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Category: United States

  • Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future

    [This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]

    Since I arrived with my family in the UK last summer, I have been repeatedly asked: “Why choose Bristol as your new home?”

    Well, it certainly wasn’t for the weather. Now more than ever I miss Nazareth’s warmth and sunshine.

    It wasn’t for the food either.

    My family do have a minor connection to Bristol. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side (one from Cornwall, the other from South Wales) apparently met in Bristol – a coincidental stopping point on their separate journeys to London. They married and started a family whose line led to me.

    But that distant link wasn’t the reason for coming to Bristol either.

    In fact, it was only in Nazareth that Bristol began occupying a more prominent place in my family’s life.

    When I was not doing journalism, I spent many years leading political tours of the Galilee, while my wife, Sally, hosted and fed many of the participants in her cultural café in Nazareth, called Liwan.

    It was soon clear that a disproportionate number of our guests hailed from Bristol and the south-west. Some of you here tonight may have been among them.

    But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with them about Palestine, Bristol began to reach out to me.

    Toppled statue

    It did so just as Sally and I were beginning discussions about whether it was time to leave Nazareth – 20 years after I had arrived – and head to the UK.

    Even from thousands of miles away, a momentous event – the sound of Edward Colston’s statue being toppled – reverberated loudly with me.

    Ordinary people had decided they were no longer willing to be forced to venerate a slave trader, one of the most conspicious criminals of Britain’s colonial past. Even if briefly, the people of Bristol took back control of their city’s public space for themselves, and for humanity.

    In doing so, they firmly thrust Britain’s sordid past – the unexamined background to most of our lives – into the light of day. It is because of their defiance that buildings and institutions that for centuries bore Colston’s name as a badge of honour are finally being forced to confront that past and make amends.

    Bath, of course, was built no less on the profits of the slave trade. When visitors come to Bath simply to admire its grand Georgian architecture, its Royal Crescent, we assent – if only through ignorance – to the crimes that paid for all that splendour.

    Weeks after the Colston statue was toppled, Bristol made headlines again. Crowds protested efforts to transfer yet more powers to the police to curb our already savagely diminished right to protest – the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Bristol made more noise against that bill than possibly anywhere else in the UK.

    I ended up writing about both events from Nazareth.

    Blind to history

    Since my arrival, old and new friends alike have started to educate me about Bristol. Early on I attended a slavery tour in the city centre – one that connected those historic crimes with the current troubles faced by asylum seekers in Bristol, even as Bristol lays claim to the title of “city of sanctuary”.

    For once I was being guided rather than the guide, the pupil rather than the teacher – so long my role on those tours in and around Nazareth. And I could not but help notice, as we wandered through Bristol’s streets, echoes of my own tours.

    Over the years I have taken many hundreds of groups around the ruins of Saffuriya, one of the largest of the Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in its ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, the Nakba or Catastrophe.

    What disturbed me most in Saffuriya was how blind its new inhabitants were to the very recent history of the place they call home.

    New Jewish immigrants were moved on to the lands of Saffuriya weeks after the Israeli army destroyed the village and chased out the native Palestinian population at gunpoint. A new community built in its place was given a similar Hebrew name, Tzipori. These events were repeated across historic Palestine. Hundreds of villages were razed, and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population were expelled from what became the new state of Israel.

    Troubling clues

    Even today, evidence of the crimes committed in the name of these newcomers is visible everywhere. The hillsides are littered with the rubble of the hundreds of Palestinian homes that were levelled by the new Israeli army to stop their residents from returning. And there are neglected grave-stones all around – pointers to the community that was disappeared.

    And yet almost no one in Jewish Tzipori asks questions about the remnants of Palestinian Saffuriya, about these clues to a troubling past. Brainwashed by reassuring state narratives, they have averted their gaze for fear of what might become visible if they looked any closer.

    Tzipori’s residents never ask why there are only Jews like themselves allowed in their community, when half of the population in the surrounding area of the Galilee are Palestinian by heritage.

    Instead, the people of Tzipori misleadingly refer to their Palestinian neighbours – forced to live apart from them as second and third-class citizens of a self-declared Jewish state – as “Israeli Arabs”. The purpose is to obscure, both to themselves and the outside world, the connection of these so-called Arabs to the Palestinian people.

    To acknowledge the crimes Tzipori has inflicted on Saffuriya would also be to acknowledge a bigger story: of the crimes inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people as a whole.

    Shroud of silence

    Most of us in Britain do something very similar.

    In young Israel, Jews still venerate the criminals of their recent past because they and their loved ones are so intimately and freshly implicated in the crimes.

    In Britain, with its much longer colonial past, the same result is often achieved not, as in Israel, through open cheerleading and glorification – though there is some of that too – but chiefly through a complicit silence. Colston surveyed his city from up on his plinth. He stood above us, superior, paternal, authoritative. His crimes did not need denying because they had been effectively shrouded in silence.

    Until Colston was toppled, slavery for most Britons was entirely absent from the narrative of Britain’s past – it was something to do with racist plantation owners in the United States’ Deep South more than a century ago. It was an issue we thought about only when Hollywood raised it.

    After the Colston statue came down, he became an exhibit – flat on his back – in Bristol’s harbourside museum, the M Shed. His black robes had been smeared with red paint, and scuffed and grazed from being dragged through the streets. He became a relic of the past, and one denied his grandeur. We were able to observe him variously with curiousity, contempt or amusement.

    Those are far better responses than reverence or silence. But they are not enough. Because Colston isn’t just a relic. He is a living, breathing reminder that we are still complicit in colonial crimes, even if now they are invariably better disguised.

    Nowadays, we usually interfere in the name of fiscal responsibility or humanitarianism, rather than the white man’s burden.

    We return to the countries we formerly colonised and asset-stripped, and drive them back into permanent debt slavery through western-controlled monetary agencies like the IMF.

    Or in the case of those that refuse to submit, we more often than not invade or subvert them – countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Iran – tearing apart the colonial fabric we imposed on them, wrecking their societies in ways that invariably lead to mass death and the dispersion of the population.

    We have supplied the bombs and planes to Saudi Arabia that are killing untold numbers of civilians in Yemen. We funded and trained the Islamic extremists who terrorise and behead civilians in Syria. The list is too long for me to recount here.

    Right now, we see the consequences of the west’s neo-colonialism – and a predictable countervailing reaction, in the resurgence of a Russian nationalism that President Putin has harnessed to his own ends – in NATO’s relentless, decades-long expansion towards Russia’s borders.

    And of course, we are still deeply invested in the settler colonial project of Israel, and the crimes it systematically inflicts on the Palestinian people.

    Divine plan

    Through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain gave licence for the creation of a militarised ethnic, Jewish state in the Middle East. Later, we helped supply it with atomic material in the full knowledge that Israel would build nuclear bombs. We gave Israel diplomatic cover so that it could evade its obligations under the international treaty to stop nuclear proliferation and become the only nuclear power in the region. We have had Israel’s back through more than five decades of occupation and illegal settlement building.

    And significantly, we have endlessly indulged Zionism as it has evolved from its sordid origins nearly two centuries ago, as an antisemitic movement among fundamentalist Christians. Those Christian Zonists – who at the time served as the power brokers in European governments like Britain’s – viewed Jews as mere instruments in a divine plan.

    According to this plan, Jews were to be denied the chance to properly integrate into the countries to which they assumed they belonged.

    Instead the Christian Zionists wanted to herd Jews into an imagined ancient, Biblical land of Israel, to speed up the arrival of the end times, when mankind would be judged and only good Christians would rise up to be with God.

    Until Hitler took this western antisemitism to another level, few Jews subscribed to the idea that they were doomed forever to be a people apart, that their fate was inextricably tied to a small piece of territory in a far-off region they had never visited, and that their political allies should be millenarian racists.

    But after the Holocaust, things changed. Christian Zionists looked like much kinder antisemites than the exterminationist Nazis. Christian Zionism won by default and was reborn as Jewish Zionism, claiming to be a national liberation movement rather than the dregs of a white European nationalism Hitler had intensified.

    Today, we are presented with polls showing that most British Jews subscribe to the ugly ideas of Zionism – ideas their great-great-grandparents abhorred. Jews who dissent, who believe that we are all the same, that we all share a common fate as humans not as tribes, are ignored or dismissed as self-haters. In an inversion of reality these humanist Jews, rather than Jewish Zionists, are seen as the pawns of the antisemites.

    Perverse ideology

    Zionism as a political movement is so pampered, so embedded within European and American political establishments that those Jews who rally behind this ethnic nationalism no longer consider their beliefs to be abnormal or abhorrent – as their views would have been judged by most Jews only a few generations ago.

    No, today Jewish Zionists think of their views as so self-evident, so vitally important to Jewish self-preservation that anyone who opposes them must be either a self-hating Jew or an antisemite.

    And because non-Jews so little understand their own culpability in fomenting this perverse ideology of Jewish Zionism, we join in the ritual defaming of those brave Jews who point out how far we have stepped through the looking glass.

    As a result, we unthinkingly give our backing to the Zionists as they weaponise antisemitism against those – Jews and non-Jews alike – who stand in solidarity with the native Palestinian people so long oppressed by western colonialism.

    Thoughtlessly, too many of us have drifted once again into a sympathy for the oppressor – this time, Zonism’s barely veiled anti-Palestinian racism.

    Nonetheless, our attitudes towards modern Israel, given British history, can be complex. On the one hand, there are good reasons to avert our gaze. Israel’s crimes today are an echo and reminder of our own crimes yesterday. Western governments subsidise Israel’s crimes through trade agreements, they provide the weapons for Israel to commit those crimes, and they profit from the new arms and cyber-weapons Israel has developed by testing them out on Palestinians. Like the now-defunct apartheid South Africa, Israel is a central ally in the west’s neo-colonialism.

    So, yes, Israel is tied to us by an umbilical cord. We are its parent. But at the same time it is also not exactly like us either – more a bastard progeny. And that difference, that distance can help us gain a little perspective on ourselves. It can make Israel a teaching aid. An eye-opener. A place that can bring clarity, elucidate not only what Israel is doing but what countries like Britain have done and are still doing to this day.

    Trade in bodies

    The difference between Britain and Israel is to be found in the distinction between a colonial and a settler-colonial state.

    Britain is a classic example of the former. It sent the entitled sons of its elite private schools, men like Colston, to parts of the globe rich in resources in order to steal those resources and bring the wealth back to the motherland to further enrich the establishment. That was the purpose of the tea and sugar plantations.

    But it was not just a trade in inanimate objects. Britain also traded in bodies – mostly black bodies. Labour and muscle were a resource as vital to the British empire as silk and saffron.

    The trafficking in goods and people lasted more than four centuries until liberation movements among the native populations began to throw off – at least partially – the yoke of British and European colonialism. The story since the Second World War has been one of Europe and the United States’ efforts to reinvent colonialism, conducting their rape and pillage at a distance, through the hands of others.

    This is the dissembling, modern brand of colonialism: a “humanitarian” neocolonialism we should by now be familiar with. Global corporations, monetary
    agencies like the IMF and the military alliance of NATO have each played a key role in the reinvention of colonialism – as has Israel.

    Elimination strategies

    Israel inherited Britain’s colonial tradition, and permanently adopted many of its emergency orders for use against the Palestinians. Like traditional colonialism, settler colonialism is determined to appropriate the resources of the natives. But it does so in an even more conspicuous, uncompromising way. It does not just exploit the natives. It seeks to replace or eliminate them. That way, they can never be in a position to liberate themselves and their homeland.

    There is nothing new about this approach. It was adopted by European colonists across much of the globe: in North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, as well as belatedly in the Middle East.

    There are advantages and disadvantages to the settler colonial strategy, as Israel illustrates only too clearly. In their struggle to replace the natives, Israel’s settlers had to craft a narrative – a rationalisation – that they were the victims rather than the victimisers. They were, of course, fleeing persecution in Europe, but only to become persecutors themselves outside Europe. They were supposedly in a battle for survival against those they came to replace, the Palestinians. The natives were cast as irredeemably, and irrationally, hostile. God was invoked, more or less explicitly.

    In the Zionist story, the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians – the Nakba – becomes a War of Independence, celebrated to this day. The Zionist colonisers thereby transformed themselves into another national liberation movement, like the ones in Africa that were fighting after the Second World War for independence. Israel claimed to be fighting oppressive British rule, as Africans were, rather than inheriting the colonisers’ mantle.

    But there is a disadvantage for settler colonial projects too, especially in an era of better communications. In a time of more democratic media, as we are currently enjoying – even if briefly – the colonisers’ elimination strategies are much harder to veil or airbrush. The ugliness is on show. The reality of the oppression is more visceral, more obviously offensive.

    Apartheid named

    The settlers’ elimination strategies are limited in number, and difficult to conceal whichever is adopted. In the United States, elimination took the form of genocide – the simplest and neatest of settler-colonialism’s solutions.

    In the post-war era of human rights, however, Israel was denied that route. It adopted settler colonialism’s fall-back position: mass expulsion, or ethnic cleansing. Some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and outside the new borders of Israel in 1948.

    But genocide and ethnic cleansing are invariably projects that cannot be completed. Some 90 per cent of Native Americans died from the violence and diseases brought by European incomers, but a small proportion survived. In South Africa, the white immigrants lacked the numbers and capacity either to eradicate the native population or to exploit such a vast territory.

    Israel managed to expel only 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside its new borders before the international community called time. And then Israel sabotaged its initial success in 1948 by seizing yet more Palestinian territory – and more Palestinians – in 1967.

    When settler populations cannot eradicate the native population completely, they must impose harsh, visible segregation policies against those that remain.

    Resources and rights are differentiated on the basis of race or ethnicity. Such regimes institute apartheid – or as Israel calls its version “hafrada” – to maintain the privileges of their own, superior or chosen population.

    Colonial mentality

    Many decades on, human rights groups have finally named Israel’s apartheid. Amnesty International got round to it only this month – 74 years after the Nakba and 55 years after the occupation began.

    It has taken so long because even our understanding of human rights continues to be shaped by a European colonial mentality. Human rights groups have documented Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians – the “what” of their oppression – but refused to understand the “why” of that oppression. These watchdogs did not truly listen to Palestinians. They listened to, they excused, Israel even as they were criticising it. They indulged its endless security rationales for its crimes against Palestinians.

    The reluctance to name Israeli apartheid derives in large part from a reluctance to face our part in its creation. To identify Israel’s apartheid is to recognise both our role in sustaining it, and Israel’s crucial place in the west’s reinvented neocolonialism.

    Being ‘offensive’

    The difficulty of facing up to what Israel is and what it represents is, of course, particularly stark for many Jews – not only in Israel but in countries like Britain. Through no choice of their own, Jews are more deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes because those crimes are carried out in the name of all Jews. As a result, for Zionist Jews, protecting the settler colonial project of Israel is identical to protecting their own sense of virtue.

    In the zero-sum imaginings of the Zionist movement, the stakes are too high to doubt or to equivocate. As Zionists, their duty is to support, dissemble and propagandise on Israel’s behalf at all costs.

    Nowadays Zionism has become such a normalised part of our western culture that those who call themselves Zionists are appalled at the idea anyone could dare to point out that their ideology is rooted in an ugly ethnic nationalism and in apartheid. Those who make them feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”.

    That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.

    This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.

    Into the fire

    Arriving in the UK from Nazareth at this very moment is like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phony grounds.

    Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.

    And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

    The fight for justice for Palestinians resonates with so many of us precisely because it is not simply a struggle to help Palestinians. It is a fight to end colonialism in all its forms, to end our inhumanity towards those we live alongside, to remember that we are all equally human and all equally entitled to respect and dignity.

    The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn – and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.

    The post Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Economic Tectonic Shifts: Letters from Russia

    Note to our readers: These are letters from a comrade of ours who currently lives in Russia. English is not the first language of HCE so please be understanding. In order to preserve the integrity of these letters, we kept the original phrasing as best we could.

    March 11th

    Hello Barbara,

    Thank you for your message and concern. My wife and I are passing through a difficult phase in our lives. After our second vaccination in December, we, for some reason or other, went through a period of being sick, myself in a light form while my wife gave me a scare. Anyway, that is behind us.  Barbara, I thought that in my late years, being 80 years old now, we would settle down and I would take good care of my wife, go for long walks in the forest-parks of Moscow. Fate, however, had other plans for us, and here we are in the midst of another war and sanctions surrounded by nations led by clowns, comedians, lunatics, and obsessed madmen. Allow me to give you my opinion on a number of issues.

    The dependence of Europe on Russian natural gas

    The US tried all the possible tricks to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Generally, they want this energy market for US companies, in spite if the fact that gas will be in liquid form and transported by ships. The port that has to receive the liquid gas must have a very expensive plant. Besides the market factor there is the geopolitical factor of having Europe depending on the US for their energy. Russia has always delivered through thick and thin and always will. I wonder whether the US and their companies will be just as trustworthy.

    Zelensky’s dirty bomb threat

    Chernobyl, the place where the terrible catastrophe happened, is located in the Ukraine.  Zelensky declared that he would consider making an atom bomb if not given the security guarantees that he was asking for from Europe and the US on the second day of the war. He had in mind using materials from the damaged reactor and make a “dirty bomb”. I think that was the last straw. Russian special troops immediately moved to occupy Chernobyl. Thank goodness not a single shot was fired as the Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. The 8 years that the people of Donbas served as a shooting gallery for the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists has finally come to an end. Chernobyl at the present is being patrolled by joint Russian – Ukrainian units. There is a huge Sarcophagi covering the damaged reactor (if you see a clip or pictures, it is so ominous and awe striking. It makes you shiver).

    The Mood of the Russian people

    Now let me discuss the mood of the Russian people who I see on the street, the people who I talk to, and what I read and watch on local tv. Russians differ in their assessment of the war. By far the broadest section supports their president, and especially their armed forces. They are mainly working class, solid people, nationalists, and the majority of the left including CPRF.

    Since the nomination of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ obsession with Russia’s and Trump’s supposed ties with them, these Democrats have played a terrible role in pushing the Russian people more to the right. Anything that is seen as part of the Democrats, like BLM, MeToo, or LGBT is derided here. White supremacy is on the rise. I have tried on many occasions to explain, for example, BLM. The conversation usually begins with “I don’t take a knee before a N.” So, I have to explain the rules of US football, who Colin Kaepernick is and the conditions of his kneeling during the national anthem. Presenting the subtleties of this is not easy when Russians are already riled up. The Communist Party in Ukraine was prohibited many years ago and in this void came nationalism and religion. Both cards were used to divide the Russians and the Ukrainians. Russia has officially declared that the aim of their operation in the Ukraine is demilitarization and denazification.

    Then there is a loud minority of very young people guided by NGOs financed by the West, part of the humanitarian intellectuals, artists, and actors. They are against their army and its operations in the Ukraine. The Russian Government has started taking measures against openly anti-Russian channels like Echo Moscow and Dozhd/Rain.

    The situation in Russia is characterized by a retreat of the liberals and pro-western opposition. The polls show that the support for the president is 75% as of today, March 11. The street is calm, my apartment is near a university and campus and I see hundreds of young people going about their studies. I see people shopping, and I go shopping too. No panic, no rush. If the West thinks by imposing draconian sanctions it will change the mood of the people, then it is right but exactly in the opposite direction, instead of the critical and quite often satiric attitude towards the authorities. In fact, they are consolidating and supporting it.  A new world is being born and Russia with all her faults and problems is the midwife and godmother. I will stop here but I have lot more to say. Please let us continue with the dialogue

    With affection and respect

    HCE

    Dear Bruce,

    Before writing on my observations on religious hostilities, allow me to make some notes on what the Ukraine fascist and ultra-national ideology is based on and where it comes from.  I will not go too far back in history but pick it up after WW2.

    Nazi collaborators and their role:

    The Ukrainian government after the disintegration of the Soviet Union till today, with V. Zelensky have tried their best to whitewash and portray these collaborators as heroes and founders of the Ukraine State. I have chosen to describe Stepan Bandera, who probably is the most popular among the fascists who march with his portrait. Kindly find below my translation from Russian about Bandera. I have taken extracts from an article and what seemed to me important that would provide an idea of the basis for fascism.

    The History of S. Bandera and the rehabilitation of fascism in Ukraine including by V. Zelensky

    Bandera Stepan Andreevich was a leader and organizer of the Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine and considered a terrorist. He was a member of the Ukrainian military organization (from 1928) and the Organization of the Ukraine nationalists (OUN) from 1929, and organizer of a series of terrorist acts. Bandera was condemned by the Polish authorities to life in prison and his memory has not been rehabilitated till now. He was considered a criminal. 

    Stepan Bandera and his supporters sought “independence” through violence, revolution, and genocide. The theoretical activity of the Bandera supporters started in Poland, their most notorious terror cases was the killing of government personalities Soviet Cousul Andre Mailov in 1933. In 1934 he participated in the organization in the killing of the Polish minister of interior Bronislav Peratski and the director of the Ukraine academic gymnasium Ivan Babi. He organized an explosion in the offices of the “Pratsia” newspaper.

    In the summer of 1934, polish authorities arrested Bandera. On January 13, 1936, Stepan Bandera and his accomplices were sentenced to death for the murder of Peratski. Then the death penalty was changed to life in prison, which he spent till 1939 in Polish prisons. After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 he was freed.

    During the German occupation, Bandera and his supporters cooperated with Hitler’s Germany and they terrorized the population. Poles and Jews were killed most of all. Immediately after the capture of Lvov the Bander, supporters jointly carried out mass pogroms.

    In our days in Ukraine one of the dates that is commemorated as the “liberation movement for the independence of Ukraine” is 30 June 1941, when the Bandera supporters in Lvov declared the restoration of the Ukrainian state. In the “Act of the declaration of the Ukraine state”, there was the following point:

    “The newly created Ukraine state will closely cooperate with the great National –Socialist Germany under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, who is creating a new order in Europe the world and helps Ukraine to free itself from the Moscow occupation”

    After the war, Stepan Bandera lived in Munich and worked for the British security services. A Soviet agent executed him in 1959.

    The Ukraine authorities and V. Zelensky personally make a hero out of Bandera. Monuments are erected and marches take place in his honor in which the participants call for the killing of Russians. The original text of the link above contains pictures of the fascists in Ukraine during their marches, as well as a document in Ukrainian and its Russian translation, where Bandera and his supporters glorify Hitler and fawn over the Nazis, I recommend taking a look at it.

    This is the ideology of a minority that has managed, with the financing and support of the West, to create an atmosphere of hate and terror, Russophobia, and xenophobia. The forces that could have stood up to them were either banned (the communists), or brainwashed and tempted by the dream of EU and NATO.

    Fascist and nationalistic ideology in Ukraine is not a phenomenon that is purely local. it is part of the populist ultra-right ideas that have swept Europe and the US. These include the appearance of fascist movements that rode on the wave of capitalist austerity instability, lack of steady employment, to scapegoating refugees for the lack of capitalist prosperity.

    Place of Religion: Ukraine Greek Orthodox vs Ukraine Greek Catholic Church  

    There is another card that has been played by the west, the card of religion. Little has been said in the western media about this, but the fact that religion started to play a big role in the life of the people of the countries who were living in what was the  Soviet Union is undeniable. People of various classes and occupations became religious, some even fanatics.

    Very briefly, historically in Ukraine there were two main religious tendencies. Ukraine Greek Orthodox in the East and Ukraine Greek Catholic in the West. Relations are not the best. The Ukraine Greek Catholic Church actively cooperated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine. Moreover, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Greek Orthodox Church in Ukraine from being part of the Moscow Patriarchy split into different parts mainly along nationalistic lines. This hatred was built not only on theological differences, but on property, including churches and land.

    Economic self-sufficiency                                                                                                                             

    I do not know whether you have heard Sergei Lavrov’s interview. There were the following words that made an impression on me:

    “As for our economic problems, we will deal with them. We have coped with difficulties at all stages of our history when these difficulties arose. But this time, I assure you, we will get out of this crisis with a completely healthy psychology and a healthy consciousness. We will have no illusions about the reliability of the west as a partner. We will not have any illusions that the West, when it talks about its values, does not really believe in its promises and spells, and we will have no illusions that the West is capable of betrayal at any moment. It will betray anyone and betray its own values.” TASS reports Lavrov’s words. (My translation)

    With affection and respect

    HCE

    •  First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Economic Tectonic Shifts: Letters from Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bombs and Missiles ‘r Us . . . and Further Infantilization of USA/EU/UK

    I’m finishing up a “children’s book.” It’s longish. Kati the Coatimundi Finds Lorena. It’s about a precocious (actually, super smart) 12 year old, Lorena, who is in a wheelchair (paraplegic) who ends up finding out the family trip to Playa del Carmen back to San Antonio, Texas, brought with them a stowaway animal — a coati. Yep, the world of the 12 yeare old is full of reading, drawing, smarts. Yep, the girl and the animal can communicate with each other. Yep, lots of struggle with being “the other,” and, well, it’s a story that I hope even keeps grandma on the edge of her seat, or at least wanting to read more and more. She is a mestizo, too. We’ll see how that goes with the woke folk. I think I have a former veterinarian who is retired and now is working on illustrations, art. We shall see where this project heads.

    Under this veil of creativity, of course, it’s difficult to just meld into pure art when the world around me is very very pregnant with stupidity, injustice, despotism, and Collective Stockholm Syndrome. Being in Oregon, being in a small rural area, being in the Pacific Northwest, being in USA, now that also bogs down spirits.

    It’s really about how stupid and how inane and how blatantly violent this so-called Western Civilization has become. The duh factor never plays in the game, because (a) the digital warriors writing stuff like this very blog are not engaged with centers of power, influence or coalescing. Then (b) so many people are in their minds powerful because with the touch of a keyboard, they can mount an offensive on or against facts . . . or deeply regarded and thought out opinions. So, then (c) everyone has a right to their opinion . . . . that is how the American mind moves through the commercial dungeons their marketing and financial overlords end up putting them.

    No pitchforks? How in anybody’s room temperature IQ does this make any sense? Demands for daily procurement of weapons for imbalanced, losing, and Nazified Ukraine?

    It is about the food, stupid, okay, Carville?

    So, before we move on, this is a communique from the G7 summit of the world’s biggest economies. And, no, EU and USA and Canada, not prepared for the Russian offensive’s affect on global food security. Alas, March 24, the G7 leaders agreed to use “all instruments and funding mechanisms” and involve the “relevant international institutions” to address food security, including support for the “continued Ukrainian production efforts.”

    Ukraine has told the US that it urgently needs to be supplied with 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 500 Stinger air defense missiles per day, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a document presented to US lawmakers.

    Western countries have been sending weapons and military gear to Kiev but President Volodymyr Zelensky says it is not enough to fend off the Russian attack that was launched a month ago.

    CNN quoted sources as saying that Ukraine is now asking for “hundreds more” missiles than in previous requests sent to lawmakers. Addressing the leaders of NATO member states via video link on Thursday, Zelensky said he had not received a “clear answer” to the request of “one percent of all your tanks.” (source)

    And, again, this is not blasphemy? Imagine, this “leader” and those “leaders,” smiling away during what is the 30 seconds to midnight doomsday clock. Smiling while Ukraine kills humanitarian refugees, while the biolabs sputtering on in deep freeze (we hope), and while the food prices are rising. Gas cards in California, and food coupons in France?

    In a normal world, a million pundits would be all over this March 24 group/grope photo. Smiles, while we the people have to watch billions go to ZioLensky and trillions more shunted to these world leaders’ overlords?

    As I alluded to in the title — the mighty warring UK, with the highrises in London, with those jet-setters and those Rothschild-loving royal rummies, it has food banks set up for the struggling, working class, and, alas, the gas is so pricey that people can’t boil spuds! Bring back the coal stoves!

    These are leaders? The elites? The best of the best?

    In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 Today program on Wednesday, Richard Walker said the “cost of living crisis is the single most important domestic issue we are facing as a country.” He cited reports from some food banks that users are “declining products such as potatoes and other root veg because they can’t afford to boil them.” Walker suggested that the UK government could implement measures to take the heat off retailers. He urged that the energy price cap on households could be extended to businesses, which he said would translate into some £100m in savings on consumers. He also called on authorities to postpone the introduction of the planned increase in national insurance, as well as some new environmental taxes. (source)

    The operative words are “crumbling,” and, then, “malfescence,” and then, “hubris,” and then, “bilking.”

    I just heard some inside stuff from someone working for a high tech company. I can’t get into too much about that, but here, these “engineers” in electronics or in data storage systems, they are, again, the height of Eicchmanns, but with the added twist of me-myself-and-I. Their expectations are $180,000 a year, with six weeks paid vacation, stocks, and, well, the eight-hour day.

    I don’t think the average blog reader gets this — we are not talking about celebrities, or the executive team for Amazon or Dell or Raytheon. Yep, those bastards pull in millions a year, like those celebrities, the pro athletes and the thespians of note, or musicians. These are people who are demanding those entry pay rates who have no empathy for the world around them. Sure, they believe they have kids to feed, and they might rah-rah the Ukraine madness (that, of course, means, more diodes, batteries, computer chips, communication systems, et al for the monsters of war), but they laugh at the idea of real people with real poverty issues getting a cheque from Uncle Sam.

    These are the everyday folk. I harken to the Scheer Report, tied to this fellow: It’s almost surreal and schizophrenic to valorize this fellow. Here, his bio brief, Ted Postol, a physicist and nuclear weapons specialist as well as MIT professor emeritus, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence” to explain just how deadly the current brinkmanship between the U.S. and Russia really is. Having taught at Stanford University and Princeton prior to his time at MIT, Postol was also a science and policy adviser to the chief of naval operations and an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment. His nuclear weapons expertise led him to critique the U.S. government’s claims about missile defenses, for which he won the Garwin Prize from the Federation of American Scientists in 2016. (source)

    I’ll go with Mr. Fish, as his illustration, even though it has words, speaks volumes —

    It all begs the question, so, now this weapons of war fellow, this US Navy advisor, physcist, he is now having his coming to Allah-Jesus-Moses moment? He gets it so wrong, and, one slice of the Ray-gun play, well, he also misses the point that people brought up in the warring world, and those with elite college backgrounds, or military and elite college backgrounds, and those in think tanks, or on the government deep or shallow state payroll, those in the diplomatic corps, those in the Fortune 5000 companies, the lot of them, and, of course, the genuflect to the multimillionaires and billionaires, they are, quite frankly, in most cases, sociopaths.

    But, here, a quote from his interview with Robert Scheer:

    And unfortunately, most of what people believe—even people who are quite well educated—is just unchecked. You know, only if you’re a real expert—and these people were not, in spite of the fact they viewed themselves that way—do you understand something about the reality of what these weapons are about. And so basically, to use a term that gets overused a lot, I think the deep state in both Russia and the United States—more the United States than Russia, at least as far as I can see—the deep state in the United States mostly, basically undermined the ideas and objectives of Ronald Reagan. And of course Gorbachev was facing a similar problem in Russia.

    So there’s these giant institutions inside both countries. They’re filled with people who, at one level, honestly believe these bad ideas, or think they are right; and because they think they are right, and they convince themselves that it’s in the best interest of the country, what’s really going on, it’s in their best interest as professionals but they mix up their best interest with the interest of the country. They, these people take steps to blunt the directives of the president, and basically the system just moves on without any real modification, independent of this remarkable and actually extraordinarily insightful judgment of these two men. (source)

    We know Reagan’s pedigree, and we know the millions who have suffered and died under his watch. And his best and brightest in his crew, oh, they are still around. Imagine, that, Trump 2024. Will another war criminal and his cadre of criminals rise again to national prominence. He will be seeking counsel:

    Then, alas, the flags at the post office, half mast, yet again and again and again — Today, that other war criminal:

    Go to minute 59:00 here at the Grayzone, and watch this woman (Albright) call Serbs disgusting. Oh well, flags are flapping once again for another war criminal!

    Sure, watch the entire two hours and forty-five minutes, and then try and wrap your heads around 1,000 missiles a day on the road to Ukraine, and no-boiling spuds in the UK. And it goes without saying, that any narrative, any deep study of, any recalled history of this entire bullshit affair in the minds of most Yankees and Rebels, they — Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter, Abby Martin, et al — are the fringe. Get to this one from Escobar, today:

    A quick neo-Nazi recap

    By now only the brain dead across NATOstan – and there are hordes – are not aware of Maidan in 2014. Yet few know that it was then Ukrainian Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov, a former governor of Kharkov, who gave the green light for a 12,000 paramilitary outfit to materialize out of Sect 82 soccer hooligans who supported Dynamo Kiev. That was the birth of the Azov batallion, in May 2014, led by Andriy Biletsky, a.k.a. the White Fuhrer, and former leader of the neo-nazi gang Patriots of Ukraine.

    Together with NATO stay-behind agent Dmitro Yarosh, Biletsky founded Pravy Sektor, financed by Ukrainian mafia godfather and Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky (later the benefactor of the meta-conversion of Zelensky from mediocre comedian to mediocre President.)

    Pravy Sektor happened to be rabidly anti-EU – tell that to Ursula von der Lugen – and politically obsessed with linking Central Europe and the Baltics in a new, tawdry Intermarium. Crucially, Pravy Sektor and other nazi gangs were duly trained by NATO instructors.

    Biletsky and Yarosh are of course disciples of notorious WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for whom pure Ukrainians are proto-Germanic or Scandinavian, and Slavs are untermenschen.

    Azov ended up absorbing nearly all neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine and were dispatched to fight against Donbass – with their acolytes making more money than regular soldiers. Biletsky and another neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Petrenko, were elected to the Rada. The White Führer stood on his own. Petrenko decided to support then President Poroshenko. Soon the Azov battalion was incorporated as the Azov Regiment to the Ukrainian National Guard.

    They went on a foreign mercenary recruiting drive – with people coming from Western Europe, Scandinavia and even South America.

    That was strictly forbidden by the Minsk Agreements guaranteed by France and Germany (and now de facto defunct). Azov set up training camps for teenagers and soon reached 10,000 members. Erik “Blackwater” Prince, in 2020, struck a deal with the Ukrainian military that would enable his renamed outfit, Academi, to supervise Azov.

    It was none other than sinister Maidan cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the EU” Nuland who suggested to Zelensky – both of them, by the way, Ukrainian Jews – to appoint avowed Nazi Yarosh as an adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The target: organize a blitzkrieg on Donbass and Crimea – the same blitzkrieg that SVR, Russian foreign intel, concluded would be launched on February 22, thus propelling the launch of Operation Z. (Source: “Make Nazism Great Again — The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.”)

    In the minds of wimpy Trump and wimpy Biden, or in those minds of all those in the camp of Harris-Jill Biden disharmony, these white UkiNazi hombres above are “our tough hombres.” Send the ZioLensky bombs, bioweapons, bucks, big boys. Because America the Ungreat will be shaking up the world, big time.

    So, I slither back to the writing, finishing up my story about a girl, a coati, Mexico, what it means to be disabled, and what it means to be an illegal animal stuck in America, Texas, of all places, where shoot to kill vermin orders are a daily morning conversation with the oatmeal and white toast and jam.

    See the source image

    If only the world could be run by storytellers, dancers, art makers, dramatists, musicians everywhere. Here, a great little thing from Lila Downs — All about culture, art, dance, language, food, color. Forget the physicists, man. And the electrical and dam engineers.

    If you do not understand Spanish, then, maybe hit the YouTube “settings” and get the English subtitles.. In either case, magnificent, purely magnificent!

    The post Bombs and Missiles ‘r Us . . . and Further Infantilization of USA/EU/UK first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • More Evidence That The US Is Trying To Prolong This War

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.

    “Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.

    So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

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    The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to "bleed Putin". They don't care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw). https://t.co/NBOKvmT63K

    — Leonid Bershidskiy (@Bershidsky) March 22, 2022

    Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:

    “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

     

    I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.  It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.

    Earlier this month when The Intercept’s Ryan Grim was able to get a word in edgewise at a White House press briefing amid the throngs of mass media reporters demanding to know why Biden still hasn’t started World War 3, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a very revealing answer.

    “So, aside from the request for weapons, President Zelensky has also requested that the US be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?” asked Grim.

    “Well, one of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” Psaki answered, completely dodging the question of whether the US was actually doing anything to help negotiate peace.

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    This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz

    — Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022

    As we’ve discussed previously, the US government has a well-documented history of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires with the goal of preoccupying its military forces and draining its coffers. Former US officials are on record publicly boasting about having done so in both Afghanistan and Syria. This is an agenda geared toward sapping the Russian government, manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare designed (though perhaps ineptly) to crush the Russian economy, to foment discord and rebellion, and ultimately to effect regime change in Moscow.

    The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.

    I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.

    ___________________________

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

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  • US goal is to ‘bait and bleed’ Russia, not defend Ukraine’s people

    The United States’ main objective in Ukraine is to significantly, if not completely, remove an international rival — Russia — from the world stage, write Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • War Crimes, Mental Molestation and Language Rape

    The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.

    The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.

    The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.

    This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.

    While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.

    While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?

    A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.

    A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.

    This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.

    Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.

    A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.

    The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.

    With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.

    This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.

    The post War Crimes, Mental Molestation and Language Rape first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Peculiar European “Peace”

    Building Europe to have peace. Such is the just and fine ambition that one must pursue relentlessly. Nevertheless, it is necessary to define ‘Europe’ and to specify the conditions for the peace that is desirable on our continent.

    For Europe is a continent. Only de Gaulle had envisaged Europe as a geopolitical ensemble composed of all the states participating in balance. François Mitterrand took up the idea in the form of a European confederation, but he too quickly abandoned it.

    Since 1945, what is presented as ‘Europe’, in the West of the continent, is only a subset of countries incapable by themselves of ensuring peace. One regularly hides its powerlessness behind proud slogans. Such is the case with that which affirms ‘Europe means Peace’. As a historical reality and as promise it is false.

    During the Cold War, it is not the organs of the Common Market, of the European Economic Community then of the European Union which have assured peace in Europe. It is well known that the equilibrium between the great powers has been maintained by nuclear dissuasion and, more precisely, by the potential for massive destruction possessed by the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France.

    NATO forces under American command offered Western Europe a fragile umbrella, since the US would not have put their very existence in jeopardy to prevent a very improbable land-based offensive by the Soviet Army. Ready for all possibilities but not prepared to pay the price of a classic confrontation, France, having left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, considered the territory of West Germany as a buffer zone for its Pluton nuclear-armed missiles.

    The collapse of the Soviet Union has pushed into the background the debates on nuclear dissuasion, but it is still not possible to glorify a ‘Europe’ pacific and peace-making. For thirty years we have seen the «peace of cemeteries» established on our periphery, and under the responsibility of certain members states of the European Union.

    The principal states of the EU carry an overwhelming responsibility in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany, supported by the Vatican, unilaterally recognises Slovenia and Croatia on 23 December 1991, which pushes the then “Twelve” to follow this lethal route. France could have opposed this decision. It gives up this option because, on 15 December in Council, François Mitterrand reaffirms his conviction: it is more important to preserve the promises of Maastricht than to attempt to impose the French position on Yugoslavia. In other words, Yugoslavia has been deliberately sacrificed on the altar of “Franco-German friendship“, when one could already see that Berlin lied, manoeuvred and imposed its will. The German ambition was to support Croatia, including by the delivery of arms, in a war that would be pursued with a comparable cruelty by all the camps.

    The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia embroiled Bosnia-Herzegovina and provoked the extension of the conflict, then its internationalisation. Tears would be shed for Sarajevo while forgetting Mostar. Some Parisian intellectuals would demand, in the name of ‘Europe’, an attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. Their wish was granted in 1999 when NATO, under American commandment, bombed Yugoslav territory for 78 days, killing thousands of civilians. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium … participated in this military operation, in contempt of the UN Charter and of NATO statutes, an alliance theoretically defensive …

    Let no one pretend that the principal member states of the EU were waging humanitarian wars and wanted to assure economic development and democracy. ‘Europe’ has protested against ethnic cleansing by Serbs but has left the Croats to force out 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. ‘Europe’ waxes indignant about massacres in Kosovo but it has supported extremist ethnic Albanians of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have committed multiple atrocities before and after their arrival to power in Pristina.

    These Balkan wars occurred in the previous Century, but it is not ancient history. The countries devastated by war suffer henceforth the indifference of the powerful. In Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, one lives poorly, very poorly, if one is not involved in illegal business networks. Then one seeks work elsewhere, preferably in Germany, if one is not too old.

    After having mistreated, pillaged then abandoned its peripheries, ‘peaceful’ Europe then goes to serve as an auxiliary force in American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were in the forefront in the bombardment of Libya, but the outcome is as disastrous as in the Middle East and Central Asia – graveyards, chaos, the hate of the West and, at Kabul, the return of the Taliban.

    This brief review of the deadly inconsistencies of European pacificism cannot ignore Ukraine. The European Commission itself has encouraged the Ukrainian government in its quest for integration in the EU, before proposing a simple accord of association. The Ukrainian government, having declined to sign this accord, the pro-European groups allied to the ultranationalists have descended into the street in November 2013 with the support of Germany, Poland and the US. The Maidan movement, the eviction of President Yanukovych and the war of the Donbass have led, after the Minsk accords and a stalemate in the conflict to the situation that we have before our eyes in early January – the US and Russia discuss directly the Ukrainian crisis without the ‘Europe of peace’ being admitted to the negotiating table. The EU has totally subjugated itself to NATO and does not envisage leaving it.

    It is therefore possible to note, once again, the vacuity of the discourse on the ‘European power’ and on ‘European sovereignty’. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should acknowledge all the opportunities lost. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, France could have demanded the withdrawal of American forces installed in Europe and proposed a collective security treaty for the entirety of the continent, while pursuing its project for a European Confederation. From Right to Left, our governments have preferred to cultivate the myth of the “Franco-German friendship”, leave the US to pursue its agenda after the upheaval of 2003, and then return to the integrated command of NATO.

    They offer us not peace but submission to war-making forces that they have given up trying to control.

    *****

    • Translated by Evan Jones (a francophile and retired political economist at University of Sydney) and is published here with permission from author.

    The post A Peculiar European “Peace” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The people of Yemen Suffer Atrocities, too

    WFP food distribution in Raymah (credit: Julian Harneis CC BY-SA 2.0)

    The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in.

    “I am deeply disappointed,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The people of Yemen need the same level of support and solidarity that we’ve seen for the people of Ukraine. The crisis in Europe will dramatically impact Yemenis’ access to food and fuel, making an already dire situation even worse.”

    With Yemen importing more than 35% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, disruption to wheat supplies will cause soaring increases in the price of food.

    “Since the onset of the Ukraine conflict, we have seen the prices of food skyrocket by more than 150 percent,” said Basheer Al Selwi, a spokesperson for the International Commission of the Red Cross in Yemen. “Millions of Yemeni families don’t know how to get their next meal.”

    The ghastly blockade and bombardment of Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is now entering its eighth year. The United Nations estimated last fall that the Yemen death toll would top 377,000 people by the end of 2021.

    The United States continues to supply spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Without this support, the Saudis couldn’t continue their murderous aerial attacks.

    Yet tragically, instead of condemning atrocities committed by the Saudi/UAE invasion, bombing and blockade of Yemen, the United States is cozying up to the leaders of these countries. As sanctions against Russia disrupt global oil sales, the United States is entering talks to become increasingly reliant on Saudi and UAE oil production. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE don’t want to increase their oil production without a U.S. agreement to help them increase their attacks against Yemen.

    Human rights groups have decried the Saudi/UAE-led coalition for bombing roadways, fisheries, sewage and sanitation facilities, weddings, funerals and even a children’s school bus. In a recent attack, the Saudis killed sixty African migrants held in a detention center in Saada.

    The Saudi blockade of Yemen has choked off essential imports needed for daily life, forcing the Yemeni people to depend on relief groups for survival.

    There is another way. U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Peter De Fazio of Oregon, both Democrats, are now seeking cosponsors for the Yemen War Powers Resolution. It demands that Congress cut military support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition’s war against Yemen.

    On March 12, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including seven Yemenis – two of them prisoners of war and five of them accused of criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen.

    Just two days after the mass execution, the Gulf Corporation Council, including many of the coalition partners attacking Yemen, announced Saudi willingness to host peace talks in their own capital city of Riyadh, requiring Yemen’s Ansar Allah leaders (informally known as Houthis) to risk execution by Saudi Arabia in order to discuss the war.

    The Saudis have long insisted on a deeply flawed U.N. resolution which calls on the Houthi fighters to disarm but never even mentions the U.S. backed Saudi/UAE coalition as being among the warring parties. The Houthis say they will come to the negotiating table but cannot rely on the Saudis as mediators. This seems reasonable, given Saudi Arabia’s vengeful treatment of Yemenis.

    The people of the United States have the right to insist that U.S. foreign policy be predicated on respect for human rights, equitable sharing of resources and an earnest commitment to end all wars. We should urge Congress to use the leverage it has for preventing continued aerial bombardment of Yemen and sponsor Jayapal’s and De Fazio’s forthcoming resolution.

    We can also summon the humility and courage to acknowledge U.S. attacks against Yemeni civilians, make reparations and repair the dreadful systems undergirding our unbridled militarism.

    • A shortened version of this article produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine.

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  • Propaganda 101: Ukraine 2022 

    During 2011, NATO bombed a path to Tripoli to help its proxy forces on the ground oust Gaddafi. Tens of thousands lost their lives and much of Libya’s social fabric and infrastructure lay in ruins.

    The 2016 article appearing in Foreign Policy Journal ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libyan Intervention’ exposed why Libya was targeted. Gaddafi was murdered and his plans to assert African independence and undermine Western hegemony on that continent were rendered obsolete.

    A March 2013 Daily Telegraph article ‘US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’’ reported that 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia had been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to rebels.

    In the same month of that year, The New York Times ran the article ‘Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands with CIA Aid’, stating that Arab governments and Turkey had sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters. This aid included more than 160 military cargo flights.

    In his book The Dirty War on Syria, Tim Anderson describes how the West and its allies were instrumental in organising and then fuelling that conflict.

    Over the last two decades, politicians and the media have been manipulating popular sentiment to get an increasingly war-fatigued Western public to support ongoing conflicts under the notion of ‘protecting civilians’ or a ‘war on terror’.

    A yarn is spun about securing women’s rights or fighting terrorists, removing despots (possessing non-existent WMDs) from power or protecting human life to justify military attacks, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and the displacement of many more.

    Emotive language designed to instill fear about terror threats or ‘humanitarian intervention’ is used as a pretext to wage imperialist wars in mineral-rich countries and geo-strategically important regions.

    Although it has been referred to in many articles over the years, it is worth mentioning again retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark and a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense that he was told about just a few weeks after 9/11. It revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran”. Clark argued this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.

    Part of the battle for the public’s hearts and minds is to convince people to regard these wars and conflicts as a disconnected array of events, not the planned machinations of empire. For the last decade, the ongoing narrative about Russian aggression has been part of the strategy.

    Anglo-American financial-corporate interests have long been seeking to drive a wedge between Europe and Russia to prevent closer economic alignment. Aside from the expansion of NATO and installation of missile systems in Eastern Europe targeting Russia, there has also been the ever-tightening economic sanctions which the EU has largely been compelled to go along with.

    Back in 2014, the proposed (but never implemented) Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was part of the broader geopolitical game plan to weaken Western Europe by making it even more dependent on the US and to divide the European continent by side-lining Russia. While the TTIP may appear to have had nothing to do with what was happening in Ukraine in 2014 (the coup) or Syria, it was a cog in the machine to cement US hegemony.

    Much more can be (and has been) written about US strategies to undermine Russia’s fossil-fuel based economy, but the point is that US actions have for some time been aimed at weakening Russia.

    The financial-industrial-military complex is setting this agenda, hammered out behind closed doors in its various forums. Those who sit at the top of this complex fine-tune their plans within powerful think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute (documented in Brian Berletic’s 2012 article ‘Naming Names: Your Real Government’) as well as at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and NATO, as described in the 2008 book by David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.

    It is worthwhile noting the 2019 report ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ by the influential US policy think tank the Rand Corporation. The document sets out various scenarios for destabilising and weakening Russia, including “imposing deeper trade and financial sanctions” and “providing lethal aid to Ukraine” but without provoking “a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages”.

    The invasion of Ukraine by Russia did not happen out of the blue. It is not the result of the machinations of a power-hungry madman hellbent on taking over Europe, a notion that mainstream commentators have for a number of years tried to embed in the psyche of the Western public.

    A recent analysis appearing on the India-based news channel WION, ‘Did NATO push Ukraine into war?’, provides the type of insightful analysis of events absent from the Western media. It succinctly outlines Russia’s valid concerns about NATO’s expansionist thrust into Eastern Europe and how successive US administrations ignored these concerns for many years, including those from top officials in Washington itself.

    That such an analysis remains off the Western media agenda is of no surprise. Prominent journalists in key media outlets are essential foot soldiers whose role is to support power. They are groomed for their positions by various means (the British-American Project being a case in point) as they climb the well-paid career ladder.

    Notwithstanding the countless civilian casualties and the suffering currently in Ukraine, a country being used as a pawn in a geopolitical war, there are also the effects of disrupted energy supplies and fertilizer and food exports from Ukraine and Russia which will impact possibly hundreds of millions across the world.

    For instance, the war could unleash a “hurricane of hunger” and poverty with the World Bank estimating that the average person in Sub-Saharan Africa will be spending about 35% of their income on food in 2023 if the war in Ukraine drags on. It was a little more than 20% in 2017. Elsewhere, in places like South Asia and the Middle East, the increase could be worse.

    But this is merely ‘collateral damage’ worth imposing on others in the calculations of those who determine what the ‘price worth paying’ is and who will pay it.

    Nevertheless, the public has been encouraged to support a strategy of increasing tension towards Russia, culminating in the situation we now see in Ukraine, by a media which plays its part well. The media serves as a key cheerleader for US-led wars and ensures the civilian wounded and dead of those conflicts are kept out of the headlines and off the screens, unlike the current situation in Ukraine whose victims receive 24/7 coverage across the major media outlets.

    But this comes as little surprise. Former CIA boss General Petraeus stated in 2006 that his strategy was to wage a war of perceptions conducted continuously through the news media.

    Many readers will be aware of the revelation back in 2015 about the former editor of a major German newspaper who said he planted stories for the CIA. Udo Ulfkotte claimed he accepted news items written and given to him by the agency and published them under his own name in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

    While this came as a shock to many, it was noted decades ago by former senior British intelligence officer Peter Wright (author of the 1987 autobiographical book ‘Spycatcher’) that many top journalists in the UK were associated with MI5.

    It was another former CIA boss, William Casey, who in the 1980s said:

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    Civilian suffering is given full media coverage when it can be used to tug at the emotional heartstrings in order to sway public opinion. Made-for-media outpourings of morality about good and evil are designed to create outrage and support for more ‘interventions’.

    The shaping of public opinion is not a haphazard affair. It is now sophisticated and well established.

    Take, for instance, the harvesting of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica to shape the outcomes of the US election a few years back and the Brexit campaign. According to journalist Liam O’Hare writing in 2018, its now defunct parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) conducted ‘behavioural change’ programmes in more than 60 countries. Its clients included the British Ministry of Defence, the US State Department and NATO.

    According to O’Hare, among SCL’s activities in Europe were campaigns targeting Russia. The company had “sweeping links” with Anglo-American political and military interests. In the UK, the interests of the governing Conservative Party and military-intelligence players were brought together via SCL: board members included “an array of Lords, Tory donors, ex-British army officers and defence contractors”.

    For O’Hare, all SCL’s activities were inextricably linked to its Cambridge Analytica arm.

    He states:

    We finally have the most concrete evidence yet of shadowy actors using dirty tricks in order to rig elections. But these operators aren’t operating from Moscow… they are British, Eton educated, headquartered in the City of London and have close ties to Her Majesty’s government.

    Welcome to the world of mass deception à la Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels.

    With talk of a ‘no-fly zone’ over Ukraine, sanctions on Russia which Putin says are “akin to a declaration of war” and Biden calling Putin a “war criminal”, the world now finds itself in a ‘thinking the unthinkable’ scenario that was totally avoidable.

    The day before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin stated on Russian TV:

    Whoever tries to get in our way and create further threats to our country and our people must know that Russia’s response will come immediately and will lead to consequences without precedent in history. All the necessary decisions have been taken.

    President of the German Council on Foreign Relations Thomas Enders has since responded by calling for a no-fly zone in western Ukraine, which would most likely lead to direct military involvement by NATO:

    It is time for the West to expose Putin’s nuclear threats for what they really are – a bluff to deter Western governments from military intervention.

    Speaking on TV in 2021, prominent US politician and Iraq war veteran Tulsi Gabbard spelt out the consequences of a war with Russia over Ukraine. With thousands of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia have aimed at each other, she said that a nuclear exchange would “exact a cost on every one of us that would result in excruciating death and suffering beyond comprehension”.

    And yet, despite what Gabbard warns of, the arrogance and recklessness of power brokers is displayed each day for all to see.

    Although it may be regarded as political posturing – in a centuries-old ‘great game’ played out by the ruling elites that boils down to oil, gas, minerals, power, wealth, ego and strategic and military dominance – talk of direct NATO intervention or Putin’s implied threat about the use of nuclear weapons ultimately amounts to those at the pinnacle of power risking gambling away your life and the lives of every living creature on the planet.

    The post Propaganda 101: Ukraine 2022  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Sick and Sicker, Dumb and Dumber, Rich and Richer

    Quote — “The US will likely end up supplying Ukraine with Switchblade loitering munitions. The system poses a real threat. Nevertheless, the Russian military will likely use the tactics we saw in Syria to neutralize this threat.” (Southfront)

    And, well, it is tax time, and these beasts of a nation — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, MSM — they rally around the military offensive murdering complex for, well, billions thrown at the Nazi regime of Ukraine. And I have to pay more taxes on my subpar wages? Give me a few of those drones, please! Billions of dollars thrown at the most corrupt and evil of them all (well, there are many evil ones, so see this as hyperbole). One contract with this outfit, AeroVironment. Looking into that company, I find its current president to be an interesting man:

    Wikipedia — Nawabi is an Afghan sub clan mega Barakzai the majority of this clan played an important role during the Barakzai dynasty – such as Ismail Khan Nawabi.

    The name Nawabi is borrowed from the Arabic, being the honorific plural of Naib or “deputy”. The name Nawab is mostly used among South Asians. In Bengal it is pronounced Nowab. The English adjective nawabi (from the Urdu word nawwābī) describes anything associated with a nawab.

    He says AeroVironment is a great place to work because: “There is no place like AeroVironment where a group of honorable, smart, and hardworking people can make such a big and positive impact on our lives and society. I am excited and honored to lead such a team in order to help all of our 3 stakeholders Proceed with Certainty.”

    Wahid Nawabi

    Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

    Yes, the face of the military murdering complex is a smile, a wink, and even a diversity statement validation.

    As President and Chief Executive Officer at AEROVIRONMENT INC, Wahid Nawabi made $2,524,773 in total compensation. Of this total $632,319 was received as a salary, $535,513 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $1,333,024 was awarded as stock and $23,917 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year. President and Chief Executive Officer. AEROVIRONMENT INC

    So, the wink and a nod, all those stock options, all of that base pay, all of it, all predicated on, hmm, contracts. Yes, US GI Joe fed contracts. And, well, a contract is a contract, whether Mario Puzo is writing about it, or if one of the slick female heads of the war complex companies is drafting and signing it. This is one company, which I have previously discussed in general and specifically is really not just one in Santa’s Serial Murder workshops, but one represents dozens of companies (contracted) relying on those contracts for these drones with payloads: wires, optics, diodes, motherboards, paint, metal, gears, etc. Kamikaze drones, what a lovely thing to be proud of, and this company is just one of thousands that makes money off of blood.

    The officials told the outlet that the White House is currently considering supplying Ukraine with Switchblades, as part of a new package of military aid. However, they noted that no decisions on the matter have been made, yet.

    There are two available variants of the loitering munition, the Switchblade 300 and the 600. The 300 was designed to target personnel and unarmored vehicles. It has a range of 10 kilometers and an endurance of 10 minutes. The larger 600 was designed to destroy armored vehicles, like battle tanks. This version has a range of 80 kilometers and an endurance of up to 20 minutes. (source)

    Please, kind reader, look at these people — the website of their team: Aerovironment. For me, they are scary people, for sure, in that they are the paper-pushers and state college grads from engineering programs; they are the marketers, the CPAs and the HR folk. These are what I have faced my entire life teaching — people who have no reservation about making money selling drugs that kill (Big Pharma) or booze that kills or anything that kills, both human or environment. Look at their biographies on the “About Us” page above. This is the banality of evil, and I am afraid, that evil is much much deeper engrained than Hannah Arendt could have conjured up because there is no “great war,” no great global war against Nazis and fascists, as in WWII. It’s all transactional, money for blood, weapons ‘r us!

    Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

    — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

    I’m not sure she was thinking of the pure structural/sanctions-led/financial tyranny of capitalism, that soft tyranny of western consumerism, the constant inverted tyranny in a world where most First World folk eat, drink, sleep oil. A world that is run by business men and business women, under the umbrella of the Deep State and government thugs. I do not think she was in the know around how pernicious the marketing of lies and evil doing was under the guidance of a fellow Jew, Edward (Freud) Bernays. But she was onto something, for sure:

    In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

    ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

    You see, the totalitarianism is in the marketing of these spoils of war, and the war minders, and the war industry. Look at this company’s founder, Paul MacCready. Check him out on Wikipedia — Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “do more with less.”

    In so many ways, MacCready represents the best and the brightest of his generation, the hope for mankind, the genius of the American System producing tools of war, tools of profit. He represents the undying American work ethic, with only the heavens (err, he said sky, as he was an avowed atheist) as his limit.

    That is it, really — the biography of a military industrial complex tool of death, all started in the twinkle of a 15-year-old MacCready’s eye when he was designing planes and gliders in 1940. Now? Every sort of munition and payload delivered in the fuselages of those toys. Heck, why not drone-carrying bugs injected or engineered with viruses?

    CNBC 3/16/2022: “Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Alibaba, AeroVironment, Boeing and more”. Again, success at the start of the trading and the end of the day bell on Wall Street! Get US taxpayer contract in the millions, and see you stock rise rise rise like sour dough bread,

    Dark Side of Delivery: The Growing Threat of Bioweapon Dissemination by Drones —

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  • Weathering the Global Storm: Why Neutrality is Not an Option for Palestinians

    A new global geopolitical game is in formation, and the Middle East, as is often the case, will be directly impacted by it in terms of possible new alliances and resulting power paradigms. While it is too early to fully appreciate the impact of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war on the region, it is obvious that some countries are placed in relatively comfortable positions in terms of leveraging their strong economies, strategic location and political influence. Others, especially non-state actors, like the Palestinians, are in an unenviable position.

    Despite repeated calls on the Palestinian Authority by the US Biden Administration and some EU countries to condemn Russia following its military intervention in Ukraine on February 24, the PA has refrained from doing so. Analyst Hani al-Masri was quoted in Axios as saying that the Palestinian leadership understands that condemning Russia “means that the Palestinians would lose a major ally and supporter of their political positions.” Indeed, joining the anti-Russia western chorus would further isolate an already isolated Palestine, desperate for allies who are capable of balancing out the pro-Israel agenda at US-controlled international institutions, like the UN Security Council.

    Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of its Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s, Russia was allowed to play a role, however minor, in the US political agenda in Palestine and Israel. It participated, as a co-sponsor, in the Madrid peace talks in 1991, and in the 1993 Oslo accords. Since then a Russian representative took part in every major agreement related to the ‘peace process,’ to the extent that Russia was one of the main parties in the so-called Middle East Quartet which, in 2016, purportedly attempted to negotiate a political breakthrough between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership.

    Despite the permanent presence of Russia at the Palestine-Israel political table, Moscow has played a subordinate position. It was Washington that largely determined the momentum, time, place and even the outcomes of the ‘peace talks.’ Considering Washington’s strong support for Tel Aviv, Palestinians remained occupied and oppressed, while Israel’s colonial settlement enterprises grew exponentially in terms of size, population and economic power.

    Palestinians, however, continued to see Moscow as an ally. Within the largely defunct Quartet – which, aside from Russia, includes the US, the European Union and the United Nations – Russia is the only party that, from a Palestinian viewpoint, was trustworthy. However, considering the US near complete hegemony on international decision-making, through its UN vetoes, massive funding of the Israeli military and relentless pressure on the Palestinians, Russia’s role proved ultimately immaterial, if not symbolic.

    There were exceptions to this rule. In recent years, Russia has attempted to challenge its traditional role in the peace process as a supporting political actor, by offering to mediate, not just between Israel and the PA, but also between Palestinian political groups, Hamas and Fatah. Using the political space that presented itself following the Trump Administration’s cutting of funds to the PA in February 2019, Moscow drew even closer to the Palestinian leadership.

    A more independent Russian position in Palestine and Israel has been taking shape for years. In February 2017, for example, Russia hosted a national dialogue conference between Palestinian rivals. Though the Moscow conference did not lead to anything substantive, it allowed Russia to challenge its old position in Palestine, and the US’ proclaimed role as an ‘honest peace broker.’

    Wary of Russia’s infringement on its political territory in the Middle East, US President Joe Biden was quick to restore his government’s funding of the PA in April 2021. The American President, however, did not reverse some of the major US concessions to Israel made by the Trump Administration, including the recognition of Jerusalem, contrary to international law, as Israel’s capital. Moreover, under Israeli pressure, the US is yet to restore its Consulate in East Jerusalem, which was shut down by Trump in 2019. The Consulate served the role of Washington’s diplomatic mission in Palestine.

    Washington’s significance to Palestinians, at present, is confined to financial support. Concurrently, the US continues to serve the role of Israel’s main benefactor financially, militarily, politically and diplomatically.

    While Palestinian groups, whether Islamists or socialists, have repeatedly called on the PA to liberate itself from its near-total dependency on Washington, the Palestinian leadership refused. For the PA, defying the US in the current geopolitical order is a form of political suicide.

    But the Middle East has been rapidly changing. The US political divestment from the region in recent years has allowed other political actors, like China and Russia, to slowly immerse themselves as political, military and economic alternatives and partners.

    The Russian and Chinese influence can now be felt across the Middle East. However, their impact on the balances of power in the Palestine-Israel issue, in particular, remains largely minimal. Despite its strategic ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2012, Washington remained entrenched behind Israel, because American support for Israel is no longer a matter of foreign policy priorities, but an internal American issue involving both parties, powerful pro-Israel lobby and pressure groups, and a massive right-wing, Christian constituency across the US.

    Palestinians – people, leadership and political parties – have little trust or faith in Washington. In fact, much of the political discord among Palestinians is directly linked to this very issue. Alas, walking away from the US camp requires a strong political will that the PA does not possess.

    Since the rise of the US as the world’s only superpower over three decades ago, the Palestinian leadership reoriented itself entirely to be part of the ‘new world order’. The Palestinian people, however, gained little from their leadership’s strategic choice. To the contrary, since then the Palestinian cause suffered numerous losses – factionalism and disunity at home, and a confused regional and international political outlook, thus the hemorrhaging of Palestine’s historic allies, including many African, Asian and South American countries.

    The Russia-Ukraine war, however, is placing the Palestinians before one of their greatest foreign policy challenges since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Palestinians, neutrality is not an option since the latter is a privilege that can only be obtained by those who can navigate global polarization using their own political leverage. The Palestinian leadership, thanks to its selfish choices and lack of a collective strategy, has no such leverage. 

    Common sense dictates that Palestinians must develop a unified front to cope with the massive changes underway in the world, changes that will eventually yield a whole new geopolitical reality.

    The Palestinians cannot afford to stand aside and pretend that they will magically be able to weather the storm.

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  • Homicidal Drives: US Dreams of Killing Putin

    Wars disturb and delude.  The Ukraine conflict is no exception.  Misinformation is cantering through press accounts and media dispatches with feverish spread.  Fear that a nuclear option might be deployed makes teeth chatter.  And the Russian President Vladimir Putin is being treated as a Botox Hitler-incarnate, a figure worthy of assassination.

    The idea of forcing Putin into the grave certainly tickled South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.  Liberated by more generous rules regarding hate speech (freedom in Silicon Valley is fickle), Graham took to Twitter to ask whether Russia had its own calculating Brutus willing to take the murderous initiative.  Moving forward almost two millennia for a historical reference, the Senator pinched an example from the Second World War (when else?). “Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?”  The only way to conclude the conflict was “for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

    In support of the proposition came Fox News host Sean Hannity, using long discredited logic in dealing with the leaders of a country.  “You cut off the head of the snake and you kill the snake.  Right now, the snake is Vladimir Putin.”

    Armchair psychologist types tend to suggest that homicidal fantasies are fairly common.  Julia Shaw of University College London told those attending the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2019 that this was to be expected from humans, enabling them to think through “the consequences” of their actions, obey a moral code and “develop our empathy.”

    Shaw might have missed a beat on this one, especially regarding the harm wished upon the Russian leader from a certain number in self-declared Freedom’s Land.  Empathy has been in short supply, and the moral code, if it can be called that, has gone begging.

    Graham’s homicidal call did bring out its critics, but the outrage was far from unconditional.  To have shown balance would have betrayed the cause and revealed solidarity for wickedness.  There were the mild, spanking rebukes from Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.  “As the world pays attention to how the US and its leaders are responding, Lindsey’s remarks and remarks made by some House members aren’t helpful.”

    Republican Senator Ted Cruz thought it “an exceptionally bad idea”, preferring “massive economic sanctions”, boycotts of Russian oil and gas, and the provision of military aid to Ukraine.  Democratic Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, Chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, wondered if a certain number of people had lost their minds.  “I have seen at least a half a dozen insane tweets tonight.  Please everyone keep your wits about you.”

    Billionaire financier Bill Browder, the inspiration behind the Magnitsky Act of 2012, preferred to diminish Putin as “a very little man.  He’s very scared of everybody, and he’s very vindictive.  And so he’s constantly looking around for betrayal.”  Hardly worth assassinating, it would seem.

    One should give Graham some leeway here, despite the flat assertion by White House press secretary Jen Psaki that assassination was “not the policy of the United States.”  Given that the US has not been averse to assassinating leaders or prominent figures, why be squeamish now?  President Abraham Lincoln thought it morally appropriate to condone the assassination of leaders who had caused suffering for an extended period of time, and could not be ousted by peaceful or legal means.  With Cleo’s irony, he would himself be assassinated along the lines of such logic by thespian John Wilkes Booth.

    For decades, Washington wished to do away with Cuba’s obstinately resilient Fidel Castro, bumbling along and eventually failing.  (Such oafish, nursery incompetence surely demands a Netflix production.)

    With the People’s Republic of China starting to make its mark in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower thought it appropriate that a blow be struck by singling out one of the Communist state’s brighter lights, Premier Zhou Enlai.  The Central Intelligence Agency’s murderous effort involved blowing up an Air India flight for Bandung in 1955, killing 16 passengers.  Zhou never boarded the flight.  A second effort at attempted poisoning was aborted.

    The CIA did not always fail, even if it gave an excellent impression of doing so.  There was more success in operations against Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo.

    During the absurdly named “Global War On Terror”, drones became the weapon of choice to target high profile figures, a murderous policy given a bubble wrapping of weasel words.  As recently as January 2020, President Donald Trump went so far as to order the killing of one of Iran’s most popular figures, the legendary leader of the Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani.

    At stages, US officials have shown remarkable candour on the policy of targeting heads of state, despite the existence of Executive Order 12333 which states that, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

    In 1990, Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Dugan promised that, in the event of war between the two countries, US planes would make a special point of targeting Saddam Hussein, his family and his mistress.  It must have then come as a surprise to him that a certain Secretary of Defense, the usually amoral Dick Cheney, would sack him for making comments possibly in violation of the assassination ban.  Dugan should have stuck to generalities, such as targeting the country’s leadership.  It’s all in the presentation.

    What of the point of assassination, that most severe form of censorship?  Stephen Kinzer is solid in pointing out that liquidating that man in the Kremlin will hardly guarantee a more accommodating replacement.  “No one who hopes to secure power in Moscow […] could ever accept Ukraine’s entry into NATO or the presence of hostile troops on Ukrainian soil.”  But Kinzer is even more on the mark for pointing out that US efforts tend to be hallmarks of stunning failure.

    All this chat about purported tyrannicide should not detract from the pattern of US history, which has affirmed that the imperium will dispose of leaders and prominent figures it does not like, even if it fails along the way.  Little wonder that Graham and his ilk are urging Russians to fulfil their blood-soaked fantasies.

    The post Homicidal Drives: US Dreams of Killing Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Taiwan’s impending tank boost

    An initial batch of the Republic of China Army’s (RoCA’s) fleet of M60A3 main battle tanks (MBTs) is set to be upgraded under a NT$444 million contract awarded to the state-run National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST). The contract was announced via the Taiwanese government’s procurement website on 9 March. Forty M60A3 MBTs […]

    The post Taiwan’s impending tank boost appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Rotten Rulings: Julian Assange and the UK Supreme Court

    Julian Assange, even as he is being judicially and procedurally tormented, has braved every legal hoop in his effort to avoid extradition to the United States.  Kept and caged in Belmarsh throughout this farce of judicial history, he risks being extradited to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

    District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser initially ruled on January 4, 2021 against the US, finding that Assange would be at serious risk of suicide given the risk posed by Special Administrative Measures and the possibility that he would end his days in the ADX Florence supermax facility.  It took little to read between the lines: the US prison system would do away with Assange; to extradite him would be oppressive within the meaning of the US-UK Extradition Treaty.

    The US Department of Justice appealed to the High Court of England and Wales, citing a range of implausible arguments.  Baraitser, they argued, could have sought reassurances from the prosecutors about Assange’s welfare.  A number of diplomatic reassurances were duly offered after the fact.  Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or spend his time in the supermax facility.  Adequate medical attention to mitigate the risk of suicide would also be provided.  Just to sweeten matters, the publisher would be able to serve the post-trial and post-appeal phase of his sentence in Australia.

    Every one of these undertakings was served with a leaden caveat. Everything was dependent on how Assange would behave in captivity, leaving it to the authorities to decide on whether to honour such undertakings.  Given that the US authorities have previously instigated surveillance operations against Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy, and contemplated his possible poisoning and abduction, such undertakings sounded crudely counterfeit.

    The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, in their December 2021 decision, ate from the hands of the US prosecution.  They did “not accept that the USA refrained for tactical reasons from offering assurances at an earlier stage, or acted in bad faith in choosing only to offer them at the appeal stage.”  There was no evident “basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.”  It followed that Assange’s suicide risk would be minimised – he had, the judges reasoned, little to worry about.  He would not be subjected to SAMs or be sent to ADX Florence.

    Assange’s legal team made several formidable arguments, suggesting that the US prosecution had inappropriately introduced fresh evidence against an adverse ruling “in order to repair holes identified” in their case.  Natural justice issues were also at stake given the timing of the move to provide assurances at such late stage.  There were also issues with the “legality of a requirement on judges to call for reassurances rather than proceeding to order discharge”.

    The defence readied themselves for an appeal.  In a short ruling on January 24, Lord Burnett kept the grounds of the appeal to the UK Supreme Court anaemically thin.  “Assurances [over treatment] are at the heart of many extradition proceedings.”  The question left facing the Supreme Court was a lonely one: “In what circumstances can an appellate court receive assurances from a requesting state which were not before the court at first instance in extradition proceedings”.  This did not even consider the point that diplomatic assurances are not legal considerations but political undertakings to be modified and broken.

    Other public interest grounds were also excluded.  No mention of press freedom.  No mention of the role played by the CIA, the dangers facing Assange of ill-treatment in the US prison system, or risks to his mental health.  There was nothing about the fact that the prosecution case is wretchedly shoddy, built upon the fabricated testimony of Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, famed conman, convict and trickster.  This was an appeal encumbered with the serious prospect of failure.

    Despite this, Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, was initially confident that the High Court had done enough, certifying that “we had raised a point of law of general public importance and that the Supreme Court had good grounds to hear this appeal.”

    On March 14, Moris and others of same mind were roundly disabused.  The Supreme Court comprising Lord Reed, Lord Hodge and Lord Briggs, were curt in dismissal.  In the words of the Deputy Support Registrar, “The Court ordered that permission to appeal be refused because the application does not raise an arguable point of law.”

    Birnberg Peirce Solicitors, the firm representing Assange, expressed “regret that the opportunity has not been taken to consider the troubling circumstances in which Requesting States can provide caveated guarantees after the conclusion of a full evidence hearing.”  In the matter of Assange, “the Court found that there was a real risk of prohibited treatment in the event of his onward extradition.”

    Dismay at the decision was expressed by Amnesty International’s Deputy Research Director for Europe, Julia Hall.  “The Supreme Court has missed an opportunity to clarify the UK’s acceptance of deeply flawed diplomatic assurances against torture.  Such assurances are inherently unreliable and leave people at risk of severe abuse upon extradition or other transfer.”

    The next stage in this diabolical torment of the WikiLeaks founder involves remitting the case to Westminster Magistrates’ Court, which will only serve a ceremonial role in referring the decision to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.  Only the most starry-eyed optimists will expect extradition to be barred.  (Patel is fixated with proposed changes to the UK Official Secrets Act that will expansively criminalise journalists and whistleblowers who publish classified information.)  The defence will do their best in submissions to Patel ahead of the decision, but it is likely that they will have to seek judicial review.

    In the likely event of Patel’s approval, the defence may make a freedom of press argument, though this is by no means a clear run thing.  It will still be up to the higher courts as to whether they would be willing to grant leave to hear further arguments.  Whichever way the cards fall, this momentous, torturous journey of paperwork, briefs, lawyers, and prison will continue to sap life and cause grief.

    The post Rotten Rulings: Julian Assange and the UK Supreme Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • United States: Why we should oppose economic sanctions against Russia

    Socialists and antiwar forces in the United States must oppose the United States-NATO economic sanctions against Russia, write Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Blunt Economic, Mental, Spiritual Ravages of the Millionaires

    Oh, you can pull a million images and a million news briefs from the Internet to illustrate the powerful and their stupidity and their absolute disdain for the rest of us.

    Kamala Harris laughs after question on Ukrainian refugees

    She laughs when asked about refugees, this time, from Ukraine. She is laughing about being in either the west or east flank in Poland. She doesn’t know for sure. This is the blunt end of a hammer. They all may be woke and full of civet-feces coffee and gourmet bacon-laced canopies, but they are still blunt ends of the stick. Look, she’s a multimillionaire, so they have a million and one excuses to go with their greenbacks. (Here, one source, RT, banned, on her “gaffs”!)

    They all are —  those old policy makers, those politicians, those diplomats — mulimillionaires. They are the blunt end of the protection rackets for the super rich and billionaire class. However, even multimillionaires can, with a pronouncement, a flip of the hand, jigger of the computer mouse, they can say, “We deem all Russian things off limits.” Imagine the power, and then those countries like China, so-called all powerful, accepting some of the sanctions, for now. USA is one tough hombre.

    This is serious stuff — read Whitney’s, “Twice in a Century: Russia Faces a War of Annihilation”!

    So, then, the $5.5 a gallon for gasoline. Again, the multimillionaires, the Greta “I Am Aspergers” Thornberg’s, they can all applaud the hurt locker their leaders are unleashing on the common folk (Russians), and we know Greta’s parents are, well, they are Swedish millionaires (with a small “m”). Actors! Whew!

    Wheat prices, doubling? Electricity, doubling? Food shortages and food tripling? That is, doubling and tripling of the price of these items. When you are a multimillionaire like Biden or Harris, Nuland or Kagen (even DoD Generals are millionaires), and when your pay is a taxpayer-dredged paycheck, and when you have an all-expenses-paid suite of benefits, and when you have insider trader information, and when you have full-spectrum health care, and when you have accountants, CPAs, financial advisors in the backrooms assisting you, this doubling of foodstuffs, this dollar or two/three more for a gallon of gasoline, well, that’s a laughing matter. . . for THEM. I’ve heard many a multimillionaire Mainstream Media Press Hoaxes telling you and telling me and telling all those home health workers and slave wage workers that we have to suck it up, that is, this is the small small price to pay in order to liberate (send billions in terrorist-headed small and large arms) Ukraine for capitalism, well, they call it PayDay Democracy with a big “d” for Dollar.  When you are making these funny jokes and imbecilic comments, as we hear from Harris on down the line of Georgetown-Harvard-Stanford-Yale grads, and yet there still will be no pitchforks and gallows for you, and, alas, that small price to pay for mainstreet USA and pensioner USA, well, well, they can still have a very fine and fun life in their multimillionaire dollar homes . . . . It is the sacrifice they take, letting us know, we should sacrifice, and yet we will consume their junk, gobble up their celebrity feces, wait with bated breath for their words and deeds to be announced on MDM, as they continue with their fun lives, no matter if the gallon goes to $5 or $7 or $10 a gallon.

    But, then, think of granny. Think of her meds going up-up-up! The foodstuffs going up-up-up. And if she has a leak under her sink, or if she has a puddle of mud outside the door along the pathway out gushing into her basement . . .  and if she has a car that needs some new used tires and spark plugs . . . and if she needs to visit friends once in a while one-way in that vehicle, say, 120 miles one way (she lives in a rural abode) . . .  and if she has a cat that needs teeth pulled . . .  and if she dares thinks about seeing an ailing sister across the country via a plane, oh, well, let’s laugh at the pain she is now under. You know how much a plane ticket is? That’s the laughing break-point for granny. From podunk town Oregon to Virginia, or Florida: do the math on what a Roundtrip ticket sets granny back. But then these left/right politicians and woke/woodern corporate leaders can say, “Suck it up. It’s only $5 a gallon for gas. Look what those blonde and blue eyed ones in the Ukraine are suffering. Suck it up for a Ukraine refugee” (recall: eat all those spuds and green beans cuz a kid in China is starving . . . .!)

    Let’s have a great laughing circle jerk as sanctions kill, and lies and mass incompetence murder people, and massive war profiteering wounds both humanity and townships, and where massive Covid-19 profiteering creates lingering death and long-term mental instability. As massive stock trading on those futures and those offensive weapons companies grow grow grow, while the Kamala Harrises of the world, really, get into the cackling mood on any number of topics for which she knows nothing, we are the sufferers.  All those multimillionaire laughing hyenas, and I see Hillary and Bill are at it again with their continuing criminal enterprise, the Clinton Foundation!

    Hyena Facts - Animal Facts Encyclopedia

    Let’s hear about Elon Musk’s latest creepy surrogate childbirth. Let’s hear about this $1 million here and that $20 million there shoved down some redneck university football coach’s mouth while the college students are under another load of debt.

    Fans shocked by Elon Musk and Grimes' new baby boy's unusual name | HELLO!

    Let’s laugh it all off, the reality of this war, or that incursion, this sanction/that sanction, or that weaponized economic movement toward more of the gilded laughing class, that Hyena Laughing Multimillionaire Chorus. We can have Stephen Colbert help us laugh. Where’s Jon Leibowitz Stewart and Sean Penn when we need them? We need their multimillionaire advice, ASAP, and their laughs! “It’s only a few bucks more for a gallon of gas . . .  deal with it,” old Colbert chortled.

    Imagine, all those months and years The Putin warned against all that EU-Nato-UK-USA aggressive shit coming to Russia’s borders. All those times he petitioned, nyet, nyet, nyet!

    Shifting now to make an analogy — Now, interestingly, I have been involved in a SWAT killing, that is, one of our clients — homeless veteran — had a suicidal moment alone, in his truck, with a handgun. Roads cordoned off. Everything around the Portland Salvation Army’s facility lock-downed. News at Six and Headlines at Ten there. Massive police armed presence. Armored trucks and gun turret vehicle, and then, of course, all guns drawn and three nifty SEAL trained snipers.

    They gave him two and a half hours to get his shit together, and then, bam, 13 shots, seven to the body. He was handcuffed and lived. He was by himself. Suicide Not By Cops.

    Or, just yesterday, in the rural community where I scratch out sanity:  “Police shoot, kill suspect after alleged bomb threat during standoff”

    Bomb-Threat

    Another two-hour standoff. And, then, bullets to the head. Imagine that. I have been around cops most of my life, and I was a city and rural reporter, newspapers, that is, and covered the cop beats — local, feds, military, county. I have interviewed FBI, and I have been in some K9 units for both city and military cops. The bottom line is — there is absolutely a one in a million chance someone who threatens cops in a standoff in his car yelling “bomb, bomb, bomb” has a bomb. Absolutely Zero chance, really. Lots of TV shows and Netflix series, aside.

    So, Putin gives the world, the EU, the UK-USA-Five Eyes, Nato, what, a month, a year, several years, eight years warning about needing those missiles and other weapons off of Ukraine’s soil?

    Nothing like the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there shall be no military or no nothing allowed in the Western Hemisphere, err, in the US’s Neighborhood; i.e., backyard!

    That old soft shoe — survival of the fittest or most riches or best placed bribes. That loving spoonful, here, all those pensioners, all those with multiple chronic illnesses, all those people in housing that is falling apart, all those loans hobbling folk. Choices between medications, or food. This is the country, man, USA, this is it for the epitome of exceptionalism.

    Those $57 billion in loans the other laughing hyena, Zelensky the Comic, that’s what he wants forgiven. Laughing, while demanding more weaponry, more billions. That’s the jig is up game when you are a testing lab (country) for GMOs, drugs, and, well, bioweapons.

    Putin's provocations are met with ridicule in Ukraine | TheHill

    It’s funny stuff, the billions he has in Costa Rica (maybe) and the mansion in Florida ($28 million valued). These are laughing matters, and VP Harris is just one in a long line of laughers in the multimillionaire category; or for those in the billionaire’s “mile high screw the hundreds of millions of us club,” the laughing is incredible, cowboy hats and all!

    See the source image

    This is serious, and no laughing matter, unless you are Nuland and Biden and Harris and the US’s spy agents: “Documents expose US biological experiments on allied soldiers in Ukraine and Georgia” by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva! Ahh, that funny “fake news.” Now, Colbert, let’s all line up and laugh!

    Again, granny and the kiddos. When I was working as a reporter in Southern Arizona, I did a couple of pieces on the O’Malley Clan — a group of people, many in the same family, who would take their panel trucks and pick-up trucks and go to trailer parks and low income housing tracts and get old people to pay for roofing, for gutter work, for all sorts of things that the O’Malley Clan said needed fixing. Then, up on the roof, and a five gallon white can of paint later, leaky roof fixed. A cool $800 cash for a $75 five gallon of roof sealant. This is the style of the American who sees PT Barnum as a god, that sucker born every second, man oh man, that god.

    Of course, States Attorney General had some squads trying to break up those O’Malley rings, but imagine, now 42 years later, and the amount of pure scam, pure fraud, pure bilking, pure rip-off, pure lying and chronic cheating that have cascaded into the American culture.

    The amount of multiple millions stolen from granny and from kiddo is out the roof, out of the sky. And those Laughing Politicians and All Those Amazing Celebrities, all of them, just rah-rahing the sanctions, the price of oil going up up up, all the strain and weathering on common people who can’t afford what’s going on in their Circle Jerks.

    The blame is on capitalism, on predatory and casino capitalism. The Gilded Agers, the deep state, all those Eichmann’s making money with the blood of granny and kiddo on their hands.

    The laughing all the way to their offshore banks — and then, well, DeltaCron will be coming to a neighborhood around Halloween.

    Those bioweapons, man:

    Every day, every moment of these scams, these false flags, this depravity of Empire USA, all of those things, shit, it is, as McGovern and Mearsheimer and Matlock say, this is not a done deal, MSM.

    Those chickens have come home to roost and roost and crap and crap:

    A revealing Portside article of Feb. 14 describes how 36 American states either have or are seeking to pass laws that censor the teaching of both local and national history so as to tell a traditional, Eurocentric story. This effort seeks to deny the demonstrable facts about the role racism has played in shaping social and economic development since the nation’s inception. Against this trend, 17 U.S. states have moved to officially expand their history and social studies curriculum to make it more racially and class inclusive.

    We should state clearly that the teaching of such a culturally approved official history has always been pursued in the United States, and is indeed not just an American tactic. It is a ubiquitous practice in much of the world. As public education evolved in the American colonies during the 19th century, it had specific goals: (1) to make the young as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty. If in this effort there was any reference to or concern for “the truth,” it was allegedly to be represented by the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.  — Lawrence Davidson

    [ The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0) ]

    But, again, it’s the old lady down the lane. The man and child living in their RV, and it is the person just trying to live out a life with few things having no one willing to come out and saw up the downed tree and patch the hole in the side of the house. Little homes with roof bids at $20,000!

    Those lovely places, Israel, now Ukraine, where money is stuffed, again, down those Hyenas’ mouths while the land here is more and more susceptible to waves, winds, rising oceans, inundation.

    Pacific Northwest coastal communities are at risk from earthquakes, including “The Really Big One”, tsunamis, sea level rise, landslides, erosion, and increased precipitation. Stretching from Cape Mendocino, California through Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, Canada, these Cascadia communities are calling for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience to these coastal hazards. (Event, March 16) 

    Yet, here we are, the war, the Putin, after how many years stating that EU-UK-USA-Five Eyes-Nato to stand down.

    Pity the Nation

    Pity the nation whose people are sheep
    And whose shepherds mislead them…
    Pity the nation oh pity the people
    Who allow their rights to erode
    and their freedoms to be washed away

    – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2007

    Scott Ritter:

    I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?

    To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.

    The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened. (Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.)

    Wow! A picture says a million words from 100 million misinformed people:

     

    Putin Russiagate Feature

    But then, this fellow, Larry Summers, what a poster we can make for him, USA felon on multiple crimes: Larry Summers is something else. He loves to say women cannot be great scholars in math and sciences.

    See the source image

    Max Blumenthal on Twitter: “Larry Summers – who presided over the demolition and plundering of Russia’s economy in the 1990’s and pushed policies that led to the US financial crash – says Americans need to suffer higher gas & food prices and inflation ‘as the price of fighting tyranny.’”

    A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations.

    Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.

    In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.

    “This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” (source)

    This seems like the poster plastered around town, no, or is Word Press now in the employ of the censors? Maybe we can put a question mark behind, “8 Real Threats to Humanity?” Does that work better?

    See the source image

    The post The Blunt Economic, Mental, Spiritual Ravages of the Millionaires first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Foreign Policy Tripe: Scott Morrison’s “Arc of Autocracy”

    Grand foreign policy speeches are not usually the specialty of Australian Prime Ministers.  Little insight can be gleaned from them.  A more profitable exercise would be consulting the US State Department’s briefings, which give more accurate barometric readings of policy in Canberra.  The same goes for the selected adversary of the day.  Washington’s adversaries must be those of Canberra’s.  To challenge such assumptions would be heretical.  To act upon them would be apostasy.

    The speech by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on March 7 to the Lowy Institute lived down to expectations.  Where it did serve some value was to highlight a mirror portrait of the man himself, describing an amoral world of power he inhabits.  “We face,” he solemnly stated, “the spectre of a transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency, where state sovereignty, territorial integrity and liberty are surrendered for respite from coercion and intimidation, or economic entrapment dressed up as economic reward.”

    In other respects, this speech was derivative of previous efforts to simplify the world into camps of wearying darkness and sublime light.  In his 2002 State of the Union Address, US President George W. Bush did precisely that.  Before losing our intellectual integrity in examining Morrison’s efforts of profound shallowness, let us go back to that original, dunce-crafted address, amply aided by David Frum, the Iraq War’s polished and persistent apologist.

    When Bush delivered his address, the moment was certainly strained.  The September 11, 2001 attacks still searingly fresh; the administration trying to come up with a doctrine to cope with the scourge of international Islamist terrorism.  In such instances, a subtle analysis of the global scene, a mapping of sensible policy, might have been too much to ask.

    What the world got was an adolescent morality sketch based on angry pre-emption in a rotten world.  The US, Bush promised, would pursue “two great objectives.”  The first involved shutting down terrorist camps, disrupting the plans of terrorists, and bringing “terrorists to justice.”  The second: “to prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world.”

    With the objectives stated, the heavy padding was introduced into the speech.  North Korea, Iran and Iraq were singled out for special mention.  “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”  The sequence of catastrophic, and bloody blunders that would culminate in the destruction of the ancient lands of Mesopotamia, was being floated.  Evidence would be secondary to assumption and ideology.

    Morrison’s own assessment is not much better.  “A new arc of autocracy is instinctively aligning itself to challenge and reset the world order in their own image.” At best, this silly formulation is dated, one straight out of musty history books depicting Beijing and Moscow as joined at the hip, keen on world revolution.

    Russia’s assault on Ukraine is taken to be an attack on the “rules-based international order, built upon the principles and values that guide our own nation”.  This order “supported peace and stability, and allowed sovereign nations to pursue their interests free from coercion.”

    This same order was grossly, and willingly violated by the US-led coalition that marched into a sovereign state in 2003, unleashing tides of sectarianism that continue in their fury.  The grounds for attacking Iraq were specious, and there was no interest in allowing it to pursue its “interests free from coercion.”  Instead, a sanguinary, ramshackle protectorate was created, crudely supervised by international forces that aided in driving jihadi tourism.

    The same order Morrison blithely describes was violated by NATO in its bombing of vital civilian infrastructure in Serbia in 1999, ostensibly to halt a genocide of Kosovars.  In 2011, the same rules-based-order became something of a joke with the aerial intervention by French, UK and US forces in backing a revolt against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.  Unceremoniously butchered by an ecstatic mob, Gaddafi did not live to see his country virtually partitioned by rival militias.

    The adversaries of the US are on very solid ground to point these misdeeds out, and Russian President Vladimir Putin does not shy away from reminding the West of this fact in his February 24 speech.  Western colleagues, Putin remarked, “do not like to remember those events, and when we talk about it, they prefer to point not to the norms of international law, but to the circumstances that they interpret as they see fit.”  This hardly adds weight to his own self-interpreted claims, but they serve to draw a thick line under hypocrisy masquerading as virtue.

    Morrison hits a sinister register in describing the effects of the principle-free, transactional world.  “The well-motivated altruistic ambition of our international institutions has opened the door to this threat.  Just as our open markets and liberal democracies have enabled hostile influence and interference to penetrate not our own societies and economies.”  What is he suggesting?  A violent retaliation, a forced reversal?

    Much impatience was expressed with how these naughty regimes of the autocratic arc have managed to get away with it.  It might be “right to aspire” to “inclusion and accommodation”, but Australia and its allies had been left “disappointed”.  But not his government – not the Liberal-Nationals, who had been “clear eyed”, having “taken strong, brave and world-leading action in response.”

    To show how clear of eye Morrison has been, he has successfully made Australia the subservient partner in the AUKUS security pact with the United States and the UK.  What was left of Australian sovereignty has been brazenly outsourced.  The prime minister barely acknowledges the rationale of the agreement in the Lowy address, which has little to do with Australia eventually having its own questionable submarines with nuclear propulsion.  The central point is granting greater access to US armed forces for easier deployment in the Indo-Pacific, a logistical benefit that is bound to make any war more, rather than less likely.  Some freedom; some sovereignty.

    The post Foreign Policy Tripe: Scott Morrison’s “Arc of Autocracy” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cutting Ties: The West, Ukraine, and the Russian Academy

    Working with Russian academics and institutions.  The attack upon Ukraine by Russia. These are two features playing out heavily in university discussions.  As typifies such chitchat, nuance features rather less than cant and sanctimony. As writer and lecturer Paolo Nori of Milano-Bicocca University stated after discovering that his course on Fyodor Dostoevsky would be cancelled in response to the war, “Not only is it a fault to be a living Russian in Italy today, but also to be a dead Russian.”  (Dostoevsky has since been reprieved; the course will now run.)

    Throughout history, academic cooperation between universities and academic institutions, despite the political differences of states, has taken place.  Even at the height of the Cold War, exchanges across several intellectual fields were regular occurrences.  The cynic could see these as culture wars in the service of propaganda, but work was still done, projects started and completed.

    The times have tilted, and now universities, notably in Western states, find themselves rushing with virtuous glee to divesting and banning contacts and links with the Russian academy.  Russian President Vladimir Putin is deemed a monster of unsurpassed dimension; the Russian attack on Ukraine emptied of historical rationale or basis.  There is simply no room for academic debate, in of itself a risible irony.

    In Freedom’s Land, some US institutions have snipped and severed cooperation.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended its long-standing association with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Skoltech.  The reasoning strikes an odd note: we will exclude you and ostracise you out of respect for your achievements.  “We take it with deep regret,” MIT explained in a statement, “because of our great respect for the Russian people and our profound appreciation for the contributions of the many extraordinary Russian colleagues we have worked with.”

    The university also makes it clear that the “step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.”  It’s all well and good to reject those actions, but how logical is it to then make those profoundly respected Russian colleagues suffer exclusion?

    Behind every virtuous condemnation is the encumbrance of self-interest.  MIT may have severed ties with Skoltech, but that did not mean that MIT principal investigators, or students, would be affected.  “The Institute is in close communication with the PIs to offer guidance and to make sure that the students involved can complete their research and academic work without interruption.”

    Russian students have also been singled out for special mistreatment, notably by Californian Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell.  “I think closing [the Russian] embassy in the United States, kicking every Russian student out of the United States, those should all be on the table, and Putin needs to know that every day that he is in Ukraine, there are more severe options that could come.”

    To his credit, President Samuel Stanley, Michigan State University’s president, has sought to distinguish between individual and political decisions made by governments.  The distinction is trite, but the Ukraine War has made it exceptional.  “In times of crises and conflict,” he writes in a public letter, “it is important that we decouple individuals from adverse actions of their home countries and governments.”  Emphasis should instead be placed on unity in “supporting one another with dignity, empathy and mutual respect.”

    In Australia, a country with few ties to Russian or Ukrainian institutions, universities have been issuing statements of condemnation against, not merely the Russian state but Russian institutions and figures.  The last thing on the minds of these academic bureaucrats is adopting something along Stanley’s lines.

    The Australian National University has gone one step further, having officially announced the suspension of all ties and activities with Russian institutions on March 3.  “We identify with those brave Russian academics and students who oppose President Putin’s unprovoked aggression.”  Curiously enough, the decision was made as the Russian attack “threatens the peace, freedom and democracy on which freedom of inquiry and academic collaboration is based.”

    Proceeding to show no inclination to follow those cherished principles of free inquiry, the authors of the statement explicitly note that only those Russian academics and students who opposed Putin’s “unprovoked aggression” would be taken seriously.  For Ukraine, the support was unqualified, whatever its actions.  “We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their defence of sovereignty and freedom and offer our support for the universities of Ukraine.”

    The ANU statement has little time for ethnic Russians, preferring to acknowledge “that this is a very difficult time for our Ukrainian staff and students and for those who have family members, friends and colleagues in Ukraine.”

    The statement from La Trobe University is not much more nuanced either, though it openly promotes the work of one academic, Robert Horvath, given the task of demystifying Russian aggression and chewing over Putin’s numbered days.  (Horvath’s referenced opinion, it should be said, distinguishes between Putin the ruler and Russia itself, something his university is less inclined to do.)

    Having been approached by “a number of staff” as to whether La Trobe had “any active connections with Russian institutions”, management expressed a deep sigh of relief.  “We can confirm that La Trobe does not have any formal education partnerships or partnerships with Russian research institutions.”

    The university’s investment portfolio was also fairly liberated of Russian investment, a mere $20,000 in value.  “We are liaising with our Investment Fund about divestment options for this exposure.”

    Singling out Russia has a note of self-indulgence to it.  In the case of Australian universities in particular, outrage expressed against Russia seems at odds with, say, the relationships with Chinese institutions.  The reasons, in the end, are financial rather than principled: excoriating the Russian Bear only harms intellectual merit, not the budget.  The same cannot be said about students and academics from the Middle Kingdom.

    To that end Vice Chancellors and members of academic boards have been less forthright in their condemnation of Chinese foreign policy and the country’s human rights record.  Money often wins out in the moral dilemma, a point that activist Drew Pavlou found to his cost at the University of Queensland.  Suspended on disciplinary grounds, Pavlou was adamant about the reason.  “It’s a calculated move to silence me.  It’s because the University of Queensland wants to do everything possible to avoid offending its Chinese allies.”

    In discriminating on the political and ideological standing of academics and students, a slippery slope presents itself.  Putting all your institution’s eggs into one basket and cause is never a good thing, however meretriciously popular and virtuous it might be at the time.  But the Academy, and the modern university, work in contradictory, self-defeating ways.  Wars do not merely make truth a casualty but kill off intellectual inquiry.

    The post Cutting Ties: The West, Ukraine, and the Russian Academy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Not by Bread Alone, but Mainly by Platitudes

    Unlike many who seem to believe that freedom of movement (since 2020 extinguished in the EU) must mean an end to national borders, I have only felt that borders should be recognised as the product of political will and history.

    In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.” The idea that anywhere in Europe especially borders are natural or that they are defined by some innate qualities is absurd.1

    However, following the principles first proposed in international law (by the British, speaking through their ventriloquist Woodrow Wilson) that nations were to be recognised based on ethnic or language “self-determination”, the only peoples permitted to exercise such political will were granted their “patent” by the British Empire after the Great War. This was consistent with British policy of dismembering all its competitors; e.g., Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The October Revolution seemed to offer Britain and its US partner the opportunity to redesign the Russian Empire too.

    In order to defeat those forces, a brutal war had to be waged and the system of soviet republics was created both to endow many non-Russian populations with elements of self-determination and to defend the territorial integrity of the Russian Revolution.2 We know that Ukraine emerged as a modern state in this context. War, civil war, and negotiation created a state out of the eastern remnants of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia. Such configurations have always benefitted British (today Anglo-American) imperial interests. Precisely those qualities were to promote the use of Ukraine against Russia, in the way Croatia has been used against Serbia but on a far greater scale.

    In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.”

    British objectives have always been to use “cultural” weapons to create or maintain internally fragmented states which can be manipulated through federal structures dependent upon external arms and finance. All of the white dominions of the British Empire were created as federations ruled from above.3 There was clearly legitimate fear among those who supported nationalism in the US that the British would subvert the federal system to their advantage, especially during the Civil War. In fact, they obtained this goal in 1913 and consolidated it by 1918 through the “Bank of England” model of public-private partnership.4 But that is another story.

    A major source of confusion in the debate about Ukraine and Russia’s incursion is the question of Ukrainian sovereignty, on which a wide range of people oppose Russia’s actions because it should not attack a sovereign state (naively drawing on the prohibitions of the UN Charter). Moreover, the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.5 The fact that the Russian Federation has not engaged in military retaliation for multiple violations of its territory does not mean that it has waived or forfeited those territorial rights. 6

    That is the ultimate premise upon which most of the critique and attack on Russian military action has been based. There is a principle of English common law by which the convention of traversing private property can create a prescriptive easement – a right of way – which the titular owner of the property can no longer obstruct.7 Title must be actively and conspicuously asserted to remain enforceable. This is augmented by the concept of adverse possession whereby a party may assert title to land occupied for a given period and have that title sustained against the original owner by virtue of that owner’s failure or neglect to challenge the possession. In other words, there is no such thing as absolute title: it must always be effectively asserted.

    Common law, while not necessarily enshrined in statutes, can be seen as an expression of the underlying social and psychological conventions prevailing in a regime. Although a nation-state would not appear comparable with a private home or farm, the material beliefs held and practiced in daily life do shape the prejudices of those who debate politics and political concepts. That is what makes this kind of law “common” – as opposed to the details of statutes or treaties.

    The Anglo-American view of sovereignty is implemented by people for whom such fluid ideas of property, title and boundaries are conventional. This can be seen throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in every aspect of international-law practice. Even the so-called international judiciary has been formed or deformed by such assumptions, with some contradictory concessions to continental jurisprudence. The extremes to which disputes in Britain and the US lead to litigation are also an indication of the operational instability of legal conventions and norms – and of the level of aggression in everyday violation of whatever norms may be created by statute or courts.

    NATO often appears absurd because its continental European bureaucrats utter pronouncements wholly at odds with their own cultural and legal traditions in order to articulate the policies generated by their Anglo-American principals. On the other hand this is part of the Anglo-American sleight of hand: framing their imperial designs in the alien terms of continental European politics. No amount of fealty or obsequy can conceal the fact that neither Stoltenberg nor Von der Leyen are natural “common law” politicians.8 That is one reason their insincerity is so blatant. They both try to present essentially Anglo-American imperial objectives as if they were continental peninsular. Their statements are incredulous and can be dismissed on their face. The real issue — which they are employed to conceal — is the anti-Russian policy of the Anglo-American Empire. To rectify the name of this policy and the actions derived from it would openly deny any pretense of sovereignty in occupied Germany and the vassal monarchies that comprise the core of NATO.9

    So to return to the debate about the war that continued with Russia’s military response in the Ukraine, the issues ought to be described in the way the antagonists actually see them and not using the distorted language of professional propagandists.

    The world has been at war no later than when behind the pretext of a constructive “emergency of international concern” — an asset of the Anglo-American international organisation cartel — presented the fictive requirements for a global state of martial law.10 Let us call it what it is. Martial law is imposed for a state of war. The enemy in this case was the world’s ordinary population — the 99% some would say. As I wrote two years ago, the WHO exercised implied authority to empower the Anglo-American Empire to commence a global counter-insurgency.11 Like similar counter-insurgency wars fought by that Empire, the focus of operations has been the global drug-weapons-energy cartel. This cartel is managed by the espionage organisations and organised criminal gangs shielded by US-UK forces and those of their closest allies.12

    Under these conditions of global counter-insurgency, the Anglo-American Empire has intensified its operations (war) against its historical enemies/competitors Russia and China. The guiding principle by which this war is fought in the saturation propaganda of the biggest psychological operation since the founding of the Roman Catholic Church can be stated simply: Use it or lose it. There are no human rights, civil rights or sovereign rights which the Anglo-American Empire is obliged to respect. The only rights anyone has are those that the person or nation actually exercises. That exercise must be “open and notorious” (the words comes from common law meaning generally known and as such undeniable).

    Beginning in March 2020 most of the world’s citizenry was tricked and bullied into surrendering all their natural rights.13 Now, two years later, they are finding just how difficult it is to counter adverse possession of all they surrendered under martial law. At the same time, “astute” observers have failed to take seriously the trespass of NATO and other forces of the Anglo-American Empire’s cartels. They have willfully ignored the conspicuous assertion of sovereign rights and privileges by Russia (and China). They have downplayed or ignored – when not apologising for – the violations committed since 1991 (at least).

    The Russian Federation, pursuant to the decisions of its highest legislative and executive bodies, ordered deployment of military force to actively and conspicuously assert its sovereign rights against a government controlling a territory adjacent to it which has collaborated in attacks on its territory and people, violating those sovereign rights. Thus, consistent with the more general (as opposed to Anglo-American) concepts of international law, it is engaged in the right to self-defense. This claim is not diminished or forfeited either by failure to so act earlier or by the refusal of the opposing party to acknowledge violations committed.

    The end of the military operations by forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine can only be considered in the context of a resolution (dare anyone say “end”) of the world war commenced by the Anglo-American Empire in 2020. Threats by agents and assets of that regime to continue guerrilla war against Russia in Ukraine only amplify the necessity of grasping the Russian actions in Ukraine as a response to Anglo-American aggression. Until the subjects of that Empire are capable of grasping that and accepting responsibility for that aggression (not only against Russia) and reasserting those human rights they forfeited to their criminal oligarchs two years ago, (not only) central Europe will remain a very messy place indeed.

    1. The cultural historian Morse Peckham was fond of saying that “man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Historically Ukraine has been a “bread basket”. Germany has certainly been able to turn much of its arable land into fields of biomass because Western domination of the Ukrainian economy permits importation of cheap grain from Ukrainian fields. Many of the strategic goals of Unternehmen Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) lay in Ukraine: grain, oil, access to the Black Sea, etc. historically, the West has only paid lip service to Ukrainian sovereignty.
    2. In his address to the Russian people on 21 February 2022, Vladimir Putin credited Lenin with the creation of the Ukraine as a republic. He argued that this—as part of Lenin’s policy for the nationalities issue—was intended to assure Bolshevik control over Russia. Putin presents himself as an opponent of the Soviet Union, hence he considers such a policy negative and a violation of Russian sovereignty. However, Lenin was not immune to the problems of suppressing foreign intervention in the Russian civil war—of which the US was a part with troops in Russia until 1921. Lenin had to accommodate both the Wilsonian ideology and the threatened disintegration of Russia through foreign invasion. The Soviet Union would not have been the first federal state to factually deny the formal conditions of federation; e.g. the US Civil War.
    3. The “white dominions” were those constituents of the empire covered by the Statute of Westminster (1931): Australia, Canada, Irish Free State, Newfoundland (which was not yet part of Canada), New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Conspicuously absent was India. Along with India, the rest of the British Empire was not “self-governing”.
    4. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) was based on the Aldrich Plan conceived secretly at the so-called Jekyll Island conference (1910). The design of the Federal Reserve System was based on many key features of the Bank of England, a privately owned bank with monopoly powers over the country’s money. Coherence with the BoE model was assured by the participation of the Warburg and Morgan interests. Although the Aldrich Plan failed in Congress, a modified version was adopted. The key element was the private control of the nation’s monetary system—as in the UK.
    5. The US circumvented the  ostensible intent of the UN Charter to enshrine the prohibition of war (the 1928 ”Kellogg-Briand Pact”, General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) and establish the UN as the sole venue for international disputes, with the Security Council responsible for the use of force by including provisions that permitted so-called “collective security” arrangements. This sleight of hand was used to justify the creation of NATO outside the UN framework. NATO has commonly been portrayed as a defence against the Soviet-led “Warsaw Pact”. This too is propaganda. NATO was founded before the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union only initiated its own collective security agreement after US bombing of the Soviet Union while the US was waging war against Korea and China (1951-53).
    6. In Putin’s address to the Russian nation on 24 February 2022, he detailed the NATO transgressions which Russia had endured since 1991. Many of these went unreported or under-reported at the time. Rick Rozoff (Anti-Bellum) has been posting blow-by-blow reports of NATO actions all along Russia’s border for years using NATO press releases and official publications for operations from Estonia to Kazakhstan.
    7. The inception of a prescriptive easement can be prevented by appropriately defending the ownership rights. A well-known example is the closure of the central court of Rockefeller Plaza in New York City (where the ice rink is) for one day in the year to interrupt the period of otherwise continuous public access that would create such a prescriptive easement.
    8. Jens Stoltenberg is the Norwegian NATO General Secretary. Ursula von der Leyen is the President of the European Commission, the junta that runs the European Union on behalf of its multi-national corporate cartels.
    9. While it is tempting to assume that NATO is comprised of democracies, the fact is that core members are monarchies; e.g., United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, and Spain. Until 1974, NATO included outright dictatorships like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey. Constitutionalism notwithstanding, monarchy has been an essential part of NATO’s political culture.
    10. The declaration of a “health emergency of international concern“ by the Gates-dominated, Rockefeller-founded World Health Organization in 2020 was only possible by regulatory manipulation and statutory deception perpetrated after the 2009 “Swine Flu pandemic“. The definition of “pandemic” was changed. This bureaucratic fraud has been discussed everywhere except by the general public which is still misled by official deceit.
    11. In Dissident Voice: From Rags to Riches (2 April 2020) “The First Circle” (24 April 2020), “Economic Epidemic” (2 May 2020), “The Fourth Circle” (29 September 2020). See also “The Military and Intelligence  Origins of Public Health” (1 October 2021) and The Real Anthony Fauci, reviewed there.
    12. Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organised Crime, also  reviewed by this author.
    13. George Carlin rendered a very sober summary of the problem of rights, as popularly understood in the West –“Rights and Privileges”.
    The post Not by Bread Alone, but Mainly by Platitudes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz

    The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the US while the Gulf War was waged over there.’ ((Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, p. 12.))

    What a strange feeling it was to know that the cruise missile shown descending towards an airport and erupting in a ball of flame was not fired by US or British forces.

    Millions of Westerners raised to admire the ultimate spectacle of high-tech, robotic power, must have quickly suppressed their awe at the shock – this was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.

    Rewind to April 2017: over video footage of Trump’s cruise missiles launching at targets in Syria in response to completely unproven claims that Syria had just used chemical weapons, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams felt a song coming on:

    ‘We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean – I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons” – and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight…’

    TV and newspaper editors feel the same way. Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power.

    In 1991, the ‘white heat’ of our robotic weaponry was ‘beautiful’ because it meant that ‘we’ were so sophisticated, so civilised, so compassionate, that only Saddam’s palaces and government buildings were being ‘surgically’ removed, not human beings. This was keyhole killing. The BBC’s national treasure, David Dimbleby, basked in the glory on live TV:

    ‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman?’1

    Might makes right! This seemed real to Dimbleby, as it did to many people. In fact, it was fake news. Under the 88,500 tons of bombs that followed the launch of the air campaign on January 17, 1991, and the ground attack that followed, 150,000 Iraqi troops and 50,000 civilians were killed. Just 7 per cent of the ordnance consisted of so called ‘smart bombs’.

    By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. A BBC media review explained:

    ‘A number of front pages feature a picture of a Ukrainian woman – a teacher named Helena – with blood on her face and bandages around her head after a block of flats was hit in a Russian airstrike.

    ‘“Her blood on his hands” says the Daily Mirror; the Sun chooses the same headline.’

    ‘Our’ wars are not greeted by such headlines, nor by BBC headlines of this kind:

    ‘In pictures: Destruction and fear as war hits Ukraine’

    The fear and destruction ‘we’ cause are not ‘our’ focus.

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

    ‘Wow! Radical change of policy at BBC News at Ten. It excitedly reports young women – the resistance – making improvised bombs against Russia’s advance. Presumably Palestinians resisting Israel can now expect similar celebratory coverage from BBC reporters’

    A BBC video report was titled:

    ‘Ukraine conflict: The women making Molotov cocktails to defend their city’

    Hard to believe, but the text beneath read:

    ‘The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke to a group of women who were making Molotov cocktails in the park.’

    For the entire morning of March 2, the BBC home page featured a Ukrainian civilian throwing a lit Molotov cocktail. The adjacent headline:

    ‘Russian paratroopers and rockets attack Kharkiv – Ukraine’

    In other words, civilians armed with homemade weapons were facing heavily-armed elite troops. Imagine the response if, in the first days of an invasion, the BBC had headlined a picture of a civilian in Baghdad or Kabul heroically resisting US-UK forces in the same way.

    Another front-page BBC article asked:

    ‘Ukraine invasion: Are Russia’s attacks war crimes?’

    The answer is ‘yes,’ of course – Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, of course, the idea that such an article might have appeared in the first week of that invasion is completely unthinkable.

    Generating The Propaganda Schwerpunkt

    On 27 February, the first 26 stories on the BBC’s home page were devoted to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The BBC website even typically features half a dozen stories on Ukraine at the top of its sports section.

    On 28 February, the Guardian’s website led with the conflict, followed by 20 additional links to articles about the Ukraine crisis. A similar pattern is found in all ‘mainstream’ news media.

    The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war – ‘I stand with Ukraine!’

    Political analyst Ben Norton commented:

    ‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’

    This is no small matter. Norton added:

    ‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’

    Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:

    ‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’

    Over half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids on Yemen are UK-supplied. UK-made equipment includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles, and cluster munitions. Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:

    ‘Researchers on the grounds have discovered weapons fragments that demonstrate the use of UK-made weapons in attacks on civilian targets.’

    Despite the immensity of the catastrophe and Britain’s clear legal and moral responsibility, in 2017, the Independent reported:

    ‘More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.

    ‘A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.

    ‘The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.’

    The Independent added:

    ‘At least 75 people are estimated to be killed or injured every day in the conflict, which has pushed the country to the brink of famine as 14 million people lack a stable access to food.’

    On Twitter, Dr Robert Allan made the point that matters:

    ‘We as tax paying citizens and as a nation are directly responsible for our actions. Not the actions of others. Of course we can and should highlight crimes of nations and act appropriately and benevolently (the UK record here is horrific). 1st – us, NATO, our motives and actions.’

    We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’

    As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat.

    Certainly, we at Media Lens welcome the idea that powerful state-corporate media should be prevented from promoting state violence. It is absurd that individuals are arrested and imprisoned for threatening or inciting violence, while journalists regularly call for massive, even genocidal, violence against whole countries with zero consequences (career advancement aside). But banning media promoting state violence means banning, not just Russian TV, but literally all US-UK broadcasters and newspapers.

    Confirming the hypocrisy, The Intercept reported:

    ‘Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.’

    In 2014, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote:

    ‘The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle.

    ‘But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.’

    The report continued:

    ‘Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.’

    Perhaps the hundreds of journalists who attacked Jeremy Corbyn for questioning the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural – which depicted a mixture of famous historical and identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish bankers – with the single word, ‘Why?’, would care to comment?

    According to our ProQuest search, the Guardian has made no mention of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the last week – as it most certainly would have, if Ukraine were an Official Enemy of the West. ProQuest finds a grand total of three mentions of the Azov Battalion in the entire UK national press – two in passing, with a single substantial piece in the Daily Star – in the last seven days. ‘Impressive discipline’, as Noam Chomsky likes to say.

    ‘Russia Must Be Broken’

    Britain and the US have been waging so much war, so ruthlessly, for so long, that Western journalists and commentators have lost all sense of proportion and restraint. Neil Mackay, former editor of the Sunday Herald (2015-2018), wrote in the Herald:

    ‘Russia must be broken, in the hope that by breaking the regime economically and rendering it a pariah state on the world’s stage, brave and decent Russian people will rise up and drag Putin from power.’

    If nothing else, Mackay’s comment indicated just how little impact was made by the deaths of 500,000 children under five when the US and Britain saw to it that the Iraq economy was ‘broken’ by 13 years of genocidal sanctions.

    For describing his comment as ‘obscene’, Mackay instantly blocked us on Twitter. His brutal demand reminded us of the comment made by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:

    ‘Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation… and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.’

    We can enjoy the ‘shock and awe’ of that comment, if we have no sense at all that Serbian people are real human beings capable of suffering, love, loss and death exactly as profound as our own.

    On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine told a caller, Bill, from Manchester:

    ‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

    Unlike his celebrated interviewer, Bill, clearly no fan of Putin, had retained his humanity:

    ‘Do you?! Do kids deserve to die, 18, 20 – called up, conscripted – who don’t understand it, who don’t grasp the issues?’

    Vine’s sage reply:

    ‘That’s life! That’s the way it goes!’

    We all know what would have happened to Vine if he had said anything remotely comparable of the US-UK forces that illegally invaded Iraq.

    MSNBC commentator Clint Watts observed:

    ‘Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming’

    The strangest thing is media commentators reflexively imagining that US-UK-NATO can lay any moral or legal claim to act as an ultra-violent World Police.

    Professor Michael McFaul of Stanford University, also serving with the media’s 101st Chairborne Division, appeared to be experiencing multiple wargasms when he tweeted:

    ‘More Stingers to Ukraine! More javelins! More drones!’

    Two hours later:

    ‘More NLAWs [anti-tank missiles], Stingers (the best ones), and Javelins for Ukraine! Now!’

    Echoing Mackay, McFaul raved (and later deleted):

    ‘There are no more “innocent” “neutral” Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!’

    Courageous words indeed from his Ivy League office. Disturbing to note that McFaul was ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, widely considered to be a saint.

    ‘Shockingly Arrogant Meddling’ – The Missing History

    So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions.

    In February 2014, after three months of violent, US-aided protests, much of it involving neo-Nazi anti-government militias, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for Russia. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) provide some context:

    ‘On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State [Victoria] Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk — Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats” — should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.’

    The BBC reported Nuland picking the new Ukrainian leader:

    ‘I think “Yats” is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.’

    FAIR continues:

    ‘Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.’

    We can read between the lines when Nuland described how the US had invested ‘over $5 billion’ to ‘ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine’.

    In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:

    ‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’

    Carpenter concluded:

    ‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.

    ‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’

    Within days of the 2014 coup, troops loyal to Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of Ukraine. As Jonathan Steele, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, recently explained:

    ‘NATO’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans.’

    The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:

    ‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’

    Mearsheimer argues that Russia views the expansion of NATO to its border with Ukraine as ‘an existential threat’:

    ‘If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that.’

    Mearsheimer adds:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:

    ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’

    Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The pattern persists today. When Fox News recently spoke about the Russia-Ukraine crisis with former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the key perpetrators of the illegal invasion-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, she nodded her head in solemn agreement when the presenter said:

    ‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.’

    The cognitive dissonance required to engage in this discussion and pass it off as serious analysis is truly remarkable.

    Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:

    ‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’

    It is sobering to read the dissenting arguments above and recall Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s warning to MPs last week:

    ‘Let me be very clear – There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of Nato.’

    The Independent reported that Starmer’s warning came ‘after leading left-wingers – including key shadow cabinet members during the Jeremy Corbyn-era key, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – were threatened with the removal of the whip if their names were not taken off a Stop the War letter that had accused the UK government of “aggressive posturing”, and said that Nato “should call a halt to its eastward expansion”’.

    Starmer had previously waxed Churchillian on Twitter:

    ‘There will be dark days ahead. But Putin will learn the same lesson as Europe’s tyrants of the last century: that the resolve of the world is harder than he imagines and the desire for liberty burns stronger than ever. The light will prevail.’

    Clearly, that liberty does not extend to elected Labour MPs criticising NATO.

    In the Guardian, George Monbiot contributed to the witch-hunt, noting ominously that comments made by John Pilger ‘seemed to echo Putin’s speech the previous night’. By way of further evidence:

    ‘The BBC reports that Pilger’s claims have been widely shared by accounts spreading Russian propaganda.’

    Remarkably, Monbiot offered no counter-arguments to ‘Pilger’s claims’, no facts, relying entirely on smear by association. This was not journalism; it was sinister, hit and run, McCarthy-style propaganda.

    Earlier, Monbiot had tweeted acerbically:

    ‘Never let @johnpilger persuade you that he has a principled objection to occupation and invasion. He appears to be fine with them, as long as the aggressor is Russia, not Israel, the US or the UK.’

    In fact, for years, Pilger reported – often secretly and at great risk – from the Soviet Union and its European satellites. A chapter of his book, ‘Heroes’, is devoted to his secret meetings with and support for Soviet dissidents (See: John Pilger, ‘Heroes’, Pan, 1987, pp.431-440). In his 1977 undercover film on Czechoslovakia, ‘A Faraway Country’, he described the country’s oppressors as ‘fascists’. He commented:

    ‘The people I interview in this film know they are taking great risks just by talking to me, but they insist on speaking out. Such is their courage and their commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia.’

    Three days before Monbiot’s article was published in the Guardian, Pilger had tweeted of Ukraine:

    ‘The invasion of a sovereign state is lawless and wrong. A failure to understand the cynical forces that provoked the invasion of Ukraine insults the victims.’

    Pilger is one of the most respected journalists of our time precisely because he has taken a principled and consistent stand against all forms of imperialism, including Soviet imperialism, Chinese imperialism (particularly its underpinning of Pol Pot), Indonesian imperialism (its invasion of East Timor), and so on.

    Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?

    Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.

    Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.

    To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad.

    As Chomsky has frequently pointed out, it is easy to condemn the crimes of Official Enemies. But it is a basic ethical principle that, first and foremost, we should hold to account those governments for which we share direct political and moral responsibility. This is why we focus so intensively on the crimes of our own government and its leading allies.

    We have condemned Putin’s war of aggression and supported demands for an immediate withdrawal. We are not remotely pro-Russian government – we revile Putin’s tyranny and state violence exactly as much as we revile the West’s tyrannical, imperial violence. We have repeatedly made clear that we oppose all war, killing and hate. Our guiding belief is that these horrors become less likely when journalism drops its double standards and challenges ‘our’ crimes in the same way it challenges ‘theirs’.

    Chomsky explained:

    ‘Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.’

    Our adding a tiny drop of criticism to the tsunami of Western global, billion-dollar-funded, 24/7 loathing of Putin achieves nothing beyond the outcome identified by Chomsky. If we have any hope of positively impacting the world, it lies in countering the illusions and violence of the government for which we are morally accountable.

    But why speak up now, in particular? Shouldn’t we just shut up and ‘get on board’ in a time of crisis? No, because war is a time when propaganda messages are hammered home with great force: ‘We’re the Good Guys standing up for democracy.’ It is a vital time to examine and challenge these claims.

    What critics dismiss as ‘Whataboutism’ is actually ‘Wearenobetterism’. If ‘we’ are no better, or if ‘we’ are actually worse, then where does that leave ‘our’ righteous moral outrage? Can ‘compassion’ rooted in deep hypocrisy be deeply felt?

    Critics dismissing evidence of double standards as ‘whataboutery’, are promoting the view that ‘their’ crimes should be wholly condemned, but not those committed by ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ allies. The actions of Official Enemies are to be judged by a different standard than that by which we judge ourselves.

    As we pointed out via Twitter:

    Spot all the high-profile commentators who condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine…

    …and who remain silent about or support:

    * Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq

    * NATO’s destruction of Libya

    * Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen

    * Apartheid Israel’s crushing of Palestinians

    The question has to be asked: Is the impassioned public response to another media bombardment of the type described by Howard Zinn at the top of this alert a manifestation of the power of human compassion, or is it a manifestation of power?

    Are we witnessing genuine human concern, or the ability of global state-corporate interests to sell essentially the same story over and over again? The same bad guy: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin; the same Good Guys: US, UK, NATO and ‘our’ obedient clients; the same alleged noble cause: freedom, democracy, human rights; the same means: confrontation, violence, a flood of bombs and missiles (‘the best ones’). And the same results: control of whole countries, massively increased arms budgets, and control of natural resources.

    Ultimately, we are being asked to believe that the state-corporate system that has illegally bombed, droned, invaded, occupied and sanctioned so many countries over the last few decades – a system that responds even to the threat of human extinction from climate change with ‘Blah, blah, blah!’ – is motivated by compassion for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. As Erich Fromm wrote:

    ‘To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.’2

    1. Quoted, John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.45.
    2. Fromm, The Art Of Being, Continuum, 1992, p. 19.
    The post Doubling Down On Double Standards: The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Outing the Iraq War White Washers

    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 Daily Beast, “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.

    The post Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Outing the Iraq War White Washers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Manufacturing Savagery: US Military Training in West Africa and Beyond

    On January 24th, Burkina Faso bore witness to its third destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It also marked the eighth successful putsch American soldiers launched in multiple West African countries since 2008. The Intercept reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many United States led AFRICOM (Africa Command) exercises and an American sponsored military intelligence course. This disturbing pattern raises serious questions about what the U.S. army is teaching its African allies.

    The U.S. developed an alarming habit for training individuals likely to commit horrendous crimes after the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) based in Fort Benning, Georgia spent decades teaching the dark arts of torture and counterinsurgency warfare to thousands of Central and Latin American soldiers and aspiring dictators keen to annihilate socialist or peasant movements. Distinguished alumni include Bolivian autocrat Hugo Banzer, Panamanian strongman turned drug lord Manuel Noriega, and El Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. Monterrosa led battalions that slaughtered a thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote, according to anthropologist Lesley Gill.

    Guatemalan SOA students enjoyed exceptional careers as well. Proud graduates like dictators Efraín Rios Montt, General Fernando Lucas García, and various members of Guatemala’s feared D-2 intelligence agency terrorised the indigenous and impoverished Mayan community into submission over a nearly four decade-long civil war. Devastating scorched earth campaigns, which reached their apogee in the early eighties, wiped out hundreds of Mayan villages and almost all their inhabitants. Journalist Zach El Parece noted that a member of the infamous “Kaibiles” Special Forces, a unit that bludgeoned children to death with hammers for being communist sympathisers in the village of Dos Erres, among many others, later became an instructor at the SOA.

    The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) concluded that the Guatemalan army was responsible for displacing 1.5 million people and murdering or vanishing most of the war’s 200,000 victims. The CEH deemed the army’s atrocities so severe that they amounted to acts of genocide against the Mayan population. The report even singled out the United States’ crucial role in reinforcing Guatemala’s homicidal “national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations…”

    The U.S. government also paid millions to train Indonesian soldiers implicated in Jakarta’s barbaric occupation of East Timor. Amnesty International revealed that approximately 7,300 Indonesian officers took part in IMET (International Military Education and Training) courses at U.S.-based army, navy, and air-force schools between 1950 and the early nineties. Washington promised to cancel military aid to Indonesia after the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, during which Indonesian troops killed 271 protesters at a peaceful pro-independence rally in the Timorese capital of Dili. However, they secretly continued to train elite Kopassus troops. This regiment, according to the Guardian, indulged in “some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia’s history”.

    Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s current Minister of Defence, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, finished first in his class, and re-joined the Kopassus after returning home. Historian Gerry van Klinken and journalist Jill Jolliffe believe it is highly likely that Subianto participated in the brutal suppression of the East Timorese uprising of 1983-84. A former Indonesian intelligence employee alleged that Subianto directed anti-insurgent operations that butchered hundreds of innocent civilians. Soldiers executed surrendering women and children on sight, while countless others endured starvation, torture, sexual abuse, and arbitrary detention in overcrowded concentration camps. Moreover, reporter David Jenkins claims the Kopassus eagerly adopted tactics the shadowy U.S. Phoenix program perfected during the Vietnam War—a program that assassinated thousands of Vietnamese peasants with impunity. The abhorrent methods of U.S. trained “Contra” death squads in Nicaragua proved quite influential among the Kopassus as well.

    Scholar Noam Chomsky asserts that Jakarta’s invasion of East Timor incurred “perhaps the greatest death toll relative to the population since the Holocaust…” Approximately 200,000 East Timorese perished in the Indonesian onslaught, while survivors still suffer the long-term effects of napalm and chemical weapon poisoning. The Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor issued a damning verdict: the U.S. backed Indonesian military deliberately imposed unbearable conditions of life which almost exterminated the East Timorese. A genocide in paradise, to borrow Matthew Jardine’s haunting phrase.

    U.S. Special Forces also trained the Tutsi RPA (Rwandan Patriotic Army) in the late nineties as it decimated refugee camps and massacred Hutu exiles fleeing into the jungles of eastern Congo. Many of them were sickly and starving civilians that had nothing to do with the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Le Monde and The Irish Times cited French intelligence findings and Pentagon papers stating that U.S. instructors and mercenaries provided combat training to dozens of Rwandan officers. Some reports even alleged that U.S. advisers accompanied the RPA as it expanded its rampage into the Congo. These destructive incursions marked the opening salvo in the DRC’s (Democratic Republic of the Congo) endless “world war”—a cataclysmic conflict that has caused, thus far, the deaths of millions.

    Historians and authors like Filip Reyntjens, René Lemarchand, and Judi Rever largely agree that the RPA, along with the Ugandan and Burundian-backed AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire) rebel group, killed tens of thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutus in the DRC between 1996-97. A United Nations report released in 2010 insisted that in most cases perpetrators did not carry out these atrocities unintentionally in the heat of battle and may be guilty of “crimes of genocide”.

    Yet the U.S. is not alone in enabling, unwittingly or otherwise, regimes prone to committing egregious crimes. In December 2008, Guinean Army Captain Moussa Dadis Camara spearheaded the “German Coup” which brought a military junta into power in Conakry. Deutsche Welle reported that Camara and his co-conspirators received extensive training from the German Armed Forces in Bremen. German-trained paratroopers unleashed a wave of extreme violence against peaceful protestors in Conakry Stadium less than a year after Camara suspended the Guinean constitution and threadbare republican institutions.

    Amnesty International said that security forces murdered more than 150 people, wounded hundreds more, and raped or assaulted dozens of women and girls with sticks, bayonets, rifle butts, and batons in broad daylight. A failed assassination attempt quickly disposed Camara, only for another ruthless soldier—the Moroccan, French, and Chinese trained Sékouba “The Tiger” Konaté—to take his place. To this day, undiscerning European Union member states continue to provide military training and weapons to African countries hampered by weak civilian governments and very powerful armies. It is a recipe for disaster.

    Ideally, massive grassroots movements in both the U.S. and West Africa should try to convince representatives to bring a permanent end to these borderline colonial military exchanges. Following that, Congress must enact more legislation that would strengthen background checks for future trainees. Furthermore, any manuals, textbooks, or instructors advocating torture and other unlawful or inhumane tactics need to be removed and replaced with courses that seek to improve civic-military relations.

    However, adding human-rights awareness or international law modules to military curricula is by no means an effective solution. Political scientist Jacob Ricks worries that promoting courses or practices geared towards professionalizing and enhancing the social responsibilities of the military is a lackluster strategy. Survey data demonstrates that many high-ranking Siamese soldiers, already among the largest recipients of US IMET programs now replete with professionalizing courses, are statistically more likely to support a coup or greater military interference in Siamese politics and society. Thailand has weathered 19 coup attempts since 1932. Teaching soldiers to respect the sanctity of human life, democracy, and the rule of law, although necessary and beneficial, is clearly not enough to curb such vicious tendencies.

    West African politicians and civil society groups need to be more creative and ambitious if they ever hope to tame their often unruly armies. Professor Kwesi Aning, head of academic affairs and research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, told University World News that African states keep sending troops abroad for training because they do not possess the resources or facilities required to properly train them at home. This breeds a dangerous imbalance of power as foreign-trained troops, imbued with delusions of superiority and entitlement after studying in the U.S., France, or Germany, could return home with a burning desire to take control. Depending on the lessons, especially in the U.S., foreign-trained soldiers might begin to perceive fellow citizens not as ordinary people who need protection but as potential or internal enemies to be eradicated.

    Constructing homegrown, truly sovereign, and well-funded military academies, devoted to teaching civic-military cooperation and unencumbered by harmful relations with exploitative armies in the Global North, would be a step in the right direction. To paraphrase Colonel Jahara Matisek, West African nations must develop military institutions steeped in their own histories and cultures. Only then can trustworthy armies emerge and the coup curse finally fade.

    The post Manufacturing Savagery: US Military Training in West Africa and Beyond first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • United States: Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers convicted for hate crimes

    Malik Miah looks at the significance of the historic guilty verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery hate crime case.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The CIA Propaganda Verse:  Putin’s Ploy in “Context”

    I don’t feel safe in this World no more,
    I don’t wanna die in a nuclear war,
    I wanna sail away to a distant shore
    and live like an Apeman

    — From the song “Apeman” by the Kinks, 1970

    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!

    The post The CIA Propaganda Verse:  Putin’s Ploy in “Context” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The CIA Propaganda Verse:  Putin’s Ploy in “Context”

    I don’t feel safe in this World no more,
    I don’t wanna die in a nuclear war,
    I wanna sail away to a distant shore
    and live like an Apeman

    — From the song “Apeman” by the Kinks, 1970

    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!

    The post The CIA Propaganda Verse:  Putin’s Ploy in “Context” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • USA Sees Russia’s Operation in Ukraine as Blessing in Disguise

    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 post USA Sees Russia’s Operation in Ukraine as Blessing in Disguise first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • USA Sees Russia’s Operation in Ukraine as Blessing in Disguise

    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 post USA Sees Russia’s Operation in Ukraine as Blessing in Disguise first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • United States: Why we should oppose Russia’s war with Ukraine

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is a violation of that nation’s sovereignty and must be opposed by anti-war forces in the United States, argue Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Immune to Irony: Nazi Collaborators and Authoritarian Personalities Denounce Russia

    O would some Power the gift to give us
    To see ourselves as others see us!

    — Robert Burns, To a Louse, 1786

    This famous quote by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns stands as one of the clearest reminders of a precondition for any matured identity.

    Burns understood that without having learned to use our God-given ability to place ourselves in the shoes of another, then those powers needed to self-examine our false prejudices, exercise humility (upon which creative insight is premised) and correct our false motives, actions and beliefs would be completely lost.

    It is thus disappointing, albeit no small surprise, that those basic tools of self-criticism are entirely non-existent when one listens to the gossipy make-believe speeches of so many helmsmen manning today’s ship of fools, sometimes known as the Trans Atlantic “rules-based international order”.

    A Clash of Paradigms

    After seven years of civil war in East Ukraine, 14 thousand casualties, broken peace deals and countless appeals by those living in the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics for independence from the Nazi-infested militias embedded in the Kiev defense forces, Russia decided to finally recognize the East Ukrainian republics as sovereign nations. A few days later, Russia unleashed a program of de-militarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine featuring targetted military strikes that (as of this writing) have annihilated over 74 military bases, US biolabs and entrenched radical neo-nazi forces that have been entrenched in the Ukrainian military since 2014.

    But despite this completely understandable humanitarian intervention which is provably NOT an annexation, we see endless instances of western sock puppet statesmen denouncing Russia’s imperial ambitions and antagonism to western democratic values.

    From Canada, where Justin Trudeau and his handlers have used an Emergency Measures Act to justify the violent crushing of peaceful protestors in Ottawa (including the freezing of bank accounts of hundreds of citizens who donated money to a freedom convoy), we hear only buzzing threats of anti-Russian sanctions and pompous condemnation of “Russian aggression” with more comparisons of Adolph Hitler to Putin than one can count.

    In response to Russia’s recognition of the East Donbass republics, Justin stated “Canada and our allies will defend democracy”. Referring to the wide array of sanctions and Canadian troop deployments to Latvia, Trudeau said “we are taking these actions to stand against totalitarianism.”

    He then stated “the people of Ukraine, like all people must be free to determine their own future”. This last remark implies that the people in East Ukraine who have been demanding independence are not actually people.

    These remarks are coming from a Canadian regime that had only days earlier arrested nearly 200 people for the terrible crime of “causing mischief” in Ottawa and freezing bank accounts using “secret information” which none of those representatives or Senators expected to vote for the act were allowed to see. Deputy Prime Minister Freeland herself (who has more than a few uncomfortable connections with outright pro-Nazi Ukrainian networks) has even publicly stated that many extraordinary powers created under ‘emergency conditions’ should be continued indefinitely after the emergencies act is revoked. 1

    Across the Trans-Atlantic Five Eyes cage, similar virtue signalling in defense of “democracy” has resounded with the USA, European Union and UK moving in lockstep to condemn Russian aggression, and impose similar sanctions on Russian parliamentarians, businessmen and banks, with the USA and UK joining Canada in sending troops to Russia’s border.

    While an energy crisis has already made a hard life harder for millions of Europeans struggling with a self-induced economic crisis under pandemic conditions, the German government has been pressured to accelerate its own self-destruction by cancelling the desperately needed Nord Stream 2 in order to “punish” Russia.

    Nazis and Operation Gladio

    European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans has demonstrated the typical level of over-exaggerated hypocrisy asserting that February 22 was “one of the darkest days in Europe’s history” apparently forgetting that WWI or WWII happened.

    Timmermans is a character who has distinguished himself as a technocratic sock puppet by pushing anti-Russian sanctions for 8 years beginning with the highly flawed MH-17 bombing investigation in 2014, while covering up the true Kiev-connected hands behind that atrocity. Amidst his current crocodile tears over the “darkest days” Europe has ever faced, Timmermans appears oblivious to the mass atrocities committed by Nazi “stay behinds” used by western intelligence operations under Operation Gladio during the Cold War. This is especially strange since it was during Timmermans’ time as Deputy Chair on the Commission of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands that an extensive 2005 report on Nazi stay-behinds was published by the Dutch Ministry of Defense.

    After having been established by the CIA, NATO and MI6 in 1956, Operation Gladio saw hundreds of terrorist cells deployed by former leaders of Nazi intelligence embedded across Europe who were used to kill civilians and troublesome politicians while stoking the fires of anarchy along the way. These acts of terror were in turn used to justify the excessive “emergency management” by oligarchically captured trans Atlantic nations throughout the Cold War based upon the logic that “the war against communism justifies everything… including fascism”.

    While some say that the Gladio Operations were cancelled when the Soviet Union disintegrated, evidence points to a very different picture.

    One particularly loud case is found in the figure of Andriy Parubiy, founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine who was appointed to serve as Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU) in the post-regime change putsch managed by Victoria Nuland and overseen by Joe Biden.

    It is noteworthy that Parubiy, who has close ties to Freeland (herself the proud granddaughter of Hitler collaborator Michael Chomiak) cozied up to Justin in 2016 while seeking weapons, training and other logistical support from Canada. Meetings between Canadian politicians and leading neo-Nazi groups from Ukraine like the Azov Battalion continued to be so frequent that the Ottawa Citizen reported on November 9, 2021 that:

    Canadian officials who met with members of a Ukrainian battalion linked to neo-Nazis didn’t denounce the unit, but were instead concerned the media would expose details of the get-together, according to newly released documents. The Canadians met with and were briefed by leaders from the Azov Battalion in June 2018. The officers and diplomats did not object to the meeting and instead allowed themselves to be photographed with battalion officials despite previous warnings that the unit saw itself as pro-Nazi. The Azov Battalion then used those photos for its online propaganda, pointing out the Canadian delegation expressed “hopes for further fruitful co-operation.

    Then-Deputy Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament, Andriy Parubiy, visited Ottawa in February 2016, meeting with the prime minister. At that meeting (from left) are Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada Andriy Shevchenko, Verkhovna Rada Deputy Chairman Andriy Parubiy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Member of Parliament Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

    It is thus no small irony that among those “liberal democracies” of Canada, the USA, UK and EU, we have repeated evidence of actual neo-Nazi collaboration both past and present as well as fascist behavior deployed against the people living in and around those very liberal democracies. Among these self-professed bastions of freedom and democracy, we have numerous cases of torture (Guantanamo Bay), illegal arrests of dissidents who participated in January 6 Washington rallies or Ottawa anti-medical dictatorship mandates, unlawful freezing of bank services for those whose political views are deemed unacceptable to a governing elite, and the imprisonment of whistleblowers.

    What is clear is that those managerial technocrats processed through World Economic Forum training camps are generally entirely incapable of self-criticism or recognizing their own hypocrisy. They are wired to move in echo chambers of self-congratulatory flattery without every confronting points of disagreement that need to be dealt with through dialogue or reason. The typical unipolarist automaton is entirely incapable of basic fundamental human character traits that allows each of us to see and judge ourselves from the standpoint of people outside of our class, group, or even cultural matrix choosing instead to expect everyone and even the universe itself, to fit into those ivory tower models and values which are wired into the mind of any Davos creature.

    At the end of the day, those statesmen who are unencumbered by such mechanical handicaps as those suffered by Davos creatures, have access to a much greater degree of insight, and creative flexibility to lawfully break the rules of rigged games in ways that those control freaks sitting in ivory towers can ever comprehend. It is precisely this incapacity to either comprehend creative human thinking or self-criticize their own false thinking that creates those systemic conceptual blind spots which will ultimately prove their own undoing.

    • First published in The Canadian Patriot

    1. Thankfully, pushback from a few courageous Senators and Members of Parliament (as well as certain financial institutions petrified of an immanent bank run) have induced the Canadian government to pull back from the act on February 23 although an Orwellian “war on disinformation and hate” and a new level of integration between banks and intelligence agencies has now been put into motion.
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  • Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are the Enemy of Freedom

    Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,

    — James Madison, Political Observations, 20 April 1795

    War is the enemy of freedom.

    As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

    It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

    This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

    And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.

    Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world into a state of global authoritarianism, just as the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates seems to have finally worn thin, we are being prepped for the next distraction and the next drain on our economy.

    Yet policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

    Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

    What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

    Consider: We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

    We are also being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

    All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

    Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

    What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

    Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.

    It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

    And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

    This is how you acclimate a population to war.

    This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

    This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

    As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon:

    [C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts—is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.

    Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

    To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers…. At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

    The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

    This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

    ‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.

    This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

    “This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

    “Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

    In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

    Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

    The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

    This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

    No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out:

    Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.

    No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

    No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

    No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

    We are dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

    Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhaul.

    Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

    It happened in Rome: at the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise.

    It’s happening again.

    The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

    The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

    This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

    Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

    We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

    The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

    What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    The growth of, and reliance on, militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

    As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

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