) toward the same trends of autocracy, oligarchy and hyper-nationalism that more greatly afflict Russia. Liberal foreign policy hawks like George Packer and Ben Rhodes see these trends and think they can be reversed through a new generational conflict that revives the country’s national spirit.
That sounds a bit like an American version of Putin’s logic, which only shows how much both countries were commonly shaped (and misshaped) by 50 years of the original Cold War. As the deadline for decisive climate action gets closer, the world can’t afford to waste another half-century on a new one.
The cultural vandals and iconoclasts have been busy of late, removing Russians from the stables at short notice and demanding what might be called a necessary affirmation of disloyalty. It’s all good to talk about world peace and the resolution of disputes, but that will hardly do for the flag bearing choirs who have discovered their object of evil. Do you hate Vladimir Putin? If so, good. Do you love freedom? Well, of course, as everyone does with squeaking enthusiasm, even if they cannot define it.
The main interest is never in the second answer, but the first. Putin must be condemned and banished from your conscience, your mind and history. Ignore the fact that he is the elected leader of a country – he remains a tyrant to be condemned to liberal democratic execration. Best go about punishing people innocent of this fact.
Such a cringeworthy approach has seduced and trapped some able minds over the years. During the Cold War, the division of camps and ideologies demanded unthinking loyalty, not so much to truth but a version of it long lost in political drag and the hypocrisy of appearances. On September 22, 1947, delegates from Communist parties across the European spectrum heard the infantile ravings of the main Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov, who suggested with nether clenching tediousness that the world was divided between the “imperialist and democratic camp”. The US, allied with Great Britain and France, made up the former. “The anti-fascist forces comprise the second camp”, rooted in the USSR and its various, anomalously named “new democracies.”
In the United States, divisions were also being marked by the mind ravaging nature of ideological conformism. Executive Order 9835, issued by President Harry Truman, focused on whether “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” with any organisation designated by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive”, or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
The President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty (TCEL), packed with representatives from six government departments overseen by Special Assistant to the Attorney General A. Devitt Vanech, dealt with assessing federal loyalty standards and developing procedures to expunge or disqualify “any disloyal of subversive person” from federal service.
In this atmosphere, the vulgar and coarse Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy operated, at least for a time, with pugnacious impunity, claiming in his infamous Wheeling, West Virginia speech that 57 communists had found their way into the US State Department. The House Un-American Activities Committee also worked aggressively to advance the spirit of demonisation, ruining careers and blackening reputations. The stupid tend to linger in political accusation.
The Ukraine War is now making Russian citizens, at the behest of various quarters, undertake acts of purification in various foreign theatres. They are being told to engage in crude demonstrations of loyalty (or, in some cases, disloyalty). Admit you hate Putin, and you can attend a tournament to earn your crust.
UK Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston has taken a keen interest in this daft effort, hoping to encourage the organisers of Wimbledon, the All England Law Tennis Club (AELTC) to take a more severe approach to players from “pariah states” as long as they do not include such angelic wonders as Saudi Arabia. Before a select parliamentary committee, Huddleston noted that, “Many countries have agreed that they will not allow representatives from Russia to compete. There are also visa issues as well. When it comes to individuals, that is more complex.”
Complexity and Huddleston do not get along. “We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try to get some assurances along those lines.”
Tennis player Daniil Medvedev and his colleagues are facing the prospect that not engaging in public denouncement of the Kremlin will be insufficient to enable them to compete. They are already not permitted to compete under the Russian flag, and they are being told that a Russian winning Wimbledon would be unpardonable for the glorious British tournament. Their country has already been banned from competing in team events such as the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King tournaments.
Across the sporting world, players from Russia now see their country barred by the International Ski Federation, Formula One, hosting the European Champions League Final, the indefensibly boring European curling championships and the International Biathlon Union.
Such expectations are so extreme as to remind one of Cold War parallels. An occasional voice of reason can be found, even if they come from an individual who has no reason to fear repercussions himself. Australian tennis commentator and former player Todd Woodbridge told Nine’s Sports Sunday that this line of reasoning placed one on “slippery and dangerous ground.” Everyone knew “they have families back in whatever part of Russia they are from, and you do not want to be on the wrong side of that, because your family will pay the price.”
Woodbridge is a reliably unworldly sort, but these are sensible, humane words lost in the feverish hysteria that will cake and cloak discussion in this field for months. From culture to sporting fixtures, the smug, Putin hating establishment, under direction from their various advisors, are being told that denigrating and cancelling the representatives of Barbarian Rus is the way to go. Individuals will be crucified.
The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.
The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.
The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.
This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.
While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.
While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?
A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.
A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.
This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.
Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.
A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.
The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.
With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.
This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.
Corporate media outlets are calling for the United States and its allies to react to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by escalating the war. The opinion pages are awash with pleas to pump ever-more deadly weaponry into the conflict, to choke Russian civilians with sanctions, and even to institute a “no-fly zone.” That such approaches gamble with thousands, and possibly millions, of lives doesn’t shake the resolve of the press’s armchair generals.
No-fly zone: ‘necessary and overdue’
The Daily Beast (3/18/22) dismisses fears of nuclear war in one paragraph: “To those who would argue that a no-fly-zone would mean the beginning of an apocalyptic World War III, I would counter argue that history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future.”
The Daily Beast (3/18/22) ran an opinion piece by Joshua D. Zimmerman contending that “A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue.” He said that
NATO should immediately announce a 72-hour ultimatum—using the threat of a no-fly zone over Ukraine as leverage—to demand an immediate cease-fire and the beginnings of a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.
If Putin fails to meet these terms, then a NATO-led no-fly zone over Ukraine—at the express invitation of the Ukrainian government—will go into effect.
It’s hard to imagine three words doing more work than “go into effect” are here. A “no-fly zone” could only “go into effect” by NATO destroying Russia’s air capacities—by launching, that is, a direct NATO/Russia war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (3/7/22) conveyed the risks of such a move:
So long as NATO and Russian forces don’t begin fighting each other, the risk of nuclear escalation may be kept in check. But a close encounter between NATO and Russian warplanes (which would result if NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace) could become a flashpoint that leads to a direct and wider conflict.
Pesky details like nuclear war don’t bother Zimmerman, who claimed that “the only form of aid that today would halt Russia’s day-in, day-out slaughter of Ukrainian civilians is military intervention,” specifically a “no-fly zone.” He argued that “history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future,” citing events from the 1930s such as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Italy’s of Ethiopia and the Nazis’ conquests in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Perhaps Zimmerman selected examples from more than 80 years ago because more recent cases, in contexts much more comparable to the present one, demonstrate the danger of advocating a “no-fly zone” to save Ukrainians. Every “no-fly zone” established in the post–Cold War era has been a precursor to all- out war and the destruction of a country.
The United States implemented two “no-fly zones” over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, at which point the US and its partners moved on to the full-scale devastation of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process (Jacobin, 6/19/14). NATO created “no-fly zones” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later over Kosovo, during the period in which NATO was dismantling Yugoslavia (Monthly Review, 10/1/07). In 2011, NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” in Libya, ostensibly to protect the population from Moammar Gadhafi (Jacobin, 9/2/13): The result was ethnic cleansing, the emergence of slave markets, mass civilian casualties (In These Times, 8/18/20) and more than a decade of war in the country.
Defending ‘US global leadership’
Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22): Some say a “no-fly zone” “might anger Mr. Putin and trigger World War III. But inaction based on fear usually causes more conflict than action based on confidence.” Positive thinking will allow the US to go to war with a nuclear power with nuclear war!
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joe Lieberman (3/9/22) in which he too states “The Case for a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine.” The former senator and vice presidential candidate bemoaned that
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.
It’s Lieberman’s argument that “makes no sense”: NATO imposing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine would be an offensive action because it entails firing on Russian forces, and Russia has not fired at a NATO member.
Lieberman went on to say:
Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut US global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.
“Keep[ing] Russian aircraft away” is a strange way of saying “shooting down Russian aircraft,” which is what Lieberman is actually describing. And not only aircraft would be targeted: Even a prominent proponent of the “no-fly zone,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, acknowledged (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 3/8/22):
Probably what would happen even before that is if there are defense systems in the enemy’s territory that can fire into the no-fly zone, then we normally take those systems out, which would mean bombing into enemy territory.
Or as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted behind closed doors while advocating for a “no-fly zone” in Syria (Intercept, 10/10/16; FAIR.org, 10/27/16): “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.”
In other words, Lieberman’s plan to “protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground” is to initiate a shooting war in Ukrainian territory between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles (Independent, 2/28/22).
‘If they can shoot it, we can ship it’
The Wall Street Journal (3/16/22) praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s evocation of peace activist Martin Luther King before declaring that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.”
A Wall StreetJournal editorial (3/16/22) said that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.” The editors approvingly quoted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse saying,
“If they can shoot it, we can ship it.” MiGs and Su-25s, S-200s and S-300s, drones.
An example are Switchblade drones that are portable and can destroy a target from a distance. The weapon is ideal for attacking tanks and some of the artillery units that are hitting cities and civilians. The latest US arms package reportedly includes 100 Switchblades. But the Pentagon should have delivered all of the Switchblades in the American arsenal to Ukraine at the start of the war, and then contracted to buy more.
The Journal’s editors were hardly alone in wanting to flood Ukraine with weapons. A WashingtonPost op-ed (3/16/22) by former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul asserted that “Ukrainians will ultimately defeat Vladimir Putin’s army,” and that the only question is how long it will take, though the basis for this claim appears to be little more than a priori reasoning and a crystal ball.
McFaul called on “the West” to “boost” military aid to Ukraine “to hasten the end of the war [in Ukraine’s favor] and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons…do just that.” McFaul wrote that “President Biden and his team cannot escalate US involvement in ways that might trigger nuclear war,” though escalation short of that threshold is apparently fine.
Michael McFaul assures Washington Post readers (3/16/22), “If the risk of Russia’s escalation can be assessed to be below the nuclear threshold, then…the transfer of planes or air defense systems will not trigger World War III.”
Russia’s ruling class sees their country as having “a vital interest in preventing the expansion of hostile alliances on its borders” (Russia Matters, 3/14/19). Full Ukrainian membership in the alliance in question, NATO, may be far-fetched in the short-term, but last June, NATO insisted that Ukraine “will become” a member, and a year earlier, NATO recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunities partner.” Given that Russia sees “preventing” that as “a vital interest,” McFaul and the Journal editors are on shaky ground when they assume that the West giving Ukraine more weapons will cause Russia to give up, rather than countering the move with more firepower of its own.
Nor do the authors worry themselves with the peculiar habit US weapons have of finding their way to some of the nastiest factions in the warzones to which the US sends arms. ISIS benefited mightily from the US doling out weapons for use in Syria (Newsweek, 12/14/17), a practice that didn’t have particularly salutary effects for Syrians or people living beyond the country’s borders.
Arming proto–Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a central cause of such minor inconveniences as the 9/11 attacks and more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21). The risks of a similar outcome in Ukraine are real, considering that the vicious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is part of the Ukrainian military (Haaretz, 7/9/18), and that “far-right European militia leaders…have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines” (New York Times, 2/25/22).
Sanctions: ‘harsh’ but ‘appropriate’
The New York Times (3/4/22) warned that ” it is the duty of all leaders to prepare their countries for…pain.”
A New York Times editorial (3/4/22) deemed the latest round of “harsh, immediate and wide-ranging sanctions” to be “appropriate,” because they “demonstrated that there are consequences for unprovoked wars of aggression.” (Note that over the last 30 years, the New York Times has never opposed and has often endorsed the United States’ numerous acts of military aggression—none of which can be described with a straight face as “provoked.”)
In this case, the “consequences”—”the ruble tanked, the Russian stock market plunged and Russians lined up at ATMs to withdraw money”—make life “harsh” for ordinary Russian civilians, irrespective of whether they support the war or the Putin government. (When polled, approximately one-fourth of Russia’s population expresses opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, roughly the same proportion of Americans that opposed the disastrous Iraq invasion—Meduza, 3/7/22; Gallup, 3/24/03).
Peter Rutland (The Conversation, 2/28/22), a scholar who focuses on Russia’s political economy, notes that “the falling ruble pushes up the price of imports, which make up over half the consumer basket,” including about 60% of the medicines Russians consume. According to Rutland, “The new sanctions will severely impact the living standard of ordinary Russians.”
Subjecting the Russian population to such policies is about as constructive a step toward a ceasefire in Ukraine as would be bombing St. Petersburg. Historically, sanctions have exacerbated rather than reduced international tensions; that sanctions preceded both Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month, would suggest that the pattern is continuing (Washington Post, 3/3/22).
‘Punishing Russia’s economy’
The Washington Post (2/24/22) described the Ukraine invasion as “an aggressor’s bombs, missiles and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor”—while the US’s similarly illegal invasions were “Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory.”
A Washington Post editorial (2/24/22) said that consequences of
unchecked Russian aggression…could be more damaging and more lasting than any turmoil stemming from the economic sanctions, limited troop deployments and other measures Mr. Biden has announced.
“Raising the costs to Mr. Putin,” the article said, “may still have an impact, but not unless those costs are truly punishing to Russia’s economy.”
In practical terms, “punishing…Russia’s economy” means penalizing virtually all Russians. Bloomberg (3/4/22) reports that Russia is now “on course for an economic collapse,” noting that JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s economists said that they “expect a 7% contraction in [Russia’s] gross domestic product this year, the same as Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Bloomberg Economics forecasts a fall of about 9%.”
Apart from being collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, “punishing” an entire country to the point that its economy faces possible “collapse” may indeed have an “impact.” However, that may be something other than a groundswell of support inside Russia for the sort of functional relationship with the United States that could help end the violence in Ukraine and prevent US/Russian brinksmanship—including the nuclear variety.
‘Putin’s troubles’
The Washington Post (2/27/22) called the remilitarization of Germany “the sound of a mature democracy, Europe’s richest and largest, dealing a strategic defeat” to Russia.
A WashingtonPost editorial (2/27/22) three days later advocated sanctions in a roundabout fashion, noting that polls suggest Americans support such moves:
Lawmakers should consider these data from a new Washington Post/ABC News poll: 67% percent of American adults favor sanctions against Russia. More than half of adults said they would support sanctions even if it meant higher energy prices. Between the resistance of the Ukrainians and the unity of the West, Mr. Putin appears baffled. Congress should add to his troubles.
Yet sanctions do not merely “add to [Putin’s] troubles”: They are acts of war. The paper is seeking an escalation in the US/Russia conflict from which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inextricable (FAIR.org, 1/15/22; Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).
Corporate media may not be saying that America should launch a third world war, but the courses these outlets are recommending are geared toward prolonging the war in Ukraine, intensifying the violence and risking its expansion, rather toward achieving a negotiated end to the war as quickly as possible.
Building Europe to have peace. Such is the just and fine ambition that one must pursue relentlessly. Nevertheless, it is necessary to define ‘Europe’ and to specify the conditions for the peace that is desirable on our continent.
For Europe is a continent. Only de Gaulle had envisaged Europe as a geopolitical ensemble composed of all the states participating in balance. François Mitterrand took up the idea in the form of a European confederation, but he too quickly abandoned it.
Since 1945, what is presented as ‘Europe’, in the West of the continent, is only a subset of countries incapable by themselves of ensuring peace. One regularly hides its powerlessness behind proud slogans. Such is the case with that which affirms ‘Europe means Peace’. As a historical reality and as promise it is false.
During the Cold War, it is not the organs of the Common Market, of the European Economic Community then of the European Union which have assured peace in Europe. It is well known that the equilibrium between the great powers has been maintained by nuclear dissuasion and, more precisely, by the potential for massive destruction possessed by the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France.
NATO forces under American command offered Western Europe a fragile umbrella, since the US would not have put their very existence in jeopardy to prevent a very improbable land-based offensive by the Soviet Army. Ready for all possibilities but not prepared to pay the price of a classic confrontation, France, having left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, considered the territory of West Germany as a buffer zone for its Pluton nuclear-armed missiles.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has pushed into the background the debates on nuclear dissuasion, but it is still not possible to glorify a ‘Europe’ pacific and peace-making. For thirty years we have seen the «peace of cemeteries» established on our periphery, and under the responsibility of certain members states of the European Union.
The principal states of the EU carry an overwhelming responsibility in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany, supported by the Vatican, unilaterally recognises Slovenia and Croatia on 23 December 1991, which pushes the then “Twelve” to follow this lethal route. France could have opposed this decision. It gives up this option because, on 15 December in Council, François Mitterrand reaffirms his conviction: it is more important to preserve the promises of Maastricht than to attempt to impose the French position on Yugoslavia. In other words, Yugoslavia has been deliberately sacrificed on the altar of “Franco-German friendship“, when one could already see that Berlin lied, manoeuvred and imposed its will. The German ambition was to support Croatia, including by the delivery of arms, in a war that would be pursued with a comparable cruelty by all the camps.
The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia embroiled Bosnia-Herzegovina and provoked the extension of the conflict, then its internationalisation. Tears would be shed for Sarajevo while forgetting Mostar. Some Parisian intellectuals would demand, in the name of ‘Europe’, an attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. Their wish was granted in 1999 when NATO, under American commandment, bombed Yugoslav territory for 78 days, killing thousands of civilians. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium … participated in this military operation, in contempt of the UN Charter and of NATO statutes, an alliance theoretically defensive …
Let no one pretend that the principal member states of the EU were waging humanitarian wars and wanted to assure economic development and democracy. ‘Europe’ has protested against ethnic cleansing by Serbs but has left the Croats to force out 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. ‘Europe’ waxes indignant about massacres in Kosovo but it has supported extremist ethnic Albanians of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have committed multiple atrocities before and after their arrival to power in Pristina.
These Balkan wars occurred in the previous Century, but it is not ancient history. The countries devastated by war suffer henceforth the indifference of the powerful. In Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, one lives poorly, very poorly, if one is not involved in illegal business networks. Then one seeks work elsewhere, preferably in Germany, if one is not too old.
After having mistreated, pillaged then abandoned its peripheries, ‘peaceful’ Europe then goes to serve as an auxiliary force in American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were in the forefront in the bombardment of Libya, but the outcome is as disastrous as in the Middle East and Central Asia – graveyards, chaos, the hate of the West and, at Kabul, the return of the Taliban.
This brief review of the deadly inconsistencies of European pacificism cannot ignore Ukraine. The European Commission itself has encouraged the Ukrainian government in its quest for integration in the EU, before proposing a simple accord of association. The Ukrainian government, having declined to sign this accord, the pro-European groups allied to the ultranationalists have descended into the street in November 2013 with the support of Germany, Poland and the US. The Maidan movement, the eviction of President Yanukovych and the war of the Donbass have led, after the Minsk accords and a stalemate in the conflict to the situation that we have before our eyes in early January – the US and Russia discuss directly the Ukrainian crisis without the ‘Europe of peace’ being admitted to the negotiating table. The EU has totally subjugated itself to NATO and does not envisage leaving it.
It is therefore possible to note, once again, the vacuity of the discourse on the ‘European power’ and on ‘European sovereignty’. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should acknowledge all the opportunities lost. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, France could have demanded the withdrawal of American forces installed in Europe and proposed a collective security treaty for the entirety of the continent, while pursuing its project for a European Confederation. From Right to Left, our governments have preferred to cultivate the myth of the “Franco-German friendship”, leave the US to pursue its agenda after the upheaval of 2003, and then return to the integrated command of NATO.
They offer us not peace but submission to war-making forces that they have given up trying to control.
*****
• Translated by Evan Jones (a francophile and retired political economist at University of Sydney) and is published here with permission from author.
So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq? The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.
Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:
Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.
Batinga also notes that:
More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.
The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.
In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.
BRIC’s Made of Straw
The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.
Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.
India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.
Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains
The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.
China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?
The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.
Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.
Hypocrisy
Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:
The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.
The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.
Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]
Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.
Tactics
Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.
You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.
Leading US media network CNN has promoted a commander of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov regiment, without mention of his hate group’s extremist views. This March 21, the neo-Nazi Azov militia posted a video on its official Twitter account of one of its commanders being promoted on CNN. CNN had republished a video clip of Azov Major Denis Prokopenko, who was helping lead the fight against Russian troops in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The major US media channel described the fascist extremist simply as a “Ukrainian military commander who has been defending the city from the siege.”
On Monday, the State Department signaled that the US is discouraging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from making concessions to Russia in negotiations that are aimed at ending the fighting in Ukraine.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said Zelensky has “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.”
As Russian forces continue to besiege Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused them of reducing the southern city of Mariupol to ashes. All foreign journalists have fled the city as heavy shelling has driven most remaining civilians into hiding in their basements. We speak to Belkis Wille, who just left Ukraine after spending over three weeks documenting the effects of the war and describes “an absolute hellscape” in Mariupol. Disabled people and seniors are often unable to retreat into safe hiding places, says Wille, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The people that we spoke to were the lucky ones. They were the ones with the means and the ability to get out of the city.”
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.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian forces of reducing the southern city of Mariupol to ashes. Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in the strategic port city with little food or water. There are now no foreign journalists in the city to document the destruction.
A team of reporters from the Associated Press recently left Mariupol after spending 20 days in the besieged city. By the end, the reporters said they were being hunted down by Russian forces. AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov has provided a harrowing account of life under bombardment in Mariupol. I want to read part of his description of what he witnessed. For our television audience, we’ll also show images of Mariupol by Sergii Makarov, the photographer from the area. They were provided to us by Human Rights Watch. These are the words of AP’s Mstyslav Chernov.
He writes, “One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in. …
“The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died.
“A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets. …
“Shelling hit the hospital and the houses around. It shattered the windows of our van, blew a hole into its side and punctured a tire. Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and then run back amid the explosions. …
“By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.
“On March 9, twin airstrikes shredded the plastic taped over our van’s windows. I saw the fireball just a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.
“We watched smoke rise from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins.”
Those are the words of the Associated Press’s Mstyslav Chernov, who spent 20 days in Mariupol documenting the Russian siege.
To talk more about the humanitarian crisis there and across Ukraine, we’re joined by Belkis Wille, senior researcher with the Conflict and Crisis division at Human Rights Watch. She just left Ukraine, where she spent over three weeks. Human Rights Watch has published a new report largely based on her research, titled “Ukraine: Ensure Safe Passage, Aid for Mariupol Civilians: Residents Describe Harsh Conditions During Russian Attack.” She’s joining us now from Zürich, Switzerland.
Belkis, thanks so much for being here. I know you must be dealing with so much trauma now, as you took in the trauma of these testimonies. Describe what you heard from the Mariupol survivors.
BELKISWILLE: I mean, what I heard was truly, as I think you’ve already depicted well, an absolute hellscape. You know, families were telling me about how they were flushing out the water in their heating systems to try and get access to more water to survive as they spent over two weeks in basements, sheltering from the constant shelling around them, before they were eventually able to get into their own personal vehicles and cars that their friends had and get outside the city. They were also melting snow to get water and going to local streams and rivers. And all of them said that, you know, waiting on these lines, even at local fountains and streams, meant that you were essentially at risk of being shelled. They would go outside of their basements only to cook food on open flame in their yards. And it was in those times when they left their basements that they would see dead bodies strewn outside, dead bodies of people that they knew, families who would say, you know, “We can’t even bury our son, who was killed in an explosion nearby, because the shelling continues and it’s not safe to bury him yet.” The stories were really horrific.
I would say perhaps most difficult stories to hear, though, were from older people and people with disabilities. They, when the electricity was cut, unlike everyone else in the city who went down into these basements to shelter, they couldn’t do that, because no electricity meant they couldn’t take elevators down. And so they sat on their sofas in apartments. You know, I spoke to a man in his eighties. He lived on the sixth floor of his building, sat on his sofa with windows blown out, so no glass between him and these below-freezing temperatures, just watching the shelling and the explosions and the fires from outside his window, hoping that he would survive.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Belkis Wille, Human Rights Watch has reported the extensive use of cluster munitions by the Russian forces in some places. Could you talk about what you found about that?
BELKISWILLE: Unfortunately, since this conflict has begun, we have seen multiple instances of Russian forces firing cluster munitions into civilian-populated areas. We saw that in the very early days when the conflict began in Donetsk. We then saw cluster munitions being used on multiple occasions in the city of Kharkiv, the second-biggest city in Ukraine, that has been heavily, heavily damaged in recent attacks. And we’ve even seen cluster munitions used elsewhere in the country. We issued a report on the use on numerous days, in numerous attacks, of cluster munitions in the city of Mykolaiv near Odessa. And in these instances, unfortunately, we have seen civilians injured and killed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And there have been reported instances of violations of attempts at ceasefires in an effort to create humanitarian corridors. What have you found about that? And how have so many people been able to leave despite the lack of an organized form of humanitarian relief through these corridors?
BELKISWILLE: Officials have tried to negotiate humanitarian corridors, including with the help of independent institutions like the International Committee of the Red Cross, and numerous times have said that these efforts to put in place a short-term ceasefire to allow for a humanitarian corridor to open have failed. The idea is that these corridors would allow for civilians to safely evacuate areas of fighting, but also that urgently needed humanitarian aid could get into areas where there are going to be some civilians that simply can’t flee, some people, as I mentioned, you know, older people, people with disabilities, other people who can’t leave or don’t want to leave the areas that they live in. I would say it’s important to note that, ultimately, the obligation on both sides is to allow civilians to flee safely and for aid to get in, regardless of whether corridors exist or not.
The people of Mariupol waited for days, waiting for news that a corridor would be put in place so that they could evacuate in an organized fashion and evacuate safely. And after days and days and days of waiting, where each of these corridors failed, it was around March 14th that a few people simply decided, “Enough is enough. Either I’m going to die in my basement, or I’m going to die trying to leave the city, and I prefer the latter option.” So they got into their cars, and they just started driving. They knew they were driving into Russian-controlled territory, but eventually were hoping they would make it to the Ukrainian side. One car led to five cars, led to 10 cars. And then, on March 14, as I said, this number grew, and we heard in the news suddenly that 160 cars were trying to make it to the Ukrainian side.
And that’s when my colleague and I actually headed to the area where we knew people would be arriving once they made it back into Ukrainian-controlled territory in the city of Zaporizhzhia. And then we stayed there for two days interviewing some of the thousands of people that then also got into their own vehicles and took the risk of making it out of the city and arriving to safety.
AMYGOODMAN: Belkis, you talk about people getting into their own vehicles. What about people who don’t have them, the most compromised people, the poorest, the disabled, the old?
BELKISWILLE: Absolutely. That’s the thing that everyone that I interviewed raised with me. They said, you know, “We were sheltering for weeks in a basement with 50 other people, 80 other people. When we heard that cars were trying to get out, we got into our car. Maybe half the people, a quarter of the people who were sheltering with us also had cars and left, but we left behind the others.” And these are people who didn’t have private vehicles, who don’t have the means to leave. And I think the sad reality is that, you know, the people that we spoke to were the lucky ones. They were the ones with the means and the ability to get out of the city. We know from local authorities that they estimate at least 200,000 people are still in the city. And as you say, many of them simply don’t have the means to get out. And that’s why it is so important that humanitarian aid can get into the city, where food stocks are dwindling, where medication is running out, and where so much assistance is urgently needed.
AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about — more about Kharkiv, the eastern city. These are the voices of volunteers who cleaned debris from residential buildings that have been attacked.
VOLUNTEER 1: [translated] A girl that was walking opposite the medical center was killed. A man wounded with shrapnel in his lungs and another part of his body is laying near entrance five. He was going back home when it happened. He was hit by shrapnel. He was a lieutenant colonel in the reserve. Who else got hit? A grandmother was killed. Her grandson is disabled.
VOLUNTEER 2: [translated] Honestly speaking, I do not see much sense in leaving the city. Joining the Territorial Defense Force? I do not have any military experience, but I can help the city with my labor. Why not?
VOLUNTEER 3: [translated] At the moment, I do not have any work at home. I am 70. I am an engineer with experience. Until yesterday, I had work to do. But when I saw the appeal, I understood this was more urgent, more important, more needed now.
AMYGOODMAN: So, those are the voices of volunteers in Kharkiv. You also have Human Rights Watch documenting Russia’s use of cluster munitions, particularly in another city under siege, in Mykolaiv. If you could talk about these attacks, as well, and what you’ve documented?
BELKISWILLE: In the city of Kharkiv, we initially were documenting several distinct uses of cluster munitions in the city at a time when many civilians were still there, cluster munitions that did injure and kill civilians. And we more recently have published a much more detailed report that actually looks at 43 individual attacks on civilian property, shops, homes, other common spaces that civilians use, to the point that the city has been so severely damaged. And during the time that these attacks were rocking the city, there wasn’t any safe corridor out. There wasn’t an easy way for civilians to leave. And that’s, unfortunately, why so many were wounded and killed in those attacks.
And then, as you said, the fighting has proceeded on other fronts. The city of Mykolaiv in the last days has been under a heavy shelling and attack. There is a military air base in the city. There is a military factory in the city. But the areas where we’ve seen cluster munitions landing are also in residential neighborhoods. In other parts of the city, we’ve interviewed people who had munitions landing in the middle of their household, that they and their family were still there. And unfortunately, these attacks will continue to wound and kill civilians.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the role of countries like Poland in welcoming millions of Ukrainians who are fleeing the war. And they’ve gotten a lot of media attention for that. But at the same time, Poland has continued to close its borders to Syrian, Libyan, Yemenis and people from Africa who are fleeing the devastation in their own countries. For example, on March 2nd, according to press reports, a Polish border guard tweeted, quote, “Last night, 51 foreigners tried to illegally cross into Poland from Belarus. 11 people from Syria, 33 from Iraq, 1 from Burkina Faso and 6 from Congo were arrested.” Now, this is an area, the Belarus border, where foreign journalists are not allowed, while the foreign journalists are allowed to film and report on the refugees being welcomed from Ukraine. What does this say about the nature of, the human rights implications of one group of people being treated one way and another group of people being treated another way?
BELKISWILLE: I think that’s such an important point to make. I crossed the border out of Ukraine into Poland on Sunday, and I was simply astounded by what I saw. As I crossed the border, I saw dozens of tents from numerous organizations from around the world. As I was getting my bearings straight and figuring out which direction to go in, a man handed me a steaming cup of coffee. Another woman handed me a bowl of soup. Someone was offering me a free SIM card. There were people distributing diapers, baby food, providing free transport to cities in Poland. I mean, this response is incredible.
The welcome that Ukrainians and foreigners in Ukraine who flee from the country are facing is amazing, but at the same time stands in such stark contrast to what we’ve seen at the Polish border, the Polish-Belarus border, only in November, when we saw people being pushed back illegally across the border back into Belarus. We saw people freezing to death in the forest and being beaten by border guards. And as you say, you know, it’s not like volunteer organizations hadn’t wanted to provide assistance at that point to people stuck on the border, but they weren’t allowed to. So I think it is disturbing to see this difference. And all I can hope is that now that we’ve seen what a welcoming response can look like and should look like, that that is extended to all refugees and asylum seekers that are fleeing war.
AMYGOODMAN: In fact, didn’t you go into Ukraine to investigate what was happening to African students, for example, who were trying to flee Ukraine?
BELKISWILLE: In the first days of the war, in particular, we had a country — Ukraine is a country that has many, many tens of thousands of foreign students that study there, students from India, Nigeria, China, Morocco, all over the world. And when the conflict started, you saw many people trying to get on trains and buses to get to the border, the border with Poland and other borders. And priority was being given to Ukrainian women and Ukrainian children. And those spaces on buses and on trains were actually being prevented for boarding for many foreign students. I interviewed many students who eventually made it to the western city of Lviv — Indian students, Moroccan students, Algerian students — and they described to me how they were pushed off of buses. They were pushed off of trains. They were prevented from boarding because, you know, local authorities were telling them, “Priority is given to Ukrainian women and children, not to you.”
AMYGOODMAN: Belkis Wille, we want to thank you for being with us, senior researcher with the Conflict and Crisis division at Human Rights Watch, just left Ukraine, where she spent over three weeks documenting the effects of the war across the country. Human Rights Watch has published a new report largely based on her research, and we will link to it at democracynow.org.
Coming up, we’ll speak with a pacifist in Kyiv. Stay with us.
The government is not doing enough for refugees. After showing reluctance to allow any refugees fleeing Ukraine to come to the UK, there is finally a scheme in place, but it still falls extremely short of the mark. The French interior minister quite rightly accused the UK government of showing a “lack of humanity” towards Ukrainian refugees. He also warned that some refugees may try to cross the English channel by boat if they have no other options available.
The plan now in place is the Homes for Ukraine Scheme. However, this requires the sponsorship of refugees by British citizens. This is a wonderful step, but the government should take more responsibility for receiving and re-homing refugees – not just rely on the public to do its job for it.
Justice secretary Dominic Raab attempted to justify reports that 150 Ukrainian refugees had been turned away for not having correct visas. He stated that the government won’t “just open the door” because that would “undermine the popular support” for helping “the genuine refugees”. It’s unclear whether Raab thinks that some Ukrainians are not “genuine refugees” or is simply taking the opportunity to bash non-European refugees who also need help.
Deadly alternatives
Denying entry to refugees or reducing their rights is also an issue of international law. The Nationality and Borders Bill has now made it’s way through the House of Lords and is awaiting votes on amendments in the House of Commons. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is urging the government not to overturn the removal of Clause 11, which would give most refugees a lower status and fewer benefits The UNHCR states that this would:
cause unnecessary suffering to refugees fleeing war and persecution
The alternative to allowing safe entry is already a well-documented tragedy. Entering the country via small boats is extremely dangerous. In 2021 alone, 44 people died or went missing attempting to cross the British Channel via boat. Other routes can be as equally deadly. In October 2019, 39 Vietnamese people died in a lorry in Essex. It’s our duty as a country to welcome and help those in need, not to turn the journey into a deadly gauntlet or to turn people away at the border.
We should remember that refugees are human beings – not just statistics or a commodity to put an arbitrary value on. They should be given a safe and welcoming space that respects their human rights and treats them humanely.
Not a new issue
Of course, resistance to immigration is not a new issue. The Windrush Scandal provides both current and historic evidence that migrants faced pushback for entering the country, as well as trying to remain here. When Windrush migrants arrived in 1948, politicians on both sides of the aisle in Britain reacted negatively. 11 Labour MPs wrote a letter to prime minister Clement Atlee stating their displeasure:
An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impact the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.
they have altogether a different standard of civilisation, to begin with.
Both reactions are xenophobic, but not a far cry from Tory statements in the last few years.
Ongoing struggles
Unfortunately, fleeing war and persecution is, of course, not an issue unique to Ukraine. I spoke to Anwar, a refugee from Afghanistan, and asked him about his experience.
When asked how he travelled to the UK, Anwar said:
I came by a very difficult way… Iran first, then to Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, then to England. I travelled through the borders via trucks, cars and a lot of walking. The chance of dying was 75%.
I asked Anwar how he was treated when he got to the UK border. He replied:
I was in a holding cell for 48 hours but still very well.
When asked if there was anything that would make his life in the UK better, he said:
Now that I am here, all I want is to be equal. I want to work and pay my own way. Make a family and live life.
His experience will parallel those coming from Ukraine. People have a high chance of injury or death en route to the Ukrainian border followed by travel through unfamiliar countries. The goal is also clearly the same. Refugees just want equal treatment, to be with their families, and to live life. However, they are not all treated the same:
The unequal treatment is also visible between Ukrainian refugees. The majority of refugees evacuating Ukraine are white. But People of Colour are also trying to escape the conflict in Ukraine and have experienced racism and attacks trying to leave. And in Poland, for example, People of Colour are being attacked by white nationalists. The Canary has previously reported on the racism refugees face.
Meanwhile, refugees from Afghanistan or Syria are treated like a burden, and a problem to solve, with mention of military bases alluding to notions of invasion. By contrast, Ukrainian refugees are shown as desperate and worthy of help. This is an abhorrent comparison. Without international condemnation and attention, Ukrainian refugees would likely face the same media hostility as other refugees.
Enough is enough!
The government needs to consider the trauma that refugees have experienced en route as well as the situation that caused them to leave their home country in the first place. For Ukraine and many other countries, that situation is war. Instead of refusing entry to refugees, we should be respecting their human rights and giving them fair treatment and care.
We need to take note of the history of the hostile environment that has been created in the UK. We should be taking a stand against the ever-tougher measures imposed on those entering this country. And we must say enough is enough and have our voices heard by those in power. International law must be followed and the government must treat refugees like human beings.
A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world.
Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it’s important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, the Biden administration’s proposed Pentagon budget (as well as related work like nuclear-warhead development at the Department of Energy) was already guaranteed to soar even higher than that, perhaps to $800 billion or more for 2023.
Here’s the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that’s anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis.
Some supporters of higher Pentagon spending have, in fact, been promoting figures as awe inspiring as they are absurd. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, is advocating a trillion-dollar military budget, while Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council called for the United States to prepare to win simultaneous wars against Russia and China. He even suggested that Congress “could go so far as to double its defense spending” without straining our resources. That would translate into a proposed annual defense budget of perhaps $1.6 trillion. Neither of those astronomical figures is likely to be implemented soon, but that they’re being talked about at all is indicative of where the Washington debate on Pentagon spending is heading in the wake of the Ukraine disaster.
Ex-government officials are pressing for similarly staggering military budgets. As former Reagan-era State Department official and Iran-Contra operative Elliott Abrams argued in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled “The New Cold War”: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] will need to be spent on defense.” Similarly, in a Washington Post op-ed, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that “we need a larger, more advanced military in every branch, taking full advantage of new technologies to fight in new ways.” No matter that the U.S. already outspends China by a three-to-one margin and Russia by 10-to-one.
Truth be told, current levels of Pentagon spending could easily accommodate even a robust program of arming Ukraine as well as a shift of yet more U.S. troops to Eastern Europe. However, as hawkish voices exploit the Russian invasion to justify higher military budgets, don’t expect that sort of information to get much traction. At least for now, cries for more are going to drown out realistic views on the subject.
Beyond the danger of breaking the budget and siphoning off resources urgently needed to address pressing challenges like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice, a new Cold War could have devastating consequences. Under such a rubric, the U.S. would undoubtedly launch yet more military initiatives, while embracing unsavory allies in the name of fending off Russian and Chinese influence.
The first Cold War, of course, reached far beyond Europe, as Washington promoted right-wing authoritarian regimes and insurgencies globally at the cost of millions of lives. Such brutal military misadventures included Washington’s role in coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the war in Vietnam; and support for repressive governments and proxy forces in Afghanistan, Angola, Central America, and Indonesia. All of those were justified by exaggerated — even at times fabricated — charges of Soviet involvement in such countries and the supposed need to defend “the free world,” a Cold War term President Biden all-too-ominously revived in his recent State of the Union address (assumedly, yet another sign of things to come).
Indeed, his framing of the current global struggle as one between “democracies and autocracies” has a distinctly Cold War ring to it and, like the term “free world,” it’s riddled with contradictions. After all, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines, all too many autocracies and repressive regimes already receive ample amounts of U.S. weaponry and military training — no matter that they continue to pursue reckless wars or systematically violate the human rights of their own people. Washington’s support is always premised on the role such regimes supposedly play in fighting against or containing the threats of the moment, whether Iran, China, Russia, or some other country.
Count on one thing: the heightened rhetoric about Russia and China seeking to undermine American influence will only reinforce Washington’s support for repressive regimes. The consequences of that could, in turn, prove to be potentially disastrous.
Before Washington embarks on a new Cold War, it’s time to remind ourselves of the global consequences of the last one.
Cold War I: The Coups
Dwight D. Eisenhower is often praised as the president who ended the Korean War and spoke out against the military-industrial complex. However, he also sowed the seeds of instability and repression globally by overseeing the launching of coups against nations allegedly moving towards communism or even simply building closer relations with the Soviet Union.
In 1953, with Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA instigated a coup that led to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeqh. In a now-declassified document, the CIA cited the Cold War and the risks of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression” as rationales for their actions. The coup installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, initiating 26 years of repressive rule that set the stage for the 1979 Iranian revolution that would bring Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
In 1954, the Eisenhower administration launched a coup that overthrew the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz. His “crime”: attempting to redistribute to poor peasants some of the lands owned by major landlords, including the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Arbenz’s internal reforms were falsely labeled communism-in-the-making and a case of Soviet influence creeping into the Western Hemisphere. Of course, no one in the Eisenhower administration made mention of the close ties between the United Fruit Company and both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Such U.S. intervention in Guatemala would prove devastating with the four decades that followed consumed by a brutal civil war in which up to 200,000 people died.
In 1973, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger followed Eisenhower’s playbook by fomenting a coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, installing the vicious dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. That coup was accomplished in part through economic warfare — “making the economy scream,” as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it — and partly thanks to CIA-backed bribes and assassinations meant to bolster right-wing factions there. Kissinger would justify the coup, which led to the torture, imprisonment, and death of tens of thousands of Chileans, this way: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Vietnam and Its Legacy
The most devastating Cold War example of a war justified on anti-communist grounds was certainly the disastrous U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It would lead to the deployment there of more than half a million American troops, the dropping of a greater tonnage of bombs than the U.S. used in World War II, the defoliation of large parts of the Vietnamese countryside, the massacre of villagers in My Lai and numerous other villages, the deaths of 58,000 U.S. troops and up to 2 million Vietnamese civilians — all while Washington systematically lied to the American public about the war’s “progress.”
U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in earnest during the administrations of Presidents Harry Truman and Eisenhower, when Washington bankrolled the French colonial effort there to subdue an independence movement. After a catastrophic French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. took over the fight, first with covert operations and then counterinsurgency efforts championed by the administration of John F. Kennedy. Finally, under President Lyndon Johnson Washington launched an all-out invasion and bombing campaign.
In addition to being an international crime writ large, in what became a Cold War tradition for Washington, the conflict in Vietnam would prove to be profoundly anti-democratic. There’s no question that independence leader Ho Chi Minh would have won the nationwide election called for by the 1954 Geneva Accords that followed the French defeat. Instead, the Eisenhower administration, gripped by what was then called the “domino theory” — the idea that the victory of communism anywhere would lead other countries to fall like so many dominos to the influence of the Soviet Union — sustained an undemocratic right-wing regime in South Vietnam.
That distant war would, in fact, spark a growing antiwar movement in this country and lead to what became known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a public resistance to military intervention globally. While that meant an ever greater reliance on the CIA, it also helped keep the U.S. out of full-scale boots-on-the-ground conflicts until the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Instead, the post-Vietnam “way of war” would be marked by a series of U.S.-backed proxy conflicts abroad and the widespread arming of repressive regimes.
The defeat in Vietnam helped spawn what was called the Nixon Doctrine, which eschewed large-scale intervention in favor of the arming of American surrogates like the Shah of Iran and the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Those two autocrats typically repressed their own citizens, while trying to extinguish people’s movements in their regions. In the case of Indonesia, Suharto oversaw a brutal war in East Timor, greenlighted and supported financially and with weaponry by the Nixon administration.
“Freedom Fighters”
Once Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981, his administration began to push support for groups he infamously called “freedom fighters.” Those ranged from extremist mujahideen fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan to Jonas Savimbi’s forces in Angola to the Nicaraguan Contras. The U.S. funding and arming of such groups would have devastating consequences in those countries, setting the stage for the rise of a new generation of corrupt regimes, while arming and training individuals who would become members of al-Qaeda.
The Contras were an armed right-wing rebel movement cobbled together, funded, and supplied by the CIA. Americas Watch accused them of rape, torture, and the execution of civilians. In 1984, Congress prohibited the Reagan administration from funding them, thanks to the Boland amendment (named for Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Boland). In response, administration officials sought a work-around. In the end, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Marine and member of the National Security Council, would devise a scheme to supply arms to Iran, while funneling excess profits from the sales of that weaponry to the Contras. The episode became known as the Iran-Contra scandal and demonstrated the lengths to which zealous Cold Warriors would go to support even the worst actors as long as they were on the “right side” (in every sense) of the Cold War struggle.
Chief among this country’s blunders of that previous Cold War era was its response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a policy that still haunts America today. Concerns about that invasion led the administration of President Jimmy Carter to step up weapons transfers through a covert arms pipeline to a loose network of oppositional fighters known as the mujahideen. President Reagan doubled down on such support, even meeting with the leaders of mujahideen groups in the Oval Office in 1983. That relationship would, of course, backfire disastrously as Afghanistan descended into a civil war after the Soviet Union withdrew. Some of those Reagan had praised as “freedom fighters” helped form al-Qaeda and later the Taliban. The U.S. by no means created the mujahideen in Afghanistan, but it does bear genuine responsibility for everything that followed in that country.
As the Biden administration moves to operationalize its policy of democracy versus autocracy, it should take a close look at the Cold War policy of attempting to expand the boundaries of the “free world.” A study by political scientists Alexander Downes and Jonathon Monten found that, of 28 cases of American regime change, only three would prove successful in building a lasting democracy. Instead, most of the Cold War policies outlined above, even though carried out under the rubric of promoting “freedom” in “the free world,” would undermine democracy in a disastrous fashion.
A New Cold War?
Cold War II, if it comes to pass, is unlikely to simply follow the pattern of Cold War I either in Europe or other parts of the world. Still, the damage done by the “good versus evil” worldview that animated Washington’s policies during the Cold War years should be a cautionary tale. The risk is high that the emerging era could be marked by persistent U.S. intervention or interference in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the name of staving off Russian and Chinese influence in a world where Washington’s disastrous war on terrorism has never quite ended.
The United States already has more than 200,000 troops stationed abroad, 750 military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, and continuing counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. The end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and the dramatic scaling back of American operations in Iraq and Syria should have marked the beginning of a sharp reduction in the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere. Washington’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may now stand in the way of just such a much-needed military retrenchment.
The “us versus them” rhetoric and global military maneuvering likely to play out in the years to come threaten to divert attention and resources from the biggest risks to humanity, including the existential threat posed by climate change. It also may divert attention from a country — ours — that is threatening to come apart at the seams. To choose this moment to launch a new Cold War should be considered folly of the first order, not to speak of an inability to learn from history.
Last week, a startling but seemingly familiar story emerged on the periphery of the Ukraine war: A former Washington state representative named Matt Shea, long associated with the far right, turned up in a hotel in a small Polish town with 63 Ukrainian children he apparently hoped to bring to the U.S. for adoption. For those who have followed both Shea’s career and the recent history of evangelical Christian adoption advocacy, this was cause for alarm.
Over his six terms in the Washington House of Representatives, Shea maintained close ties to “Patriot” and militia groups. He became involved in the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 and proposed legislation to transform rural eastern Washington, a heavily conservative region, into a 51st state to be called “Liberty.” Shea partnered with a group that ran a training camp to instruct youth in “Christian warfare,” and authored a pamphlet called “Biblical Basis for War” that appeared to offer advice to Christian “patriots” readying themselves for war against Muslim and Marxist “terrorists” (and which included a proposal to “kill all males” who resisted the new theocratic order they’d establish). Shea has maintained that document only amounted to notes for a sermon, but he also reportedly wrote an eight-page plan for the restoration of civilization after a civil war and governmental collapse (including banning all “centralized” education and medicine, implementing “severe” penalties for anyone seeking to limit public religiosity, and reinstating the death penalty for murder, rape, “sodomy” and possibly adultery — a provision marked for discussion).
Shea’s record led his state House colleagues to commission an independent investigation into his far-right associations. In 2019, that probe concluded that Shea’s activities amounted to support for “domestic terrorism,” after which he was stripped of his committee assignments and suspended from the legislature’s Republican Caucus. He didn’t run for reelection in 2020, but instead transformed himself into a pastor, and now leads his own church, On Fire Ministries.
This month Shea and a group of his supporters, drawn from both the U.S. and Polish far right, reportedly set up camp in a hotel in Kazimierz Dolny, a small town in eastern Poland about three hours from the Ukrainian border. They were accompanied by dozens of children Shea claimed had been evacuated from an orphanage in the besieged city of Mariupol. When an aide to the local mayor went to the hotel to find out what was going on, she said Shea refused to explain himself or even give his full name. In an interview with a right-wing Polish television show though, he claimed to be working with a Texas group, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, that arranges for American families to host Ukrainian children on a short-term basis, with the ultimate aim of facilitating adoptions.
After the Seattle Times and a number of other media outlets began investigating, Shea’s plans appeared murkier still. Loving Families and Homes for Orphans wasn’t a registered adoption agency and its website didn’t work. Shea pointed supporters to a different website that seemed to have been recently created and contained language, as journalist Daniel Walters noted, that appeared to have been copied word for word from other hosting groups.
Although Loving Homes has been registered as a business entity in Texas for several years, the group registered itself anew in Florida in mid-February, under the names of at least two individuals connected to Spokane, Washington, Shea’s hometown. The addresses listed for the organization, and for two of its three officers, appear to be vacant lots.
One of Shea’s allies, former Spokane Valley City Councilman Mike Munch, told Walters that Shea was trying to adopt four children from Ukraine, and an American volunteer with Shea’s party said the group’s hope was to take the children to America soon. But after the media attention, Shea denied any such plan, complaining on Facebook that his critics didn’t understand the distinction between hosting programs and adoption. Talking Points Memo’s Matt Shuham, however, reported that Shea delivered a sermon in a Polish church describing his efforts to “bring these orphans home” — standard language in the adoption world for finalizing an adoption — and also to “bring them home to the father,” an almost certain reference to Christian evangelism.
Shea has accused his critics of deploying “Russian-style propaganda” to bring “politics and religion into a humanitarian issue.” And on a March 17 livestream show, “Church & State,” which is linked to Shea’s ministry, he argued that the coverage had distressed potential adoptive parents in particular. “You have a lot of very, very upset parents right now who were ecstatic that their kids were rescued out of a war zone, brought to safety, and now the media is literally trying to put some insidious motivation behind this,” Shea said, “when really it’s about making sure there’s no more orphans in the world.”
***
Whatever Shea’s agenda may be, he’s not the only person who sees the crisis in Ukraine as a moment that may call for the large-scale adoption of children. On social media, numerous people have posted requests seeking information on how to adopt, host or foster a war “orphan” from Ukraine. Former Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel announced on Twitter that she had an apartment building standing ready to house 157 orphans currently taking refuge in Poland. In the U.K., a brief political battle broke out between two members of Parliament after one accused the other of slowing the transport of 48 purported Ukrainian orphans to Scotland, while the second charged that it was “wrong to move children without attempting to reunite them with their family first and without the agreement of their home and host governments.”
That sort of explanation — both in the British skirmish and in broader internet debates about Ukraine’s vulnerable children — was met with variations of the response, “Don’t you know what ‘orphan’ means?” as though explaining for the simple-minded that orphans by definition are children without parents.
That may be the dictionary definition, but it’s not true in the world of adoption, where many children who live in institutional care have living parents or other kin who have no intention of giving them up. Amid emergency circumstances, whether natural or manmade, it’s often simply impossible for officials tasked with determining which children are actually eligible for adoption, and which are not, to do that job. And that vacuum can create situations ripe for exploitation.
That was certainly the case in Haiti in 2010 with the notorious case of Laura Silsby, a woman from Idaho who was arrested trying to take 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic without paperwork or permission. Silsby led a group of 10 Baptist missionaries who had flown to Haiti in the aftermath of that year’s devastating earthquake, on a vague mission to help.
Her plans were more specific: With her personal and business life in shambles, Silsby seemingly intended to reinvent herself as the head of an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where Christian couples from the U.S. would stay in “seaside villas” while waiting out that nation’s adoption residency requirement. When the earthquake hit, she devised a scheme to drive a bus through Haiti “and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then bring them back to the DR,” where she had leased a 45-room hotel. Instead, when the bus reached the border, Silsby and her missionaries were arrested and charged with kidnapping and criminal conspiracy.
Many other evangelical Christians and adoption advocates denounced Silsby as a bad apple who gave international adoption a bad name, especially after it turned out that all 33 children she’d tried to abduct had at least one living parent or other close relatives. Silsby protested that she was being punished for something many other people in the adoption world had gotten away with. She had a point.
What Silsby tried to do “has been done a million times in human history, especially after disaster,” said Canadian global development professor Karen Dubinsky, the author of Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. After catastrophe, she continued, a form of “disaster rescue” often emerges as a parallel to disaster capitalism: “You can do almost anything in the name of rescue, and so much more so when it comes to child rescue.” And the process has become “almost seamless: Disaster happens and we in the West show up with bottled water — and we’ll take your children.”
It happened in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in 14 countries, prompting one American missionary group to announce its effort to “airlift” 300 Muslim children out of one devastated province and raise them according to “Christian principles.” It happened two years later in Chad, when a French charity was accused of kidnapping 103 children it claimed were Sudanese war orphans, but in many cases were just local kids with families.
After the Haitian earthquake, while adults in that nation were warned not to try to seek asylum in the U.S., the drive to expedite adoptions rose to fever pitch. The U.S. government began following new guidelines of “humanitarian parole” to fast-track the paperwork of about 1,200 children who were already somewhere in the adoption process. But soon after that came efforts to expand the loopholes even wider and transport children out of Haiti who had no adoption plans in place, or whose parents hadn’t signed off on them leaving.
Media coverage grew increasingly focused on the plight not just of Haitian “orphans” but prospective adoptive families in the U.S., and a strange counterfactual language took hold, calling for the “repatriation” of Haitian kids who’d never been to America, or their “reunification” with families they often had never met. Headlines called for flying children out of the country now, and sorting out “the paperwork” later, even though children with ambiguous legal status who end up in American families’ homes are often not returned.
Politicians joined the chorus, lobbying to speed adoptions up, or warning that recalcitrant aid groups like UNICEF — one of many groups that warned against fast-tracking earthquake adoptions — might lose their funding if they stood in the way. In Pennsylvania, then-Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, muscled through the evacuation of 54 children from a Haitian orphanage run by two Pittsburgh sisters — including 12 children whose families had not agreed to adoption, and in at least one case didn’t find out their child was gone until they visited the orphanage.
A version of this story may now be unfolding in Ukraine. “Out of the children in orphanages or shelters, only about 10 percent are actually available for adoption,” said Teresa Fillmon, the American director of a Ukraine-focused children’s organization, His Kids Too!, and the former director of an agency that facilitated adoptions from eastern Ukraine before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Most of the kids in such institutions, Fillmon said, are there because a parent “might be in jail, might be sick in the hospital, might be doing a number of things that there is no one able to take care of the children. They’re usually there in a temporary situation.”
When war came to Ukraine, the nation’s Ministry of Social Policy declared a moratorium on adoptions, explaining that it was impossible to properly vet the documentation of either prospective adoptive families or the status of potential adoptees. The National Council for Adoption in the U.S. has echoed this, saying: “It is paramount that the identities of these children and their families be clearly established, and their social, legal and familiar status is fully verified by government authorities. For many of these children, we cannot do that at this time.”
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Around the same time that Laura Silsby was making headlines, I reported on a surprisingly similar plan unfolding in Alabama, albeit one with a much more sympathetic face. In early 2010, Alabama pastor Tom Benz announced his intention to “airlift” some 50 to 150 Haitian children out of the country and bring them to a church retreat center he had recently acquired halfway between Montgomery and Birmingham, from which he hoped the children might be adopted to local Christian families. Benz raised funds for this plan, using donations and volunteer help to overhaul the retreat center’s aging infrastructure. While that was happening, he told reporters that he planned to skirt the tense politics around unauthorized adoptions out of Haiti by presenting his program to authorities there as a “cultural exchange.”
But by late 2010 his Haiti plan had fallen apart and Benz shifted his focus to Ukraine, where his wife had been born and where he’d worked earlier in his career, handing out Bibles after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That December, Benz brought over his first group of “orphans,” and he has done so, at a pace of several groups per year, ever since, amounting to around 500 children hosted and close to 200 adopted.
At the time, Benz admitted that his program was walking a blurry line. “Our program in Ukraine, if it were about adoption, it couldn’t happen,” he told me. Each group of children he flew over prompted a new letter from the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, telling him the purpose couldn’t be adoption. “Everyone knows it’s about adoption,” he said, “but it can’t be about adoption.”
It couldn’t “be about adoption” because the Ukrainian government was seeking to retain more control over its child welfare programs than often happens in an international adoption industry that can function like a boom-and-bust market. As the nation developed and grew more stable, it sought to promote domestic adoption by Ukrainian parents. It also wanted to prevent the sort of scandals that had happened in the first years after the country’s independence, including one episode in the early 1990s when dozens of Chicago-area families refused to return Ukrainian children they were hosting and wanted to adopt.
When I visited Benz’s retreat center in 2011, it was obvious the line was often blurred beyond legibility. Staff at the center warn visitors to never use “the ‘A’ word,” but each group of children was accompanied by an independent Ukrainian adoption facilitator, who stood to earn thousands of dollars for every successful adoption they completed. Children were painfully aware that their presence wasn’t just an American vacation but an unofficial audition for families who might whisk them into a new life — a reality underscored when I drove into the center and my car was surrounded by a half-dozen Ukrainian kids, opening doors and shaking my hand, eager to make a good first impression on any adult who arrived.
Ukraine has tried to prohibit foreign groups from sharing photos or information about children available for adoption, and, at least technically, bans most “pre-selection” adoptions — that is, foreign parents requesting a specific child.
Fillmon says both these rules have been broken by some groups working in Ukraine. But amid the chaos of the war, as she fields calls from people asking whether it’s possible to go to Ukraine to “get some children,” she worries about what the new disorder could bring.
“It makes me think about the children that came across the border from Mexico” under the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, she said. “There’s [hundreds of] children that they still can’t find their parents. I wouldn’t want that to happen in Ukraine.” She sketches out scenarios in which children are dispersed into foster homes in the U.S., where the foster parents later become unwilling to send them back to a country that, no matter the outcome of the war, is likely to be a difficult place to live in coming years.
Nonetheless, pressure is beginning to mount. Media coverage focusing on prospective adoptive parents often includes suggestions that the public urge their legislators to expedite adoptions, or casts Ukraine’s adoption moratorium in ominous tones.
In early March, Tom Benz announced in a press release that he was working to shuttle eight or nine Ukrainian children who had come to Alabama last December into neighboring countries, in hopes that they can be moved through the adoption process “on their way to the U.S.” One prospective adoptive father made nationalnews as he and Benz traveled to Poland in hopes (so far unmet) of bringing some of the children back.
On Monday, Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., called on the State Department and Homeland Security to begin expediting international adoptions from Ukraine, specifically calling for the reinstitution of the humanitarian parole program that sped up adoptions from Haiti 12 years ago.
Despite the echoes of the child welfare missteps in 2010, Dubinsky says she hopes things might be different this time: After more than a decade of falling international adoption numbers, many adoption advocates have begun embracing family preservation or local child welfare alternatives instead. As generations of adoptees have come of age and begun to speak for themselves, public discussion of adoption and its consequences has become more nuanced and complex.
“My impression is that the rescue narratives that came very easily to people’s lips in Haiti” do not come as easily now, Dubinsky said. “The idea that adoption is always good, adoption is rescue, just grab the children and sort out the details later — that story has become more complicated.”
On February 27th, the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she supported individuals from the UK who might want to go to Ukraine to join an international force to fight the Russians. After all, this is a fight between Good (Ukraine/NATO/the West) and Evil (Putin/Russia/the East).
In an interview on BBC One’s Sunday Morning programme, the UK foreign secretary replied “absolutely” when asked whether she would back anyone wanting to volunteer to help Ukrainians “fighting for their freedom”.
She told the programme: “The people of Ukraine are fighting for freedom and democracy, not just for Ukraine, but for the whole of Europe.”
Yet by March 10th, speaking at a Washington press conference alongside the US Secretary of State, the oleaginous British politician claimed, “I have been very clear that the travel advice from the United Kingdom is not to go to Ukraine…”
The US is planning to provoke conflict with China through Taiwan just as it has done to Russia through Ukraine. A similar process of replacing both governments in 2014 and then preparing both territories for war has been underway since.
US policy papers have called for the encirclement and containment of both Russia and China for decades and ultimately, stopping China requires first isolating it from its largest, most powerful ally, Russia.
Ukrainian leftists have appealed for international solidarity, as President Volodomyr Zelensky moved to ban leftist groups, including those opposing the Russian invasion, reports Steve Sweeney.
Then all cried with one accord,
‘Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’
— “The Mask of Anarchy,” Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the American ruling establishment embarked on a policy of backing radical anti-nation state ideologies (henceforth to be referred to as ANSIs) with the goal of dismantling national identities and leaving failed states in their wake. Only through acknowledging both the extraordinary dangers that this entails, and the fact that the process emanates from powerful transnational capitalist forces rather than from “the left” (which once referenced a Marxist or social democratic position), can the chaos within the West as well as US foreign policy in the post-Soviet era be understood.
If left unchecked, an ANSI will act as a cancer and metastasize, until the national identity it has infiltrated has reached the point of dissolution. Indeed, it will either eradicate or be eradicated; there is no other alternative. A curious phenomenon in the panoply of neoliberal barbarities is that those who reject extremism are inevitably labeled as extremists themselves. For instance, the American and Canadian truckers who are defending the informed consent ethic, the principle of bodily autonomy, and the Nuremberg Code, without which a democracy cannot survive, are guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” to quote Canada’s puerile prime minister – i.e., it is they who are the extremists.
Serbs that endured over seventy days of NATO bombing, and who suffered genocidal attacks at the hands of Croatian neo-Ustasha soldiers and Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists were also “extremists;” their oppressors, “freedom fighters.”
Identity politics, a deranged yet powerful ANSI which has cataclysmically destabilized American society, and is likewise being used as a battering ram to turn much of the West into a Tower of Babel while dismantling the rule of law, is predicated on the notion that any opposition to unrestricted immigration and the jettisoning of the American canon is indicative of “white supremacy.” This zealotry has been taken to its inescapable conclusion in the New York City public schools, where non-native speakers of English are hanging from the chandeliers, and a curriculum which demonizes American letters, British literature, classics of Western Civilization, civics, and the history of Western art – the foundational pillars of our civilization – is hegemonic.
Not only has this brought about a collapse of the society, but those for whom this curriculum purports to help – Americans of color and immigrant youth – are rendered illiterate, both culturally and intellectually. What better time than the 21st century to use one’s knowledge of the Nuremberg Code, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War (particularly prior to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan), and the role played by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War? The ignorance, alienation, tribalism, atomization, and dehumanization fomented by the multicultural society (essentially the inversion of white supremacy), has spawned a younger generation drowning in amnesia and amorality – a zombie class which is extremely amenable to brainwashing by the presstitutes.
Another example of an ANSI is the problem of Sunni fundamentalism in Syria, as Syria is comprised of not only Sunnis, but Alawites, Jews, Christians, Kurds, as well as other religious and ethnic minorities, all of which would be regarded as nonpersons by the jihadis should they sack Damascus. There are also considerable numbers of Sunnis in Syria that reject the radicalism of ISIS, Jaysh al-Islam, and Jabhat al-Nusra. In other words, the Syrian government had no choice but to outlaw these groups, as there is no way that they could peacefully coexist with a modern and secular Syrian state.
Multiple ANSIs were introduced into Iraq during the US military occupation. In commenting on the animus between the Baath Party and the Dawa Party, The Oklahoman writes:
The parties’ rivalry dates back more than four decades. The two groups have traditionally held opposing views on how Iraq should be run, with Dawa calling for an Islamic Shiite state, and the Baath party having a secular, pan-Arab ideology.
Unlike Iran, Iraq is not a predominantly Shiite state. Consequently, the rise of the Dawa Party, which was dominant in Iraq from 2003 to 2018, disenfranchised Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians, thereby facilitating Kurdish separatism as well as the birth of ISIS. In a similar vein, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India undermines a cohesive national identity and poses a threat to democratic institutions. Democracy demands freedom of speech, yet cannot become a synonym for dogmatism, sectarianism, and tribalism.
The Branch Covidian coup d’état has facilitated the emergence of a global cult which is anchored in a contempt for informed consent and which poses an existential threat to democracy. This contempt for the informed consent ethic is rooted in the notion that human beings are the property of the state, and that the state has a right to do whatever it wants to its subjects medically. Hence, this is a totalitarian position. Once a totalitarian position has been embraced, its acolytes invariably abandon the world of reason. This explains why you can send your indoctrinated relatives countless links to articles showing that masks and lockdowns don’t work, that the mRNA vaccines are dangerous and do not confer immunity, and that Covid can be treated with repurposed drugs, all to no avail. They have turned their backs, not only on democracy, but on logic, and are operating on a purely primordial emotion. Indeed, the irrationality of totalitarianism is tied to the fact that those who seek to destroy vital democratic pillars, such as the First Amendment and informed consent, are not only fighting to destroy the freedom of their adversaries but are fighting to destroy their own freedoms as well.
One might argue that the polarization that has ensued following the imposition of medical mandates was an unforeseen consequence of the Branch Covidian response, yet this phenomenon is fundamentally no different than inciting internecine strife within a country that has fallen into Washington’s crosshairs. Alas, it is another mechanism of the age-old divide and conquer strategy.
The Western elites’ post-Soviet love affair with smashing civilizations to the wall came to Ukraine in the winter of 2014, when the US-backed Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” saw the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, which precipitated the disintegration of Ukraine’s constitutional order. In the Western part of the country there has long been a considerable amount of support for Ukrainian nationalism, whose disciples regard themselves as “Aryans” and who romanticize Stepan Bandera, a fanatical leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, rabid Russophobe and Nazi collaborator. This putsch allowed the heirs to the Ukrainian nationalists that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War to seize power in Kiev. As there are millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, this could only lead to the country becoming a failed state.
Consider this extravaganza of ludicrousness: we have been told that truckers protesting medical mandates are “Nazis,” while the Western elites have been supporting a neo-Nazi government in Ukraine for eight years. No less galling, the Branch Covidian contempt for informed consent has its roots in the Nazi medical ethos.
On May 2, 2014, Banderite pogromists set fire to the Odessa Trade Union House, where locals who were protesting the nationalist coup were holed up, savagely beating and shooting those who attempted to escape. This incident, which led to the loss of over forty lives, was deeply symbolic of the new regime, its lawlessness and savagery, and its visceral hatred of Russians. In the West it would be unthinkable for there to be statues and monuments honoring prominent Nazis and Nazi collaborators. However, in Ukraine this is all too common. That Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, and Zelensky have proven adroit in speaking in the language of neoliberalism fails to alter the fact that the real power in post-Maidan Ukraine lies unequivocally with the Banderites.
A recent Bloomberg article titled “Russian Fleet Approach has Ukraine’s Port City Odessa Bracing” embodies the pervasive ignorance of the Western media, as Odessa is a Russian speaking city whose civilian inhabitants would mostly be delighted should the Russian military turn up. Not to be outdone, the BBC laments the fact that the residents of Kiev have been forced to spend a couple of nights in basements and metro stations. Where have the BBC, CNN, The New York Times,The Guardian, and other esteemed institutes of skulduggery been when Donbass residents were forced by a genocidal NATO-backed regime to live in basements for eight years? Incredibly, the songs and music videos of the Russian singer Artem Grishanov offer better journalistic coverage of post-Maidan Ukraine than all the Pentagon storytellers put together (see here, here, here and here). Note the total absence of any context in the mass media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: do we discuss the Invasion of Normandy in this way?
This coup, which brought a bloodthirsty ultranationalist cabal to power, proceeded to ban the formerly influential pro-Russian Party of Regions as well as the Communist Party, and has taken steps to undermine the language rights of Russian speakers. When the oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk refused to recognize the new junta, the Ukrainian military, backed by neo-Nazi units such as the Azov Battalion and the Aidar Battalion, and supported by the no less loathsome Right Sector and Svoboda Party, placed the Donbass under a medieval siege, a siege that has caused terrible suffering, but was doomed to fail militarily due to the fact that Donetsk and Lugansk share a border with Russia. These paramilitary groups have committed crimes against humanity, operate with minimal oversight, and have, together with regular Ukrainian forces, long been attempting to “ethnically cleanse” the Donbass of its ethnically Russian inhabitants in the same way that the Croatian government of Franjo Tudjman forcibly expelled 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region in 1995 (see here, here, and here). Many thousands of Donbass residents have lost their lives at the hands of these Western-backed gangs, which delight in shelling residential neighborhoods, and which have been green-lighted to commit atrocities with impunity. Videos of neo-Nazis boasting of how they are abusing and torturing captured Russian soldiers, and how they will hunt down and punish Ukrainians accepting Russian aid, is yet another sad reminder of who invariably benefits from US government largesse.
Putting Ukraine, a country that has long-standing cultural, linguistic, and civilizational ties to Russia that go back centuries in the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, has served to weaken Russia and transformed the country into a dangerous Western proxy. The mass media’s histrionics over the Russian military’s alleged targeting of residential neighborhoods is preposterous indeed, as this has long been an integral part of US imperial policy, as evidenced by relentless and indiscriminate US bombing campaigns conducted over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, and even when conducting air raids in the heart of Europe during the Second World War. Many Russians, in fact, have family in Ukraine – hence their genuine desire to not do this. Moreover, the Russian military has made a concerted effort to help civilians evacuate the war zone via humanitarian corridors, avenues of escape which have been repeatedly cut off by nationalists who have been accused by refugees of holding them hostage and even firing on those attempting to flee the fighting.
A substantial percentage of the Ukrainian population was hoodwinked into believing that for eight years they have been at war with Russia when they have been massacring their fellow countrymen in the Donbass. This underscores the mass hysteria that has gripped a vast swath of the country following the Maidan coup, and is indicative of how a mass psychosis can seize hold of a population once an ANSI has been imposed through the use of a hijacked media and education system.
Perhaps forgetting that Russia has nuclear weapons, Adam Kinzinger has called for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine, a country whose airspace is controlled by Russia. Elaborating on the there-is-no-difference-between-Russia-and-Somalia theme, Sean Hannity has called for drone strikes to be carried out against Russian military convoys, arguing that the Russians wouldn’t be able to figure out who did it; which leads one to wonder which country has more lunatics per capita: Ukraine or the United States? Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he wrote in Beyond Good And Evil that “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
Following the onset of the Russian intervention, the freedom-loving government in Kiev opened the doors to its prisons, granting convicts an early release should they agree to fight “the Moskal.” Empowered by this maelstrom of anarchy, heavily armed bandits are free to join their Banderite brethren, embrace “democracy,” and terrorize the locals at will. Fittingly, the new draconian sanctions directed at Russia are being called “the Halting Enrichment of Russian Oligarchs and Industry Allies of Moscow’s Schemes to Leverage its Abject Villainy Abroad Act;” a strange name, yet one which happens to form the acronym HEROIAM SLAVA, a Ukrainian fascist greeting meaning “Glory to the Heroes,” and which is comparable to “Sieg Heil.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Russophobia in the US is starting to resemble the Russophobia in Ukraine itself, with Lindsey Graham openly calling for Putin to be assassinated (which doesn’t constitute “hate speech,” incidentally, according to Twitter).
The government in Kiev has recently spoken of reconsidering its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum and obtaining nuclear weapons, a threat that undoubtedly contributed to Moscow’s recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. There has also been speculation that one of the objectives of the denazification campaign is the elimination of biowarfare labs, as the Russian government has been accusing the US of operating these facilities near its borders for quite some time (a claim not denied by Maidan architect Victoria Nuland). A false flag chemical weapons attack à la the White Helmets is a real and present danger.
The Kremlin has been trying for decades to have a respectful dialogue with the West about NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, and has repeatedly attempted to come to terms with its “Western partners” on establishing a new European security architecture which would take into account Moscow’s legitimate security concerns. The Kremlin’s attempts at getting Washington to cease its deliveries of arms to the murderers and sociopaths in Kiev, coupled with Putin’s tireless attempts at getting the Banderite regime to implement the Minsk agreements, have proven no less futile. Moscow will not permit the Banderite regime to obtain nuclear weapons, it will not permit the Donbass to be overrun, and it will not allow Ukraine to join NATO – each constitutes a non-negotiable red line.
In many ways it was inevitable that the Russian military would be sent into the Donbass, as the position of Donetsk and Lugansk has grown increasingly precarious due to the relentless influx of NATO weaponry, and they have been pleading with Moscow for protection ever since the commencement of hostilities. The decision to execute a reverse regime change operation is likely due to the Russian elite concluding that if they were to leave the Banderite junta in place, it would grow increasingly dangerous over time as its military capabilities expand exponentially – a kind of illiterate Russophobic Israel at one’s doorstep, if you will. If thousands of Americans were being killed and tortured at the hands of a tyrannical Moscow-backed puppet government in Mexico, would Washington have the patience to pursue diplomacy for the greater part of a decade?
The Russian military needs to get in and out of Kiev, a hornet’s nest of Banderivtsi, as efficiently as possible. The longer they remain, the greater the likelihood that the CIA will entrap them in an Afghan-style quagmire, as Western intelligence agencies are working around the clock to flood Ukraine with as many private military contractors, jihadis, and neo-Nazi volunteers as possible. Should Ukraine cease to exist, balkanization would certainly be preferable to the country being pulled inexorably into a never-ending vortex of violence as transpired in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is difficult to see how the country could be put back together, with one half comprised of Russophobes; and the other, of Russophiles.
The Western elites’ growing reliance on the use of ANSIs as a form of unconventional warfare threatens civilization both at home and abroad, and if directed at Russia or China, could unleash a nuclear war from which there would be no survivors. Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton, Washington has worked long and hard to smoke a hibernating bear out of its den. Through the resurrection of the ghost of Bandera, at long last, they have succeeded.
Unlike Ukraine, Venezuela successfully resisted the violent US-led coup attempt in 2014, and in other years, by right wing forces and the hybrid war being waged against it. Venezuela is recovering despite the ongoing economic blockade. Now, because the United States needs oil, the Biden administration has started talking to the Maduro government and there is hope that relations between the two countries may resume. For an update on this situation, as well as the future of Venezuela’s US-based oil company CITGO, the status of Venezuela’s gold in the Bank of London, the demise of Juan Guaido, and the kidnapping of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab, Clearing the FOG speaks with Leonardo Flores, the Latin American campaign director for CODEPINK.
We’re risking a very fast, very radioactive third world war defending the “democracy” of a regime who just banned eleven opposition parties.
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Liberals explaining why it’s fine to eliminate opposition parties when they become inconvenient is just liberals telling you who they really are.
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One reason you always hear about the genocidal depravity of Adolf Hitler but not King Leopold II is because Hitler did imperialism to white people. Keep that in mind as you watch the disparity between coverage of Ukraine and coverage of other recent military invasions.
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This is the message desktop Twitter users are receiving at the top right of their screen as of this writing:
We talk a lot about Silicon Valley’s role in facilitating US government censorship, but we should probably talk a lot more about its role in facilitating US government propaganda as well. We have two different words for censorship and propaganda, but in reality they’re just different aspects of the same one thing: narrative control. Propaganda is the positive aspect of imperial narrative control (adding communications), censorship the negative (removing communications).
Whoever controls the world’s dominant narratives controls the world itself. Narrative management constructs like Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the oligarchic “news” media play an even greater role in upholding the US-centralized empire than the US military.
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The US and all its imperial member states are strangling Russia’s economy in response to a war they provoked because Putin threatens US unipolar planetary domination and there are still right wingers whispering “I bet there’s a hidden conspiracy to create a one world government.”
Yes there’s an agenda to unite the world under a single power structure, but it’s the one leftist anti-imperialists have long warned about. And it’s not hidden at all; it’s evidenced in public information like the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and just by simple naked-eye observations of the movements of military equipment and resources.
Our world’s problems are systemic. Pretending our problems are due to specific individuals like Klaus Schwab is tempting for people who are ideologically invested in existing systems like capitalism and US supremacy, because then you just need to get rid of those few bad apples. Really though we’re looking at the way our power-serving systems inevitably allow power to consolidate and reinforce itself and gradually work toward bending all humanity to its will. This will continue happening until we change those systems, if we don’t nuke ourselves into oblivion first.
This is all being driven by one particular power structure’s self-appointed role as global ruler. The US-centralized empire’s foreign policy behavior is essentially a nonstop war on disobedience, continuously working to absorb nations into its blob and destroy those who refuse.
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If you mentally mute the “why” narratives about what’s happening and just look objectively at what’s happening, what you’ll see is a single dominant power structure controlling the majority of the world’s resources, wealth and information and punishing any nations who disobey it. What this tells you is that there’s a power structure doing whatever it has to do to shore up more and more control over the world, and then we’re fed narratives about why that needed to happen (Saddam needs to go because blah blah, NATO needs to expand because blah blah, etc).
Really underneath the narrative spin it’s just a giant tyrant doing tyrannical things. Heinlein said “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” This applies to empires and their narrative control mechanisms just as much as to individuals.
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People talk about “blaming the US for everything” like it’s some kind of outlandish and paranoid position to say that a unipolarist planetary hegemon probably plays some role in major conflicts of immense geostrategic consequence. They seriously have a hard time believing that the most powerful empire in the history of civilization could be involved in manipulating all major conflicts which directly affect its agenda of global domination.
They’re like, “Come on. The US empire can’t have a villainous role in EVERY major international conflict.” If that were true there wouldn’t be a US empire. You don’t become a unipolar planetary hegemon by being nice, you do it by forcefully tilting all global happenings toward your benefit.
You can’t take all of the control and none of the responsibility. It’s like a domineering narcissist who tyrannizes his family having a pity party when someone gets upset at him. “Oh right, it’s ALWAYS Dad’s fault. I’m ALWAYS the bad guy.” I mean, yeah, kinda. Duh.
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Russell Brand @rustyrockets reads from my article "International Law Is A Meaningless Concept When It Only Applies To US Enemies".https://t.co/Ma5AmF8Edr
If you’re so upset about “westsplaining” then maybe tell the western empire to stop “westspreading”.
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Liberals don’t even really believe it’s legitimate to ban opposition parties during a war. That thought never once occurred to them before today. They just assume it must be the right thing to do because their holy Ukrainian sex god did it.
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Liberals have spent five years defending the right of the powerful to keep secrets and tell lies. Now there’s a war and they get mad if you say the powerful are keeping secrets and telling lies. What’d you all think censorship, glorifying the CIA, persecuting Assange etc was about?
Liberals were brought up to think of themselves as skeptical, sophisticated progressives who believe in peace, democracy and the freedom of the press, and somehow they wound up arguing against all three of them without any critical thought. What an extraordinary thing to behold.
If a friend told me that they were going to keep secrets from me and sometimes lie but for my own good, they wouldn’t be my friend for long. I certainly wouldn’t absorb everything they said with nary a hint of skepticism. And yet this is the state of the western liberal today.
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Being a “contrarian” in the face of bat shit insanity is a good thing, actually.
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The United States is setting up China as a second target of its intense economic war against Russia in what could have cataclysmic effects on the world economy, including the West.
The U.S. could not impose the most stringent sanctions on Moscow without the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the U.S. is trying to link China to the war.
Washington’s move to frame Beijing emerged Monday when unnamed U.S. officials told its allies that Russia had asked China for military aid in Ukraine. Reuters reported: “The message, sent in a diplomatic cable and delivered in person by intelligence officials, also said China was expected to deny those plans, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” China indeed denied it.
In yet another assault on dissenting political views in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a ban on the activities of major opposition political parties in the country after alleging that they have links with Russia. He also announced the merger of all TV channels in the country in the name of implementing a “unified information policy”, thus creating a government monopoly over the medium.
Citing the need to maintain the unity of the country, Zelensky claimed in a statement that “the National Security and Defense Council decided, given the full-scale war unleashed by Russia and the political ties that a number of political structures have with this state, to suspend any activity of a number of political parties for the period of martial law.”
Below are various bits of interest from the war in Ukraine. In two draft treaties, which Russia had sent to the U.S. and EU in December, it demanded written declarations that the Ukraine would never join NATO. The U.S. and the EU publicly rejected that demand. It was a major reason for Russia to start its intervention. Consider the above in light of this interview Zelensky gave yesterday to CNN. He said, “I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five. Just say it directly and clearly or just say no the response was very clear, you are not going to be a NATO or E.U. member, but publicly the doors will remain open.” The cowards just didn’t want to say it publicly, even as it could have avoided a war.
The Russian army, having failed since invading Ukraine to take a single major city, has turned to besieging and bombing civilians, and to terrorizing opponents in the areas it controls.
This ruthless, anti-popular character of the Russian war is the key to understanding what motivated the Kremlin to launch it in the first place, turning upside down its relationship with Western powers, and Russia’s own future, for decades to come.
In Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, and other occupied towns in southeastern Ukraine, Russian troops have faced crowds of thousands calling on them to go home. Mayors who refuse to cooperate with the Russian army have reportedly been kidnapped. Along with other Ukrainian activists, they have been taken to Luhansk — one of the two eastern Ukrainian “people’s republics” established with Russian support in 2014 — and reportedly prosecuted there. The “republics,” unrecognized even by Russia until last month, suppress dissent with abductions and arbitrary detention free of meaningful judicial constraint.
The war looks very different to the one Russian President Vladimir Putin described on the day of the invasion. The Russian army would “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine, but there were no plans to occupy or to impose anything by force, he said. Occupation has since become a central focus.
Putin called on the Ukrainian army to switch sides: not only has it not done so, it has also proven to be an unexpectedly tough opponent. Russian soldiers expected to be greeted with open arms and flowers — but have apparently been shocked at the level of resistance. Even an attempt to set up a puppet “people’s republic” in Kherson, alongside those in Donetsk and Luhansk, failed. While Ukraine’s government has seen working people’s rights as expendable in wartime, the Kremlin’s war against those people is one of annihilation: It has already murdered hundreds of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians it claimed to protect, and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.
Putin’s statements are laced with the nationalist ideology with which the Kremlin justifies the invasion. Alongside his false claims that Ukraine is governed by a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” responsible for “genocide,” Putin has made a case that Ukraine could only have “true sovereignty” in unity with Russia, that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” and that Ukrainian nationhood was an invention by the Poles and/or Austro-Hungarians.
This view of Russia’s oldest colony is analogous, perhaps, to a British head of state claiming that Irish nationhood is fictitious. And here Putin speaks not only for himself and his closest colleagues, but for the most aggressive militarist elements in the state, and a range of extreme Russian nationalists and fascists.
Since Putin took office 22 years ago, this militarism and nationalism has been married to an economic program that allowed Russian businesses to profit from integration with world markets — although this was integration as a subordinate power, a supplier of oil, gas, minerals and metals to world markets. While Western nations are dependent on Russian oil, gas and precious metals, in particular, Russia is dependent on the export revenues.
By going to war, and provoking a barrage of economic sanctions, Putin has not only condemned Ukrainians to death, destruction and exile, but has also wrecked the Russian economy’s prospects. So even business groups such as Lukoil, the largest privately owned oil company in Russia, and EN+, the vast aluminium business, have voiced alarm at the war.
The Kremlin has prioritized military adventure and associated political aims over the medium-term and perhaps long-term economic interests of Russian capital.
To understand this reckless gamble, it helps to recall its motivation in 2014, when, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in Kyiv, Russia decided to annex Crimea and give military backing to the armed gangs who established the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics.”
First, there was the pressure of nationalism and militarism. While Russia’s economic reformers despaired at the damage done by the Crimea annexation and the resulting sanctions, Putin could not be seen by hardliners in the military and security services to be the president who had failed to undermine the Ukrainian state when he had the chance. Second, there was a fear within the Kremlin of the social movement that had removed Yanukovych. However confused and politically heterogenous the movement was, it embraced a huge swath of the Ukrainian population. The Kremlin has long related to active civil society and mass popular action as a threat to be contained by force. In recent times, it has responded to it in both Belarus (2020) and Kazakhstan (this year) by sending in troops. Third, there was concern that such social movements might find their echo in Russia, and this was an opportunity to use flag-waving as a means of social control.
Between 2014 and 2021, the war in eastern Ukraine — between Russian forces and the “republics” on one side, and Ukraine on the other — claimed 14,000 lives. The living nightmare inside the “republics” strikes a contrast with Kremlin narratives of “liberation.” Independent media, civil society activity and trade unionism have been crushed. Arbitrary law is enforced by torture and forced labor in prisons. Half the prewar population has fled and the economy of the area, once Ukraine’s industrial heartland, has been trashed.
While the U.S. and European imperial powers marshal economic and military power together, Russian imperialism uses its military power to substitute for its weakness economically. The use of troops to support the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus against social unrest in 2020 was a step toward this year’s war in Ukraine. Recognition on February 21 of the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics,” previously treated by Russia legally as areas of Ukraine, was the final trigger.
Since 2014, Putin has claimed that Russia’s military activity is necessitated not only by an (exaggerated) specter of Nazism in Ukraine — as though Russia doesn’t have a thriving fascist movement itself — but also by the threat to Russia posed by NATO expansion. While this narrative is politically attractive to those in Western nations who see imperialism as a unipolar phenomenon centered in the U.S., it is problematic in two ways.
Politically, it diverts attention from the Kremlin’s responsibility for this war of aggression, which it has waged not so much against the Ukrainian state as against its civilian population. Analytically, it one-sidedly attributes the war’s causes to the U.S. military complex, rather than situating it in the broader crisis of 21st century capitalism. It is this crisis that dashed the 1990s hopes of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and many social democrats, that Russia would be integrated as a democratic European partner. Moreover, it is this same crisis that favored the rapacious form of capitalism on which Kremlin authoritarianism rests, and that produced the social unrest of the 2010s in both Russia and Ukraine that formed the backdrop for the initial outbreak of war in 2014.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 remade economic relationships in the first place. The implosion of the autarchic, state-directed economy — and the worst-ever peacetime slump that followed in both Russia and Ukraine in the early 1990s — presented Western capital with huge opportunities to access, above all, raw material supplies and consumer markets.
With the Russian state at its weakest, Western capital rarely sought direct ownership of oil, gas and minerals, but facilitated their transfer to emergent domestic business groups. Capital flight from both Russia and Ukraine, mostly to offshore tax havens, ran at tens of billions per year in the 1990s. In both countries, working people’s living standards were devastated by hyperinflation and the social crisis ruined health. Life expectancy in Russia, which was on par with life expectancy in developed countries in the 1960s, was 15 to 19 years lower for men and 7 to 12 years lower for women in the 1990s. Russia’s grain harvest fell by half between 1993 and 1998.
As Russian imperial power in Soviet form disappeared from eastern Europe, NATO indeed expanded — first to the Baltic states and then to the seven countries that acceded in 2004. The causality was as much east European as Western imperialist. While, to American eyes, the U.S.’s ever-longer reach is striking, this process looked different to some east Europeans. With the exception of NATO’s bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, many had historical memories of military attacks not from the U.S. but from Russia — and in the Baltics’ case, of being forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union under a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler.
In Russia, when Putin took over in 2000, he reestablished strong Russian state power, first with the murderous second war in Chechnya and then with a clampdown on the business groups, who from then on had to pay more tax. This model of skillful statecraft and state-business partnership, supported by the commodity price boom of 2001-08, underpinned the new Russian imperialism with the state’s finances back on a strong foundation of oil dollars, government centralized and business leaders’ wings clipped by arrests and confiscations, Putin could go to the Munich summit in 2008 and rail against the idea of a “unipolar world.”
The western powers responded not with NATO expansion (in the 18 years since 2004, four small Balkan countries have been admitted), but, at first, by treating Russia as a potentially dangerous but necessary partner.
For all their disavowals of “spheres of influence,” Western powers not only ignored Russia’s multiple war crimes in Chechnya, but acquiesced in the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and, most significantly, Russia’s bloody intervention in support of the Assad dictatorship in Syria since 2015. This tolerance for Russia as a gendarme was the other side of the coin of the Western powers’ own military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and their support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen.
The tolerance only went so far. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 resulted in Western sanctions that constricted the flow of finance to Russian companies, but left the exports of oil, gas and metals untouched. Perhaps the simultaneous Russian intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk could have been hidden under the veil of hypocrisy with which the western powers cover Saudi crimes in Yemen or Turkish crimes in Kurdistan. But the seizure of a piece of territory in Europe, in blatant breach of the 1994 Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, provoked a response.
The uneasy balance between the west and Russia, disrupted in 2014, has been finally blown apart by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the far-reaching Western response.
The well-publicized (and in the U.K.’s case, incomplete) sanctions on Russian business leaders are only part of it. The sanctions on the Russian central bank are more damaging, as they prevent the Kremlin from getting its hands on its own money and make default almost inevitable. Also significant is the withdrawal from Russia of major Western oil companies — BP, Shell, Equinor and ExxonMobil — which have written off billions of dollars. (The oil service companies Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes have not followed.)
The 180-degree turn in German policy, implied by supplying Ukraine with arms and freezing Russia’s treasured Nord Stream II gas pipeline project, is significant. European energy policy is now being rewritten to reduce dependence on imports from Russia, and that in turn opens up assumptions about climate policy in a manner that could be positive or negative, long term.
It appears that, in the true centers of Western decision making, Russia has been cut loose. It is threatened with a future as an impoverished wasteland, largely dependent on China.
In the long term, labor and social movements in Europe and beyond face a radically changed world. In the short term, all our efforts should be directed at supporting Ukrainian people — both those who are resisting the invasion, and the millions who have fled across the border — and the antiwar movement in Russia.
This is a line you’ve probably had bleated at you by propagandized empire livestock if you’ve engaged in online debate about the role western powers have played in paving the way to this war.
One of the many, many tricks that imperial spinmeisters have pulled out of their hats in their shockingly frenetic campaign to manage the narrative about what’s happening in Ukraine is to insist that it’s outrageous and disgusting to suggest that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn in the grand chessboard maneuverings of the US-centralized empire, because it is denying the “agency” of that nation. The argument is that Ukraine freely chose to enter into the situation in which it now finds itself, with no outside pressure or influence of any kind whatsoever.
All these circulating arguments about "NATO expansion" ignore that Ukrainians have agency.
Seemingly overnight it became not just wrong to say that the US hegemon has played a role in giving rise to this war, but actually monstrous and evil. My online notifications are currently flooded with furious empire apologists screaming at me for assigning any degree of responsibility in this conflict to western power structures with the kind of vitriol people normally reserve for Holocaust deniers or pedophelia advocates.
Imperial narrative managers have even been workingovertime to make the word “westsplaining” happen, which is their progressive-sounding term for when one makes the self-evident observation that western powers influence world events. Mainstream westerners are actively trained to regurgitate lines like “Stop westsplaining to Ukrainians about coups and proxy conflicts! You’re denying their agency!”
Calling this a “proxy war” between Russia and the United States or calling Kyiv a “puppet regime” of Washington is strictly taboo now. That Ukraine has lacked independent agency in this war and the events leading up to it is something you are simply not allowed to say.
Well, I’m saying it. This is a proxy war. Kyiv is a puppet regime. Ukraine does not have independent agency in any meaningful way. This is not the fault of the Ukrainian people, who are obviously far and away the greatest victims of the Russian invasion, but of the giant western power structure which deliberately worked to take away the nation’s agency many years before the invasion took place.
I mean, my god. The US and its allies are pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine from around the world, the CIA has been training Ukrainians to kill Russians, the US intelligence cartel is directly sharing military intelligence with Kyiv as we speak, and this follows US-backed coups in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2004 before that.
This is a proxy war. This is exactly the thing that a proxy war is. The only “agency” Ukraine has is the Central Intelligence kind.
In this article, a leftist Ukrainian activist explains how the US government created the crisis, backing two coups in one decade, fueling a devastating civil war that killed 14,000 people, and exploiting his nation as "cannon fodder" against Russiahttps://t.co/4G5FjLC48S
Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.
…
The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.
The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.
Yes indeedy. Amid all the phony profile pic activism and concern trolling about denial of Ukraine’s “agency”, no concern whatsoever has been shown for actual, known assaults on Ukrainian independence by the US-centralized empire.
Where was all this reverence for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2004, when The Guardian was reporting that “while the gains of the orange-bedecked ‘chestnut revolution’ are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes”?
Where was the respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2014, when a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland (now working on Ukraine under the Biden administration) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt showed US officials casually discussing who they were going to select as Ukraine’s next Prime Minister following a US-backed coup in Kyiv?
Where was all this respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2018, when Joe Biden openly boasted before the Council on Foreign Relations that he had used his power as Obama’s Vice President to brazenly interfere in Ukraine’s judicial system?
Obama VP Joseph Biden brags about how he rigged the judicial system of another country. pic.twitter.com/BC4u7AUPHB
The US power alliance does not care about Ukraine’s sovereignty beyond what measures need to be taken to actively subvert it. When people object to criticisms of the way the empire has actively robbed Ukrainians of any real agency, what they are actually doing is defending the most powerful empire that has ever existed from attempts to highlight its malfeasance.
I’m not just spouting off about a far away nation from my safe home here in Australia, for the record. This is a dynamic which affects my country directly, and is very likely to affect it a lot more as the empire’s “great power competition” with China heats up.
It is very likely that in the not-too-distant future, Australia will end up playing a crucial role in the empire’s grand chessboard maneuverings to stop the rise of China. When that occurs, I will most certainly be saying that we are being used as pawns in a proxy conflict, and I will most certainly be saying that our agency in this matter has been stolen from us.
As in Ukraine, there have been US-backed coups in Australia not once but twice. This nation is now functionally little more than a US military and intelligence base with a smattering of suburbs and kangaroos, which is why the puppet regime in our capital Canberra has done nothing whatsoever to end Washington’s brutal persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange. John Mearsheimer, now the subject of great controversy for his completely accurate predictions years ago that US and NATO actions would lead to this exact war in Ukraine, told an Australian think tank in 2019 that the US will destroy Australia if Canberra doesn’t align with imperial agendas against Beijing. And he was right.
And yes, just as there are Ukrainians supporting the imperial line against Moscow, when the time comes for Australia to make great sacrifices for US unipolarist agendas against the Chinese government there will absolutely be Australians supporting it. Because of a massivepropaganda campaign in this nation facilitated by our Murdoch-dominated press and imperial narrative management operations like the empire-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, there are many Australians who intensely despise China right now. I know. I’ve met them.
But that won’t mean our sovereignty wasn’t robbed from us, by mass-scale oligarchic psyops, by CIA coups, by secret deals, by the threat of knowing we’d be immediately attacked by a murderous empire if we tried to pivot to Beijing or even to simply espouse a neutral posture. What’s true of Ukraine is also true of Australia: we have no meaningful agency in the most important decisions made by this nation.
Denying the western role in subverting Ukrainian sovereignty doesn’t benefit ordinary Ukrainians, it hurts them. You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand, and until there’s widespread understanding of the way the US empire uses proxies to advance its agendas of global domination, nothing can be done to stop these ugly proxy wars from happening.
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Last week, it was announced that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor was opening an investigation into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, examining whether any war crimes had been committed.
Then this week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held a preliminary hearing into the Ukrainian demand that it issue an emergency order that Russia stop its incursion.
Despite these two international courts having similar acronyms, they’re quite different. So, what are these courts, how do they differ, and what are their roles in the Ukraine-Russia conflict?
The International Criminal Court
As the name suggests, the ICC is a court that deals with criminal matters. Specifically, with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression. It was established in 1998 by a treaty, and has 123 member states (countries). The ICC has jurisdiction (authority) to investigate and prosecute international crimes if they’re committed on the territory of a member state, or by a national of a member state.
The ICC can go beyond this and investigate crimes alleged to have been committed on the territory of a non-member state if the United Nations (UN) Security Council has authorised it.
The ICC has 18 international judges who are elected by the member states. It also has an independent prosecutor whose office is responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Karim Khan, from the UK, is the ICC’s newest prosecutor. The ICC is headquartered in The Hague and, as a criminal court, it prosecutes individuals, not countries. Punishment for anyone convicted is jail time.
The ICC and Ukraine
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are member states of the ICC, but Ukraine has previously accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction over any international crimes committed in its territory since 2014. An unprecedented 40 ICC member states (including Australia) referred the current situation in the Ukraine to the prosecutor, who decided to open an official investigation that may lead to prosecutions.
What crimes might be investigated?
The ICC will be investigating possible war crimes that Russians are committing in Ukraine. If Ukrainians commit any war crimes, then they may also be investigated by the ICC.
What the ICC will not have authority over is the crime of aggression. Despite the fact that Russia has clearly committed an act of aggression against Ukraine by invading, the rules on the ICC’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression are different – if the aggressor state (Russia) is not a member of the ICC, then the ICC cannot exercise its jurisdiction, even if the victim state (Ukraine) has agreed to the court’s jurisdiction. The reasons for this are complex and political.
Who might be prosecuted?
The ICC is a “court of last resort”, which means it usually focuses on a small number of people who are considered most responsible for the crimes. Even if high-ranking commanders never actually set foot on the battlefield, they can still be held responsible for the crimes of their subordinates. The ICC can issue arrest warrants, but relies on member states to arrest and transfer any suspects to the court. Anyone wanted by the court might then avoid traveling to countries that are members of the ICC.
Could the ICC prosecute Putin?
Under international law, senior state officials such as presidents and prime ministers are immune from any kind of legal action in foreign courts. As an international court, the ICC does not allow immunity for any individuals over whom it has jurisdiction.
However, because Putin is the head of state of a non-member country, it’s legally more complicated as to whether the ICC can exercise jurisdiction over him. If the UN Security Council had referred the situation to the ICC (as it did with Sudan and Libya), then the court would be able to assert its authority over Putin.
But without UN Security Council authorisation, it’s uncertain as a matter of legal principle that the ICC will be able to assert jurisdiction over Putin while he remains president.
The International Court of Justice
The ICJ is older than the ICC. It was established after World War II as the principal judicial organ of the UN. It has 15 international judges who are elected by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, and it’s also based in The Hague. The ICJ hears legal disputes on a range of issues between countries, but it only has authority to adjudicate if the countries involved have agreed to its jurisdiction.
Ukraine v Russia
On 26 February, Ukraine filed an application with the ICJ to institute proceedings against Russia. Because Russia will not simply agree to the ICJ’s jurisdiction in this case, Ukraine has come up with a creative legal argument that may mean that the ICJ can adjudicate the matter.
Does the ICJ have jurisdiction?
One of the ways that the ICJ can exercise jurisdiction over a dispute is if the countries involved are parties to a treaty containing a dispute resolution clause that gives the ICJ jurisdiction. In this case, Ukraine is invoking the fact that both Ukraine and Russia are parties to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which has such a clause to enable the jurisdiction of the ICJ.
One of the pretexts Russia has used for the invasion is that Ukraine has committed genocide in its Donbas region, which, if true, would be a violation of the convention. Ukraine is arguing that it has not violated the convention, and is asking the ICJ to exercise its jurisdiction over a dispute arising in relation to it.
What does Ukraine want from the ICJ?
If the ICJ decides it does have jurisdiction to hear the matter, Ukraine is seeking a declaration from the court that Russia’s claim of Ukrainian genocide is false. Ukraine is also asking the ICJ to affirm that it’s unlawful for Russia to invade on this pretext, and wants an order of “full reparation for all damage caused by the Russian Federation as a consequence of any actions taken on the basis of Russia’s false claim of genocide”.
What happens next?
Proceedings at the ICJ (and ICC) take a long time. So Ukraine has also asked the ICJ for provisional measures in the interim. In the expedited hearing that took place on Monday this week, Ukraine asked the ICJ to order Russia to suspend its military campaign against Ukraine until the broader dispute is resolved before the court.
In the short term, it’s almost guaranteed that Russia will ignore anything the ICJ has to say. But a ruling from a respected international court will nevertheless have important symbolic significance, and will dispel any doubt that Russia’s invasion is not justifiable under international law.
Update: On 16 of March, the ICJ ruled in Ukraine’s favour on the provisional measures.
Dr Monique Cormier is a Senior Lecturer in the Monash University Faculty of Law. Her primary research interests include jurisdiction and immunities in international law and legal issues relating to nuclear non-proliferation.
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The issue that has generated heated discussion on the left is not over whether the Russian invasion is justifiable, writes Steve Ellner, but whether raising the issue of NATO distracts from the atrocity of the invasion.
Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.
The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”
A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.
Tsai: Hello Volodya. I hope you do not mind my calling you that.
Zelensky: (Sobs, wordless.)
Tsai: What is it Volodya? Calm down.
Zelensky: (Sobbing continues.) We have been left alone to defend our state. Who is ready to fight alongside us? I don’t see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO membership? Everyone is afraid.*
Tsai: But the Americans have given you weapons, rifles. The Germans even gave you helmets — right away — and now they are promising more. And they also sent military advisors “little green men”– I think that is what they call them when they are Russian.
Zelensky: We are facing tanks and missiles. I am afraid what we have is pretty small potatoes. As the American politician Ron Paul said, it seems the Americans are ready to fight Russia – down to the last Ukrainian (more sobbing).
Tsai: But Volodya, you got to address the U.S. Congress and plea for help – certainly that shows support.
Zelensky: Support? The script that the Americans handed me centered on a No Fly Zone, in other words, a call for WWIII, nuclear war. I looked like a madman! (More sobbing.)
Tsai: I did not think that made you look like a madman. I admire someone who is willing to risk nuclear war for our beliefs. That shows real spine, real guts. And those Congress people applauded you. If you looked mad, would that not make them all insane too. Surely you cannot believe that.
But I know how you feel about those scripts. The Americans stuff one in my face every now and then with the “advice” that it would be good to read it. I feel I am getting an offer I cannot refuse as they say in the American movies.
But you do not have to accept the script – you are safe in hiding in Ukraine.
Zelensky: I cannot comment on where I am – if you understand what I mean.
And I do not know what kind of company you are keeping, Tsai, but most people are appalled and frightened by the prospect of nuclear war. My stance allowed Biden to look sane by turning thumbs down. I was the fall guy.
Tsai: Look Volodya. You have to get hold of yourself. The U.S. has managed to get the whole world behind you. Just like the US has got the whole world behind me. Not to worry.
Zelensky: Are you serious, Tsai? You know that not only China but also India has refused to join US sanctions on Russia – that is 35% of the world’s population right there. China is the number one economy in the world by PPP-GDP and India number three as you surely know. So two of the big three are not backing sanctions. Also refusing are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico. That is over half the world’s population! And there are many more refusenik nations including the 40 countries not in that list on which the US has sanctions – I have lost count.
And NATO is showing cracks. Macron and others are talking to Putin all the time. Sweden has refused to join NATO, saying that would be “destabilizing.”
The world is changing, Tsai.
Exactly how many countries are behind you, Tsai? You better check — carefully. I wish I had. (More sobbing.)
Tsai: (Now looks very worried) Good point, Volodya.
Zelensky: And now Germany is rearming under the influence of the crazy German Greens, the most hawkish of the Parties in the governing coalition. That of course is a dream come true for the neocons – having Germany fight Russia. Two principal competitors of the U.S. fighting one another. It will destroy Ukraine and the rest of Europe. As I have said in the past, this war will engulf Europe.
Tsai: (Now a bit shaken.) But why did you not stop all this as soon as you were elected. You ran as a peace candidate.
Zelensky: (Even more upset). I could not. The Americans would not permit it, and Russia is well aware of this as Lavrov has made clear. And America’s Neo-Nazi friends like the Azov Battalion fiercely oppose it – and together they have enough clout to stop an elected President – or even depose him as we saw back in 2014. I am keenly aware of that as is any President until the U.S. grip on this country is broken and it is “de-nazified,” if I may borrow a term.
So here I am presiding over the unnecessary destruction of my beloved country, unable to agree to the simple terms of peace that the Minsk accords established.
My place in history is not going to be a glorious one.
Tsai: But at least you have the Ukrainian people united behind you. Here on Taiwan there is considerable pro-Mainland sentiment.
Zelensky: United? I have had to ban a dozen political parties, including the main opposition one. I have had to bring all TV under control of one platform. And I have had to declare martial law. Do you think everyone here is happy that instead of implementing the Minsk accords we have brought ourselves to this point?
My advice to you, Tsai, is do not allow Taiwan to become the Ukraine of East Asia, because right now that is the plan the Americans have for you.
I have to go now. I am being called. I am not even supposed to make calls like this.
(Nervously) Keep this call between us. Good-bye.
Tsai: (Shaken) Good bye Volodya.
(Hangs up, summons her assistant.) I need to place another call. Please get President Xi on the line. He has wanted to talk. Tell him I want to discuss the One Country, Two Systems Policy.
And tell him it is the Governor of Taiwan Province calling.
* These are the exact words that Zelensky used in a midnight speech to Ukraine on February 25.
“Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980,” said former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shortly after the February Russian offensive in Ukraine. “It didn’t end well for the Russians.” she explained. “There were other unintended consequences as we know, but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.” [emphasis added]
The “unintended consequences” Clinton referred to were the arming and funding of the mujahideen fighters, who eventually became the ultra-violent groups Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who have terrorized and continue to terrorize both the people of Afghanistan and the US.
What Clinton hinted at, that the infamous Western tactic of using well-funded insurgents could win the war against Russia in Ukraine’s favor, has many worried about the potential fallout.
