The United Nations Refugee Agency said late Wednesday that Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine has forced more than a million people to flee the country in just a week, a humanitarian crisis that the organization warned will get exponentially worse if the war continues.
“In just seven days, one million people have fled Ukraine, uprooted by this senseless war,” Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement. “I have worked in refugee emergencies for almost 40 years, and rarely have I seen an exodus as rapid as this one. Hour by hour, minute by minute, more people are fleeing the terrifying reality of violence. Countless have been displaced inside the country.”
“And unless there is an immediate end to the conflict, millions more are likely to be forced to flee Ukraine,” added Grandi. “International solidarity has been heartwarming. But nothing — nothing — can replace the need for the guns to be silenced; for dialogue and diplomacy to succeed. Peace is the only way to halt this tragedy.”
The agency’s stark assessment of the crisis in Ukraine came as Russia ramped up its attack on the country, seizing control of a major port city, hammering densely populated areas with shelling and airstrikes, and continuing its advance on the capital Kyiv. Russian bombs and artillery fire have reportedly damaged and destroyed Ukrainian schools, residential and administrative buildings, and hospitals.
The U.N. human rights office said Wednesday that through March 1, at least 227 civilians were killed and more than 500 were injured in Russia’s invasion, which shows no signs of abating despite the West’s intensifying financial sanctions targeting aspects of Russia’s economy as well as the country’s political leaders and oligarchs.
“In the cities and streets of Ukraine today, innocent civilians are bearing witness to our Age of Impunity,” David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), said Wednesday. “The fact that 1 million refugees have already been forced to flee is a grim testament to barbaric military tactics taking aim at homes and hospitals. The IRC is calling on the Russian government to immediately cease all violations of the laws of war to spare additional harm to civilians and avoid further displacement.”
“As war rages across Ukraine and the world bears witness to a displacement crisis at a scale rarely seen in history,” Miliband continued, “it is urgent that Europe not just offer protection to Ukrainian nationals who have visa-free access to the E.U., but to also grant non-discriminatory pathways to safety to people of all citizenship and nationalities facing grave dangers inside Ukraine.”
Human Rights Watch echoed that sentiment in a statement earlier this week, declaring that it is “vitally important for all countries neighboring Ukraine to allow everyone to enter with a minimum of bureaucratic procedures.” The group also pointed with alarm to reports that Africans and other foreign nationals have faced racist abuse and discrimination from authorities as they’ve attempted to escape violence in Ukraine.
“This is a landmark moment for Europe, and an opportunity for the European Union to remedy the wrongs of the past and rise to the occasion with genuine compassion and solidarity,” said Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “That requires a truly collective commitment to keeping the door and our hearts open to everyone fleeing Ukraine.”
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) argued in an interview that the United States should join European countries in welcoming Ukrainian refugees.
“The world is watching, and many immigrants and refugees are watching,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “How the world treats Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees should be how we are treating all refugees in the United States.”
“We really need to make sure that, when we talk about accepting refugees, that we are meaning it, for everybody, no matter where you come from,” the New York Democrat added.
Rep. @AOC (D-NY) calls out reception of Ukrainian refugees vs. other refugees:
“We really need to make sure when we talk about accepting refugees, that we are meaning it for everybody, no matter where you come from.” pic.twitter.com/fbJorUBi5t
During a press briefing last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the Biden administration is “working in close lockstep with our European counterparts about what the needs are and how to help, from our end, meet those needs.”
“Our assessment is that the majority of refugees will want to go to neighboring countries in Europe, many of which have already conveyed publicly that they will accept any refugee who needs a home, whether it’s Poland or Germany, and there are probably others who have made those comments,” Psaki added. “That certainly means an openness to accepting refugees from Ukraine but also making sure that all of these neighboring countries who are willing to welcome these refugees, you know, have our support in that effort.”
Psaki declined to provide an “anticipated number” of Ukrainian refugees that the Biden administration would be ready to accept.
Residents of the Ukrainian city of Lviv are suspicious of strangers, and often ask people shooting video or taking photos to show their passports, an exiled Chinese dissident who traveled to Ukraine to document the resistance told RFA.
“I am currently in Lviv, a city in the west of Ukraine,” U.S.-based dissident He Anquan told RFA. “Both the authorities and the people are very nervous, but it’s a fairly orderly kind of tension, because the war hasn’t gotten here yet.”
“The fighting is mostly around Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second city, but this city is also prepared,” He said. “If someone who looks like a stranger starts taking photos on the streets, people there will want to know where they’re from and ask for their passport.”
“Restaurants here are basically closed, but bakeries and supermarkets are still open,” he said.
He said he took a flight via Poland in a bid to report from the front line of the war, but that he was finding it harder than he expected.
“I was disgusted with Russia’s use of force … [so] I wanted to express my opposition to this violence by going to Ukraine in person,” He said.
“The biggest difficulty has been … blending in with my surroundings, because people are on a war footing,” he said. “This means that I haven’t been able to shoot sometimes … I’d like to be able to share more video and photos.”
He said Lviv has become a transit point for refugees — now more than a million — fleeing Ukraine.
“I saw some food supply stations at the train station, as well as big tents to give refugees some shelter from the wind and rain,” He said. “It’s still pretty cold [here], with the average temperature around zero.”
He said the Chinese government appears to have picked a side already in the conflict, owing to its “quasi-alliance” with Russia.
He said the mood on the streets is currently a mixture of fear and defiance.
“They are extremely angry about the Russian invasion, and while there is fear mixed in with that, there is more of a sense of courage and shared hatred,” He said.
Luo, a Taiwanese national currently in Poland after fleeing Ukraine. RFA
‘You just want revenge’
Meanwhile, a Taiwanese national who is currently in Poland after fleeing Ukraine called on his 23 million compatriots to stand firm in the face of aggression from China.
“I used to think that if there was a war in Taiwan, I would be the first to support surrender,” the man, who gave only the surname Luo, told RFA.
“But when your homeland is invaded, your people’s lives and property destroyed, and your relatives and friends become casualties, the hatred in your heart doesn’t allow you to surrender, and you just want revenge, and an outlet for your anger,” he said.
“The biggest revelation for me is that Taiwan may have to recognize that freedom may not be free,” Luo said. “There is another country with different values right next door who don’t accept our values, our choices.”
“That’s why Taiwan could be in danger,” he said. “The enemy is the one with their guns pointing at us.”
China has stepped up its military saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, flying regular incursions into Taiwan’s air defense zone, and refuses to rule out annexing democratic Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China.
Luo said he was surprised at how soon the missiles started landing, and had the impression that China was caught off guard by the war.
“I had always thought that given China’s close relationship with Russia, they would be the first to know [about a war], but China never said anything to its nationals about evacuating, so I thought Russia probably wouldn’t start military action,” Luo said.
“When it started, I found out that China was completely in the dark about it from start to finish, so I guess Russia and China never communicated on the matter [beforehand].”
The first group of Taiwanese were evacuated from Ukraine on the afternoon of the first day, Feb. 24, while the first group of Chinese didn’t leave until Feb. 28, sources told RFA.
A Taiwanese national who gave only the nickname Jacky said he was evacuated to the Baltic by the Taiwanese foreign ministry, although some photos of the group were posted online by Chinese nationals, who claimed they were being evacuated by China.
“To be honest, I can’t understand, since Russia and China are such good allies, even brothers, why the news was so slow in getting to them; why they got it so badly wrong,” Jacky said. “Did Xi Jinping and Putin even talk about this?”
The first group of Taiwanese — 19 adults and two children — arrived in Warsaw at about 10.00 p.m. on Feb. 26 local time, after 53 hours in transit, he said.
Luo, who lived in Kyiv, said his evacuation was also slow, with a journey that would usually take 30 minutes taking six hours, and amid long lines outside ATMs everywhere.
“War is so cruel,” Luo said. “You can’t sleep at night for the sound of artillery fire, and your life is in danger every single day.”
“Even the most pro-Russian people in Ukraine are going to hate Russia and hate Putin now,” he said.
TV host censored
Meanwhile, CCP internet censors have deleted the social media accounts of a TV host who called Putin a “crazy Russian,” and called for an end to the war.
Host Jin Xing, who has more than 13 million followers on Weibo, also pointed out that a news anchor for state broadcaster CCTV had appeared wearing yellow and blue, taking her choice of clothing to mean tacit support for Ukraine.
Current affairs commentator Sun Dazhi said everyone is expecting to toe the party line on the war in Ukraine, which China declines to describe as an invasion.
“There can be no dissenting voices; we have to be of one mind, and fall in with what the government is saying,” Sun told RFA. “There is only the voice of the party in China now.”
Jin Xing, 54 , is also a modern dancer with about 13.58 million followers on Weibo . Jin Xing’s last blocked anti-war post received 45,000 likes and nearly 10,000 retweets.
Jingdezhen-based scholar Pang Xinhua cited media reports as saying that people making critical comments about the war on social media are being detained for up to 15 days’ administrative detention.
“There is a lot of information about internet users being detained or punished for making some comment,” Pang said. “They post a few complaints on the internet, on WeChat Moments or on Weibo … then they are detained for 5-15 days or fined.”
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa, Qiao Long and Jia Ao.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that if a Third World War were to take place, it would be a nuclear war. His comments come just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert and after Russian nuclear submarines set sail for tests in waters near Norway. Meanwhile, voters in Belarus have approved a referendum opening the door for Russia to station nuclear weapons in Belarusian territory, and Russia has called on the U.S. to remove its nuclear weapons from European soil. “We need to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are clearly not a cause of stability in the world, as we’re often told,” says Daniel Högsta, campaign coordinator for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “They don’t deter conflicts; they in fact have the potential to exacerbate them.” Högsta also explains the dangers of imposing a no-fly zone in Ukraine despite Russia’s continued threats of using nuclear weapons, which he says amount to a kind of “nuclear blackmail.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily and has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia amounting to what some have called “economic warfare.” We look at Biden’s response with Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, who is also Ukrainian American. He says the U.S. should continue to exhaust all diplomatic avenues in order to stop violence in Ukraine. Duss also details the U.S. role in setting the stage for Putin’s oligarchical government and says the U.S. must not use “Ukranians as a tool for our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The guilty can be devious in concealing their crimes, and their role in them. The greater the crime, the more devious the strategy of deception. The breaking of international law, and the breaching of convention, is a field replete with such figures.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has presented a particularly odious grouping, a good number of them neoconservatives, a chance to hand wash and dry before the idol of international law. Law breakers become defenders of oracular force, arguing for the territorial integrity of States and the sanctity of borders, and the importance of the UN Charter.
Reference can be made to Hitler’s invasions during the Second World War with a revoltingly casual disposition, a comparison that seeks to eclipse the role played by other gangster powers indifferent to the rule and letter of international comity.
Speculation can be had that the man in the Kremlin has gone mad, if he was ever sane to begin with. As Jonathan Cook writes with customary accuracy, western leaders tend to find it convenient “that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac.”
It might well be said that the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003 was a product of its own mental disease, the product of ideological and evangelical madness, accompanied by a conviction that states could be forcibly pacified into a state of democracy. Where there was no evidence of links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda operatives responsible for the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, it was simply made up.
The most brazen fiction in this regard was the claim that Iraq had the means to fire weapons of mass destruction at Europe within 45 minutes. Showing that farce sometimes precedes tragedy, that assessment was cobbled from a doctoral dissertation.
When the invasion, and subsequent occupation of Iraq, led to sectarian murderousness and regional destabilisation, invigorating a new form of Islamicist zeal, the neocons were ready with their ragbag excuses. In 2016, David Frum could offer the idiotic assessment that the “US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever [the] West’s mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Such ungrateful savages.
On Fox News Sunday, this nonsense was far away in the mind of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She could merely nod at the assertion by host Harris Faulkner that “when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime… I mean, I think we’re at just a real, basic, basic point there.”
Jaw-droppingly to those familiar with Rice’s war drumming in 2003, she agreed that the attack on Ukraine was “certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” That explained why Washington was “throwing the book at [the Russians] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also part of it.” She also felt some comfort that Putin had “managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.”
As Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was distinctly untroubled that her advice created a situation where international law would be grossly breached. She was dismissive of the role played by UN weapons inspectors and their failed efforts in finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction and evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” she warned in 2002. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
As the seedy conspiracy to undermine security in the Middle East and shred the UN Charter gathered place in 2002, those against any Iraq invasion were also denouncing opponents as traitors, or at the very least wobbly, on the issue of war. Frum, writing in March 2003, was particularly bothered by conservatives against the war – the likes of Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Thomas Fleming, and Llewellyn Rockwell. Thankfully, they were “relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large.” They favoured “a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.”
In the Ukraine conflict, the trend has reasserted itself. Neoconservatives are out to find those appeasing types on the Right – and everywhere else. “Today,” rues Rod Dreher, “they’re denouncing us on the Right who oppose war with Russia as Neville Chamberlains.” Conservatives are mocked for daring to understand why Russia might have an issue with NATO expansion, or suggest that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not, in the end, of vital interest to Washington. “It’s Chamberlain’s folly,” comes the improbable claim from Matt Lewis of The DailyBeast, “delivered with a confident Churchillian swagger.”
A more revealing insight into neoconservative violence, the lust for force, and an almost admiring take on the way Putin has behaved, can be gathered in John Bolton’s recent assessment of the invasion. Bolton, it should be remembered, detests the United Nations and was, just to show that President George W. Bush had a sense of humour, made US ambassador to it. For him, international law is less a reality than a guide ignored when power considerations are at play – an almost Putinesque view.
Almost approvingly, he writes in The Economist of the need to “pay attention to what adversaries say.” He recalls Putin’s remark about the Soviet Union’s disintegration as the 20th century’s greatest catastrophe. He notes those efforts to reverse the trend: the use of invasions, annexations and the creation of independent states, and the adoption of “less kinetic means to bring states like Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan into closer Russian orbits.”
With a touch of delight, Bolton sees that “the aggressive use of military force is back in style. The ‘rule-based international order’ just took a direct hit, not that it was ever as sturdy as imagined in elite salons and academic cloisters.” And with that, the war trumpet sounds. “World peace is not at hand. Rhetoric and virtue-signalling are no substitute for new strategic thinking and higher defence budgets.” In this equation, the UN Charter is truly doomed.
There will be reams of words attempting to provide a coherent analysis of the manufactured crisis dramatically unfolding in Ukraine, which took another unanticipated turn when Russia extended recognition to the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the territory referred to as the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.
It may be premature somewhat to consider economic consequences of the Ukraine war with the Russian invasion still less than a week old. However, certain outlines of where things are going are nonetheless possible. With that caveat, the following represent some early considerations of the likely—in some cases already occurring—economic consequences of the war for Russia, European Union, and the USA.
Delivering his annual state of union address, US president Joe Biden announced the decision to close its airspace for all Russian flights on Tuesday, March 1. He accused Russia of rejecting “efforts of diplomacy” and called president Vladimir Putin’s decision to send armies to Ukraine a “badly miscalculated” move. However, Biden also announced that the US will not fight against Russia directly. The announcements of sanctions against Russia and its boycott by various countries and individual corporations continued on Tuesday.
Because the website of the Kremlin containing the full text of Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 address announcing the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has been hacked, and because of requests from readers, we provide the entire transcript here, obtained from the Kremlin site before it was brought down. It is presented without endorsement and for information purposes only.
A number of U.S. lawmakers have called for a boycott targeting Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, but some of the same politicians are responsible for their states’ anti-BDS laws.
Just before noon on Tuesday, March 1, following a morning of intermittent air-raid sirens, a tweet went live from an account geotagged to Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. “We are scared,” its author wrote. “We need you to be there for us.”
The tweet, posted to the account of Ukraine’s chapter of Fridays for Future — the youth activist group named after Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s now-iconic weekly protest — ricocheted quickly around online climate communities.
“We are youth climate activists usually fighting a crisis we didn’t cause, now finding ourselves at the front lines of a war we didn’t start,” the thread continued. “We ask for all of our brothers and sisters from Fridays for Future to go on the streets, to demand this war to end, to fight for peace in our name.”
Within a matter of hours, young people around the world had rallied in full force, and are now planning targeted actions for Thursday, March 3, which will mark one week since Russian troops launched their invasion into Ukraine. Youth-led protests are planned in nearly 60 cities, according to organizers, including Lagos, Nigeria; Lisbon, Portugal; and Las Vegas, Nevada.
“We’re seeing that climate justice and the call for peace has never been more intertwined than now, as we’re seeing a war being fought funded by fossil fuel exports taking people’s lives away,” Luisa Neubauer, 25, lead organizer with Fridays for Future Germany, told Truthout. “So for us, we know that there will be no real freedom or sustainable peace anywhere as long as there’s dependency on fossil fuels, and at the same time we need emergency help for Ukrainians,” she said.
Organizers are calling on school districts to let students join midday protests on Thursday, which officials have authorized for the first time in Neubauer’s hometown of Hamburg, Germany. Youth climate activists in the Fridays for Future network have also launched a protest-planning website modeled after the one they used to map and rally support for weekly global climate strikes during the swell of youth climate activism in 2018-2019. “We know how to do it,” Neubauer said.
Worldwide dependence on Russian oil and gas — the backbone of the Russian economy, constituting over 60 percent of Russian exports in 2019 — is one reason why Russian President Vladimir Putin could launch this attack without fearing stronger pushback from other world leaders.
Meanwhile youth activists are quick to point out that goals related to Russia’s fossil fuel exports and control of pipeline routes have driven previous military ventures directed by Putin, including Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its support for dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in 2011 and the annexation of Crimea in March 2014.
The Fridays for Future Ukraine’s call to action was not the only antiwar rallying cry in the youth climate community. “We believe that the threat of global war, which can potentially become nuclear, can be diverted if Gazprom, Rosneft and all oil and gas companies that actively cooperate with Putin’s regime, are immediately deprived of financial resources and political influence,” youth activists with Ukraine’s chapter of Extinction Rebellion (XR), another leading international climate activist organization, wrote in a separate emergency call to action. The group characterized Putin’s regime as aiding “in the project of planetary destruction and war against people and nature.” Russia is the third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
“We are calling for blocking, picketing and climbing over the offices of oil and gas companies of the Russian Federation and all their business partners in the EU, UK and worldwide,” the call said, noting Gazprom, Rosneft, Transneft, Surgutneftegas and LukOil as priority sites for protest.
As of this writing, youth activists Truthout reached out to for comment did not confirm actions in response to XR Ukraine, which could be due to the rise in laws that criminalize protest that occurs within a certain distance of energy infrastructure or that could “hinder business.”
The European Union, which according to reporting by TheNew York Times, relies on Russia for more than 25 percent of its oil and 40 percent of its gas, is well-positioned to accelerate plans to build fleets of renewables, young people say — if they can tap into ample political will.
Leading climate experts agree. “Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia,” 350.org founder Bill McKibben wrote for The Guardian. “We can do it fast if we want: huge offshore wind farms in Europe have been built inside of 18 months without any wartime pressure.”
Climate scientists and diplomats have similarly reiterated perspectives in line with activists’ calls for building massive renewable energy capacity as a conflict intervention. “Heat pumps for peace!” tweeted Leah Stokes, climate and energy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, referring to the fossil fuel-free alternative to a furnace for heating and cooling buildings. Stokes’s comment was in direct response to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s post calling for even more rapid decarbonization in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on the heels of the latest, extremely dire, but still hopeful, comprehensive climate report.
Youth climate activists — who research shows have particular sway over changing opinions on climate of their conservative parents — are in a unique position to heighten awareness of the links between the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and societal dependence on fossil fuels. Their potential to reach wide audiences is also profound: the youth climate movement grew with force in the years just prior to the pandemic, and many youth climate activist groups have digital media followings at their fingertips that rival in size those of established news organizations. According to the organization’s own granular statistics, Fridays for Future has consistently drawn hundreds of millions of people to the streets for its protests since November 2019.
Young people are also urging their elders not to get distracted from working to curb the climate crisis amid the conflict. “It’s not disrespectful for us to keep working and keep advocating for the climate during this crisis,” 16-year-old youth climate activist and founder of Earth Uprising, Alexandria Villaseñor, said on Twitter. “Actually, it’s imperative. Researchers and scholars have told us events such as this and climate collapse are linked. Our work is not a distraction, it’s part of the solution.”
Many activists — particularly those in Russia — are taking on serious risk to partake in the protests. Arshak Makichyan, 27, a member of Fridays for Future Russia, was recently detained with his wife ahead of an action, and both are awaiting trials for a slew of arbitrary charges. Makichyan told Truthout that engaging in activism in Russia is “almost unbearable,” adding that activists are being expelled from university and work, surveilled and blackmailed, and their families are being harassed.
“We are risking our freedom and lives in Russia, people in Ukraine are dying, so world leaders should do something,” Makichyan said. “Everyone should do something.”
Neubauer, the German climate activist, wonders if youth climate activist concerns — which have always been about international peace and well-being — will now, finally, be taken seriously. “For years we have been smiled at when we demand renewables, which are not only the cheapest and greenest energies, but also the most peaceful,” Neubauer posted on Twitter, from a protest in Berlin on February 27. “Autocrats don’t stop being autocrats, the answer to war must be a radical exit from coal, oil and gas.”
On Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) argued in favor of accepting Ukrainian refugees in the United States, emphasizing that asylum seekers from other parts of the world should be treated with similar respect.
Speaking to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address, Ocasio-Cortez made the case for giving Ukrainian refugees Temporary Protection Status (TPS), saying that the Biden White House should make it easier for individuals with that status to eventually become citizens.
“Now that we know a huge, new migration is going to start because of that war, do you have caution or words of advice … in terms of how to be smarter about those politics, about the inevitable demonization of those victimized people?” Maddow asked the New York congresswoman.
“The world is watching, and many immigrants and refugees are watching,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “How the world treats Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees should be how we are treating all refugees in the United States, especially when you look at such stark juxtapositions where so many of the factors are in common.”
Citing the Syrian refugee crisis, Ocasio-Cortez said that “the way the world treated Syrian refugees versus the way the world is greeting Ukrainian refugees is a very stark contrast.” She also condemned U.S. policy toward asylum seekers from Central America and Haiti under Biden and past administrations.
“We really need to make sure that, when we talk about accepting refugees, that we are meaning it, for everybody, no matter where you come from,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez also said that the current crisis presents “an opportunity” to make things better for all future asylum seekers coming to the U.S. Ukrainian refugees should receive TPS status, she said — and Congress and the president should make it easier for individuals who receive TPS status to become citizens, if they want to do so. This should apply not only to Ukrainians but also to other asylum seekers, she went on.
The crisis in Ukraine could “push Biden to grant #TPS to Ukrainians in the United States,” as well as “push Congress to deliver a path to citizenship for all TPS recipients — including Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, etc.,” Escalante said.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will undoubtedly result in a refugee crisis. According to estimates from the United Nations, as of Tuesday, more than 874,000 Ukrainians have already fled the country, crossing their country’s border into neighboring areas.
The Russian invasion has forced peaceful, ordinary people to risk their lives. Many are fighting because they believe in a Ukraine that welcomes all its citizens and recognizes the rights they all possess.
Putin sees Russian statehood and Russian national and linguistic identity as inextricably connected, and he is willing to spill Russian and Ukrainian blood to protect this nationalist vision.
The United Nations reports more than 800,000 people have fled Ukraine since Russia attacked last week, but many foreign nationals trying to escape have described racist discrimination and abuse, saying they were turned away from buses and at the border, while Ukrainians were welcomed with open arms. We speak with one of the African students who documented their experiences on Twitter with the hashtag #AfricansInUkraine. Nigerian student Alexander Somto Orah says the discriminatory treatment he and other African students faced started at the train station in Kyiv and continued at the border with Poland. “We started protesting and telling them they have to let us go, that this is rubbish. They take in like a hundred Ukrainians and then take in like two Africans. It doesn’t make sense, because there are more Africans there than Ukrainians at the border,” Orah recalls. “So we started pushing, and the police cocked their guns and pointed at us guns and told us that they’re going to shoot us.” Orah eventually made his way to Warsaw and is now helping other students to cross.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
The United Nations reports more than 800,000 people have fled Ukraine since Russia attacked last week, but many foreign nationals trying to escape have described racist discrimination and abuse, saying they were turned away from buses and at the border, while Ukrainians were welcomed with open arms. India’s government has dispatched ministers to Ukraine’s border with Poland after people from India seeking to cross from Ukraine to Poland reported they were told to go to Romania instead. Citizens of several African countries report they were also pushed back from Poland because they are Black. Some 16,000 African students are thought to have been studying in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Russia’s invasion had, quote, “affected Ukrainians and non-citizens in many devastating ways,” and said, quote, “Africans seeking evacuation are our friends and need to have equal opportunities to return to their home countries safely.”
Several African governments also condemned the racism Africans in Ukraine faced while trying to escape, with the African Union calling the treatment a “breach of international law.”
On Tuesday,Democracy Now!reached 25-year-old Nigerian student Somto Orah after he had reached Warsaw, Poland. He described the discriminatory treatment he and other African students faced as they tried to flee, starting at the train station in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
ALEXANDERSOMTOORAH:The first discrimination started in Kyiv, which is the capital, at the train station. I was trying to enter, and they were telling us it’s only women and children. And they were only picking white women and children. So, when the first train left, the second one came, and they said the same thing. We now asked them, “What do you mean by women and children? Because we are not seeing you taking any Black women here. If you mean white women and children, at least you are being honest. But telling us women and children and not taking African women along is totally rubbish.” So we started shouting and started telling them, “Nobody is going to leave here if dishonest to their words.” So, they asked us, “Where are the African women?” We started showing them the African women and children, and they were able to board.
So, another train that is going to Poland came in. I jumped in with other two Africans. I was in the cabin, and they called the police on us. The police came and told us to get out of the train. They dragged us out and told us that this train going to Poland is basically for Ukrainians only, so we have to wait for another train that was in the night. That train came, and they told us the train is not going to Lviv, which is the city that has border with Poland. So we copied the train number and sent it to — my friend copied. I copied it, and my friend also copied it and sent it to his girlfriend, who is a Ukrainian. The girlfriend told him that “This train is going to Lviv. Don’t listen to them. Jump in.” The train was about to leave. We jumped in. They were already trying to close the door. We told them, “You either open the door, or you push us on the way.” So they have no other option than to open the door. So, we went in, and we were the only Africans in the train.
When we got to Lviv, the whole train going — the first train came in, and they told us it’s only Ukrainians, women and children only, and they usually pick more white people than Black people. We started shouting again. So, when the second train came, we have to push the whole white — African women and children to the front so that they are — so they were able to take them. And we had no other option than to look for a taxi that will take us to the border. And we got to a barricade that is 30 minutes away to the border. And the barricade told us that — the soldiers there, with the police there, separated us. They said, “Foreigners go to this side. The Ukrainians go to the other side.” So, I was going. I asked some people there, “How long have you been here?” One said three days. The other one said two days. I was like, “No, I cannot endure this. I have to find a way.”
So, in the morning, which is the next day, we started protesting and telling them they have to let us go, that this is rubbish. They take in like hundred Ukrainians and then take in like two Africans. It doesn’t make sense, because there are more Africans there than Ukrainians at the border. So, we pushed — we started pushing, and the police cocked their guns and pointed at us gun and told us that they’re going to shoot us. We told them that “We are students. We just want to go home. And if one person gets shot here, that will be never taken lightly. We are thousands here. I don’t think all of them can kill us.” The police came in and drove with speed, parked in our front, brought out gun like the soldiers and told us that they’re going to shoot. We told them, “We don’t care. We have to cross.” So, we started pushing over, pushing over. Before we know, all of us shouting “Yay!” We broke the barricade and started running across towards the border. So, some of them started beating some people with batons.
Meanwhile, when we were trekking to the border, Ukrainians were helping us. They were giving us foods and water on the road, which is very nice. The only people that discriminated against us were the officials. That’s the law enforcement officers. Then, after the whole day in the night, they started allowing the men because there are only a few women left. So it was pretty easy for us to cross over. And on the Poland side, there was no discrimination.
So, we want to continue our education. And nobody wants to go back without completing their education. So, we also want the world to know that it is actually not good to be asking the world for help while committing war crime and discriminating against Africans. It never made sense. I was expecting people at war to be more compassionate. I wasn’t expecting them to do such things.
AMYGOODMAN:That’s Nigerian student Somto Orah speaking withDemocracy Now!after he fled to Poland from Ukraine and reached Warsaw. Special thanks toDemocracy Now!producer Messiah Rhodes, who reached him for this report. And for the radio listeners, you can go to democracynow.org and see the video, the B-roll that we laid over what Somto was saying. It is his own B-roll. It’s his own video of what took place on his journey.
Coming up, we talk about Russia’s invasion and President Biden’s State of the Union address with Filipino vice-presidential candidate Walden Bello and Branko Marcetic ofJacobin. Stay with us.
Police in Poland have warned that fake reports of violent crimes being committed by people fleeing Ukraine are circulating on social media after Polish nationalists attacked and abused groups of African, south Asian and Middle Eastern people who had crossed the border last night.
Attackers dressed in black sought out groups of non-white refugees, mainly students who had just arrived in Poland at Przemyśl train station from cities in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. According to the police, three Indians were beaten up by a group of five men, leaving one of them hospitalised.
While unequivocally condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine, some U.S. experts on Tuesday made the case for prioritizing diplomacy and humanitarian assistance over military aid to end the violence, help suffering Ukrainians, and promote long-term peace.
Their arguments came as Russiaheldnuclear weapon drills and continued toattack Kyivandother Ukrainian cities — and as the United Nations refugee agency and other humanitarian groupscalled forfunding to aid the millions who have been displaced by the war.
Although a plan for donated fighter jets from European nations fell apart this week, various countrieshave sent or pledgedto send arms and other military aid — including ammunition, anti-tank weapons, assault rifles, body armor, helmets, and missiles as well as fuel, medical supplies, and ration packages — to Ukrainians fighting off Russian invaders.
The Biden administration, whichmaintainsthat it won’t send U.S. troops into a war with Russia, has responded to the invasion with economic sanctions and more military aid. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that over the past year, the United States hascommittedmore than $1 billion in security assistance to Ukraine.
The White House hasaskedCongress for at least $6.4 billion — including $3.5 billion for the Pentagon and $2.9 billion for providing European allies with humanitarian and security assistance — but some lawmakers reportedly think the Ukraine package may ultimately top $10 billion.
Noting plans to include that package in an annual budget Congress has pledged to finish by next week, William D. Hartung — a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — urged U.S. lawmakers not to cause more global conflict,writing:
Whatever Congress chooses to do with respect to aid to Ukraine, the military portion should be a carefully circumscribed, not first step towards an open-ended commitment that would boost U.S. military involvement in Europe back towards Cold War levels, or create a loosely regulated slush fund like the account that was used to finance the Iraq and Afghan wars. And given the growing humanitarian crisis sparked by the war, the bulk of new funding should be for humanitarian aid, not guns and troops.
Beyond the question of the composition of a new aid package, Congress should refrain from promoting steps that could push the current conflict towards a direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia. A shooting war between two nuclear-armed powers would increase the risk of escalation towards a nuclear confrontation. Avoiding that risk means no U.S. or NATO troops in Ukraine, and no imposition of a no-fly zone that would entail aerial combat between NATO and Russian forces. The Biden administration has wisely ruled out either of these options, and it should resist any pressure to pursue either of them.
While blasting the Russian invasion as “a major war crime, ranking alongside the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in September 1939,” world-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky also pointed out that “perhaps Putin meant what he and his associates have been saying loud and clear for years” about the eastward expansion of NATO.
The current crisis, Chomsky told C.J. Polychroniou in an interviewpublishedbyTruthout, “has been brewing for 25 years as the U.S. contemptuously rejected Russian security concerns, in particular their clear red lines: Georgia and especially Ukraine.”
Referencing Moscow’s recent demands that preceded the invasion last week — including the exclusion of Ukraine from NATO — Chomsky said that “there is good reason to believe that this tragedy could have been avoided, until the last minute.”
Though “it’s easy to understand why those suffering from the crime may regard it as an unacceptable indulgence to inquire into why it happened and whether it could have been avoided,” he continued, “if we want to respond to the tragedy in ways that will help the victims, and avert still worse catastrophes that loom ahead, it is wise, and necessary, to learn as much as we can about what went wrong and how the course could have been corrected.”
The UN estimates that 12 million people will need relief and protection.
As lawmakers respond to the crisis in Ukraine, humanitarian aid needs to be the top priority. https://t.co/4EnTGAg2z8
Of the “grim” choices that remain, Chomsky said, “the least bad is support for the diplomatic options that still exist, in the hope of reaching an outcome not too far from what was very likely achievable a few days ago: Austrian-style neutralization of Ukraine, some version of Minsk II federalism within.”
That is “much harder to reach now,” he added, while also emphasizing that it is necessary to include “an escape hatch for Putin, or outcomes will be still more dire for Ukraine and everyone else, perhaps almost unimaginably so.”
“Like it or not,” he said, “the choices are now reduced to an ugly outcome that rewards rather than punishes Putin for the act of aggression — or the strong possibility of terminal war.”
Chomsky also asserted that “we should do anything we can to provide meaningful support for those valiantly defending their homeland against cruel aggressors, for those escaping the horrors, and for the thousands of courageous Russians publicly opposing the crime of their state at great personal risk, a lesson to all of us.”
In her weekly column forThe Washington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel alsoencouragedlearning from “Putin’s indefensible invasion” that has fueled a “perilous escalation of violence.”
“Putin has simply (and brutally) reasserted Russia’s role. The old order — with its Cold War attitudes, militaries, alliances, and enmities — is reclaiming center stage,” she wrote.The Nation’s editorial director and publisher continued:
NATO, adrift since the Soviet Union ended, now claims new purpose and energy. Hawks in Russia and the United States alike are emboldened. Weapons-makers are drawing up plans to profit in the coming arms buildup, and ideologues and demagogues are dusting off familiar rhetoric. China, clearly helping Russia mitigate its sanctions, now weighs heavily in the balance.
Indeed, we should expect ringing calls to arms for a decadeslong battle against authoritarianism. These cries will emanate from a foreign policy establishment that has been discredited by its serial debacles from Iraq to Libya to Afghanistan, but that will nevertheless seek to consolidate bipartisan and militarized support anew. Already an armchair warrior at the Atlantic Council has called on the United States to prepare to fight Russia and China at the same time — and double our military budget to do so.
What’s lacking here is any sense of proportion or grasp on reality. The new Cold War will sap resources and attention from pressing dangers we already face.
“The intense diplomacy spurred by the crisis should also lead to new thinking about security,” she argued. “Could security focus first on building the cooperation needed to address pandemics and climate change? Could it create institutions that divert resources from the entrenched institutions of war?”
“Rather than build up weaponry in Europe, could the United States initiate negotiations about shared security, disarmament, and a military stand-down?” vanden Heuvel wondered. “Could this war lead us to think more seriously about how to build peace rather than how to build weapons?”
Calling for a “courageous and transnational citizens’ movement demanding not simply the end of the war on Ukraine but also an end to perpetual wars” as well as “political leaders who will speak out about our real security needs,” she concluded that “by invading Ukraine, Putin demands a return to just that archaic and obsolete Cold War order. The world would be wise not to accede.”
In February, a photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting hunched over a 13-foot table with French President Emmanuel Macron circulated the globe. News about their sprawling table and sumptuous seven-course dinner was reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll story. But their meeting was deadly serious. Macron arrived to discuss the escalating crisis in Ukraine and threat of war. Ultimately, their talk foundered over expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), yielding little more than the bizarre photograph.
Yet the meeting was surreal for another reason. Over the past year, Macron, the leading European Union (EU) peace negotiator, has led an ambitious arms sales campaign, exploiting tensions to strengthen French commerce. The trade press even reported that he hoped to sell Rafale fighter jets to Ukraine, breaking into the “former bastion of Russian industry.”
Macron is not alone. NATO contractors openly embrace the crisis in Ukraine as sound business. In January, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes cited “tensions in Europe” as an opportunity, saying, “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit.” Likewise, CEO Jim Taiclet of Lockheed Martin highlighted the benefits of “great power competition” in Europe to shareholders.
On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine, pounding cities with ordnance and dispatching troops across the border. The sonic boom of fighter jets filled the air, as civilians flooded the highways in Kyiv, attempting to flee the capital. And the stock value of arms makers soared.
The spiraling conflict over Ukraine dramatizes the power of militarism and the influence of defense contractors. A ruthless drive for markets — intertwined with imperialism — has propelled NATO expansion, while inflaming wars from Eastern Europe to Yemen.
Selling NATO
The current conflict with Russia began in the wake of the Cold War. Declining military spending throttled the arms industry in the United States and other NATO countries. In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry convened a solemn meeting with executives. Insiders called it the “Last Supper.” In an atmosphere heavy with misapprehension, Perry informed his guests that impending blows to the U.S. military budget called for industry consolidation. A frantic wave of mergers and takeovers followed, as Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing and Raytheon acquired new muscle and smaller firms expired amid postwar scarcity.
While domestic demand shrunk, defense contractors rushed to secure new foreign markets. In particular, they set their sights on the former Soviet bloc, regarding Eastern Europe as a new frontier for accumulation. “Lockheed began looking at Poland right after the wall came down,” veteran salesman Dick Pawlowski recalled. “There were contractors flooding through all those countries.” Arms makers became the most aggressive lobbyists for NATO expansion. The security umbrella was not simply a formidable alliance but also a tantalizing market.
However, lobbyists faced a major obstacle. In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if he allowed a reunited Germany to join NATO, the organization would move “not one inch eastward.” Yet lobbyists remained hopeful. The Soviet Union had since disintegrated, Cold War triumphalism prevailed, and vested interests now pushed for expansion. “Arms Makers See Bonanza In Selling NATO Expansion,” The New York Times reported in 1997. The newspaper later noted that, “Expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — first to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and then possibly to more than a dozen other countries — would offer arms makers a new and hugely lucrative market.”
New alliance members meant new clients. And NATO would literally require them to buy Western military equipment.
Lobbyists poured into Washington, D.C. fêting legislators in royal style. Vice President Bruce Jackson of Lockheed became the president of the advocacy organization U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Jackson recounted the extravagant meals that he hosted at the mansion of the Republican luminary Julie Finley, which boasted “an endless wine cellar.”
“Educating the Senate about NATO was our chief mission,” he informed journalist Andrew Cockburn. “We’d have four or five senators over every night, and we’d drink Julie’s wine.”
Lobby pressure was relentless. “The most interested corporations are the defense corporations, because they have a direct interest in the issue,” Romanian Ambassador Mircea Geoană observed. Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, and other firms even funded Romania’s lobbying machine during its bid for NATO membership.
Ultimately, policy makers reneged on their promise to Gorbachev, admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in 1999. During the ceremony, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — who directly cooperated with the Jackson campaign — welcomed them with a hearty “Hallelujah.” Ominously, the intellectual architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, predicted disaster. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” Kennan cautioned.
Few listened. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman described the mentality of policy makers: “The Russians are down, let’s give them another kick.” Relishing victory, Jackson was equally truculent: “‘Fuck Russia’ is a proud and long tradition in US foreign policy.” Later, he became chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which paved the way for the 2003 invasion, the biggest industry handout in recent history.
Within two decades, 14 Central and Eastern European countries joined NATO. The organization originally existed to contain the Soviet Union, and Russian officials monitored its advance with alarm. In retrospect, postwar expansion benefited arms makers both by increasing their market and stimulating conflict with Russia.
Targeting Ukraine
Tensions reached a new phase in 2014 when the United States backed the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. Yanukovych had opposed NATO membership, and Russian officials feared his ouster would bring the country under its strategic umbrella. Rather than assuage their concerns, the Obama administration maneuvered to slip Ukraine into its sphere of influence. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland coordinated regime change with brash confidence. Nuland openly distributed cookies to protesters, and later, capped a diplomatic exchange with “fuck the EU.” At the height of the uprising, Sen. John McCain also joined demonstrators. Flanked by leaders of the fascist Svoboda Party, McCain advocated regime change, declaring that “America is with you.”
By then, newly minted NATO members had bought nearly $17 billion in American weapons. Military installations, including six NATO command posts, ballooned across Eastern Europe. Fearing further expansion, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and intervened in the Donbas region, fueling a ferocious and interminable war.
NATO spokespeople argued that the crisis justified expansion. In reality, NATO expansion was a key inciter of the crisis. And the conflagration was a gift to the arms industry. In five years, major weapons exports from the United States increased 23 percent, while French exports alone registered a 72-percent leap, reaching their highest levels since the Cold War. Meanwhile, European military spending hit record heights.
As tensions escalated, Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove of NATO wildly inflated threats, calling Russia “a long-term existential threat to the United States.” Breedlove even falsified information about Russian troop movements over the first two years of the conflict, while brainstorming tactics with colleagues to “leverage, cajole, convince or coerce the U.S. to react.” A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution concluded that he aimed to “goad Europeans into jacking up defense spending.”
And he succeeded. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute registered a significant leap in European military spending — even though Russian spending in 2016 equaled only one quarter of the European NATO budget. That year, Breedlove resigned from his post before joining the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish think tank awash in industry funds.
The arms race continues. After European negotiations gridlocked, Russia recognized two separatist republics in the Donbas region before invading Ukraine this February. Justifying the bloody operation, Putin wrongly accused Ukrainian authorities of genocide. Yet his focus was geopolitical. “It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries,” he said. “In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.”
In retrospect, three decades of industry lobbying has proved deadly effective. NATO engulfed most of Eastern Europe and provoked a war in Ukraine — yet another opportunity for accumulation. Alliance members have activated Article 4, mobilizing troops, contemplating retaliation and moving further toward the brink of Armageddon.
Yet even as military budgets rise, European arms makers — like their American counterparts — have required foreign markets to overcome fiscal restraints and production costs. They need clients to finance their own military buildup: foreign wars to fund domestic defense.
Yemen Burning
Arms makers found the perfect sales opportunity in Yemen. In 2011, a popular revolution toppled Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had monopolized power for two decades. His crony, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, became president the next year after easily winning the election: He was the only candidate. Thwarted by elite intrigue, another uprising ejected Mansour Hadi in 2015.
That year, Prince Salman became king of Saudi Arabia, but power concentrated into the hands of his son, Mohammed bin Salman, who feared that the uprising threatened to snatch Yemen from Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence.
Months later, a Saudi-led coalition invaded, leaving a massive trail of carnage. “There was no plan,” a U.S. intelligence official emphasized. “They just bombed anything and everything that looked like it might be a target.”
The war immediately attracted NATO contractors, which backed the aggressors. They exploit the conflict to sustain industrial capacity, fund weapons development and achieve economies of scale. In essence, the Saudi-led coalition subsidizes the NATO military buildup, while the West inflames the war in Yemen.
Western statesmen pursue sales with perverse enthusiasm. In May 2017, Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia for his first trip abroad as president, in order to flesh out the details of a $110 billion arms bundle. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived beforehand to discuss the package. When Saudi officials complained about the price of a radar system, Kushner immediately called the CEO of Lockheed Martin to ask for a discount. The following year, Mohammed bin Salman visited company headquarters during a whirlwind tour of the United States. Defense contractors, Hollywood moguls and even Oprah Winfrey welcomed the young prince.
Yet the Americans were not alone. The Saudi-led coalition is also the largest arms market for France and other NATO members. And as the French Ministry of the Armed Forces explains, exports are “necessary for the preservation and development of the French defense technological and industrial base.” In other words, NATO members such as France export war in order to retain their capacity to wage it.
President Macron denies that the coalition — an imposing alliance that includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan and Senegal — uses French weapons. But the statistics are suggestive. Between 2015 and 2019, France awarded €14 billion in arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia and €20 billion in licenses to the United Arab Emirates. CEO Stéphane Mayer of Nexter Systems praised the performance of Leclerc tanks in Yemen, boasting that they “have highly impressed the military leaders of the region.” In short, while Macron denies that the coalition wields French hardware in Yemen, local industrialists cite their use as a selling point. Indeed, Amnesty International reports that his administration has systematically lied about its export policy. Privately, officials have compiled a “very precise list of French materiél deployed in the context of the conflict, including ammunition.”
Recently, Macron became one of the first heads of state to meet Mohammed bin Salman following the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Like Trump’s trip, Macron’s diplomatic junket was a sales mission. Eventually, Macron clinched a deal with the United Arab Emirates for 80 Rafale fighters. The CEO of Dassault Aviation called the contract “the most important ever obtained by French military aerospace,” guaranteeing six years of work for a pillar of its industrial base.
French policy is typical of NATO involvement in Yemen. While denouncing the war, every Western producer has outfitted those carrying it out. Spanish authorities massage official documents to conceal the export of lethal hardware. Great Britain has repeatedly violated its own arms embargo. And the United States has not respected export freezes with any consistency.
Even NATO countries in Eastern Europe exploit the war. While these alliance members absorb Western arms, they dump some of their old Soviet hardware into the Middle East. Between 2012 and July 2016 Eastern Europe awarded at least €1.2 billion in military equipment to the region.
Ironically, a leading Eastern European arms exporter is Ukraine. While the West rushes to arm Kyiv, its ruling class has sold weapons on the black market. A parliamentary inquiry concluded that between 1992 and 1998 alone, Ukraine lost a staggering $32 billion in military assets, as oligarchs pillaged their own army. Over the past three decades, they have outfitted Iraq, the Taliban and extremist groups across the Middle East. Even former President Leonid Kuchma, who has led peace talks in the Donbas region, illegally sold weapons while in office. More recently, French authorities investigated Dmytro Peregudov, the former director of the state defense conglomerate, for pocketing $24 million in sales commissions. Peregudov resided in a château with rolling wine fields, while managing the extensive properties that he acquired after his years in public service.
The Warlords
Kuchma and Peregudov are hardly exceptional. Corruption is endemic in an industry that relies on the proverbial revolving door. The revolving door is not simply a metaphor but an institution, converting private profit into public policy. Its perpetual motion signifies the social reproduction of an elite that resides at the commanding heights of a global military-industrial complex. Leading power brokers ranging from the Mitterrands and Chiracs in France, to the Thatchers and Blairs in Britain, and the Gonzálezes and Bourbons in Spain have personally profited from the arms trade.
In the United States, the industry employs around 700 lobbyists. Nearly three-fourths previously worked for the federal government — the highest percentage for any industry. The lobby spent $108 million in 2020 alone, and its ranks continue to swell. Over the past 30 years, about 530 congressional staffers on military-related committees left office for defense contractors. Industry veterans dominate the Biden administration, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin from Raytheon.
The revolving door reinforces the class composition of the state, while undermining its moral legitimacy. As an elite rotates office, members insulate policymaking from democratic input, taint the government with corruption and mistake corporate profit with national interest. By 2005, 80 percent of army generals with three stars or more retired to arms makers despite existing regulations. (The National Defense Authorization Act prohibits top officers from lobbying the government for two years after leaving office or leveraging personal contacts to secure contracts. But compliance is notoriously poor.) More recently, the U.S. Navy initiated investigations against dozens of officers for corrupt ties to the defense contractor Leonard Francis, who clinched contracts with massive bribes, lavish meals and sex parties.
Steeped in this corrosive culture, NATO intellectuals now openly talk about the prospect of “infinite war.” Gen. Mike Holmes insists that it is “not losing. It’s staying in the game and getting a new plan and keeping pursuing your objectives.” Yet those immersed in its brutal reality surely disagree. The United Nations reports that at least 14,000 people have died in the Russo-Ukrainian War since 2014, and over 377,000 have perished in Yemen.
In truth, the doctrine of infinite war is not so much a strategy as it is a confession — acknowledging the violent metabolism of a system that requires conflict. As a self-selecting elite propounds NATO expansion, military buildup and imperialism, we must embrace what the warlords most fear: the threat of peace.
The author would like to thank Sarah Priscilla Lee of the Learning Sciences Program at Northwestern University for reviewing this article.
The Ukrainian arm of the climate movement Fridays for Future has called for global demonstrations to demand an end to Russia’s military assault, reports Andrea Germanos.
Seven political parties, meeting on February 26 in Turkey’s capital Ankara, to discuss the creation of a democratic front, released a joint statement on the war in Ukraine, reports Medya News.
The catastrophic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are reverberating throughout the world, reports Susan Price. Socialists in the Asia Pacific are adding their voices to condemn Russia’s attack and call for de-escalation and a negotiated solution.
Considering the Chernobyl-like crisis bubbling over Ukraine in recent days, some questions arise like mushroom clouds of steam from tempests in teapots, namely: Is Vladimir Putin acting like an “Ape, man?”; has this WEF-grad truly gone “rogue”?; and even the “content moderation” set thought that Putin has been –“Horrors!” — ex-communicated from the holier-than-thou Davos Community? What in the Ukraine is really going on?
According to all of the usual Western Corporate Media sources, Russia’s “incursion” into Ukraine has caused a noticeable spike-protein in “human interest” stories. As Western economies collapse, suddenly we are seeing fleeing Ukrainians as images of ourselves displaced, with the only explanation offered: Why would Putin do this? The real answer, of course, is that Joe “Malarkey” Biden’s been “doing this” for quite some time now; indeed, “Credit Card Country” Joe was most likely an early fan of Putin’s rise to the top of the post-Soviet oligarchical rubbish heap I do not have the “receipts” here to “prove” this assertion, but word around the campfire has it that Biden pretty much ruled Ukraine after the Maidan coup orchestrated by the United States of America, under the leadership of Barack O’Bushma. Some circles are saying: What took Putin so long?
To Obama’s credit, he refused to publicly allocate weapons-systems to Ukraine, stating that a direct military confrontation with Russia was a “No Go, Bro” (This is a paraphrase of Obama’s position, but anyone mildly familiar with Obama’s take on Putin’s Crimea-grab knows that Obama knew he’d already gotten away with “Maidan” murder, so he laid off putting further fingerprints on the case in question, just in case someone else came knocking…). Then Donald J Trump barged in, imagine that!, and all hell almost broke loose. Except that — it didn’t. Business-as-usual reigned, with Donald the Duck awkwardly waltzing before Cameras triggered to his appearance, as if nothing else in the World were happening.
So the “Ukraine Thing” has been going on for a while now, and let’s just give Victoria “Nukeland” her fair share — and balanced — bit of cred in this space. Like Chrystia Freeland in Canada (eh?), “Yats is our guy” Nuland had everything to do with the coup in Kiev in 2014, and she’s now directing U$ foreign relations today “under Biden.” By the way, for the sake of accuracy, whatever that means anymore, unless you’re a sniper and getting paid for the “kill,” Freeland’s role in the 2014 Ukrainian coup was probably more “spiritual” than anything else; her current activities are much more visceral — and viscerally “twitchy.” Not to digress, but the recent Canadian Trucker protest was by far the most profound in recent Western history, or: The Truckers policed their own protest, and didn’t let any “agitators” in. One wonders: Where are the LiveStreamers in Ukraine? Quick answer: To “Livestream” in Ukraine is to be shot dead, either by invading Russians or neo-nazi-styled Ukrainians. Putin’s no hero, in case anyone was confused. He’s just another elite who got caught on the wrong side of a certain “financial” situation. To date, at least, there is no evidence that Putin was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and his “Lolita Express,” so some of these moral quibbles might be a bit, to say the least, well beyond the realm of Reason.
As an inherently stupid optimist, as all “optimists” inherently are, I prefer to think that the current Ukrainian kerfuffle will not lead to nuclear annihilation of most life on this planet; in fact, that is why I am writing this message. However, in case it improbably does, I do not want to go out without a flurry, or fine fury, of my own. We all “own” this Planet that we’re on, regardless of “allegiance.” We’re all here Now, and have a voice — so many voices! The Revolutionary Moment might be happening now, and Vladimir Putin’s “crazy” move on Ukraine might be the latest elite attempt to stop it: Who knows? Putin knows the Forces he’s up against, and maybe Funeral Home Director Xi will back him, or, maybe he won’t? In any case, the Weapons Industry is profiteering off of this current crisis, which is obviously covering for the fall of the COVID-19 regime that ruled our World for almost two years. Yes, COVID-19: Can you see it receding in your rear-view mirror?
I’ve been stream-of-consciousnessing for a bit now; however, this piece is not over. I am appending a thing I wrote and spoke at an Open Mic forum early in March of 2014, which I think reveals my own bona fides on this issue of Ukraine. I am no longer “in touch” with the mind behind it, if only because I would have to dig up the notebook at that “time” to find what other thoughts I was thinking, etc. If you’ve read this far, please indulge me a bit further, into our recently lived past…
Ukraine? Nyet: Mykraine! — a Potemkin Village Idiot’s View
Crimea river, if all of this saber-rattling over Ukraine, the former Soviet Union’s bread basket, isn’t enough to give me a migraine! Ukraine — oof — my Cranium! Nevertheless, with cold compress applied to head, I shall attempt to analyze this grain of current contention between our famous former Cold War rivals, USA and Russia, who are still strutting their Super-Chicken feathers across the Global Chicken Coop right here and now, early in the 21st century. Let’s begin with the U$ response.
Secretary of State John Kerry has “ramped up” the rhetoric by labeling Russia’s apparent takeover of the autonomous Ukrainian republic of Crimea an “incredible act of aggression.” Scary words there, Kerry! So far, however, no shots have been fired during this “incredible act of aggression.”
And this is not the only barb that Kerry has gotten off his Cold War chest. On Face the Nation Sunday, Secretary Kerry turned fashion critic, threw down this “barbaric yawp”:
“You don’t just, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.
Well, I’ll be WMD’d in a Jonathan Swift-boat if that’s not the damndest thing that John “W” Kerry could have said! No word from Russia whether or not they consider Kerry’s current excursion to Kiev an incursion, provocation, invasion, or what.
For their part, the two big Brobdingnaggian states on the scene have held a 90-minute phone conversation on the subject. Reportedly, president Obama said something like “Vladimir, we must Putin an end to this.” Ah, yes, Putinenda! In this context, it occurs to this observer that President Putin could score a serious PR coup by ambassadorizing the heretofore anti-Putin Russian girl band Pussy Riot for the duration of this crisis. Such a move would certainly throw Secretary “WMD” Kerry a real “Curveball.” At the inevitable negotiation table, Pussy Riot could simply sing, or say: “Here’s your old Uncle Charley, Mr Secretary!”– see if he can “Slam Dunk!” that one out of the Park. (For those who don’t know, “Uncle Charley” is code for the “Curveball” in American baseball; in other words, it’s a wicked pitch, and if you just flailed at it, well, Uncle Charley’s got your number…). By the way, please pardon the mixed metaphor, but they play more basketball than baseball in Russia…
Meanwhile, at Monday’s press conference, Mr Obama unleashed another bold fashion statement, Neo-conically declaring that “Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.” Well, I’ll be an Obushma if that ain’t “True!” There has been some significant Super-Power shrinkage since the “Just Say No!” coke-snorting 1980s, when Ronald Reagan infamously labeled the now former “Soviet Union” an “Evil Empire,” a notorious epithet gamely plucked straight out of New Testament Hollywood’s playbook. What a Playbook: Can we have a big round of applause for Jesus, or at least the CIA?
Unfortunately, we’ve down-morphed a bit since then, from Holy “Caped Crusader” to global traffic cop, slapping on sanctions like parking tickets. Of course, the threat of the “overwhelming force” is still with the US, that “nuke-you-lar” vision thing. At least we can say, in light of moving from the Metaphysics of Sheer Evil to the pragmatics of merely being on the “wrong side,” the hopeful twinkle, perhaps, of a thousandth point of light.
Now, on the behalf of the Congress, House Speaker John Boner (sic — intentionally) has done some chirping, constructively likening the Russian president to a “thug.” Naturally, many commentators were shocked, and even “awed,” by the Speaker’s concise eloquence here, having pigeon-holed this potential Presidential-aspirant as a kind of neo-Provincialist unsuited for the rhetorical rigors of the wider international stage. Au contraire, Mesdames et Messieurs! Way to “thug” up that misperception, M Boner! As an aside, looking forward, I would like to suggest that House Speaker Boner could further “sex-up” his Street Cred by referring to himself as “J-Bo” from now on. An obvious campaign slogan: “It’s Tea Time for J-Bo.”
In conclusion, I believe that this review of key American statements concerning the ongoing crisis over Ukraine can leave no doubt that the US effort in this arena will be nothing if not nuanced — Fair and Nuanced. Thank you, and dosvedanya!
Considering the Chernobyl-like crisis bubbling over Ukraine in recent days, some questions arise like mushroom clouds of steam from tempests in teapots, namely: Is Vladimir Putin acting like an “Ape, man?”; has this WEF-grad truly gone “rogue”?; and even the “content moderation” set thought that Putin has been –“Horrors!” — ex-communicated from the holier-than-thou Davos Community? What in the Ukraine is really going on?
According to all of the usual Western Corporate Media sources, Russia’s “incursion” into Ukraine has caused a noticeable spike-protein in “human interest” stories. As Western economies collapse, suddenly we are seeing fleeing Ukrainians as images of ourselves displaced, with the only explanation offered: Why would Putin do this? The real answer, of course, is that Joe “Malarkey” Biden’s been “doing this” for quite some time now; indeed, “Credit Card Country” Joe was most likely an early fan of Putin’s rise to the top of the post-Soviet oligarchical rubbish heap I do not have the “receipts” here to “prove” this assertion, but word around the campfire has it that Biden pretty much ruled Ukraine after the Maidan coup orchestrated by the United States of America, under the leadership of Barack O’Bushma. Some circles are saying: What took Putin so long?
To Obama’s credit, he refused to publicly allocate weapons-systems to Ukraine, stating that a direct military confrontation with Russia was a “No Go, Bro” (This is a paraphrase of Obama’s position, but anyone mildly familiar with Obama’s take on Putin’s Crimea-grab knows that Obama knew he’d already gotten away with “Maidan” murder, so he laid off putting further fingerprints on the case in question, just in case someone else came knocking…). Then Donald J Trump barged in, imagine that!, and all hell almost broke loose. Except that — it didn’t. Business-as-usual reigned, with Donald the Duck awkwardly waltzing before Cameras triggered to his appearance, as if nothing else in the World were happening.
So the “Ukraine Thing” has been going on for a while now, and let’s just give Victoria “Nukeland” her fair share — and balanced — bit of cred in this space. Like Chrystia Freeland in Canada (eh?), “Yats is our guy” Nuland had everything to do with the coup in Kiev in 2014, and she’s now directing U$ foreign relations today “under Biden.” By the way, for the sake of accuracy, whatever that means anymore, unless you’re a sniper and getting paid for the “kill,” Freeland’s role in the 2014 Ukrainian coup was probably more “spiritual” than anything else; her current activities are much more visceral — and viscerally “twitchy.” Not to digress, but the recent Canadian Trucker protest was by far the most profound in recent Western history, or: The Truckers policed their own protest, and didn’t let any “agitators” in. One wonders: Where are the LiveStreamers in Ukraine? Quick answer: To “Livestream” in Ukraine is to be shot dead, either by invading Russians or neo-nazi-styled Ukrainians. Putin’s no hero, in case anyone was confused. He’s just another elite who got caught on the wrong side of a certain “financial” situation. To date, at least, there is no evidence that Putin was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and his “Lolita Express,” so some of these moral quibbles might be a bit, to say the least, well beyond the realm of Reason.
As an inherently stupid optimist, as all “optimists” inherently are, I prefer to think that the current Ukrainian kerfuffle will not lead to nuclear annihilation of most life on this planet; in fact, that is why I am writing this message. However, in case it improbably does, I do not want to go out without a flurry, or fine fury, of my own. We all “own” this Planet that we’re on, regardless of “allegiance.” We’re all here Now, and have a voice — so many voices! The Revolutionary Moment might be happening now, and Vladimir Putin’s “crazy” move on Ukraine might be the latest elite attempt to stop it: Who knows? Putin knows the Forces he’s up against, and maybe Funeral Home Director Xi will back him, or, maybe he won’t? In any case, the Weapons Industry is profiteering off of this current crisis, which is obviously covering for the fall of the COVID-19 regime that ruled our World for almost two years. Yes, COVID-19: Can you see it receding in your rear-view mirror?
I’ve been stream-of-consciousnessing for a bit now; however, this piece is not over. I am appending a thing I wrote and spoke at an Open Mic forum early in March of 2014, which I think reveals my own bona fides on this issue of Ukraine. I am no longer “in touch” with the mind behind it, if only because I would have to dig up the notebook at that “time” to find what other thoughts I was thinking, etc. If you’ve read this far, please indulge me a bit further, into our recently lived past…
Ukraine? Nyet: Mykraine! — a Potemkin Village Idiot’s View
Crimea river, if all of this saber-rattling over Ukraine, the former Soviet Union’s bread basket, isn’t enough to give me a migraine! Ukraine — oof — my Cranium! Nevertheless, with cold compress applied to head, I shall attempt to analyze this grain of current contention between our famous former Cold War rivals, USA and Russia, who are still strutting their Super-Chicken feathers across the Global Chicken Coop right here and now, early in the 21st century. Let’s begin with the U$ response.
Secretary of State John Kerry has “ramped up” the rhetoric by labeling Russia’s apparent takeover of the autonomous Ukrainian republic of Crimea an “incredible act of aggression.” Scary words there, Kerry! So far, however, no shots have been fired during this “incredible act of aggression.”
And this is not the only barb that Kerry has gotten off his Cold War chest. On Face the Nation Sunday, Secretary Kerry turned fashion critic, threw down this “barbaric yawp”:
“You don’t just, in the 21st century, behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.
Well, I’ll be WMD’d in a Jonathan Swift-boat if that’s not the damndest thing that John “W” Kerry could have said! No word from Russia whether or not they consider Kerry’s current excursion to Kiev an incursion, provocation, invasion, or what.
For their part, the two big Brobdingnaggian states on the scene have held a 90-minute phone conversation on the subject. Reportedly, president Obama said something like “Vladimir, we must Putin an end to this.” Ah, yes, Putinenda! In this context, it occurs to this observer that President Putin could score a serious PR coup by ambassadorizing the heretofore anti-Putin Russian girl band Pussy Riot for the duration of this crisis. Such a move would certainly throw Secretary “WMD” Kerry a real “Curveball.” At the inevitable negotiation table, Pussy Riot could simply sing, or say: “Here’s your old Uncle Charley, Mr Secretary!”– see if he can “Slam Dunk!” that one out of the Park. (For those who don’t know, “Uncle Charley” is code for the “Curveball” in American baseball; in other words, it’s a wicked pitch, and if you just flailed at it, well, Uncle Charley’s got your number…). By the way, please pardon the mixed metaphor, but they play more basketball than baseball in Russia…
Meanwhile, at Monday’s press conference, Mr Obama unleashed another bold fashion statement, Neo-conically declaring that “Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.” Well, I’ll be an Obushma if that ain’t “True!” There has been some significant Super-Power shrinkage since the “Just Say No!” coke-snorting 1980s, when Ronald Reagan infamously labeled the now former “Soviet Union” an “Evil Empire,” a notorious epithet gamely plucked straight out of New Testament Hollywood’s playbook. What a Playbook: Can we have a big round of applause for Jesus, or at least the CIA?
Unfortunately, we’ve down-morphed a bit since then, from Holy “Caped Crusader” to global traffic cop, slapping on sanctions like parking tickets. Of course, the threat of the “overwhelming force” is still with the US, that “nuke-you-lar” vision thing. At least we can say, in light of moving from the Metaphysics of Sheer Evil to the pragmatics of merely being on the “wrong side,” the hopeful twinkle, perhaps, of a thousandth point of light.
Now, on the behalf of the Congress, House Speaker John Boner (sic — intentionally) has done some chirping, constructively likening the Russian president to a “thug.” Naturally, many commentators were shocked, and even “awed,” by the Speaker’s concise eloquence here, having pigeon-holed this potential Presidential-aspirant as a kind of neo-Provincialist unsuited for the rhetorical rigors of the wider international stage. Au contraire, Mesdames et Messieurs! Way to “thug” up that misperception, M Boner! As an aside, looking forward, I would like to suggest that House Speaker Boner could further “sex-up” his Street Cred by referring to himself as “J-Bo” from now on. An obvious campaign slogan: “It’s Tea Time for J-Bo.”
In conclusion, I believe that this review of key American statements concerning the ongoing crisis over Ukraine can leave no doubt that the US effort in this arena will be nothing if not nuanced — Fair and Nuanced. Thank you, and dosvedanya!
At first glance, nearly all parties and think tanks in Europe that lie to the left of social democracy seemed united in their response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, writes Dick Nichols.
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia, speaking in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will get you years in prison.
Twitter, historically the last of the major online platforms to jump on any new internet censorship escalation, is now actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. This censorship-by-algorithm tactic is exactly what I speculated might emerge after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned back in November, due to previous comments supportive of that practice by his successor Parag Agrawal.
Twitter is also placing warnings labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform. It has also placed the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. Some are complaining that this new label has led to online harassment amid the post-9/11-like anti-Russia hysteria that’s currently turning western brains into clam chowder.
In the last 24 hours, I have been bombarded with a constant influx of hateful messages and death threats by people who have taken it upon themselves to become offended by a network I’ve worked for, for over 3 years. That hate has spread to every profile I have on every platform…
Jesus Christ. Can't even 'like' a tweet about peace talks without being warned that I'm doing a wrongthink. This is getting so crazy, and is likely to grow more so. pic.twitter.com/59eqm5kf4W
This is all on top of all the other drastic escalations in censorship which came roaring in at the beginning of the Ukraine war, and I personally find it a bit scary how fast it’s all happening, how fine people are with it, and how much worse it seems likely to get.
Others agree.
“The purge of RT and other Russian media outlets in the US and Europe is 100% censorship,” tweets journalist Michael Tracey. “Go ahead and argue it’s justified, but at least don’t be a coward and admit you are advocating censorship.”
“The western world believes that it has a monopoly on what constitutes ‘political truth’ and that their ideological worldview is the only correct, valid and authoritative one,” writer and analyst Tom Fowdy observed. “They preach freedom of speech and the press to other countries, but exempt themselves from it.”
And I can’t help but find it odd that the fight for freedom and democracy should require such copious amounts of censorship. You’d think a free society would have no objection to people trying to learn the other side of the debate about a war which NATO powers very plainly had a hand in starting, rather than being forced to consume only western mass media narratives which tell us this is happening exclusively because Vladimir Putin is evil and Hitlery and hates freedom.
The western world believes that it has a monopoly on what constitutes "political truth" and that their ideological worldview is the only correct, valid and authoritative one. They preach freedom of speech and the press to other countries, but exempt themselves from it.
You’d think a society devoted to truth and freedom, the kind of society western powers purport to be trying to defend in Ukraine, would not require a Ministry of Truth to protect us from “disinformation” about a government long targeted by the US-centralized empire, or from trying to seek out alternative perspectives beyond the homogeneous blanket of authorized mainstream narratives.
You’d think the truth would be more robust than that. You’d think freedom would extend farther than that. You’d think democracy would be more tolerant of dissent than that.
Almost like this has nothing to do with freedom, or truth, or democracy.
Almost like it never has.
Kind of makes you wonder if perhaps rallying behind the idea that it’s fine to censor people to preserve the establishment narrative about things, like Covid-19 and vaccines for example, was every bit the slippery slope that everyone warned it would be. If perhaps we have foolishly consented to a reality where the most powerful people in the world get to control the information people consume in order to shut down dissent against a murderous and oppressive globe-spanning oligarchic empire.
And it kind of makes you wonder, as we watch the same empire that just destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen being entrusted to carefully navigate extremely delicate nuclear brinkmanship escalations without ending the world, if we might perhaps be better off with a lot more dissent, rather than a lot less.
_________________________________
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