A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. They do supply news. But it is no accident that they supply news of a type that covers up the crimes of elite power.
However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal. We may well be living through an unprecedented era where the vast crimes of the West, and the complicity of major news organisations, have never been more exposed to the public.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in a recent interview:
‘We are seeing a massacre in front of our eyes—it is absolutely inhumane; it is absolutely war crimes; it is arguably, I personally think, likely genocidal according to the legal standards of the 1948 Genocide Convention.’
He continued:
‘We haven’t had genocides captured by video feed day by day.
‘We have IDF forces standing with their thumbs up as they blow up universities, mosques, hospitals, and apartment buildings—it’s unbelievable. We have members of the Israeli cabinet preaching hate.
‘We’ve seen these religious nationalist extremist rabbis talk about killing all the people in Gaza. “And do you mean the children?” the Rabbi is asked. “Yes, the children. They can grow up to be terrorists.”’
The indescribable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has elicited little more than anguished hand-wringing from Western leaders who have continued to send weapons to the apartheid state.
Sachs made the point that matters which is so often ignored or glossed over by ‘responsible’ media, notably BBC News:
‘It could end by the United States government saying, “We are not providing the munitions for slaughter, period.”’ That would end it. Israel cannot do this one day without the United States.’
Likewise, the daily Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, the country’s most widely distributed newspaper, recently carried a key quote from its lead correspondent [cited in an interview with former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy at around 6 mins : 25 secs] that:
‘Israel could not continue this war were it not for US military support.’
Indeed, a clear-cut historical example of US leverage over Israel was provided by Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, an American think tank specialising in US foreign policy:
‘In 1982, President Ronald Regan was “disgusted” by Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. He stopped the transfer of cluster munitions to Israel and told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a phone call that “this is a holocaust.” Reagan demanded that Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Begin caved. Twenty minutes after their phone call, Begin ordered a halt on attacks.’
Five British prime ministers have stopped arms to Israel in the past, including Margaret Thatcher when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Tony Blair who stopped the export of UK weapons that could be used to suppress Palestinians during the Second Intifada in 2002. But not Rishi Sunak, so far, in 2024.
‘Nothing Left To Assault’
Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone wrote this week:
‘Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.’
British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza, told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview:
‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarized the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place. And the genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.’
Dr Abu-Sittah paid tribute to Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a fellow surgeon who was killed by Israeli forces at Al-Shifa alongside his mother:
‘And so, they have the blood of my friend — the blood of Ahmad Maqadmeh is on the hands of the CNN journalists and the BBC journalists and the ITV journalists, who, from the very beginning, were peddling this narrative.’
These news organisations, and others, have routinely downplayed Israeli atrocities by serially publishing deceptive headlines that mask Israel’s responsibility. For example, when seven aid workers, three of them British, were killed in an Israeli drone attack this week, targeted in three separate strikes along a supposed ‘approved’ Israeli route, the New York Times (NYT) headline was:
‘Founder of World Central Kitchen says several workers killed in Gaza airstrike’
The word ‘Israel’ was glaringly absent from the NYT headline. Middle East historian Assal Rad said:
‘Covering up Israel’s crimes enables them to commit more, name the attacker.’
If something similar had happened in Ukraine, the headline would have prominently featured the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Putin’.
Similarly, the NYT last month shielded Israel with the headline:
‘Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh call for ceasefire’.
The phrase ‘Israeli massacre of Gazans’ was missing from the headline.
Rad pointed out yet another egregious example: an Economist article titled, ‘Gaza could face a famine by May’:
‘An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn’t say the word “Israel” once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.
‘Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include.’
Presumably stung by public exposure and criticism, the Economist later updated its piece to include mention of Israel…by including the propaganda claim: ‘Israel insists it is not obstructing aid lorries.’ Days later, this lie – because that is simply what it is – was highlighted by the Israeli murder of the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen.
Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official in New York who resigned last year over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, tweeted:
‘The murder of @WCKitchen staff is only the latest. The genocidal Israeli regime has sealed the border & destroyed crops, wells, bakeries & food stores, murdered 200 aid workers, targeted security for aid, blocked aid trucks & massacred starving people lined up for aid. #genocide’
A Guardian website headline declared:
‘Israeli military investigating after foreign aid workers killed in Gaza airstrike’.
As former UK diplomat Craig Murray noted:
‘Beyond satire from @Guardian. Who killed them?
‘The Israeli military are the good guys apparently, investigating it.’
Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, observed:
‘Israel makes allegations against UNRWA but provides zero evidence. What happens? UK suspends funding pending investigation Israel carries out three strikes against known aid worker vehicles. What happens? UK says – Israel please investigate yourself, and we’ll still sell you arms’
It is clear that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, and Israel’s starvation of Gazans, are deliberate. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said via X (formerly Twitter):
‘Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed #WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries & most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.’
Israel’s intention, made clear in multiple public statements, is to get rid of Palestinians from Gaza and to impose Israeli sovereignty ‘from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’.
It is significant that even establishment-friendly figures on prominent platforms are finally speaking out. Richard Madeley of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, clearly appalled by Israel’s killing of seven aid workers, described it as an ‘execution’ while Nick Ferrari of LBC called for the suspension of UK arms sales to Israel, adding:
‘It could’ve been our missiles that killed them.’
One could rightly argue that such outrage is long overdue. At the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza is 33,000, including more than 13,000 children. There is even overwhelming evidence that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza. In a dramatic front-page spread under the stark headline, ‘Enough’, the Independent loudly declared:
‘It may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality.’
‘It may seem wrong’? It is wrong. It is damning evidence that Palestinian lives are deemed by those in power to be less valuable than the lives of Westerners. But it is right that so many are now saying, ‘Enough’, regardless of the motivation.
‘Not A Normal War’
Dr Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician who founded the US-based charity Humanity Auxilium, left Gaza in the third week of February as Israeli forces were threatening a ground assault against Rafah. She said:
‘This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.’
Claudia Webbe, the independent MP for Leicester East, summarised where we are:
‘Israel is out of control.
‘Israel is deliberately killing International aid workers. It has now passed a law to ban journalists.
‘Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza. Murder and genocide in plain sight. They don’t want you to know the truth. Our political leaders are complicit’
But the complicit role of the media also needs to be highlighted. Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, believes that:
‘We need journalism that is committed to accurate and uncompromising investigation and not a spurious “impartiality” that hides brutal facts of occupation and genocide.’
Freedman noted that the BBC, along with other major news outlets, largely ignored growing claims of Israeli genocide until the South African government brought evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024. The ICJ then found that there was a ‘plausible’ case that genocide was taking place.
Freedman continued:
‘Since then, references to genocide on broadcasters’ ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) feeds – a sign of their editorial priorities – have virtually disappeared. While there are 54 mentions of genocide in Al Jazeera’s feed since 1 February, there is not a single one in the feeds of @BBCNews, @BBCWorld or @Channel4News.’
The BBC actually made the rare concession of a ‘mistake’ in their live coverage of the ICJ genocide case against Israel. BBC editorial policy director David Jordan made the admission to MPs after BBC editors had chosen to show Israel’s defence against genocide charges in full, while only showing clips of South Africa’s case arguing Israel is committing genocide.
Despite Jordan’s denial, the unequal coverage was indicative of serious BBC bias on Israel and Palestine, as has been demonstrated over many years by the Glasgow University Media Group, for example, and by a recent report from the Centre for Media Monitoring.
One glaring aspect of the crisis in what passes for ‘democracy’ in this country is that there is no real party of opposition in Westminster. Labour under Sir Keir Starmer has done its best to divest itself of anything that smacks of socialism, cleaving as closely as possible to the establishment, and not daring to ruffle the feathers of the billionaire-owned press.
Peter Oborne, former Telegraph chief political writer, observed recently that:
‘From the suffragettes to Gandhi, those who challenged the British state and were labelled extremists ended up being vindicated. The pro-Palestine protesters will be too.’
He warned that the real extremists are those running the country or who wish to do so:
‘I am coming to believe that the real extremists can be found in Downing Street, the Conservative Party, and in Starmer’s Labour Party.’
In a scathing column explaining why he was rescinding his Labour party membership, Owen Jones wrote:
‘The assault on Gaza, the great crime of our age, adds moral indecency to the pile of dishonesty and vacuity. When Starmer declared Israel had the right to cut off energy and water to Palestinian civilians, he did so as a human rights lawyer who understands the Geneva conventions. After letting shadow cabinet ministers defend him, he claimed it “has never been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”. We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.’
There are now belated and sporadic calls from Westminster demanding British arms be ‘suspended’. Insufficient media attention has focused on the damaging revelation that the Tory government has been told by its lawyers that Israel is in breach of international law and that the UK ‘has to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay’ or it could be found to be complicit in genocide. The government wishes to bury these truths.
But pressure continues to mount on Downing Street: more than 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, including three former supreme court justices, have signed a letter to the prime minister warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel. Neither the Tory government nor the Labour ‘opposition’ have yet agreed to stop selling arms to Israel. ‘Shameful’ hardly sums it up.
Meanwhile, Department for Business and Trade civil servants who administer licenses for arms exports to Israel have raised concerns with their trade union that they could be complicit in war crimes in Gaza. They wish to cease such work ‘immediately’. As reported by Sky News, the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, has requested an urgent meeting with the department to discuss ‘the legal jeopardy faced by civil servants who are continuing to work on this policy.’
What does it say about the state of British society, and indeed democracy itself, that the public is being denied a realistic political choice to dissociate itself from mass slaughter and to stop the genocide in Gaza?
Noam Chomsky has often pointed out that ‘the ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged’ and that ‘elections are largely a ritual form.’ In other words, the public is technically allowed to participate in ‘democracy’ by pushing buttons every few years. But we have ‘essentially no role in formulating policy’. Our function is largely reduced to ratifying decisions made by the people in power. (Quoted in ‘Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter’, Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, PM Press, 2021, pages 103 and 159).
If public awareness of this reality becomes widespread, then, and only then, is there hope of real progress in society.
Acclaimed journalist Mehdi Hasan joins Democracy Now! to discuss US media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza and how the war is a genocide being abetted by the United States.
Hasan says US media is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and fails to convey the truth to audiences.
“Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict,” he says.
Hasan has just launched a new media company, Zeteo, which he started after the end of his weekly news programme on MSNBC earlier this year.
Zeteo . . . soft launch.
Hasan’s interviews routinely led to viral segments, including his tough questioning of Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev, but the cable network announced it was canceling his show in November.
The move drew considerable outrage, with critics slamming MSNBC for effectively silencing one of the most prominent Muslim voices in US media.
Rafah invasion threat
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, which human rights groups warn would be a massacre.
President Biden has said such an escalation is a “red line” for him, but Netanyahu has vowed to push ahead anyway.
“Where is the outcry here in the West?” asks Hasan of reports of Israeli war crimes, including the killing of more than 100 journalists in the past five months in Gaza and the blockade of aid from the region.
“It’s a stain on [Biden’s] record, on America’s conscience.”
Transcript:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the UN agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a “blatant disregard [of] international humanitarian law”.
This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 23 children.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has reported six Palestinians were killed in Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for food aid. More than 80 people were injured.
In other news from Gaza, Politicoreports the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the US would support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a large-scale invasion.
AMY GOODMAN:Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the US media is covering Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC after his shows were cancelled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent Muslim voices on American television.
In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
US Media fails on Gaza, fascism. Video: Democracy Now!
Then, in November, MSNBC announced it was cancelling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt:
MEHDI HASAN: You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so — and the UN, human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. But look, your wider point is true.
MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.
MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.
MARK REGEV: I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.
And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas, until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re eroding their control.
But up until now, they’ve been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —
MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —
MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —
MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?
MEHDI HASAN: Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —
MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.
MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —
MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.
MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?
MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.
MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.
AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network, Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.
Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After, you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason those shows were cancelled? Interviews like that?
MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC, Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they cancelled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.
The shows were cancelled at the end of November. I quit at the beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice back.
And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned, called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with Mark Regev.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean? And what is the gap in the US media landscape that you hope to fill? You’ve been extremely critical of the US media’s coverage of Gaza, saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word, going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say, post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.
In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one. Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based platform since leaving Fox.
And on the progressive space, we haven’t really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now! which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza, on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole, sadly, in the US, the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the world today.
Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible.
You know, we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news — it’s a global news organisation which I’m founding — with some respect. Stop patronising them. Tell them what is happening in the world, in a blunt way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the US media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean, of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that.
And in response, you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in US media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or anyone criticising Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October 7.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7 was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.
But the world did not begin on October 7. The idea that the entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation, apartheid, can be reduced to October 7 is madness. And it’s not just me saying that.
You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our media industry people should try and run away from context.
My former colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the introduction, they were on air on October 7 as news was coming in of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors who really understand that part of the world.
Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the only US anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the world is madness.
You cannot understand what is happening in the world unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In internal meeting, Christiane Amanpour confronts CNN brass about ‘double standards’ on Israel coverage”. It’s a really interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau.
As The Interceptreported in January, “the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.”
And then it quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting. She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi? You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC . . .
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: . . . and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.
MEHDI HASAN: So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all, we should recognise that Christiane Amanpour has done some very excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two . . .
AMY GOODMAN:International . . .
MEHDI HASAN: . . . I think US media organisations . . .
AMY GOODMAN: . . . I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen . . .
MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On CNN domestic.
MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.
The second point, I would say, is US media organisations, as a whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli military censor.
How many Americans understand or even know about the Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and limited to what they can say and do.
So I think we should talk about that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from Gaza.
And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember that this is one of the reasons.
Why are Palestinians dehumanised in our media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s what leads to dehumanisation. That’s what leads to bias.
We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices. In recent years, media organisations have tried to take steps to improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.
There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2 percent of all op-eds in the Times and 1 percent in the Post were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic.
We deny these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathise with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street — well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from these people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian voices here?
MEHDI HASAN: Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens here or in our newspapers are sanitised images. We don’t see the full level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitised version of this war, of Israel’s bombardment.
They are seeing babies being pulled from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that UN humanitarian chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.
And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitising the coverage, Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again, missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course, Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document their own genocide, streaming it to our phones.
And we’ve seen over a hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal behavior.
And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed, Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide. Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they actually saw what was happening on the ground?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,” but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at hand.
We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of weeks and not months.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian islands?
MEHDI HASAN: So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know, invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity, even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen.
And I feel the same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals, many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing innocent Palestinians under the pretence that this is national security.
Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently, “Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales, is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said that.
And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff . . .
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi . . .
MEHDI HASAN: . . . over a few months . . .
AMY GOODMAN: . . . let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC. He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.
He’s hurting — in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union, this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of this, is because Israel is using US bombs and artillery to attack the Palestinians and these aid trucks?
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both, and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.
And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme, are in Gaza right now.
The idea that this pier would, A, address the scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve to death, including children, while this pier is being built?
Finally, I would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolised.
The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us, especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre.
It’s something I think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ, is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re bombing with our bombs, is just madness.
And by the way, it’s also illegal. Under US law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which is blocking US aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re blocking US aid. US government officials have said, “Yes, the Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course, has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance — Houthis, Hezbollah, etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make the backers of Israel pay a price for it?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs.
The Arab — quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes.
So, look, Arab countries have never really prioritised the Palestinian people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.
Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years, carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades, starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all happened in Yemen.
Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about that, things that they criticise Israel for doing now. And, of course, Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and support Assad as he did that.
So, you know, spare me some of the grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel, “Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently, according to the Biden administration.
We know that other Arab countries already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on Trump’s watch.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists and also the new UN investigation that just accused Israel of breaking international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13, an Israeli tank opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up.
The report stated, quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of . . . international law.” And it’s not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of other major news organisations and what Israel is doing here? Do you think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to Mehdi Hasan.
MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.
AMY GOODMAN:Oh, OK. So . . .
MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.
AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.
MEHDI HASAN: So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone wants to fix the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.
It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in the US media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry.
When Wael al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic, why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero? Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey?
I feel like, you know, when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is the outcry here in the West over the killing of them?
We claim to care about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.
Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images
On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.
On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.
It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.
In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.
How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?
The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?
And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.
The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.
Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.
But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.
That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.
U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.
On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from TheNew York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:
“Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”
The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”
A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.
As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.
The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.
If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.
A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “ I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented. You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.
We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia. Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.
A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.
There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:
“Polly wants a war!” “Polly wants a war.”
I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing. Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change. Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe. Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:
The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people. They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.
If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.
And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably. The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.
In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabamareported. Putin said:
They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.
When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more. They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith. The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:
Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
Mobilizing European NATO members
Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies
I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States. Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today. But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters. And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.
In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“. In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.
Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?
We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates. Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance. Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.
There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.
Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.
To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores? Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked? Have you completely lost your ability to think? Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?
If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?
If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger? My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?
No. I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway. I have lost patience with it. For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail. Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.
I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:
A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.
Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’
The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’
Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’
The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’
The desire for peace and security is a universal dream. Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.
It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.
But I will not stop trying. Galeano did not. He left us these words of universal resistance:
We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.
The New York Times published this week the conclusion of its investigation into the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
It was the fourth major US news organisation to look in detail at what happened to Abu Akleh during an Israeli army raid into the Palestinian city of Jenin last month.
The New York Times found a high probability she had been killed by an Israeli sniper, confirming the findings of earlier investigations by the Associated Press, CNN and the Washington Post. Like the other publications, the Times based its findings on video footage, witness testimonies and acoustic analysis.
“The bullet that killed Ms Abu Akleh was fired from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy [in Jenin], most likely by a soldier from an elite unit,” the Times concluded. A total of 16 shots were fired at the group of journalists that included Abu Akleh.
Last month, CNN said the evidence it unearthed suggested the veteran Al Jazeera journalist had been killed in a “targeted attack by Israeli forces”. Similar conclusions have been reached by human rights groups that have studied the evidence, including Israel’s respected occupation watchdog, B’Tselem.
A major blow
These probes are a major blow to Israel, coming from reputed media organisations that are usually seen as highly sympathetic to Israel rather than the Palestinians.
They have kept the killing of the journalist in the headlines when Israel had hoped interest would quickly wane – as is the case with the overwhelming majority of Palestinian deaths.
The investigations have made it much harder for Israel to obscure both its responsibility for Abu Akleh’s killing and the intention behind it. The bullet that killed her was fired with the apparent goal of executing her, hitting a narrow, exposed area of flesh between her helmet and a flak jacket marked “Press”.
And the various probes have highlighted once again how unwilling Israel is to hold its soldiers to account for committing crimes if the victim is Palestinian.
Instead, Israel has had to twist and turn in defending its failure to identify the culprit. It initially refused to investigate, claiming a Palestinian gunman, not one of its soldiers, shot Abu Akleh during the military raid.
All the media investigations show that to be untrue.
Then Israel suggested that she might have been hit by the crossfire from an Israeli soldier being fired on by Palestinian gunmen. But all the investigations have shown that Palestinian fighters were nowhere near Abu Akleh when she was shot. She was, however, clearly visible to a unit of Israeli soldiers.
More recently, Israel has tried to shift the blame onto the Palestinian Authority, saying it has not cooperated by handing over the bullet that killed Abu Akleh or by agreeing to hold a joint investigation. As ever, Israel behaves as if the party accused of the crime should be the one to oversee the investigation.
The Palestinian Authority rightly refuses requests for cooperation, arguing that they are being made in bad faith. Israel would exploit any joint investigation to concoct “a new lie, a new narrative”, the PA observes.
A meaningful question
In reality, Israel already knows exactly which of its snipers pulled the trigger. The only meaningful question at this stage is, why? Was the shooting committed by a hot-headed soldier, or was it an execution carried out on orders from above? Was the intention to target Abu Akleh specifically, or did it not matter which of the group of journalists she was among was hit?
Israel, however, isn’t the only party discomfited by the media’s repeated investigations.
They have also served to embarrass Joe Biden’s administration. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has called for an “independent, credible investigation”, while his department has underscored the need for a “thorough and independent investigation”.
The New York Times and the other major media outlets have all proved that just such an investigation can be carried out. And yet the silence from the US administration at their shared findings is deafening.
There are two further, possibly less obvious conclusions the rest of us should draw from these efforts to identify who was responsible for killing Abu Akleh.
The first relates to the exceptional nature of the investigations conducted by the US media. Concern at the killing of a Palestinian is far from the norm. In this case, it appears to have been prompted by an unusual coincidence of facts: that Abu Akleh was a high-profile, internationally respected journalist and that she had US citizenship.
In other words, she was seen not just as any ordinary Palestinian, or even as a Palestinian journalist, but as one of the western media’s own.
Total impunity
In murdering Abu Akleh, Israel reminded journalists at the New York Times, AP, CNN and the Washington Post that the lives of their correspondents covering Israel and Palestine are in more danger than they possibly appreciate. In killing her, Israel crossed a red line for the western media – one premised on self-interest and self-preservation.
There are parallels with the media’s special treatment of the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi – and for similar reasons. Khashoggi, who was working for the Washington Post, was murdered and his body dismembered during a visit to the Saudi embassy in Turkey.
As with Israel, Saudi Arabia‘s leadership has an appalling human rights record and is not hesitant to jail and kill its opponents. But Khashoggi’s murder provoked unprecedented outrage from the media – outrage that Saudi Arabia’s many other victims have never warranted.
The fact is the US media could have conducted similar investigations into any number of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli security services, not just Abu Akleh’s, and they would have reached similar conclusions. But they have consistently avoided doing so.
There is a danger inherent in focusing exclusively on Abu Akleh’s killing, just as there was with focusing exclusively on Khashoggi’s. Each has the effect of making it look as though their deaths are exceptional events requiring exceptional investigation – when they are each an example of a longstanding pattern of regime lawlessness and human rights abuses.
The special focus subtly reinforces too the impression that Palestinian accounts of Israeli abuses, even when the supporting evidence is overwhelming, cannot be trusted.
The veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has run a weekly column, the Twilight Zone, in the Haaretz newspaper for years in which he investigates the killing or serious wounding of Palestinians – often people whose names have never appeared in the western media.
Invariably he finds that Israel’s military lies – sometimes flagrantly – about the circumstances in which Palestinians have been killed, or it initiates an inconclusive, stone-walling investigation.
The lies are needed because the truth would show something consistently ugly about Israel’s decades of military occupation: that Israeli soldiers often kill unarmed Palestinians in cold blood; or that they recklessly shoot Palestinian bystanders; or that they execute armed Palestinian fighters when no one’s life is in danger.
The common thread in Levy’s reports is the complete impunity of Israeli soldiers, whatever their actions.
Pilloried in public
But there is a further conclusion to be drawn. Blinken and the Biden administration keep insisting on a thorough, independent, credible and transparent investigation, and say it is important to “follow the facts, wherever they lead”.
But who do they expect to carry out such an investigation?
The White House, of course, reflexively discounts the findings of the Palestinian Authority’s investigation that Abu Akleh was deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers. It acts as if the investigations conducted by these four large media organisations do not qualify. Meanwhile, the administration itself shows precisely zero interest in conducting an investigation, despite pressure from Congress to involve the FBI.
Would Blinken prefer that the United Nations take on the task? Presumably not, given how the US and Israel responded to the last major independent investigation by the UN, one into Israel’s month-long attack on Gaza at the end of 2008. Israel refused to cooperate.
Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African jurist, led a panel of experts who concluded that Israel had committed a series of war crimes during its attack, known as Cast Lead, as had Palestinian militias.
The UN panel’s report found that Israel had adopted a policy that intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians, the vast majority of the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Cast Lead.
Both the US and Israel worked strenuously to bury the report. Goldstone, who is Jewish, found himself publicly shamed and isolated by Jewish communities in the US and South Africa. He was even barred from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Eventually, he appeared to succumb to the pressure campaign, expressing regret over the report.
No one in Washington came to Goldstone’s defence over the UN’s thorough, independent, credible and transparent investigation. Quite the reverse: he was publicly pilloried. The US administration thereby sent a message to other experts that investigating “independently” and “credibly” is certain only to bring ignominy on their heads if it exposes Israel’s war crimes.
And yet the US demonstrated the degree to which it appreciates full, independent, credible and transparent investigations by that body two years ago, when the ICC tried to turn the spotlight on to US war crimes in Afghanistan and Israel’s in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In response, Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, imposed sanctions on the court, denying staff entry to the US and threatening to seize its assets. The threat extended to anyone offering “material support” to the court – language more normally used in the context of terrorism.
The reality, as all parties understand, is that only an investigation overseen by Israel could ever count as “thorough, independent, credible and transparent” to the US.
The subtext is that an investigation cannot hope to reach the bar of “credible, independent and transparent”, as far as Washington is concerned, until the Palestinian Authority agrees to hold a joint inquiry with Israel.
But both Israel and the US know full well that the Palestinian leadership will never agree to such “cooperation” – because Israel’s role would not be to arrive at the truth but to engineer a cover-up.
The demand for a “credible, independent and transparent” investigation is the US administration’s code for an investigation that will never take place. It is the diplomatic equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But more importantly, it is the kind of impossible investigation that, conveniently for the US and Israel, they can blame the PA for obstructing. As long as the Palestinians refuse to “cooperate”, Israel’s hands are supposedly tied.
Abu Akleh’s murder has not just revealed the fact that Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians, any Palestinian, with impunity.
It has revealed too that the Biden administration is not troubled by the killing, or by the impunity of the soldier who executed her. All that bothers the White House is the irritant of having to create the impression it cares about the truth and the impression that Israel is doing its best to investigate.
Until the matter can be swept aside, it will be a little harder for each to get on with business as usual: for the US to give Israel full-throated financial, diplomatic and military support; and for Israel to continue its incremental, decades-long work of seizing control of the Palestinians’ entire, historic homeland.
But at least for each of them, with Abu Akleh gone, there is one less fearless witness to expose quite how hollow their moral posturing is.
It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.
Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”
It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.
Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.
Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.
The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”
The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.
‘Putin apologists’
But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.
The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.
Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.
The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.
Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.
And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.
The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.
That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.
And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.
During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.
And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.
Pre-emption excuse
But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.
That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.
In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.
Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.
Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take pre-emptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and Nato were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.
But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.
First, it could have paved the way for Nato stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.
And second, Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbass region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.
In this view, absent a Russian invasion, Nato could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40bn.
Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbour Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.
Proxy wars
Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?
The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.
To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.
With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its Nato allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.
Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defence and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.
He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.
Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.
Butcher versus blunderer
Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”
But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.
A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.
This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.
That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.
It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.
But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.
If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.
A week ago, we made note of a May 11 New York Times news article, documenting that all was not going well for the U.S. in Ukraine, and a companion opinion piece hinting that a shift in direction might be in order.
Now on May 19, “THE EDITORIAL BOARD,” the full Magisterium of the Times, has moved from hints to a clarion call for a change in direction in an editorial uninformatively titled, “The War Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready.” From atop the Opinion page the Editorial Board has declared that “total victory” over Russia is not possible and that Ukraine will have to negotiate a peace in a way that reflects a “realistic assessment” and the “limits” of U.S. commitment. The Times serves as one of the main shapers of public opinion for the Elite and so its pronouncements are not to be taken lightly.
Ukrainians will have to adjust to US “limits” and make sacrifices for newfound U.S. realism
The Times May editorial dictum contains the following key passages:
“ In March, this board argued that the message from the United States and its allies to Ukrainians and Russians alike must be: No matter how long it takes, Ukraine will be free. …”
“That goal cannot shift, but in the end, it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions (emphasis, jw).”
To ensure that there is no ambiguity, the editorial declares that:
“A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal. … Russia remains too strong…”
To make certain that President Biden and the Ukrainians understand what they should do, the EDITORIAL BOARD goes on to say:
“… Mr. Biden should also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will go to confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster. It is imperative that the Ukrainian government’s decisions be based on a realistic assessment of its means and how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain (emphasis, jw).”
As Volodymyr Zelensky reads those words, he must surely begin to sweat. The voice of his masters is telling him that he and Ukraine will have to make some sacrifices for the US to save face. As he contemplates his options, his thoughts must surely run back to February, 2014, and the U.S. backed Maidan coup that culminated in the hasty exit of President Yanukovych from his office, his country and almost from this earth.
Ukraine is a proxy war that is all too dangerous
In the eyes of the Times editorial writers, the war has become a U.S. proxy war against Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – and it is careening out of control:
“The current moment is a messy one in this conflict, which may explain President Biden and his cabinet’s reluctance to put down clear goal posts.”
“The United States and NATO are already deeply involved, militarily and economically. Unrealistic expectations could draw them ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war..”
“Recent bellicose statements from Washington — President Biden’s assertion that Mr. Putin ‘cannot remain in power,’ Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comment that Russia must be ‘weakened’ and the pledge by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the United States would support Ukraine ‘until victory is won’ — may be rousing proclamations of support, but they do not bring negotiations any closer.”
While the Times dismisses these statements as “rousing proclamations,” it is all too clear that for the neocons in charge of U.S. foreign policy, the goal has always been a proxy war to bring down Russia. This has not become a proxy war; it has always been a proxy war. The neocons operate by the Wolfowitz Doctrine, enunciated in 1992, soon after the end of Cold War 1.0, by the necoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense:
“We endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”
“We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.”
Clearly if Russia is “too strong” to be defeated in Ukraine, it is too strong to be brought down as a superpower.
The Times has shifted its opinion from March to May. What Has Changed?
After 7 years of slaughter in the Donbass and 3 months of warfare in Southern Ukraine, has the Times editorial board suddenly had a rush of compassion for all the victims of the war and the destruction of Ukraine and changed its opinion? Given the record of the Times over the decades, it would seem that other factors are at work.
First of all, Russia has handled the situation unexpectedly well compared to dire predictions from the West.
President Putin’s support exceeds 80%.
165 of 195 nations, including India and China with 35% of the world’s population, have refused to join sanctions against Russia, leaving the U.S., not Russia, relatively isolated in the world.
The ruble, which Biden said would be “rubble” has not only returned to its pre-February levels but is valued at a 2 year high, today at 59 rubles to the dollar compared to 150 in March.
Russia is expecting a bumper harvest and the world is eager for its wheat and fertilizer, oil and gas all of which provide substantial revenue.
The EU has largely succumbed to Russia’s demand to be paid for gas in rubles. Treasury Secretary Yellin is warning the suicidal Europeans that an embargo of Russian oil will further damage the economies of the West.
Russian forces are making slow but steady progress across southern and eastern Ukraine after winning in Mariupol, the biggest battle of the war so far, and a demoralizing defeat for Ukraine.
In the US inflation, which was already high before the Ukraine crisis, has been driven even higher and reached over 8% with the Fed now scrambling to control it by raising interest rates. Partly as a result of this, the stock market has come close to bear territory. As the war progresses, many have joined Ben Bernanke, former Fed Chair, in predicting a period of high unemployment, high inflation and low growth – the dread stagflation.
Domestically, there are signs of deterioration in support of the war. Most strikingly, 57 House Republicans and 11 Senate Republicans voted against the latest package of weaponry to Ukraine, bundled with considerable pork and hidden bonanzas for the war profiteers. (Strikingly no Democrat, not a single one, not even the most “progressive” voted against pouring fuel on the fire of war raging in Ukraine. But that is another story.)
And while U.S. public opinion remains in favor of U.S. involvement in Ukraine there are signs of slippage. For example, Pew reports that those feeling the U.S. is not doing enough declined from March to May. As more stagflation takes hold with gas and food prices growing and voices like those of Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul pointing out the connection between the inflation and the war, discontent is certain to grow.
Finally, as the war becomes less popular and it takes its toll, an electoral disaster looms ahead in 2022 and 2024 for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, for which the Times serves as a mouthpiece.
The NYT editorial signals alarm over the insane goal of the neoconservatives
There is a note of panic in this appeal to find a negotiated solution now. The U.S. and Russia are the world’s major nuclear powers with thousands of nuclear missiles on Launch On Warning, aka Hair Trigger Alert. At moments of high tension, the possibilities of Accidental Nuclear Armageddon are all too real.
President Biden’s ability to stay in command of events is in question. Many people of his age can handle a situation like this, but many cannot and he seems to be in the latter category.
Alarm is warranted and panic is understandable.
The neocons are now in control of the foreign policy of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party. But will the neocons in charge give up and move in a reasonable and peaceful direction as the Times editorial demands? This is a fantasy of the first order. As one commenter observed, the hawks like Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan have no reverse gear; they always double down. They do not serve the interests of humanity nor do they serve the interests of the American people. They are in reality traitors to the U.S. They must be exposed, discredited and pushed aside. Our survival depends on it.
When reason hath to deal with force, yet so
Most reason is that reason overcome.
— Paradise Lost (6.125-126)
As the Western elites continue to pour weapons into Ukraine to the delight of the armaments industry and the closet Nazis of Natostan, the cult of neoliberalism, which put the Banderite regime in power during the Obama years, reaches new depths of degradation with each passing day. Both at home and abroad, the schizophrenic rift between the language of neoliberalism and the actual policies that these creatures support continues to widen. The increasingly delusional trajectory of the queen of cults is propelling us into a new dark age where literacy, reason, the rule of law, and even the survival of our species are in danger.
Subconsciously, neoliberals believe that they are carrying on in the tradition of the Enlightenment, the abolitionists, the New Dealers, the civil rights activists, and the anti-war activists that marched against the Vietnam War and the bombings of Laos and Cambodia. In actuality, what they offer today is lawlessness, unfettered capitalism, biofascism, deunionization, war, sectarianism; and the multicultural curriculum, a cousin of Banderite education, as both are predicated on the anti-humanities. It is this sophomoric hubris of neoliberals, the macabre fantasy that they are sensible, rational, and moral beings while the heathens represent intolerance, ignorance, and bigotry, which blinds them to the barbarism of their deeds. Like the lost souls in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, neoliberals believe they are firmly grounded in reality, when they are enslaved to venal public health agencies and a mass media brainwashing apparatus which have entrapped them in a world of deception and lies — a world of shadows.
While Ukrainian civilization is inextricably linked with Russian history and culture, Banderite education is anchored in Russophobia, its antithesis. Having extirpated all things Russian from their lives, Ukrainian state ideology has become synonymous with hating Russians. No less rooted in self-cannibalization, the multicultural society has become synonymous with a hostility towards the American canon and all things Western. Both are depraved, totalitarian, anti-intellectual and anti-democratic dogmas. As Orwell wrote in 1984, “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” Beware the anti-humanities, for they are the handmaidens of totalitarianism.
Indeed, identity politics and Banderite indoctrination have spawned tens of millions of illiterate, nihilistic, and atomized individuals that are devoid of a legitimate culture, cannot place current events in their appropriate historical context, are inculcated with loathing for an imaginary enemy, and can easily be manipulated by oligarchic forces. Nazi and Zionist indoctrination achieved similar results. Notably, the Russophobia in the West increasingly resembles the Russophobia in Ukraine prior to the Maidan putsch (see here and here).
The idea that neoliberalism is anchored in “anti-racism” is nonsensical, as not a day goes by without more dumbing down of children of color, mindless hate-filled rants against Russians and white people (excluding Nazis in Eastern Europe and the ones with lots of money); while the anti-white jihad ideology imbues the younger generation with a desire to launch a crusade against all things “racist.” This encompasses everything from Shakespeare to Mozart, to the principle of bodily autonomy, to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to disposable white workers themselves. This is the most dangerous form of bigotry – sectarian hatreds that are knowingly and willfully cultivated in an education system charged with the task of molding impressionable young minds.
When not smashing unions to the wall, burning books, dismantling informed consent, and fomenting ghettoization, neoliberals can be found spending trillions of dollars dropping bombs on people and supporting death squads. Indeed, the sociopathy of American humanitarian interventionism is glaringly on display with regards to the Biden administration’s support for the Banderite regime.
Like Pavlov’s dogs, neocons and neolibs alike clamor for hellfire to be unleashed on whoever is the latest to be vilified: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Serbs, Russians, the Taliban, the Iraqis. Entire societies are deemed to be somehow synonymous with their alleged dictators. While faux leftists have imaginary conversations about Russiagate, children in Mariupol are acquiring a real-world understanding of the horrors that have been inflicted on their society as a result of the US-backed Maidan coup. Yet we must follow these virtuous crusaders, who applaud their government for giving billions of dollars in weapons (or complain that it is insufficient, for the most fanatical) to a Banderite regime which permits fascists to get on television and openly call for genocide in the Donbass. Meanwhile, a vast swath of American society lacks adequate health insurance, adequate employment, education, the rule of law; and increasingly, even a society. As many a wise babushka can explain, before the specter of Ukrainian nationalism once more reared its ugly visage, western and eastern Ukrainians lived in peace with one another. Undoubtedly they would still, were it not for Washington providing the Banderite entity with enormous amounts of diplomatic aid, arms, military training, and assistance in executing psyops.
The idea currently being bandied about by a number of presstitutes and congressmen, that we could nonchalantly waltz into a third world war, as it would likely be confined to the use of conventional weapons, is indicative of a society that has lost the ability to engage in rational fact-based discussions. If there is a third world war, it will be nuclear. The Kremlin is not going to allow a repeat of Operation Barbarossa, and senior Kremlin officials have explicitly stated that they are not going to permit another war to be fought on Russian soil. This deranged thinking is yet further evidence of a society that has, over the past thirty years, been transformed into a diabolical cesspit of lies, propaganda, and deceit.
Some have speculated that there is a cabal in Washington pushing for a third world war, wagering that Europe and Russia would be destroyed, but that the US would somehow escape the carnage unscathed as transpired after the first two world wars, and that the American ruling establishment would then be able to create a new financial system which would cancel American debt and reverse the looming threat of de-dollarization. Should things degenerate to the point where the Russian military is targeting London, Paris, and Brussels is it not likely that major American cities would also be targeted?
While neoliberals wallow in the pathologies of cult dogma, the Russians are acutely aware of the following facts: the Banderite coup was orchestrated by Washington; battalions and death squads comprised of neo-Nazis and ultranationalists have been armed, funded, and trained by the West; and that Western presstitutes have fallen head over heels in love with Russophobia and are providing the Banderite regime with assistance in carrying out false flag operations. Furthermore, they are aware of the fact that Washington is providing the Banderite entity with information regarding Russian troop movements, a very delicate and dangerous tightrope indeed. In “Russia Formally Warns US to Stop Arming Ukraine,” Dave DeCamp comments on this ominous line that NATO is walking:
On top of arming the Ukrainians, the US is also providing them with intelligence for attacks on Russian forces. The huge amount of support raises questions about at what point Russia would consider the US a co-belligerent in the war.
Principles which were once deemed inviolable such as freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, the informed consent ethic, privacy, a healthy fear of nuclear war, integration, and even the notion that a democratic society must have an informed and educated population, are being swept away. The result is lawlessness, despotism, and savagery. Uncontrolled immigration, the anti-humanities, and offshoring, which together with medical mandates neoliberals look to as magical elixirs with which to solve every domestic problem, have commodified human beings and turned workers into interchangeable parts that lack any sense of ethics, class consciousness, a shared history, and can easily be manipulated and controlled. The Weimarization of America is well underway, and all things sacred are in danger of being lost.
The neoliberal notion of “tolerance” has become a euphemism for extremism, biofascism, book burning, and illegal wars of aggression. Witch hunts against heretics have become normalized, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to have rational discussions about incredibly serious political and socio-economic problems. The idea that the multicultural curriculum and identity studies “fight racism” when they constitute its quintessence is no less divorced from reality than the notion that a democracy can survive without the First Amendment, the Nuremberg Code, or any respect for international law. The lack of any empathy or remorse in the face of countless lives destroyed as a result of “humanitarian interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia is coming home to roost.
“Education” has become a euphemism for fomenting sectarian hatreds and increasingly specialized job training. Revealingly, Americans with the most advanced degrees are often the most inclined to believe in the infallibility of the legacy media and the public health agencies. With a diseased society that teaches young people to kowtow at the altar of materialism and careerism while blindly following “the experts,” self-imposed ignorance is increasingly necessary to “get ahead.” Except in unusual circumstances, physicians speaking out against the Branch Covidian coup d’état will lose their jobs. The same fate would undoubtedly befall a mainstream journalist attempting to educate their readers about the gruesome realities of US foreign policy, or a professor criticizing identity politics and the scourge of tribalism.
The Guardian’s squeamishness over London cyclists being too white and male coupled with their fondness for Ukrainian nationalists – real racists – who have wiped entire Donbass villages off the face of the earth and committed crimes against humanity, is emblematic of the unhinged, devious, and wicked nature of neoliberal cult ideology.
American universities – automaton training facilities which churn out millions of aspiring Karl Brandts, Adolf Eichmanns, and Albert Speers each year – have created a conscienceless technocratic class on the carcass of what was once a sound middle class. As any number of reporters that covered the Nuremberg trials undoubtedly discerned, hyper-careerism and hyper-specialization foment amorality, and like vultures hover menacingly whereon the anti-humanities feed. Even the original Nazi doctors would have dismissed the idea of giving an experimental vaccine series to every German in Europe as utter lunacy. Yet to millions of shameless faux leftists these policies are necessary for “the greater good,” and predicated on “the science.”
That talking heads are permitted (or perhaps even encouraged by shadowy intelligence agencies) to call for people like Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard to be arrested for questioning the official Ukraine narrative is inextricably linked with the growing illiteratization and the fact that classes in civics have been expunged from the curriculum. This growing pathologization of dissent poses extremely serious risks to the First Amendment, as liberals are increasingly slandering their critics as mentally ill, evidence that biofascism’s war on informed consent poses a grave threat to our survival as a rule of law state. Should Democratic Party devotees attempt to commit (or section, as the British say) people such as Carlson and Gabbard, what legal mechanisms will prevent this from happening now that the informed consent ethic has been all but totally destroyed?
The authoritarianism of neoliberals is directly proportional to their growing disconnection from reality; and the more delirious the faithful become, the more they believe they are the paragon of reason.
James Howard Kunstler correctly points out on his blog that, in addition to the mass media, social media has played a significant role in fomenting this epidemic of demented ideation:
All this coerced insanity has been nurtured by social media’s sly mechanisms for bending narrative into propaganda: their beloved algorithms, all fine-tuned to destroy anything that touches on truth. The result is a country so marinated in falsehood that it can’t construct a coherent consensus of reality, and can’t take coherent actions to avert its own collapse.
It is remarkable that the New Deal, the public education system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, any semblance of integration, a free press, the Nuremberg Code, and efforts to demilitarize and establish a single-payer health care system were obliterated in the name of “fighting racism,” “fighting sexism,” “fighting white supremacy,” and “fighting misogyny.” These words have become akin to dog commands, except unlike humans canines do not burn books, exploit slave labor, give weapons and military training to death squads, torture, or drop bombs on people.
Indie conservatives typically understand the dangers of identity politics and the Branch Covidians, yet often lack an adequate understanding of US foreign policy and the threat to democracy posed by unfettered capitalism. Before most leftists were enveloped by a pall of madness, that was their job.
Assuming we aren’t incinerated in a nuclear conflagration, how will reason and checks and balances be restored in a country run by toddlers, book burners, unscrupulous careerists, and homicidal maniacs? Irregardless of whether we witness the triumph of anti-white jihad, a Confederate white supremacist revival, or a takeover by the Christian Right (unlikely in this environment, as they are no fan of forced vaccination) the left’s self-evisceration threatens our existence as a civilized society and is slowly opening the harrowing portal of perdition.
Should the pendulum swing back to the traditional far-right and neoliberals dethroned, what laws will be in place to protect those who have been deposed and dispossessed? As neoliberal cultists are no longer living in the reality-based world, and are seemingly incapable of acknowledging the consequences of their actions, the path towards the spires of reason and solidarity will be difficult to forge in the long and arduous days that lie ahead.
Here is a speech Vladimir Putin DID NOT make — at least in this specific language — to the Russian people just before initiating the special military operations in Ukraine:
“It is my responsibility as the president to warn our citizens of secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of US/NATO missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to Russia and the nations of our hemisphere, in violation of American assurances, and in defiance of treaties and our own policies — this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons on our borders — is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.”
Does this have a familiar feel to it?
Here is the speech which President John F. Kennedy DID MAKE to the American people on October 22, 1962, when he warned of:
… a secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy — this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil — is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.
The Cuban Missile Crisis which resulted from the discovery of this military escalation by the Soviets, almost resulted in a world war and nuclear annihilation.
The tables have rotated 180º. Now it is the US which is putting the survival of humankind at risk, escalating the conflict in Ukraine by dumping more and more weapons into the conflict zone, demonizing Putin and everything Russian, apparently urging the Ukrainians to avoid a negotiated peace and to fight to the bitter end.
Do not for a moment forget . . .
There were solutions in place to prevent the entire Ukrainian situation from evolving into the terrifying mess we now see. First, there was the Minsk II Agreement of February 12, 2015, signed by Ukraine, guaranteed by France, Germany and Russia. It was ignored by Ukraine, never implemented. There is speculation that it was the US which prompted the stonewalling. Then, December of 2020, Russia itself proposed very concrete steps, as draft treaties, that could be taken to defuse the tensions and guarantee greater security for all of Europe and the world. These were formally submitted to both the US and NATO in writing. They were dismissed. Now with the conflict in full swing, Russia has repeatedly made clear its current position on ending this. What the Russians is demand is no different than what Kennedy demanded of the USSR. This has also been flatly rejected.
From the outset of the crisis, Russia has been maligned, vilified, rejected, canceled, viciously attacked at every opportunity for merely wanting the assurances and concrete reductions to the threat posed by NATO and the US on its borders, just as JFK laid out subsequent to his announcement of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
(As a revealing aside, the comprehensive scale of the vilification and attempted isolation of Russia across the planet, even in spheres completely unrelated to politics — dance, sports, art, music, cultural exchange programs, space exploration, pet shows — could not have been spontaneous. Any multi-layered attack of this scale had to have been in the works for some time. At least, that’s how I see it.)
So . . .
What conclusion can we draw from all of this? What message are we actually hearing from Biden, Blinken, Stoltenberg, Johnson, Scholz, Macron, and the rest of the US puppets around the world?
I can see only one: US/NATO wants war with Russia. Which frankly, hardly comes as a surprise. From documents, white papers, policy statements, speeches by officials in the State Department and various administrations along the way, all easily accessed by just looking, the dismemberment of Russia and looting its vast and varied natural resources has been on the agenda for at least three decades.
Yes, folks . . .
It’s war. Not liberation. Not freedom and democracy. It’s war.
Compassion for Ukrainians victimized by Russia’s violence demonstrates that human hearts care. However, beneath the visible current of compassion there’s an alarming, dangerous dynamic at play.
What’s hair-raising about this crisis is not only the violence but the fact that US political leaders and media makers are not recognizing positive and negative motivations on both sides of conflict. Instead, they’re deliberately creating an inaccurate good vs. evil storyline, a storyline that ignites unwarranted, dangerous feelings of self-righteous hatred against Russia.
The US perpetually perceives its role in conflict as that of a heroic rescuer or innocent victim upholding humanity and freedom against evil persecutors. However, 245 years of US history reveal that this perception is fiction, a psychological construct. Psychological analysts Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward called the persecutor, victim, and rescuer scenario a “cultural script.”
Examination of 245 years of US history reveals that the perception of always being a good guy fighting evil is fiction, a psychological construct. In fact, good and bad, truths and lies invariably exist on both sides of conflict.
Nonetheless, to deceive others and perhaps themselves, US policymakers’ pattern of relentlessly legitimating their violence, deadly sanctions, and foreign coups by denying the validity of enemy grievances, hiding their own greed and aggressive motives, refusing to cooperatively negotiate, concealing enemy negotiation offers, fabricating lies, omitting significant facts, using false pretexts, and overlooking the disastrous results of a pseudo-religious faith in the problem-solving magic of weapons is so predictable that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more enraging, pathetic, boring, or nauseating.
Consider one persecutor-victim-hero drama that began in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, livid over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claimed it was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Actually, Afghanistan’s Marxist government, which had been trying to reform the extreme, unjust inequalities of wealth and land ownership in Afghanistan, had requested Soviet assistance against insurgents, but the USSR, the “evil persecutor,” didn’t want to send troops. When the Soviets finally complied, they explained it was because of secret US involvement in Afghanistan. The world called the Soviets liars.
Two decades later US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that Carter had begun aiding the insurgent mujahideen—the “heroes”—six months prior to the entry of the persecutors, the Soviets. A delighted Brzezinski knew this could provoke the Soviets to invade and get mired in their own “Vietnam.” Convinced of Soviet evil and mujahideen goodness, US policymakers ignored that the mujahideen skinned Soviet POWs alive.
And now we’re to believe that weapon shipments and sanctions are needed for the US to help rescue Ukraine from “evil” Russia.
The first step in convincing the world to believe the script’s good vs. evil dynamics is to depict Russia as the persecutor who’s motivated, not by fear, but by evil. No problem! Simply label Putin as paranoid and discount Russian fears as ludicrous: NATO’s expansion into Slavic lands, NATO—Ukraine military collaboration, US missile bases in eastern Europe, anti-Russian policies and prejudice in Ukraine, neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine, neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Ukraine’s police, military, and government, the manipulation of Ukraine by Western profit-seekers, and Western economic and political conquest—likely of Russia itself.
The next step is to paint the US as a heroic rescuer motivated purely by integrity and compassion. Simple! Muffle up all greed-related motives for antagonizing Russia: US weapon industry profits, NATO’s agenda for bases on the Black Sea, IMF goals, ExxonMobil’s coveting Black Sea fossil fuel deposits, and Biden’s connections with Ukraine’s largest natural gas corporation. Then, conceal US hopes to dominate the global energy trade, maintain the dollar as the international energy trade currency, displace Russia from Europe’s gas market, shut down Nord Stream 2, and export fracked liquefied natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.
Also ignored are the biases and aims of those social and business circles who are forever dictating US foreign policy according to their pecuniary priorities and uncooperative, control-oriented habits of international relations. President Biden’s administration, for example, includes many members of the Alliance for Securing Democracy—with an advisory board that combines neoconservatives with liberal hawks, Albright Stonebridge Group—with its interest in Russian business acquisitions, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS, whose donors include multiple weapon corporations, the European Union, US Department of Defense, Finland’s Defense Ministry, Amazon, Google, and ExxonMobil, was formerly led by President Biden’s current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, co-founded the conquest-seeking neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Yet we’re to assume that donors’ priorities aren’t skewing foreign policy in dysfunctional ways.
With Russia’s fears dismissed and US greed disguised, the good vs. evil script is further strengthened by permitting only shallow public analysis. For example, how do we know that Russia wasn’t deliberately provoked so that the ulterior goals of certain American social circles could be advanced under the guise of nobly responding to Russia’s aggression? The topic isn’t permitted into discussion.
Another topic given quarter-inch deep analysis is Biden’s seemingly fair-minded declaration that each nation has the right to choose alliances. It’s an unusual statement coming from a “you’re with us or against us” nation that has punished or ousted national leaders who refused to sever alliances with the USSR or Cuba.
Nuland’s leaked tapes from 2014 (which mention Biden and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan) and a US record of instigating coups indicate that Americans were likely involved in promoting the bloody 2014 coup of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich to install anti-Russian leadership agreeable to European Union and NATO ties. So does Biden’s “right to choose alliances” proclamation apply to nations before a US-approved coup or only afterwards?
Another enraging example of shallow analysis is the opinion falsely parroted by US “experts” that Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” lays bare Putin’s imperialist vision for Ukraine and his lack of recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Whether the experts are deliberately lying or lack reading comprehension skills, their claim is false and, given the self-righteous hatred their claim generates, utterly irresponsible.
Nowhere in the essay does Putin speak of conquering Ukraine or refusing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin specifically describes the relationship between the US and Canada as the type of relationship Russia seeks with Ukraine. When he speaks of “unity,” he’s not speaking of dissolving Ukraine’s political sovereignty. He’s speaking of cultural and historical ties between the two nations.
Putin’s description of the Bolsheviks’ creation of borders never suggests that he’s doing away with them. It’s possible he’s implying that Donetsk, Lugansk, and certainly Crimea have large Russian populations and do not necessarily belong in Ukraine, especially if Ukraine’s post-coup government is harboring neo-Nazism and installing language and indigenous people policies of a deliberate anti-Russian nature. Note that Ukraine and the US are the only two nations in the UN to vote against the recent resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism.
Of course, US policymakers are not uncomfortable with Nazism and, following WWII, employed one thousand Nazis to spy on Russia. And it was US banks and companies such as Ford, General Motors, and du Pont that opportunistically helped fund Hitler’s war arsenal. Even in 1973, the US worked with pro-Nazi collaborators and US corporate funds to plant protests, propaganda, economic sabotage, and violence that climaxed in the CIA’ s horrific 9/11/73 coup of Chile’s Salvador Allende. It’s not surprising that in 2014, Russian news sources claimed that US private military contractors were training right-wing Ukrainian extremists.
In his essay, Putin clearly states his wish to negotiate with Ukraine, but not with Ukrainian leaders who are mere representatives of Western profiteers eager to use Ukraine’s land and resources for their own benefit. But, of course, US commentators either ignore the statement or, forgetting US history, discount Putin’s fears of Western profiteering as conspiracy theory.
Double standards also fortify the script. Russia’s invasions are motivated by belligerence, never legitimate fears, while US invasions are motivated by legitimate fears, never belligerence. Same behavior, different judgment.
Headlines scream of savage Russian war crimes. TV reporters interview sobbing Ukrainians. Yet US, NATO, and Ukrainian war crimes are barely publicized, their victims ignored. Same actions, different judgment. To learn about US war crimes and Afghan and Iraqi suffering, you’ve got to read investigative reporters’ books.
American groupthink, inflated by its self-righteous role in the script, and seeming to borrow from middle-school social dynamics, jeers and smears President Putin’s every word as absurd and staged. But we’re to trust Biden as honest, unstaged, unconcealing. No proof is needed. Just faith in the script.
Putin’s wish to protect Donetsk and Lugansk, self-declared republics since 2014, and end Kiev’s 8-year war that has killed 14,000 is automatically mocked as false pretext for conquest. Yet US wishes to protect Ukraine from Russia are trusted as caring, without ulterior design. The role of private military contractors, NATO, and the US in escalating civil war and provoking Russia by arming Ukraine with billions in weapons since 2014 rather than committing to non-violently resolve Ukraine’s internal conflict remains shamefully unassessed.
The consequences of belief in this drama? The US habitually uses exaggerated fears of evil enemies as false justification for colossal military budgets, NATO expansion, more military bases, troops, weapons, and nukes—all of which pour gasoline on the world tinderbox of tension, drain desperately-needed funding, and fail to resolve conflict.
If evil is equated with enemies, it becomes deceptively simple for “heroes” to champion goodness: bomb enemies into submission, impose deadly sanctions, strangulate funding, send weapons, engineer coups. But none of these methods nurture goodness. The truth is, those convinced they’re fighting evil are frequently blinded to the immorality and injustice of their own actions against people who aren’t so evil after all.
The good vs. evil script is also unjust because it enables the “innocent” to get away with all they’ve done to exacerbate conflict. The script can even enable the “innocent,” including Biden administration neoconservatives and liberal hawks, to slickly seize power, resources, and markets from those deemed evil.
US leaders’ promotion of this good vs. evil storyline appears compassionate, but it isn’t against killing. It isn’t about justice. It’s about pushing a script that provides pretext on the part of those proclaiming their own goodness to inflict injustice and violence against Russia and Putin, already verbally crucified by a mob of liars. It’s about solidifying our allegiance to US policymakers’ decisions about whom we should kill and whom we should cry for. Yet policymakers step beyond Constitutional grounds when they use their power to turn our hearts on and off, to bait us to hate some and love others to serve their greed for Mid-Eastern, Ukrainian, and Russian wealth.
We’ve got to scrap the script and view conflict impartially. We deserve accurate, sophisticated information about conflict, not propaganda that teaches us to hate. We need full truth to help us ground irrational fears of bad guys, cure the sickness of greed, and offer caring and friendship, not just for those falsely deemed innocent and heroic, but for all of us, with 360◦ of empathy, all the way around the world.
As one who has followed Olympic women’s figure skating, especially since Michelle Kwan (ironically a Chinese-American), I was—as an egalitarian feminist when it comes to sports—excited to learn that there was a 15-year-old Russian woman skater, Kamila Valieva, who could do effortless quad jumps. Waiting in anticipation of her first Olympic performance, I listened to commentators and former US skaters Tara Lipinsky and Johnny Weir rave about her spectacular talent. They told the audience that we were about to see “the best skating in the world”…that “a talent like this comes around once in a lifetime.” They found her first performance in the short skate “incredible… flawless… perfect in every way.” It was, they said, a rare privilege to watch her perform: “she will have an amazing legacy.” Days later they would say nothing watching her perform.
Weir and Lipinski were disgusted. They said she should not be there. It was so unfair to the other skaters. They were too sickened to even watch her. What happened? The Empire and its allies, based on a highly questionable positive drug test, declared her a “doper.” She was booed, harassed. And she finally (literally) fell. The Russians should obviously not have the first female Olympic quad jumper. The Russians were taking far too many gold medals. This whole spectacle was an intersection of hegemonic American world politics and ruthless patriarchy. Women athletes had become enemies, and thus victims, of Empire. USA! USA!
The US has always had a need to be first—to put it mildly. Any coverage of Olympic or international games I’ve ever watched features US athletes and almost never anyone else. President Jimmy Carter got the ball rolling with his 1980 boycott of the Olympics in the Soviet Union. Under Carter the Cold War had worsened because of factors like American criticism of Soviet alleged abuses of human rights and the Afghan crisis—therefore the controversial move to ignore the Olympics’ so-called non-political philosophy. American views of Russian athletics did not improve: the alleged Russian Doping Scandals began around 2008 and are still going. In 2008, Russian track and field athletes were suspended from competition because of supposed doping, cheating, cover-ups, even “state-sponsored” doping.
A 2015 New York Times article cited an ex-chief of a so-called Russian anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who claimed that samples were doctored so that several Russian gold medal winners in the 2014 winter games in Sochi could be victors. Members of the Russian Sports Ministry thought it an April Fools’ joke, done for “purely political reasons” and threatened to sue the Times. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had asked the accuser, Mr. Rodchenkov, to resign years before, for taking bribes, and since 2012 he had lived in L A. Because of such allegations, the World Athletics Federation suspended the Russian Athletic Federation in 2015, but let “clean athletes” participate under “neutral status”: no Russian flags or anthems. In 2019, 2020 and 2021, more accusations were brought against various Russian sports officials for “falsifying documents” and etc., and thus the suspensions continued.
President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have strongly denied the allegations, calling them a political weapon of the West. Any appeals from Russian athletes have been denied. Some argued all countries cheated, why single out Russia? Others thought the Russians were being framed to keep their very strong athletes from competitions. It does seem odd that once your athletes were so scrutinized you would be careful to stop “doping.” In fact, the stated goal of the Russian Sports Ministry at the end of 2021 was –once again—to have the Russian Athletic Federation and Anti-Doping Agency reinstated. The “West” has remained hostile toward Russian athletics. And this most certainly included Russian ice skaters: a sport where Russia has been at the very top for years.
Kamila Valieva had to skate under the same restraints that all Russian athletes face. But because she was so incredibly good, the skating world simply had to acknowledge her. In looking at her biographical data—there’s not much! She’s only 15; born in April of 2006 in Kazan, Russia. And she has a Pomeranian named Lena, a gift from a fan. Before she was five years old, her mother had her in gymnastics, ballet and skating, but after age five, it was only skating. In her first season out of junior ranking she had risen far above her opposition. She is the fourth woman to land a quadruple jump in competition and the first to do it in Olympic competition. Valieva set world records on her path to Grand Prix titles in Vancouver and Sochi, and the European Championships in Tallinn in January of this year. In Beijing the expectations for Kamila Valieva were very high. As one Russian journalist put it, she was so good in her short skate routine in Beijing that “even some western media outlets often so begrudging with their praise of Russian athletes were forced—perhaps through gritted teeth—to lavish praise on Valieva.” And when she competed next, for the Russian team, she did become the first woman to land a quad in Olympic history. But very soon after that, it was rumored there were “doping allegations” against Kamila Valieva. A test taken in December was only revealed just then—in the midst of the March Olympics. It seemed the Russians may not fare so well after all.
Of course, the US also insisted on besting the Chinese athletes in Beijing, but added a nasty political narrative about their host. Sports analysts like Mike Tirico were pressed into service as experts on alleged Chinese abuses vs. Uyghurs (abuses debunked by reporters like Max Blumenthal), their “authoritarian” government, misguided Covid protocols, etc. American politicians and media had already prepped the US audience to be anti-Asian generally, by these supposed abuses and the potential of China becoming an even greater economic power—and unapologetically socialist as well. The COVID pandemic was their fault too; President Trump calling it “Kung Flu” or the “Chinese virus.” It was embarrassing to listen to the vitriolic commentary by US “analysts” with their long recanting of Chinese faults and crimes. Our ugly history with China started with the US involvement in the Opium War through the dangerous gradual encirclement of present-day China with US warships and bases placed on numerous unwilling Pacific islands, as John Pilger’s brilliant film The Coming War on China illustrates. And the US had tried to help their bad faith anti-China Olympic campaign with a “diplomatic boycott” (which didn’t really catch on).
Eileen Gu
Another young woman athlete, Chinese-American Eileen Gu, also became a victim of the Empire’s anger. Gu is 18; she has a Chinese mother and was raised in San Francisco. A brilliant world class freestyle skier, she has medalled in X Games, the World Championship and the Youth Olympics. Gu announced in 2019 that she would represent China in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. But she wasn’t called a traitor until the Olympics drew near.
Gu has said that she welcomes the opportunity to draw people to winter sports. The Chinese cheered her everywhere, but Americans not so much. She was derided for taking advantage of “premier training” in the US and then abandoning the US for China. Tucker Carlson said she had betrayed her country and “renounced” her citizenship. The New York Times portrayed Gu as an “anti-hero of the feminist ideal” since she chose China which supposedly oppresses women. At the other end of the political spectrum, right-wing social media echoed Carlson’s sentiments in calling for Gu to leave the country for her betrayal. Gu won three Olympic medals in freestyle skiing, two gold and a silver. Unfortunately for USA her three medals added to China’s total of 15 (with nine gold), best ever for China in a winter Olympics.
Eileen Gu also faces anti-female prejudice since extreme sports has always been male-dominated, although women do compete alongside the men. Gu thinks “as a young biracial woman, it is super important to be able to push boundaries. . . those of the sport and those of the record books because that’s what paves the paths for the next generation of girls.” So why does the country where she lives give her an incredibly hard time? As professor of sport Simon Chadwick said, “Her success is being weaponized and used for geopolitical purposes. This is incredibly unfair because she’s an 18-year-old athlete with a dual heritage family who just wants to try her best and make her parents proud, and yet she’s being turned into a geopolitical weapon.” Journalist Danny Haiphong has argued that Eileen Gu has chosen the “wrong” side by choosing to compete for a non-white, communist country. She is assaulting “American exceptionalism” –being a traitor to the “empire’s civilizing mission.” She should not be skiing for the “Chinese devils.” But Gu insists (on her Instagram) she hopes “to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendship.” And she has said: “I am also a teenage girl. I do my best to make the world a better place, and I’m having fun while doing it.” Not what the Empire is about.
Vietnamese-American Haiphong also has pointed out that some American athletes were not going for the Empire’s narrative that the Chinese were being bad hosts—inferior food, lodging, unreasonable COVID protocols, and so on. Snowboarder Tessa Maud refuted American media’s narrative and talked of the warm welcome she’d received by Chinese volunteers and how she loved the local cuisine. Skier Aaron Blunk went so far as to criticize American media coverage of the games on Twitter as often “completely false.” He called Beijing one of the better Olympics he’s been in, including the COVID protocols, the hosting: “It’s been phenomenal.” So Twitter suspended his account. As Haiphong put it: “Humanizing China represents a direct threat to the new Cold War Agenda.” The US must control the narrative, and that included not allowing China, or Russia, to shine.
The Empire certainly succeeded in taking the shine from the great Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. Commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, who had just called Valieva the “best skater in the world” with a “talent that comes once in a lifetime,” were about to change their minds. At Beijing, Valieva’s performance in the short skate was “a thing of great beauty.” Weir and Lipinski thought it “incredible.” Weir gushed about the interview he had been granted by the young Valieva. Her second performance was a free skate for the Russian team. She fell once but the skate was historic because as noted, she became the first woman in history to land a quad at the Olympics. She finished 30 points ahead of second place Kaori Sakamoto. Weir and Lipinski could not find enough superlatives.
All awaited what would no doubt be another historic performance by Valieva in the ladies singles event. But then rumors began that the medal ceremony, with Russia winning gold and the US silver—would be delayed. And then that “a Russian skater” had a positive doping test. Then it leaked it was Kamila Valieva, in spite of IOC rules that any accusation against a “minor” must remain secret. A test taken on December 25, sent to a Swedish lab, showed minute traces of trimetazidine, an “illegal” heart drug which may have some positive effect on athletic performance, although many argue it would not help skaters. Valieva’s family and coaching team believed she may have been exposed to it through her grandfather, who took the drug. The Russian team also said she had repeatedly tested negative before and after the positive sample. They said she was innocent. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) panel ruled she would not be suspended from the competition. A further investigation would happen later, now scheduled to conclude by mid-August.
Kamila Valieva rallied to lead the field in the ladies short program. This was when stalwart patriots Lipinski and Weir were too disgusted to watch. I remember these stalwarts as being very nasty in speaking of the Russian skaters both during the Sochi (Russia) Olympics in 2014, and the 2018 PyeongChang (South Korea) games (where “cleared” Russians could skate). Some observers found them “a breath of fresh air,” but others as “mean, obnoxious, distracting.” At any rate, they were outraged Valieva was allowed to perform. She was “ruining everything.” Their only comment after her performance was “she skated.” Getting their wish for her downfall, the scandal finally impacted her free skate and she finished fourth after stumbles and falls. Unfortunately for USA! Russian Alexandra Trusova won silver. Former Russian ice dancer champion Alexander Zhulin has said that international sports authorities will have to live with “ruining” Kamila Valieva’s Olympic dreams. He had never “seen Kamila so lost.” The IOC and WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) “destroyed and removed the biggest star of figure skating.” The December 25 test was revealed after team Russia’s brilliant performance, capped by Valieva’s skate, won gold. It does seem like an American Empire kind of move.
Valieva’s coact Eteri Tutberidze, who, along with Kamila’s team, was (incredibly) criticized by the IOC’s Thomas Bach, for being “too cold.” Tutberidze said Kamila was “our star.” “Those who smiled yesterday—today left the stands demonstrably ignoring and pouncing like jackals.” There were reporters, especially the British, who followed her around at practice, yelling “Are you a doper?” Valieva addressed her Beijing experience in two “emotional instagrams” in late February. She thanked her coaches for “helping me to be strong.” And she thanked all who “were with me during this tough period . . who did not let me lose heart. . and who believed in me.” A few weeks later she was on the ice again.
Kamila participated in the “Channel One Cup” Russian skating (competitive) exhibition, since Russian skaters were banned from the Worlds. Valieva skated a “simplified” program, but said the experience of being out on the ice was “exhilarating.” Anna Shcherbakova won the women’s event. Valieva has said that the Olympics should not be “idealized” and her “journey is just beginning.” In a recent interview with “People Talk” she said she can be “cocky, obnoxious, stubborn, insecure.” But also “sociable, cheerful, active, and of course, romantic…” In skating programs, her coaches see her in “lyrical images,” but she wants to be “different in programs: a hooligan, daring, bold.” She is a typical teenager, but also very intelligent, a brilliant athlete and a targeted enemy of Empire.
Sportswriters can be very effective operatives for Empire. My favorite is probably Christine Brennan. I had admired Brennan as one of the team of reporters on HBO’s “Real Sports,” although unfortunately now they seem more apt to take a corporate line than do the critical reporting they used to do. Brennan accused Valieva, and Russia, of turning the Winter Games “into a bizarre and troubling fiasco” because of their “state-sponsored doping.” She said Valieva “would have been favored to win” the Worlds in Montpelier, but she “crumbled under the scrutiny of her positive drug test.” When Americans won the pairs skating title at Worlds, their first since 1979, Brennan wrote: “No Russia? No China? No problem.” And “few will miss them.” The Beijing medal count had USA with 25 medals, behind Norway, Russia, Germany and Canada, much like their finish at PyeongChang. The Russians had 32 medals, with six gold; the Chinese had 15, with nine gold; USA! had a paltry 25, with eight gold, well behind Russia. Totally unacceptable.
Of course, by the World Championships, more than Valieva and her fellow skaters were ousted from competition. It was all Russia, all the time—everyone Russian was out because the World Federations of all the sports, influenced and/or bludgeoned into it, had banned them all because of the Russian military action in Ukraine. This was the Russian response to being encircled with troops and NATO forces, and a Nazi-led government provided by the US in Ukraine in 2014, which had been attacking the Russian-language population of eastern Ukraine since that 2014 coup. An unprecedented campaign of Western propaganda and lies is in full swing, definitely McCarthyite in its depth and with parallel lasting and dangerous results to come. In the 1950s Ethel Rosenberg was executed for being a communist wife—a wife who either evilly influenced her husband Julius to reveal atomic secrets to the Russians or did not, as was her duty, stop him from doing so. Julius Rosenberg, executed with his wife, was reputedly worried that if the US gained too much power without a balance from the Soviets, it would lead to a dangerous situation. And he was right. The US government has become an Empire that will tolerate no state competitor, nor even states who will not line up and stay with the American Empire’s plans. This is very clear in the world of sport—certainly in the supposedly apolitical Olympic world.
To punish Russia, the US/Europe have gone totally insane with their bans and sanctions. Many sanctions such as Russian energy, will only punish Europe; others involve outright piracy as in US allies helping themselves to Russian yachts. The list goes on, but in the world of sport—athletes from Russia and its close ally Belarus are banned “until further notice” from international skiing, track and field events, tennis, basketball, aquatic sports, volleyball, curling, hockey, rugby, football (soccer), and of course, skating. Many of these sports have Russian champions, and they, as Christine Brennan put it, “will not be missed.” A few officials have objected, and paid for it. Russian sports officials say they will “temporarily” develop their own competitions, with foreign athletes. They say the western world is committing “sporting genocide” against its athletes.
So Kamila Valieva and company will skate at home, and Eileen Gu will still be considered a traitor by many Americans. The hate expressed by Tara Lipinski and Christine Brennan is too easily tapped by the American sports world. Here is hegemonic politics, and ruthless patriarchy and racism, coming together. And here are two remarkably strong and level-headed young women athletes who are braving the results of being who they are. In its overwhelming power, the US Empire has made evil all things Chinese and Russian, and women athletes have not been spared the weaponizing of that hate.
Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.
It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.
The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.
In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!
Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.
But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.
These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.
For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be, just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.
The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis
The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.
Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.
The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.
War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project
The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.
It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.
In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.
In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.
The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.
No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.
This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:
Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war
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.
Then all cried with one accord,
‘Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’
— “The Mask of Anarchy,” Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the American ruling establishment embarked on a policy of backing radical anti-nation state ideologies (henceforth to be referred to as ANSIs) with the goal of dismantling national identities and leaving failed states in their wake. Only through acknowledging both the extraordinary dangers that this entails, and the fact that the process emanates from powerful transnational capitalist forces rather than from “the left” (which once referenced a Marxist or social democratic position), can the chaos within the West as well as US foreign policy in the post-Soviet era be understood.
If left unchecked, an ANSI will act as a cancer and metastasize, until the national identity it has infiltrated has reached the point of dissolution. Indeed, it will either eradicate or be eradicated; there is no other alternative. A curious phenomenon in the panoply of neoliberal barbarities is that those who reject extremism are inevitably labeled as extremists themselves. For instance, the American and Canadian truckers who are defending the informed consent ethic, the principle of bodily autonomy, and the Nuremberg Code, without which a democracy cannot survive, are guilty of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia,” to quote Canada’s puerile prime minister – i.e., it is they who are the extremists.
Serbs that endured over seventy days of NATO bombing, and who suffered genocidal attacks at the hands of Croatian neo-Ustasha soldiers and Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists were also “extremists;” their oppressors, “freedom fighters.”
Identity politics, a deranged yet powerful ANSI which has cataclysmically destabilized American society, and is likewise being used as a battering ram to turn much of the West into a Tower of Babel while dismantling the rule of law, is predicated on the notion that any opposition to unrestricted immigration and the jettisoning of the American canon is indicative of “white supremacy.” This zealotry has been taken to its inescapable conclusion in the New York City public schools, where non-native speakers of English are hanging from the chandeliers, and a curriculum which demonizes American letters, British literature, classics of Western Civilization, civics, and the history of Western art – the foundational pillars of our civilization – is hegemonic.
Not only has this brought about a collapse of the society, but those for whom this curriculum purports to help – Americans of color and immigrant youth – are rendered illiterate, both culturally and intellectually. What better time than the 21st century to use one’s knowledge of the Nuremberg Code, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War (particularly prior to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan), and the role played by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War? The ignorance, alienation, tribalism, atomization, and dehumanization fomented by the multicultural society (essentially the inversion of white supremacy), has spawned a younger generation drowning in amnesia and amorality – a zombie class which is extremely amenable to brainwashing by the presstitutes.
Another example of an ANSI is the problem of Sunni fundamentalism in Syria, as Syria is comprised of not only Sunnis, but Alawites, Jews, Christians, Kurds, as well as other religious and ethnic minorities, all of which would be regarded as nonpersons by the jihadis should they sack Damascus. There are also considerable numbers of Sunnis in Syria that reject the radicalism of ISIS, Jaysh al-Islam, and Jabhat al-Nusra. In other words, the Syrian government had no choice but to outlaw these groups, as there is no way that they could peacefully coexist with a modern and secular Syrian state.
Multiple ANSIs were introduced into Iraq during the US military occupation. In commenting on the animus between the Baath Party and the Dawa Party, The Oklahoman writes:
The parties’ rivalry dates back more than four decades. The two groups have traditionally held opposing views on how Iraq should be run, with Dawa calling for an Islamic Shiite state, and the Baath party having a secular, pan-Arab ideology.
Unlike Iran, Iraq is not a predominantly Shiite state. Consequently, the rise of the Dawa Party, which was dominant in Iraq from 2003 to 2018, disenfranchised Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians, thereby facilitating Kurdish separatism as well as the birth of ISIS. In a similar vein, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India undermines a cohesive national identity and poses a threat to democratic institutions. Democracy demands freedom of speech, yet cannot become a synonym for dogmatism, sectarianism, and tribalism.
The Branch Covidian coup d’état has facilitated the emergence of a global cult which is anchored in a contempt for informed consent and which poses an existential threat to democracy. This contempt for the informed consent ethic is rooted in the notion that human beings are the property of the state, and that the state has a right to do whatever it wants to its subjects medically. Hence, this is a totalitarian position. Once a totalitarian position has been embraced, its acolytes invariably abandon the world of reason. This explains why you can send your indoctrinated relatives countless links to articles showing that masks and lockdowns don’t work, that the mRNA vaccines are dangerous and do not confer immunity, and that Covid can be treated with repurposed drugs, all to no avail. They have turned their backs, not only on democracy, but on logic, and are operating on a purely primordial emotion. Indeed, the irrationality of totalitarianism is tied to the fact that those who seek to destroy vital democratic pillars, such as the First Amendment and informed consent, are not only fighting to destroy the freedom of their adversaries but are fighting to destroy their own freedoms as well.
One might argue that the polarization that has ensued following the imposition of medical mandates was an unforeseen consequence of the Branch Covidian response, yet this phenomenon is fundamentally no different than inciting internecine strife within a country that has fallen into Washington’s crosshairs. Alas, it is another mechanism of the age-old divide and conquer strategy.
The Western elites’ post-Soviet love affair with smashing civilizations to the wall came to Ukraine in the winter of 2014, when the US-backed Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” saw the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych, which precipitated the disintegration of Ukraine’s constitutional order. In the Western part of the country there has long been a considerable amount of support for Ukrainian nationalism, whose disciples regard themselves as “Aryans” and who romanticize Stepan Bandera, a fanatical leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, rabid Russophobe and Nazi collaborator. This putsch allowed the heirs to the Ukrainian nationalists that collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War to seize power in Kiev. As there are millions of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, this could only lead to the country becoming a failed state.
Consider this extravaganza of ludicrousness: we have been told that truckers protesting medical mandates are “Nazis,” while the Western elites have been supporting a neo-Nazi government in Ukraine for eight years. No less galling, the Branch Covidian contempt for informed consent has its roots in the Nazi medical ethos.
On May 2, 2014, Banderite pogromists set fire to the Odessa Trade Union House, where locals who were protesting the nationalist coup were holed up, savagely beating and shooting those who attempted to escape. This incident, which led to the loss of over forty lives, was deeply symbolic of the new regime, its lawlessness and savagery, and its visceral hatred of Russians. In the West it would be unthinkable for there to be statues and monuments honoring prominent Nazis and Nazi collaborators. However, in Ukraine this is all too common. That Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, and Zelensky have proven adroit in speaking in the language of neoliberalism fails to alter the fact that the real power in post-Maidan Ukraine lies unequivocally with the Banderites.
A recent Bloomberg article titled “Russian Fleet Approach has Ukraine’s Port City Odessa Bracing” embodies the pervasive ignorance of the Western media, as Odessa is a Russian speaking city whose civilian inhabitants would mostly be delighted should the Russian military turn up. Not to be outdone, the BBC laments the fact that the residents of Kiev have been forced to spend a couple of nights in basements and metro stations. Where have the BBC, CNN, The New York Times,The Guardian, and other esteemed institutes of skulduggery been when Donbass residents were forced by a genocidal NATO-backed regime to live in basements for eight years? Incredibly, the songs and music videos of the Russian singer Artem Grishanov offer better journalistic coverage of post-Maidan Ukraine than all the Pentagon storytellers put together (see here, here, here and here). Note the total absence of any context in the mass media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: do we discuss the Invasion of Normandy in this way?
This coup, which brought a bloodthirsty ultranationalist cabal to power, proceeded to ban the formerly influential pro-Russian Party of Regions as well as the Communist Party, and has taken steps to undermine the language rights of Russian speakers. When the oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk refused to recognize the new junta, the Ukrainian military, backed by neo-Nazi units such as the Azov Battalion and the Aidar Battalion, and supported by the no less loathsome Right Sector and Svoboda Party, placed the Donbass under a medieval siege, a siege that has caused terrible suffering, but was doomed to fail militarily due to the fact that Donetsk and Lugansk share a border with Russia. These paramilitary groups have committed crimes against humanity, operate with minimal oversight, and have, together with regular Ukrainian forces, long been attempting to “ethnically cleanse” the Donbass of its ethnically Russian inhabitants in the same way that the Croatian government of Franjo Tudjman forcibly expelled 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina region in 1995 (see here, here, and here). Many thousands of Donbass residents have lost their lives at the hands of these Western-backed gangs, which delight in shelling residential neighborhoods, and which have been green-lighted to commit atrocities with impunity. Videos of neo-Nazis boasting of how they are abusing and torturing captured Russian soldiers, and how they will hunt down and punish Ukrainians accepting Russian aid, is yet another sad reminder of who invariably benefits from US government largesse.
Putting Ukraine, a country that has long-standing cultural, linguistic, and civilizational ties to Russia that go back centuries in the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, has served to weaken Russia and transformed the country into a dangerous Western proxy. The mass media’s histrionics over the Russian military’s alleged targeting of residential neighborhoods is preposterous indeed, as this has long been an integral part of US imperial policy, as evidenced by relentless and indiscriminate US bombing campaigns conducted over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, and even when conducting air raids in the heart of Europe during the Second World War. Many Russians, in fact, have family in Ukraine – hence their genuine desire to not do this. Moreover, the Russian military has made a concerted effort to help civilians evacuate the war zone via humanitarian corridors, avenues of escape which have been repeatedly cut off by nationalists who have been accused by refugees of holding them hostage and even firing on those attempting to flee the fighting.
A substantial percentage of the Ukrainian population was hoodwinked into believing that for eight years they have been at war with Russia when they have been massacring their fellow countrymen in the Donbass. This underscores the mass hysteria that has gripped a vast swath of the country following the Maidan coup, and is indicative of how a mass psychosis can seize hold of a population once an ANSI has been imposed through the use of a hijacked media and education system.
Perhaps forgetting that Russia has nuclear weapons, Adam Kinzinger has called for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine, a country whose airspace is controlled by Russia. Elaborating on the there-is-no-difference-between-Russia-and-Somalia theme, Sean Hannity has called for drone strikes to be carried out against Russian military convoys, arguing that the Russians wouldn’t be able to figure out who did it; which leads one to wonder which country has more lunatics per capita: Ukraine or the United States? Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he wrote in Beyond Good And Evil that “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
Following the onset of the Russian intervention, the freedom-loving government in Kiev opened the doors to its prisons, granting convicts an early release should they agree to fight “the Moskal.” Empowered by this maelstrom of anarchy, heavily armed bandits are free to join their Banderite brethren, embrace “democracy,” and terrorize the locals at will. Fittingly, the new draconian sanctions directed at Russia are being called “the Halting Enrichment of Russian Oligarchs and Industry Allies of Moscow’s Schemes to Leverage its Abject Villainy Abroad Act;” a strange name, yet one which happens to form the acronym HEROIAM SLAVA, a Ukrainian fascist greeting meaning “Glory to the Heroes,” and which is comparable to “Sieg Heil.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Russophobia in the US is starting to resemble the Russophobia in Ukraine itself, with Lindsey Graham openly calling for Putin to be assassinated (which doesn’t constitute “hate speech,” incidentally, according to Twitter).
The government in Kiev has recently spoken of reconsidering its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum and obtaining nuclear weapons, a threat that undoubtedly contributed to Moscow’s recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. There has also been speculation that one of the objectives of the denazification campaign is the elimination of biowarfare labs, as the Russian government has been accusing the US of operating these facilities near its borders for quite some time (a claim not denied by Maidan architect Victoria Nuland). A false flag chemical weapons attack à la the White Helmets is a real and present danger.
The Kremlin has been trying for decades to have a respectful dialogue with the West about NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, and has repeatedly attempted to come to terms with its “Western partners” on establishing a new European security architecture which would take into account Moscow’s legitimate security concerns. The Kremlin’s attempts at getting Washington to cease its deliveries of arms to the murderers and sociopaths in Kiev, coupled with Putin’s tireless attempts at getting the Banderite regime to implement the Minsk agreements, have proven no less futile. Moscow will not permit the Banderite regime to obtain nuclear weapons, it will not permit the Donbass to be overrun, and it will not allow Ukraine to join NATO – each constitutes a non-negotiable red line.
In many ways it was inevitable that the Russian military would be sent into the Donbass, as the position of Donetsk and Lugansk has grown increasingly precarious due to the relentless influx of NATO weaponry, and they have been pleading with Moscow for protection ever since the commencement of hostilities. The decision to execute a reverse regime change operation is likely due to the Russian elite concluding that if they were to leave the Banderite junta in place, it would grow increasingly dangerous over time as its military capabilities expand exponentially – a kind of illiterate Russophobic Israel at one’s doorstep, if you will. If thousands of Americans were being killed and tortured at the hands of a tyrannical Moscow-backed puppet government in Mexico, would Washington have the patience to pursue diplomacy for the greater part of a decade?
The Russian military needs to get in and out of Kiev, a hornet’s nest of Banderivtsi, as efficiently as possible. The longer they remain, the greater the likelihood that the CIA will entrap them in an Afghan-style quagmire, as Western intelligence agencies are working around the clock to flood Ukraine with as many private military contractors, jihadis, and neo-Nazi volunteers as possible. Should Ukraine cease to exist, balkanization would certainly be preferable to the country being pulled inexorably into a never-ending vortex of violence as transpired in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is difficult to see how the country could be put back together, with one half comprised of Russophobes; and the other, of Russophiles.
The Western elites’ growing reliance on the use of ANSIs as a form of unconventional warfare threatens civilization both at home and abroad, and if directed at Russia or China, could unleash a nuclear war from which there would be no survivors. Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton, Washington has worked long and hard to smoke a hibernating bear out of its den. Through the resurrection of the ghost of Bandera, at long last, they have succeeded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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,
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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:
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?
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”
It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.
It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).
My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.
The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:
Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.1
Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.
I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.
In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.
In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And, of course, there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.
The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgen of historical awareness knows.
The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”
Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.
After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:
Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.
Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the lead up to this tragedy. All the current wringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.
The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
“Engulfed” is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades-long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.
In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.
Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was, of course, a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.
Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.
The merry-go-round goes round and round.
I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.
I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.
The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.
I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.
But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae picks up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:
Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next century, but in some ways ahead of secondary catastrophes such as the obscene, raging inequality between peoples and nations unleashed by President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the global conglomerations of immense corporate and plutocratic power.
Why is it, then, that the three most important power alliances of the Western and Eurasian worlds—North America, led by the United States alongside its “Trudeauesque” poodle and with the problematic connivance of Mexico’s López Obrador; the European Union and post-Brexit UK; and the Russian Federation, in wobbly alliance with China—consider it worthwhile to suffer intensification of the risks of nuclear annihilation? This, in the face of an abundance of routes available for peaceful settlement, given a minimum of goodwill and genuine humanitarian concern?
In the case of Russia, we know very well what these reasons are because Russia has told us—clearly, consistently, loudly, and transparently—for more than 15 years. First and foremost, Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward. Secretary of State James Baker gave this commitment at least three times on February 9 that year. This was in return for Russian acquiescence to the tragic error of German reunification, paving the way for an accelerating renaissance of an aggressively militarized and potentially neo-Nazi European hegemon.
President George H. W. Bush (left) with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (right) in 1989. (Credit: theguardian.com)
Yet in place of the 16 members of NATO that existed in 1990, we today have 30, and Ukraine is more and more desperately knocking on the door, conceivably to be followed by Georgia, Finland and Sweden. Current U.S. President Joe Biden, whose son enjoyed a senior place on the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma, played a key role in that process of enlargement. The U.S. and Russia possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 4,000 each.
But the United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S. (each power also has fleets of nuclear submarines: in 2018 the U.S. had 14, against Russia’s 12). The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.
Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.
In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or other form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine, and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in their book The Untold History of the United States, relate several instances in which U.S. presidents have given serious consideration to their use. This featured in Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.
The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.
In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War. This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies (e.g., Britain, France, Israel) and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents (e.g., North Korea and Iran).
It is an adversary which fails to keep even its most important promises (e.g., about not allowing NATO to expand), a country which abrogates important treaties (as did Bush in abrogating the ABM treaty in 2002), and which has crowned itself as the rightful hegemon, entitled to crush any power, global or regional, that would dare challenge its hegemonic status (as in the “Wolfowitz doctrine” 1992, progenitor of the Bush doctrine in 2002 by which the U.S. entitles itself to preemptive war).
The U.S.’s credibility in international relations is profoundly undermined by: a long history of invasions and occupations of other powers—most egregiously, perhaps, in the case of Afghanistan 2001-2021, or that of Iraq (2003-2021), which can be counted along with many dozens of other instances since World War Two; overt and covert military interventions, with or without the consent of legitimate authorities, often reckless and cruel; fomenting of regime-change “color revolutions” as in Ukraine 2004 and 2014; and universal meddling with elections and political processes as in the activities of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, and its parent Strategic Communications Limited, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Not least is its equally long-established history of lying, just about everything, but particularly in matters of war. The Pentagon Papers, exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 with respect to the Vietnam War, or the so-called Afghanistan Papers, gathered into book form by Craig Whitlock in 2021, should be sufficient cause for considerable alarm in this respect.
There is a context here of a profound U.S.-led, multi-media and multi-targeted anti-Russia propaganda campaign that dates to the accession to the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000. It builds on previous relentless Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union (which had us all thinking this titanic struggle was all about capitalism versus communism when it was really just about who could steal the most from the developing world), and on an even more distant anti-Russian campaign stretching back at least as far as the Crimean War of 1853-56—all chronicled by Gerald Sussmann, among others, in 2020.
To this must now be added recent unfounded or presumptive anti-Russian harassment regarding an incessant and unlikely litany of all manner of accusations. These include the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; purported collusion with Syrian President Assad over the use of chemical weapons; and, the most dramatic fable of all, alleged Russian hacking of DNC/DCCC servers and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Russia has had every reason for deep distrust of the United States and its NATO and European allies. In addition, as I have chronicled elsewhere, we must take account of US/EU/NATO abetment to the illegal Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014 that was staged against a democratically elected president in 2014, just months away from scheduled elections, and whose muscle was provided by long-established Ukrainian neo-Nazi movements implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of protestors in Kiev and Odessa. To secure “legitimacy” and to stuff the coup legislature with their own people, the new leaders were obliged to ban the country’s major political parties, including the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party.
Terrified by the anti-Russian threats of the coup leaders, the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea (including Sebastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port, held on long-lease from Ukraine and where Russia was entitled to maintain thousands of soldiers) voted to secede from Ukraine and to seek annexation by Russia.
In the significantly pro-Russian Donbass, citizens established the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev has never deigned to negotiate directly with the republics, with its own citizens, but has instead, having lost the initial war, violently subjected residents to extensive shelling (with most of the casualties taking place in the republics) and spitefully withdrawn all social security protections.
Workers bury the dead in Slovyansk in Eastern Ukraine where mass graves were found (Source: hrw.org)
The republics did not seek annexation by Russia, nor did Russia entertain annexation. Instead, Russia negotiated the Minsk agreements through the “Normandy Round” in 2015-2016. This sought and agreed to greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. Unwilling or unable to combat its neo-Nazi extremists, Kiev proved unable to implement Minsk, nor did the international community, other than Russia, exert pressure on Kiev to make it happen.
It would have taken unusual credulity and naivety on the part of Russian leaders not to have concluded by 2022 that the U.S. and, with some exceptions, its NATO and EU allies, were resolutely and unforgivingly hostile to Russia.
Russia, having explored the possibility of accession to NATO in the 1990s and been rejected, resigned to the provocative continuation of NATO not just beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union—the very reason for NATO’s existence—but even beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It has been targeted close to its borders by U.S./NATO nuclear weapons that are mockingly and ludicrously described as defenses against Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear missiles, and routinely humiliated and threatened by massive annual NATO military exercises along its borders and the Black Sea.
Members of the U.S. Marine Corps perform military exercise in (now Russian-occupied) Kherson on July 28, 2021 (Source: reuters.com)
Further, it has to listen to Ukrainian President and former clown Volodymyr Zelensky plead for speedier access of Ukraine to NATO membership (extending just days ago to a demand for the placement of nuclear weapons in Ukraine) and for a no-fly zone.
As such it could have had no reasonable hope ever to be freed of the scourge of U.S./EU/NATO salivation for the break-up of the Russian Federation and unregulated freedom for Western capital, as prelude to the Western world’s ultimate confrontation with China.
Whether Russian military exercises on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine from the end of 2021 were intended from the beginning as a platform for invasion is not clear. The invasion may have been provoked by the intensification of Ukrainian army assaults against the Donbass.
Incessant, even hysterical, U.S. warnings of a Russian invasion may themselves have provoked exactly that outcome if it seemed to Russia that the United States was determined to stage any kind of provocation that would have made it impossible for Russia to resist.
Presuming, surely correctly, that the U.S./NATO has long expected and salivated for a conflict that would provide sufficient pretext for the extermination of the Russian Federation, Russia decided on a measure of preemptive advantage at a singular moment when Russia possibly enjoys nuclear superiority over the West because of its further advance (at budgets a small fraction of those enjoyed by its adversary, whose military procurement practices are rife with corruption) of hypersonic missiles and a developing alliance with China.
Putin has indicated willingness to keep moving until Russia conquers the entire territory of Ukraine. The more he can acquire, the more he can negotiate with. At the time of writing the areas under control resemble the buffer zone created by Turkey along its border with northwestern Syria and by the U.S. along Syria’s northeastern border. This seizure of the land of a sovereign nation to add to Turkish security from what it regards as the Kurdish threat, and which it is using to hold the most extremist jihadist groups that the West and others have exploited in their efforts to destabilize the Syrian government, did not occasion the squeals of indignation from Western media that we now hear from them with regard to Ukraine.
Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of March 1, 2022 (Source: bbc.com)
Nor did the U.S. grab for Syria’s oil fields, and for its most fertile agricultural land, under proxy Kurdish control. And when the refugees from the U.S. wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Libya reached the gates of Europe they were inhumanely humiliated and turned away (even allowing for a surprising measure of German generosity). Unlike whiter refugees from Ukraine into Poland and other neighbors. The oozing hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness is merely par for the course.
These considerations therefore help us to understand Russian preparedness to risk nuclear conflict. Indeed, it is possible that for Russia there is now no going back on the path to potential Armageddon. The decision to avert catastrophe has been thrown resolutely into the Western court. But what about the U.S. and its European allies? They are not in too great a hurry for the ultimate wet dream of Russian dissolution, although sooner would likely be more gratifying than later. For the moment, the conflict is well worth it, for as long as it is only Ukrainians who pay the ultimate price. Zelensky’s greatest folly has been to recklessly offer his country and its people as ground zero for World War Three.
Short-term benefits for the West include a potential fillip to Joe Biden’s otherwise steep decline in domestic popularity. War has been the eternal answer to internal instability. It is too soon to say that the Ukraine crisis will help bridge the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, but there is a chance of some measure of healing, perhaps just enough to weaken the hold of the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.
This in turn could be deeply reassuring to the military-industrial complex (or, as Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank complex) whose distrust for Trump’s wavering on Putin provided fertile ground for the success of the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the Russiagate saga.
Although Biden followed up on a shockingly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—alongside signs of a final exit from Iraq and from Syria—with a multi-billion dollar increase in the military budget, he has since advocated a further increase of 8% in 2022-2023.
Since this is close to the rate of inflation, the weapons lobby will doubtless require another 4% or so, if they are being modest (unlikely), and a sharp increase in European tension will not only boost their cause for a further budget increase but will greatly incentivize the demand for weapons for years to come.
The bloated U.S. 17-agency Intelligence community and its underworld of private contractors will be delighted that, for the first time in a generation, their intelligence (on the Russian invasion, at least) has been perceived by many to be correct, and that, for the first time in a generation, it is not a U.S. war of choice that must be lied about. Such a glorious moment of self-righteousness will go far in the propaganda business. So long as Intelligence can manipulate and coopt corporate, plutocratic, mainstream media, the extent and depth of previous U.S. evils need never prove an obstacle to beating the drums for perpetual war. The mainstream media can be relied upon to foreshorten the narrative, pull in the context, focus on only one side, demonize and personalize. Intelligence will always help with fabrication of what counts as “real.”
The Ukraine crisis upends the energy markets in a way that puts even broader smiles on the faces of fossil-fuel bosses. The forced closure of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to the rest of Europe will create an involuntary European appetite for (more expensive) U.S. LNG exports.
The brunt of energy price increases will be suffered more by Europe than by the United States. Combined with growing European dependence on the U.S., the impoverishment of Europe is to the U.S.’s advantage, under the scope of the Wolfowitz doctrine, and sustains the buffer between Russia and the continental U.S. Pressure on the U.S. to return to a policy of self-sufficiency in energy will reinvigorate public tolerance for fracking and drilling, for pipelines and spills and fires (if the world is going to end in any case.).
On the downside, from a U.S. perspective, higher energy prices will boost the Russian economy and sustain its servicing of Chinese and other Asian markets, provided they can work around U.S. sanctions (they will).
Ukraine is a test of Chinese resolve in its move toward Russia, reminding it of the economic threats to Chinese interests from U.S. sanctions in countries of the Belt and Road initiative. But this will not be sufficient to shift China from what must surely be its conclusion that the United States is irredeemably wedded to the vision of a perpetually unipolar U.S. world.
In Europe, the crisis will help Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson escape decapitation over the embarrassment of the “Partygate” scandal. It has already enhanced President Macron’s bid to appear statesmanlike in the face of upcoming elections in April, and his ability to ward off threats from the extreme right. But mainly, the crisis will benefit Germany which, in recent years, has broken free of its punitive post-war chains not only to burnish its long-established economic primacy but to rebuild and modernize its military, and to send arms to Ukraine. The sleazy proto-fascist governments of several new East European and former Soviet Union governments will feel similarly enabled and justified.
But all these short-term outcomes notwithstanding, nobody should discount the possibility, short of a robust peace agreement, of nuclear war. If not a nuclear war, then prepare for a protracted global recession, if not depression.
The sorrowful-but-gritty public faces of Europe’s equivalent to MICIMATT—Europe’s financial, plutocratic, military and intelligence elites—are President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Along with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, it will be their faces we need to first scrutinize for a heads-up as to whether, finally, there is to be a public climb-down in the face of Russia’s nuclear checkmate. For that, indeed, is what it appears to be.
Viewing the Ukraine war as starting with the current Russian invasion leads to very different conclusions than if you consider that the starting point of this war was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine. The coup, which had elements of an authentic popular revolt, has been used by outside powers to pursue geopolitical ends.
The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.
The US imperial army
NATO, it should be understood, is an army in the service of the US empire. Viewing it simply as an alliance of nominally sovereign entities obscures that it is commanded as a tool of US foreign policy in its stated quest of world dominion; that is, “full spectrum dominance.” The “alliance” members must fully integrate their militaries under that command along with purchasing US war equipment and offering up their own citizens as troops.
After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the supposed end of the first cold war, instead of NATO being disbanded, the opposite occurred. There was no “peace dividend” and no honoring of the promise that NATO would not expand any further. Instead, NATO stampeded east towards the borders of the Russian Federation adding fourteen new members of former USSR republics and allies.
Even before the 2014 coup, the US’s fateful decision in 2006 to draw Ukraine into NATO posed an existential threat to Russia. By December 2021, according to “realpolitik” international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, a US-armed Ukraine had become a de facto member of NATO, crossing a red line for Russia. Mearsheimer concludes, “the west bears primary responsibility for what is happening today.”
Failure of peaceful negotiations
Speaking before the UN on March 2, the Venezuelan representative identified the breach of the Minsk Protocols, with the encouragement of the US, as the precursor of the present crisis in Ukraine.
After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the Minsk Protocols were an attempt at a peaceful settlement through “a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government.” Moscow, Kyiv, and the eastern separatists were all parties to the agreements.
The Russian perception of negotiations with the western alliance in the run-up to the invasion, as reported by the New York Post, was described using insensitive terminology as “like the mute with the deaf” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on his meeting with his British counterpart. (NOTE: the NYP, even in the updated version of the article, refers to Lavrov as the “Soviet” Foreign Minister, forgetting that the USSR hasn’t been around for over 30 years.)
Following the latest round of “sweeping” US-imposed sanctions on Russia, their Foreign Ministry announced, “we have reached the line where the point of no return begins.” Such sanctions are a form of warfare as deadly as bombs.
Upsides of war for the US and the downsides for everyone else
War is a great diversion for Joe Biden, whose popularity has been slipping due to a lackluster domestic performance. The US empire has much to gain: further unifying NATO under US domination, reducing Russian economic competition in the European energy market, justifying increasing the US war budget, and facilitating sales of war material to NATO vassals.
NATO has dumped over a trillion dollars in arms and facilities into the border countries next to Russia and continues to this day to pour lethal weapons into Ukraine. The leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi C14 recently bragged on YouTube (while other voices are censored): “We are being given so much weaponry not because as some say ‘the west is helping us,’ not because it is best for us. But because we perform the tasks set by the west…because we have fun, we have fun killing.”
More than 14,000 people have been killed in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas in warfare between ethnic Russians and Ukrainian regular military/right-wing paramilitaries in the eight years since the coup. The self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, beleaguered enclaves in the Donbas of largely ethnic Russians, seceded from Ukraine and were recognized by Russia on February 21.
The semi-governmental (over 80% US government funded) Rand Corporation’s playbook for the US and its allies says it all: “pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress – overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”
The conflict could have ruinous consequences for the Russian Federation, according to westernsources and even some people who identify as left in Russia. As a bonus for the US, according to Juan S. González, the US National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, the sanctions against Russia are “by design” intended to hurt Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all targeted by Washington for regime change. And, of course, for Ukrainians of all ethnicities there is no winning in a war.
It is difficult to think what other options Russia has to defend itself. Perhaps there are some, but surely they are slim. It should be clear that the US has continually been the aggressor even if some do not agree with the Russian response. As Phyllis Bennis with the Institute for Policy Studies argues, the US provoked this war.
Severing Russia from Europe
The peaceful integration of Russia with the rest of Europe would be a great threat to the US empire. A unified or even a cordial Europe could truly herald the end of US hegemony. The long-game geopolitical goal of preventing the unification of Europe may well be the fundamental aim of US foreign policy in that continent.
What would become of “US strategic interests” if peace were to break out in Europe, and Russia would become partners with Germany, France, and Italy? A potentially more independent Europe, including Russia, would challenge the US-dominated Atlanticist project.
The extreme hostility that the US took to the Nord Stream 2 project, which would have piped Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, went beyond the narrow economism of favoring US liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. Where Washington’s earlier efforts of imposing illegal unilateral economic sanctions on its NATO ally faltered, the current conflict will surely discourage any rational and cooperative economic association of Russia with its western neighbors.
The severing of Russia from the rest of Europe is a tremendous victory for the US imperial project. This is especially the case, when there were recent moves in the direction of economic, cultural, and political exchange, which have now been reversed.
Spheres of Influence and inter-imperialist rivalry
Russia shares a 1,426-mile border with Ukraine and considers that region within its security perimeter, vital to its national security. The US, which is 5,705 miles from Ukraine, considers the world its sphere of influence. Clearly, there is a conflict of interest.
The contemporary geopolitical dynamic has evolved from the one Lenin described in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which was then characterized as one of inter-imperialist rivalry. This theory is not entirely adequate to understand today’s world dominated by a single superpower (with its European Union, British, and Japanese junior partners). Surely, national centers of capital continue to compete. But over-arching this competition is a militantly imposed unipolar pax Americana.
There is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.
Further, even if one just understands the present situation as one of a clash of two imperialist camps, that does not preclude taking sides. Surely World War II was an inter-imperialist war, but that did not prevent socialists from opposing the Axis pole and supporting the allies. The US is ever more aggressively stirring up the pot, not only in Ukraine, but also Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere.
Asymmetry of the Forces
The forces are asymmetrical in this contest. Russia and the US may have comparable nuclear arsenals, but Russia has no bases of any kind in North America compared to at least six nuclear and many more conventional bases for the US in Europe. The US military budget is 11.9 times the size of Russia’s, not to mention the war chests of Washington’s NATO allies. Similarly, the US economy is 12.5 times as large as Russia’s. Of the Fortune 500 top international corporations, only four are Russian compared to 122 from the US. Russia’s labor productivity is only 36% of the US’s. In terms of finance capital, the US has 11 of the world’s top 100 banks; Russia has one. Far from being a key exporter of capital, Russia is a leader in capital flight, in part owing to sanctions imposed by the US and its allies.
As analyst Stansfield Smith concludes, Russia “plays very little part in the quintessential imperialist activity: the export of capital to the periphery and the extraction of profit from developing countries’ labor and resources.” Russia is a target of US-led imperialism; Ukraine is caught in the crossfire.
Hypocrisy of the “international community”
If only the outrage over the Russian invasion had some ethical grounding by what is misleadingly called the “international community,” but is in reality the US and its subalterns. Biden’s touted “rules based order” is one where the US makes the rules and the rest of the world follows its orders, in contradiction to the Charter of the UN and other recognized international law.
From Cuba, journalist Ángel Guerra Cabrera laments: “our region witnessed flagrant US violations of those principles in Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama, the last three through direct invasions. Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are current examples of a US policy that flatly denies its assertion, not to mention Puerto Rico.”
International law expert Alfred de Zayas reminds us that the so-called “international community seems to have accepted egregious violations of Art. 2(4) [of the UN Charter] by the US against Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela; by NATO countries against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yugoslavia; by Israel against all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians and Lebanese; by Saudi Arabia against Yemen; by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh, by Turkey against Cyprus, etc.”
How this war will end
Regardless of how one sides – or not – in the new cold war, it is instructive to understand the context of the conflict. This is especially so when views outside the dominant US narrative, such as those of Russian outlets Sputnik and RT that hosted US intellectuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, are being silenced.
This article addressed how this war began. How it will end or even if it will end is another story. The world is spiraling into a new cold war, emanating from a region formally at peace under socialism.
Expressing a view from the standpoint of the Global South, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commented: “we do not want to be anyone’s enemy. We are not interested, nor is the world, in a new cold war…which is for sure dragging the whole world into a conflict that could put humanity in danger.” If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the end of endless war will come with end of the US imperial project that provoked this crisis.
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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).
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.
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.”
Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over whether it will lead to war. All agree that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine and that it is clearly justified in demanding safe borders by insisting U.S./NATO withdraw troops and missiles from the countries surrounding it, stop NATO’s “open door” policy, stop putting nuclear weapons in Europe, etc.
Clearly such demands are consonant with the U.S.’s own historical demands for safe borders, evidenced most clearly in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the world nearly suffered a nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. And equally obvious is the fact that the American posture today is hypocritical in the extreme and can only be accepted by propagandists and those ignorant of history. The Biden administration must assume that most people are ignoramuses and that its obvious belligerence and blatant propaganda will pass as some sort of defense of freedom, even when the U.S. engineered a Ukrainian coup d’état in 2014 in support of Neo-Nazis when Biden was President Obama’s vice-president. But that was nearly eight years ago, which is an eternity in a country of amnesiacs.
Whether this U.S. persistent aggression is a propaganda charade or not, it is a most dangerous game. In December 2021, Russia claimed that the U.S. was preparing a false flag event to provoke a Russian response. This was dismissed or ignored by the western media as absurd. Recently, however, the Biden administration has been pounding the message that it is Russia that is preparing a false flag event to blame on Ukraine in order to justify a Russian invasion. The western press, led by The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and the Washington Post – stenographers for the CIA, British intelligence, and the Pentagon – have become more hysterical by the day pushing this lie without any evidence whatsoever. It is sardonically comical. If evidence doesn’t exist, of course, it can be manufactured, as with “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, etc. It’s easy as pie. To call these media the Yellow Press is an understatement.
When Russia accuses the U.S. of using “information terrorism,” it is of course correct. For we are living in a MKULTRA mind control operation with multiple facets. Ukraine, Covid, economic warfare, etc. – a hydra-headed monster whose goal is total control of regular people, who are treated as morons incapable of reason and the most basic logic. Toward confirming and strengthening this premise, the media provide a daily menu of mixed and contradictory messages meant to confuse, confound, and mess with people’s sense of their own ability to understand the world.
If the public is to be convinced that the Russians have started a war, it will be attempted not so much through words as through images, as Gustave Le Bon predicted long ago in his book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. In analyzing the “crowd mind” in 1895, he was addressing the anxiety the middle class was feeling because of popular unrest. The fear of popular unrest, such as the truckers Freedom Convoy in Canada and the Yellow Vests in France, is today a major factor in the propaganda war waged by the elite press. Call it class warfare.
Le Bon argued that the crowd thinks in images, not words, and it is through images that the rulers can control them. Freud agreed with his basic premise that people in groups occupied an “hypnotic state,” while adding that this was also true for individuals who craved illusions. Pessimistic as it was, Le Bon’s point about the crowd thinking in images – “The image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection to the first” – was picked up by all the influential propagandists, including the American father of the euphemistically named “public relations” industry, Edward Bernays. Today it is all about images, still and moving ones.
Thus, one can expect to see the media using photos and film to create an emotional response in the population to convince it that Russia, not the U.S. is the villain in this standoff. Yet again, it may not be a standoff, for it is possible that the Biden administration is really intent on war because they have become completely untethered from reality and think such a war is winnable. Perhaps they think they can entice Russia to take their bait and do something that can be spun as an “invasion” of Ukraine. This would run counter to Russia’s longstanding, patient diplomatic efforts to resolve these matters and to convince the U.S./NATO that the unipolar era is over and now that it is a multipolar world there must be an end to the encircling of Russia with U.S./NATO troops and weapons.
We shall see. I don’t know whether there will be a major war or not, but I know how it will be managed. I’ll give you six guesses, as does The New York Times with its newly acquired word game, Wordle. The Grey Lady also knows the answer. It’s not “censor,” for that’s six not five letters and they’ve censored the words already. It’s not “slave,” for they have prohibited that word since some people might find it offensive or get the idea that censorship is used to create slaves to the lie. It is, as required, five letters and begins with the letter “I”.
People gather in Rome to call for peace, February 15, 2022 | Photo Credit: Reuters
Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen?
There are three possible scenarios:
The first is that Russia will suddenly launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
The second is that the Ukrainian government in Kyiv will launch an escalation of its civil war against the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), provoking various possible reactions from other countries.
The third is that neither of these will happen, and the crisis will pass without a major escalation of the war in the short term.
So who will do what, and how will other countries respond in each case?
Unprovoked Russian invasion
This seems to be the least likely outcome.
An actual Russian invasion would unleash unpredictable and cascading consequences that could escalate quickly, leading to mass civilian casualties, a new refugee crisis in Europe, war between Russia and NATO, or even nuclear war.
If Russia wanted to annex the DPR and LPR, it could have done so amid the crisis that followed the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Russia already faced a furious Western response over its annexation of Crimea, so the international cost of annexing the DPR and LPR, which were also asking to rejoin Russia, would have been less then than it would be now.
Russia instead adopted a carefully calculated position in which it gave the Republics only covert military and political support. If Russia was really ready to risk so much more now than in 2014, that would be a dreadful reflection of just how far U.S.-Russian relations have sunk.
If Russia does launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine or annex the DPR and LPR, Biden has already said that the United States and NATO would not directly fight a war with Russia over Ukraine, although that promise could be severely tested by the hawks in Congress and a media hellbent on stirring up anti-Russia hysteria.
However, the United States and its allies would definitely impose heavy new sanctions on Russia, cementing the Cold War economic and political division of the world between the United States and its allies on one hand, and Russia, China and their allies on the other. Biden would achieve the full-blown Cold War that successive U.S. administrations have been cooking up for a decade, and which seems to be the unstated purpose of this manufactured crisis.
In terms of Europe, the U.S. geopolitical goal is clearly to engineer a complete breakdown in relations between Russia and the European Union (EU), to bind Europe to the United States. Forcing Germany to cancel its $11 billion Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia will certainly make Germany more energy dependent on the U.S. and its allies. The overall result would be exactly as Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, described when he said that the purpose of the alliance was to keep “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”
Brexit (the U.K. departure from the EU) detached the U.K. from the EU and cemented its “special relationship” and military alliance with the United States. In the current crisis, this joined-at-the-hip U.S.-U.K. alliance is reprising the unified role it played to diplomatically engineer and wage wars on Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
Today, China and the European Union (led by France and Germany) are the two leading trade partners of most countries in the world, a position formerly occupied by the United States. If the U.S. strategy in this crisis succeeds, it will erect a new Iron Curtain between Russia and the rest of Europe to inextricably tie the EU to the United States and prevent it from becoming a truly independent pole in a new multipolar world. If Biden pulls this off, he will have reduced America’s celebrated “victory” in the Cold War to simply dismantling the Iron Curtain and rebuilding it a few hundred miles to the east 30 years later.
But Biden may be trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. The EU is already an independent economic power. It is politically diverse and sometimes divided, but its political divisions seem manageable when compared with the political chaos, corruption and endemic poverty in the United States. Most Europeans think their political systems are healthier and more democratic than America’s, and they seem to be correct.
Like China, the EU and its members are proving to be more reliable partners for international trade and peaceful development than the self-absorbed, capricious and militaristic United States, where positive steps by one administration are regularly undone by the next, and whose military aid and arms sales destabilize countries (as in Africa right now), and strengthen dictatorships and extreme right-wing governments around the world.
But an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly fulfill Biden’s goal of isolating Russia from Europe, at least in the short term. If Russia was ready to pay that price, it would be because it now sees the renewed Cold War division of Europe by the United States and NATO as unavoidable and irrevocable, and has concluded that it must consolidate and strengthen its defenses. That would also imply that Russia has China’s full support for doing so, heralding a darker and more dangerous future for the whole world.
Ukrainian escalation of civil war
The second scenario, an escalation of the civil war by Ukrainian forces, seems more likely.
Whether it is a full-scale invasion of the Donbas or something less, its main purpose from the U.S. point of view would be to provoke Russia into intervening more directly in Ukraine, to fulfill Biden’s prediction of a “Russian invasion” and unleash the maximum pressure sanctions he has threatened.
While Western leaders have been warning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian, DPR and LPR officials have been warning for months that Ukrainian government forces were escalating the civil war and have 150,000 troops and new weapons poised to attack the DPR and LPR.
In that scenario, the massive U.S. and Western arms shipments arriving in Ukraine on the pretext of deterring a Russian invasion would, in fact, be intended for use in an already planned Ukrainian government offensive.
On one hand, if Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government are planning an offensive in the East, why are they so publicly playing down fears of a Russian invasion? Surely they would be joining the chorus from Washington, London and Brussels, setting the stage to point their fingers at Russia as soon as they launch their own escalation.
And why are the Russians not more vocal in alerting the world to the danger of escalation by Ukrainian government forces surrounding the DPR and LPR? Surely the Russians have extensive intelligence sources inside Ukraine and would know if Ukraine was indeed planning a new offensive. But the Russians seem much more concerned by the breakdown in U.S.-Russian relations than in what the Ukrainian military may be up to.
On the other hand, the U.S., U.K. and NATO propaganda strategy has been organized in plain sight, with a new “intelligence” revelation or high-level pronouncement for every day of the month. So what might they have up their sleeves? Are they really confident that they can wrong-foot the Russians and leave them carrying the can for a deception operation that could rival the Tonkin Gulf incident or the WMD lies about Iraq?
The plan could be very simple. Ukrainian government forces attack. Russia comes to the defense of the DPR and LPR. Biden and Boris Johnson scream “Invasion,” and “We told you so!” Macron and Scholz mutely echo “Invasion,” and “We stand together.” The United States and its allies impose “maximum pressure” sanctions on Russia, and NATO’s plans for a new Iron Curtain across Europe are a fait accompli.
An added wrinkle could be the kind of “false flag” narrative that US. and U.K. officials have hinted at several times. A Ukrainian government attack on the DPR or LPR could be passed off in the West as a “false flag” provocation by Russia, to muddy the distinction between a Ukrainian government escalation of the civil war and a “Russian invasion.”
It’s unclear whether such plans would work, or whether they would simply divide NATO and Europe, with different countries taking different positions. Tragically, the answer might depend more on how craftily the trap was sprung than on the rights or wrongs of the conflict.
But the critical question will be whether EU nations are ready to sacrifice their own independence and economic prosperity, which depends partly on natural gas supplies from Russia, for the uncertain benefits and debilitating costs of continued subservience to the U.S. empire. Europe would face a stark choice between a full return to its Cold War role on the front line of a possible nuclear war and the peaceful, cooperative future the EU has gradually but steadily built since 1990.
Many Europeans are disillusioned with the neoliberal economic and political order that the EU has embraced, but it was subservience to the United States that led them down that garden path in the first place. Solidifying and deepening that subservience now would consolidate the plutocracy and extreme inequality of U.S.-led neoliberalism, not lead to a way out of it.
Biden may get away with blaming the Russians for everything when he’s kowtowing to war-hawks and preening for the TV cameras in Washington. But European governments have their own intelligence agencies and military advisors, who are not all under the thumb of the CIA and NATO. The German and French intelligence agencies have often warned their bosses not to follow the U.S. pied piper, notably into Iraq in 2003. We must hope they have not all lost their objectivity, analytical skills or loyalty to their own countries since then.
If this backfires on Biden, and Europe ultimately rejects his call to arms against Russia, this could be the moment when Europe bravely steps up to take its place as a strong, independent power in the emerging multipolar world.
Nothing happens
This would be the best outcome of all: an anti-climax to celebrate.
At some point, absent an invasion by Russia or an escalation by Ukraine, Biden would sooner or later have to stop crying “Wolf” every day.
All sides could climb back down from their military build-ups, panicked rhetoric and threatened sanctions.
The Minsk Protocol could be revived, revised and reinvigorated to provide a satisfactory degree of autonomy to the people of the DPR and LPR within Ukraine, or facilitate a peaceful separation.
The United States, Russia and China could begin more serious diplomacy to reduce the threat of nuclear war and resolve their many differences, so that the world could move forward to peace and prosperity instead of backwards to Cold War and nuclear brinkmanship.
Conclusion
However it ends, this crisis should be a wake-up call for Americans of all classes and political persuasions to reevaluate our country’s position in the world. We have squandered trillions of dollars, and millions of other people’s lives, with our militarism and imperialism. The U.S. military budget keeps rising with no end in sight–and now the conflict with Russia has become another justification for prioritizing weapons spending over the needs of our people.
Our corrupt leaders have tried but failed to strangle the emerging multipolar world at birth through militarism and coercion. As we can see after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, we cannot fight and bomb our way to peace or stability, and coercive economic sanctions can be almost as brutal and destructive. We must also re-evaluate the role of NATO and wind down this military alliance that has become such an aggressive and destructive force in the world.
Instead, we must start thinking about how a post-imperial America can play a cooperative and constructive role in this new multipolar world, working with all our neighbors to solve the very serious problems facing humanity in the 21st Century.
US President Joe Biden accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of “wanting things he cannot get”. He was referring to Moscow’s security demands in Europe with regard to the US-led NATO military alliance.
Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.
Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against its western neighbor?
The American president and his administration have been warning that Moscow could order an assault on Ukraine “any day”. Well, days and indeed weeks go by and there is no outcome as touted.
Biden has also predicted that Putin doesn’t want to pursue diplomacy and that the Russian leader is driven to make war. Then a few days later, Putin hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in Moscow for marathon talks about resolving tensions.
Russia has repeatedly rubbished the invasion claims – that have largely emanated from the United States – as baseless hysteria. President Putin said this week he has no intention of escalating the tensions over Ukraine.
Moscow says that troops marshaled within Russia’s borders are not a threat to any neighboring state. The premise of American accusations about internal Russia’s military maneuvers is absurd. The precedent for interference it would establish is an affront to any nation’s sovereignty.
Even the Ukrainian government and security officials have pushed back against the American claims of an imminent Russian invasion.
Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of evidence and rationale, and in spite of a United Nations’ rebuke to desist from such inflammatory rhetoric, Washington keeps insisting on making its bogus predictions of Russian aggression.
So, when is this gargantuan hoax going to be held to account? This contemporary version of “crying wolf” should have political and legal consequences for the hoaxers.
Arguably, the Biden administration’s media campaign regarding Ukraine is a cynical exercise in manipulating public perception and manufacturing a crisis. Washington wants Russia to invade Ukraine in order to justify a US policy of division and conflict. American imperial ambitions for hegemony must rely on inciting tensions and ultimately conflict within Europe and towards Russia.
A specific objective for American global ambitions is to sabotage the strategic energy trade between the European Union and Russia. The problem for the US is that its charade of Russian aggression is simply not working. That’s because Moscow has no intention of starting a war with Ukraine or anyone else for that matter.
Sure enough, Russia has put down red lines regarding its national security. They include no further eastward expansion of the NATO bloc and the exclusion of offensive American strike weapons from near Russia’s borders. To most reasonable observers, those demands are hardly signs of “aggression”. In fact, they sound like a plausible basis for discussing a new security framework for Europe.
It seems that because the Biden administration can’t get what it wants – that is, a Russian invasion of Ukraine – it is hellbent on forcing or fabricating one.
While European leaders this week anxiously appeal for more diplomacy to avert confrontation, it is salient and damnable that Washington is desperately militarizing the tensions. Biden has ordered more troops to deploy in Eastern Europe provocatively under the pretext of “defending allies from Russian aggression”. His administration is airlifting plane-loads of lethal weaponry to Ukraine which has the seeming intended effect of undermining any chance of finding a peaceful settlement to the Ukrainian civil war that has been simmering since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.
It is significant that Washington and London are the most hawkish advocates for trying to impose harsher economic sanctions against Russia. This is while the United States and Britain are taking the lead in militarizing Eastern Europe and talking up belligerence towards Moscow. The combined Anglo-American stance appears to be one of goading Russia into an armed conflict which can then be used as a pretext for sabotaging Europe’s energy relations with Russia.
The danger is that the longer this American charade continues and the fantasy over Russia’s alleged invasion becomes more and more apparent, the risk increases of the US forcing a provocation for war. Perhaps not intended as a direct war, more likely as a proxy war using Ukraine.
President Biden and his administration, as well as the entire US corporate media, are at risk of being exposed in the eyes of the world as war hoaxers. Included in that list of criminal warmongers is Britain.
This portends Biden’s biggest foreign policy failure which, hard to believe, exceeds even the historic US defeat in Afghanistan.
Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.
A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.
The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that “the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”
The most anti-war popular voice on the right is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been lashing out against the hawks in both parties, as have other anti-interventionist libertarians.
On the left, the anti-war sentiment was in full force on February 5, when over 75 protests took place from Maine to Alaska. The protesters, including union activists, environmentalists, healthcare workers and students, denounced pouring even more money into the military when we have so many burning needs at home.
You would think Congress would be echoing the public sentiment that a war with Russia is not in our national interest. Instead, taking our nation to war and supporting the gargantuan military budget seem to be the only issues that both parties agree on.
Most Republicans in Congress are criticizing Biden for not being tough enough (or for focusing on Russia instead of China) and most Democrats are afraid to oppose a Democratic president or be smeared as Putin apologists (remember, Democrats spent four years under Trump demonizing Russia).
Both parties have bills calling for draconian sanctions on Russia and expedited “lethal aid” to Ukraine. The Republicans are advocating for $450 million in new military shipments; the Democrats are one-upping them with a price tag of $500 million.
Progressive Caucus leaders Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee have called for negotiations and de-escalation. But others in the Caucus–such as Reps. David Cicilline and Andy Levin–are co-sponsors of the dreadful anti-Russia bill, and Speaker Pelosi is fast-tracking the bill to expedite weapons shipments to Ukraine.
But sending more weapons and imposing heavy-handed sanctions can only ratchet up the resurgent U.S. Cold War on Russia, with all its attendant costs to American society: lavish military spending displacing desperately needed social spending; geopolitical divisions undermining international cooperation for a better future; and, not least, increased risks of a nuclear war that could end life on Earth as we know it.
For those looking for real solutions, we have good news.
Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to President Biden and Secretary Blinken’s failed efforts to browbeat the Russians. There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine, a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The civil war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in early 2014, after the people of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. The post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the breakaway region, but the separatists fought back and held their territory, with some covert support from Russia. Diplomatic efforts were launched to resolve the conflict.
The original Minsk Protocol was signed by the “Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine” (Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) in September 2014. It reduced the violence, but failed to end the war. France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine also held a meeting in Normandy in June 2014 and this group became known as the “Normandy Contact Group” or the “Normandy Format.”
All these parties continued to meet and negotiate, together with the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine, and they eventually signed the Minsk II agreement on February 12, 2015. The terms were similar to the original Minsk Protocol, but more detailed and with more buy-in from the DPR and LPR.
The Minsk II agreement was unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015. The United States voted in favor of the resolution, and 57 Americans are currently serving as ceasefire monitors with the OSCE in Ukraine.
The key elements of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement were:
– an immediate bilateral ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and DPR and LPR forces;
– the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a 30-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the line of control between government and separatist forces;
– elections in the secessionist Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, to be monitored by the OSCE; and,
– constitutional reforms to grant greater autonomy to the separatist-held areas within a reunified but less centralized Ukraine.
The ceasefire and buffer zone have held well enough for seven years to prevent a return to full-scale civil war, but organizing elections in Donbas that both sides will recognize has proved more difficult.
The DPR and LPR postponed elections several times between 2015 and 2018. They held primary elections in 2016 and, finally, a general election in November 2018. But neither Ukraine, the United States nor the European Union recognized the results, claiming the election was not conducted in compliance with the Minsk Protocol.
For its part, Ukraine has not made the agreed-upon constitutional changes to grant greater autonomy to the separatist regions And the separatists have not allowed the central government to retake control of the international border between Donbas and Russia, as specified in the agreement.
The Normandy Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) for the Minsk Protocol has met periodically since 2014, and is meeting regularly throughout the current crisis, with its next meeting scheduled for February 10 in Berlin The OSCE’s 680 unarmed civilian monitors and 621 support staff in Ukraine have also continued their work throughout this crisis. Their latest report, issued February 1, documented a 65% decrease in ceasefire violations compared to two months ago.
But increased U.S. military and diplomatic support since 2019 has encouraged President Zelensky to pull back from Ukraine’s commitments under the Minsk Protocol, and to reassert unconditional Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. This has raised credible fears of a new escalation of the civil war, and U.S. support for Zelensky’s more aggressive posture has undermined the existing Minsk-Normandy diplomatic process.
Zelensky’s recent statement that “panic” in Western capitals is economically destabilizing Ukraine suggests that he may now be more aware of the pitfalls in the more confrontational path his government adopted, with U.S. encouragement.
The current crisis should be a wake-up call to all involved that the Minsk-Normandy process remains the only viable framework for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. It deserves full international support, including from U.S. Members of Congress, especially in light of broken promises on NATO expansion, the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, and now the panic over fears of a Russian invasion that Ukrainian officials say are overblown.
On a separate, albeit related, diplomatic track, the United States and Russia must urgently address the breakdown in their bilateral relations. Instead of bravado and one upmanship, they must restore and build on previous disarmament agreements that they have cavalierly abandoned, placing the whole world in existential danger.
Restoring U.S. support for the Minsk Protocol and the Normandy Format would also help to decouple Ukraine’s already thorny and complex internal problems from the larger geopolitical problem of NATO expansion, which must primarily be resolved by the United States, Russia and NATO.
The United States and Russia must not use the people of Ukraine as pawns in a revived Cold War or as chips in their negotiations over NATO expansion. Ukrainians of all ethnicities deserve genuine support to resolve their differences and find a way to live together in one country – or to separate peacefully, as other people have been allowed to do in Ireland, Bangladesh, Slovakia and throughout the former U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia.
In 2008, then-U.S. Ambassador to Moscow (now CIA Director) William Burns warned his government that dangling the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene.
In a cable published by WikiLeaks, Burns wrote, “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
Since Burns’s warning in 2008, successive U.S. administrations have plunged headlong into the crisis he predicted. Members of Congress, especially members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, can play a leading role in restoring sanity to U.S. policy on Ukraine by championing a moratorium on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and a reinvigoration of the Minsk Protocol, which the Trump and Biden administrations have arrogantly tried to upstage and upend with weapons shipments, ultimatums and panic.
OSCE monitoring reports on Ukraine are all headed with the critical message: “Facts Matter.” Members of Congress should embrace that simple principle and educate themselves about the Minsk-Normandy diplomacy. This process has maintained relative peace in Ukraine since 2015, and remains the U.N.-endorsed, internationally agreed-upon framework for a lasting resolution.
If the U.S. government wants to play a constructive role in Ukraine, it should genuinely support this already existing framework for a solution to the crisis, and end the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that has only undermined and delayed its implementation. And our elected officials should start listening to their own constituents, who have absolutely no interest in going to war with Russia.
War is big, loud, significant and attracts an audience; media likes it. Foreign wars (commonly Middle Eastern or African) distract from domestic chaos and reinforce a long-held prejudice of savagery and race, and the opposite, equally false notion of western superiority.
In all conflicts mainstream media plays a crucial role, often inflammatory, feeding the discord through a particular narrative. Western media claims it is independent, but this is fallacious; corporate owned or State sponsored, it is conditioned by a particular world-view, ideologically/politically, nationalistically, historically.
After war erupted in Ethiopia in November 2020 western media have played a major role in spreading mis-/disinformation and, occasionally, outright lies. Together with foreign powers led by the United States, international human rights groups and elements within United Nations Agencies, they attacked and undermined the Ethiopian government.
Statements are issued and regurgitated in various outlets: BBC, CNN, France24, Al Jazeera, etc., seemingly without verification; the more often something is repeated, the louder the drumbeat of insistence on its truth (currently Ukraine where Putin has no intention of invading), no matter how incredible it may be. In November 2021 e.g., media carried the totally untrue story that TPLF forces were “200 km, or 400 km away from the capital Addis Ababa and could take the city in weeks”. Was this story spread in all innocence by the media; why would a responsible editor publish such information without checking it?
Such stories sensationalize events, build tension and attract public attention. In Ethiopia they falsely portrayed the terrorist Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) as an ascendant force, the Ethiopian government as cruel and desperate, their forces deflated and inadequate.
The war was triggered by the TPLF’s preemptive attack on Federal Army bases on 4 November 2020; uncounted soldiers were killed, arms stolen. This fact (and the terrorist nature of the TPLF), is routinely disregarded by international media, and western governments, despite various TPLF spokespeople admitting it.
Imagine the outrage if such an assault took place against a western military base: there would be widespread fury, a sharp retaliatory response – or a protracted “war on terror” – unanimous support from allies, and wall-to-wall anger across the media. But, instead of condemning the terrorists, the US attacked the Ethiopian government, legitimized the TPLF, demanded PM Abiy Ahmed enter into negotiations with it. Again, would any western government be expected to negotiate with a terrorist gang that had carried out an act of treason? The hypocrisy, condescension and, yes, racism of the “international community” (the US and her bedmates), former or decaying imperialists, knows no limits.
Manufacturing Consent
An influential voice in the build-up to the conflict and a regular voice of media dis-/misinformation once fighting started, was the International Crisis Group (ICG). In a report published May 2021, Disinformation in Tigray – Manufacturing Consent for a Secessionist War, New Africa Institute (NAI) detail that, ICG “played a critical role in driving the world to believe that TPLF had the upper hand in any ensuing conflict”.
A week before the TPLF attacked the Northern Command ICG published, Steering Ethiopia’s Tigray Crisis Away from Conflict, stating, Tigray’s “well-armed regional paramilitary force is led by former national army generals. It also boasts a large militia full of war veterans. TPLF leaders say that many officers in the units of the Northern Command…would not be likely to support any federal intervention, and some could even break and join Tigray’s forces.” Such material, it is believed, emboldened the TPLF to launch their deadly attack, plunging Ethiopia into chaos.
NAI detail the extraordinary level of falsehoods, distortions and errors perpetrated by media; the dis-/misinformation campaign, they make clear, was an attempt “to manufacture consent for an unpopular irredentist, ethnic secessionist war that could not be justified in the eyes of the international public through honest reporting.” For Ethiopians it has been devastating, but within the halls of western power – Washington, mainly, but also London and, though less so, Brussels, it appears it was welcomed. A chance to destabilize not just Ethiopia under PM Abiy Ahmed, seen as too independent and potentially influential, but the Horn of Africa more broadly. The US and co. supported the TPLF politically, diplomatically and, many believe, militarily from the outset; mainstream news outlets obediently followed suit.
Media may refute the assertion of a conscious campaign of support for the TPLF; however, given the breadth of material published that either attacks the government, misleads the public or supports the terrorists, it is hard to deny.
Initially, a common excuse for the appalling coverage was the “communications blackout”. The Washington Post went as far as to blame the government for the dis-/misinformation, saying, “by blocking communications and access to Tigray, the [Ethiopian] government helped create conditions where disinformation and misinformation can thrive.” They only “thrive” if journalists/editors don’t do their jobs and check their material.
The menu of mis-/disinformation varies from the seemingly innocuous; e.g. describing the forced retreat of the TPLF to Tigray in December 2021, as a “withdrawal” (similar to reporting of the 2021 Gaza assault by Israel, in which BBC said X number of Palestinians had died and Y number of Israelis had been killed), to false accusations of “massacres, mass rape and sexual violence, looting, extrajudicial killings, genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.” Savage portrayals of Ethiopian and Eritrean forces – drawn into the conflict after the TPLF bombed the capital Asmara – that NAI make clear “draw on old colonial tropes of Africans.”
The oft-repeated media claims of rape and gang rape by Ethiopian Federal Forces and Eritrean soldiers feed into this perverse notion of primitive Africans. Sexual and gender based violence was highlighted in the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), joint report, 3 November 2021. Premature and partial, it is full of generalized accusations of criminality.
Whilst admitting it is not an “exhaustive record of all relevant incidents”, its authors asserted that violations were committed by all parties to the conflict, including rape/gang rape. Assertions disputed by the Ethiopian government (which has said it will investigate) and refuted in Eritrea, where there is no culture of rape/gang rape, among society or the military. Within the TPLF, however, rape/gang rape is part of its modus operandi.
TPLF military/para-military committed rape in the Ogaden region; e.g., over a 25 year period of suppression of the ethnic Somali population. The same abuse took place against Oromo women for decades, and long before the conflict started in Tigray rape was a serious problem throughout the region; in 2019 a leading activist, Meaza Gidey tweeted: “rape culture is ubiquitous in Tigray oftentimes stigmatizing & shaming female rape survivors into marrying their rapist.”
While Tigray was in total chaos, on 11 February, 10 prisons in the region were emptied of all inmates. EHRC report that paperwork on the prisoners was destroyed, making, “Tracking major offenders nearly impossible and that it is one of the causes for the substantial increase of … major crimes.” The increase was so pronounced that the TPLF-mouthpiece Tigrai Media House (TMH) admitted that, “TPLF itself was responsible for the rise in crimes.” NAI report the TMH statement: “When news broke out that the Ethiopian army was making its way to Mekelle, the Tigray regional police forces and the prison forces disbanded abandoning their posts. As a result of this, the prison doors were left open and all the hardcore criminals escaped into the community.”
None of this information was reported by western media; misrepresentation through omissions, like this, has been widespread throughout.
Another example is the absence of coverage or condemnation of the Mai Kadra Massacre, one of many such TPLF atrocities. In November 2020 the village of Mai Kadra was the scene of a brutal attack by TPLF militia, the Samri and Tigrayan special police forces. The EHRC found that, “Samri, …local police and militia….killed hundreds of people beating them with batons/sticks, stabbing them with knives, machetes and hatchets and strangling them with ropes.” This atrocious, ethnically motivated attack, EHRC states, “May amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.” The massacre was largely overlooked by mainstream media and ignored by foreign governments; after all, those slaughtered were savages – poor (black) Africans, murdered by other poor (black) Africans.
Mai Kadre is included in the OHCHR/EHRC report, though estimating the deaths at 200, in contradiction to the 600+ Amnesty International say were murdered. To “balance” this appalling atrocity the report refers to a highly disputed incident by the Ethiopian Defense Force (EDF) in Axum, where it is claimed more than 100 people were killed. Despite the fact that there is no evidence of such an attack and no bodies have ever been discovered the story was all over mainstream media.
Then there is the oft-repeated claim that the Abiy government blocked humanitarian aid to Tigray. In January 2021 The Economist announced that food was being used as a weapon by the government, and quoted that the US run Famine Early Warning Systems Network, saying that, “parts of central and eastern Tigray are probably one step from famine.” There was no famine (terrible hardship as in all war zones, yes), and according to Ethiopia’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission, by May 2021 all 4.5 million Tigrayans in need of food had received assistance, 70% of it subsidized by the government.
The whole area of UN humanitarian work was polluted by TPLF moles, including within the World Food Programme (WFP). In October 2021 whistleblowers from UN Ethiopia revealed that the “TPLF……. have networks within UN system.” In an attempt to purge the organisation of TPLF infiltrators on 27 September the Ethiopian government expelled seven UN officials for, “Dissemination of misinformation and politicization of humanitarian assistance;” the “diversion of humanitarian assistance to the TPLF; Transferring communication equipment to be used by the TPLF;” and, unbelievably, “reticence in demanding the return of more than 400 trucks commandeered by the TPLF for military mobilization and for the transportation of its forces since July 2021.” None of this was reported by international media or commented upon by the US administration, or any other western government.
The spirit of unity
The examples of betrayal and western media dis-/misinformation over the course of the conflict are endless. The sources of material and the way stories evolve and become disseminated is often convoluted, facts ignored, evidence found wanting, or manufactured entirely, as with the so-called “Axum massacre”, examined in detail by NAI. Various players, including Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA), where it apparently originated, and discredited ex-BBC Africa journalist Martin Plaut, contributed to a concocted narrative, accepted by Amnesty International and forming the basis for a human rights report.
A positive consequence of the west’s betrayal has been the heartening community spirit engendered among Ethiopians. Divided for decades by manipulative TPLF ethno-policies, Ethiopians, at home and abroad, have united against this group of self-supporting interconnected adversaries: The terrorist TPLF, “The West”, specifically the United States and the international mainstream media.
And now, as the fighting subsides and the country collectively draws breath the work of reconciliation and healing must begin.
To this end, in the hope of facilitating “national reconciliation”, PM Abiy announced the extraordinary step, which angered many Ethiopians, of granting an amnesty for some of the country’s most high-profile political prisoners and parliament has established a “Commission for National Dialogue”, “to pave the way for national consensus and keep the integrity of the country.” Despite the TPLF and their partners in crime, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), refusing so far to participate, this is encouraging.
Ethiopia has suffered terribly over the last year or so, and it will take time to recover. But, if the sense of national unity that has been created over the past year or so is maintained, healing will come more readily and this wonderful country will emerge stronger than ever.
Once again, the people of the United States are being lied into a war – this time with Russia over Ukraine. The corporate media echo chamber’s warning of an “imminent Russian invasion” is the equivalence of the “Iraq has WMD’s” lie used to justify a US invasion there in 2003.
We are in an urgent situation. To stop a war with Russia, antiwar groups from across the country are working together in a powerful way to organize actions, webinars and a national online rally this weekend.
Read the Call to Action: Stop War with Russia over Ukraine, which was convened by 12 national and international organizations, and now has been endorsed by nearly 200 groups. So far there are actions in more than 40 cities in 26 states and the list is growing. See the list of actions at the end of this email.
Over 700 people have signed the petition telling President Biden and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres to resolve the conflict within the framework of international law through the UN Security Council. CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION.
Joe Lauria of Consortium News reported on the UN Security Council meeting early this week. The United States repeated its lies at the meeting. In response, the Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia replied, “Our Western colleagues say that de-escalation is needed, but they are the first to build up tension, enhance rhetoric and escalate the situation. Talks about an imminent war are provocative per se. It might seem you call for it, want it and wait for it to come, as if you wanted your allegations to come true.”
Indeed, it is clear the United States is provoking war. As people who live in the US, we have a responsibility to show the government and the world that we do NOT support this.
The national online rally is one way you can do that no matter where you are. It will be held on Saturday, February 5 at 12:00 noon Eastern/9:00 am Pacific. Speakers from the initial signatories of the call to action include: David Swanson of World Beyond War, Col. Ann Wright of CODEPINK, Rafiki Morris of Black Alliance for Peace, Joe Lombardo of the United National Antiwar Coalition, Leela Anand of the ANSWER Coalition, Sara Flounders of the International Action Committee, Cherrill Spencer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Susan Schnall and Gerry Condon of Veterans for Peace, Bruce Gagnon and Lisa Savage of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Alice Loazia of Task Force on the Americas, and Henry Lowendorf of the US Peace Council. Ben Grosscup of the People’s Music Network will perform and Margaret Flowers will moderate. Register for the online rally at Bit.ly/StopWarWithRussia.
On Sunday, February 6 at 12:00 noon Eastern, the United National Antiwar Coalition will host a webinar featuring activists from the United States, Russia and Ukraine. Speakers include Ajamu Baraka, National Organizer, Black Alliance for Peace, Larissa Shessler, Chair, Union of Political Emigrants & Political prisoners of Ukraine, Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Joe Lombardo, Coordinator, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), Vladimir Kozin, Correspondent member, Russian Academy of Military Science and Leonid Ilderkin, Coordinating Council of the Union of Political Emigrants & Political Prisoners of Ukraine. Register for that event here.
In this time of crisis of US Empire, the power structure will do whatever it can get away with to try to hold onto its position as a dominant force in the world. This includes spending unprecedented amounts of money on the US military while domestic needs for basics such as healthcare, housing, education, public infrastructure and economic security are unmet. It incudes flagrant violation of international laws. As Ajamu Baraka explains in this week’s Clearing the FOG, the United States is a rogue nation wreaking havoc globally.
It is up to us to reverse the current course. That will take a popular movement opposed to war and imperialism and demanding a political and economic system that serves people and planet over profit. We are building that movement together. Show up this weekend and be a part of turning the tide to a better world.
List of actions:
Alaska
Kodiak – Saturday from 10:00 to 11:00 am. Post Office Kodiak, AK. Hosted by CODEPINK.
Arizona
Phoenix – Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00 pm. Rep. Rueben Gallego’s Office: 1601 N 7th St, #310, Phoenix, AZ 85006. Sponsored by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) & Phoenix Anti War Coalition.
Tucson – Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00 pm. Davis Monthan Air Force Base entrance Golf Links and Craycroft intersection
Tucson, AZ.
California
Bay Area – Saturday at 12 noon, Rally, Grand Lake Theater, Oakland – Fund Education, Healthcare/COVID Relief not War.
Berkeley – Saturday from 2:00 to 3:00 pm. Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, MLK Jr. Way & Center St., Berkeley, CA.
Los Angeles – Saturday from 3:00 to 4:30 pm. Wilshire Federal Building, 11000 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
Santa Cruz – Saturday from 12:00 to 2:00 pm. The Town Clock, Santa Cruz, CA.
Florida
Wildwood – Saturday from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon. No War! World Beyond War and Veterans For Peace-Central Florida Chapters. Gold Dome Building, 7375 Powell Rd, Wildwood, FL 34785. Host Contact Info: moc.liamgnull@0591yttyma
Georgia
Atlanta – Saturday at 12:3o PM at Freedom Parkway and Moreland.
Illinois
Carbondale – Saturday from 12:00 to 2:00 pm. Town Square Pavilion corner of Main and Illinois Ave, Carbondale, IL 62901. Hosted by CODEPINK.
Chicago – Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. In front of the Art Institute: 111 S. Michigan Avenue.
Louisiana
New Orleans – Saturday at 2 pm. Speak out and leaflet distribution. Broad and Canal St. Workers Voice Socialist Movement. See Facebook event page.
Maine
Portland, ME – Saturday, Feb 5 at 3:00 pm. In response to a national call for protests on February 5 against a possible US-UK-NATO war with Russia we will be holding a vigil in the Midcoast. All are invited – please bring appropriate signs that are large enough to be read by cars at a busy intersection. Our spot will be the four corners of the big intersection in Topsham that connects Main St from Brunswick and Hwy 196 near the Topsham mall. Lee Toyota is on the corner. This protest is being supported by Maine Natural Guard, Peace Action Maine, PeaceWorks, WILPF Maine and Maine Veterans for Peace.
Maryland
Baltimore – Saturday at 12 noon at North Ave. and Charles St. with an optional car caravan. Sponsored by Peoples Power Assembly, Baltimore Peace Action , Ujima Peoples Power Party, Veterans for Peace.
Massachusetts
Boston, MA – Saturday at 1:00 pm, Park Street Station, downtown Boston.
Michigan
Ann Arbor – Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00 pm. Corner of Fourth Ave. and Catherine St. Ann Arbor, MI.
Minnesota
Minneapolis – NO War with Russia! Funds for human needs, not another war! Anti-war protest: Saturday at 11:00 am Mayday Plaza, 301 Cedar Ave South West Bank, Minneapolis. Join a visible anti-war presence to say NO to another war. Neighborhood march will include a stop at the office of U.S. Senator Amy Kobuchar. For more info see: http://antiwarcommittee.org/event/no-war-with-russia-funds-for-human-needs-not-another-war/
Montana
Missoula – Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00 pm. South end of the Higgins Street Bridge, Missoula, MT.
New York
New York City – Saturday at 3:00 pm. Gather at Father Duffy Square / intersection of 7th Ave and Broadway, W. 47th St to oppose war in Ukraine.
Setauket – Saturday from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm. Corner of Rt. 25A & Bennetts Road Setauket, NY. Hosted by CODEPINK.
Woodstock, NY – Saturday at 11:00 am at the Woodstock Town Green in opposition to war in Ukraine to make our voices, banners and signs heard and seen.
North Carolina
Asheville – Saturday from 4:00 to 5:30 pm. Pack Square, Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC.
Raleigh, NC – Saturday at 12 noon Federal Bldg 310 New Bern Ave, Raleigh, NC.
Oregon
Portland – Saturday from 12:00 to 1:00. 911 NE 11th Ave (In front of Senator Wyden’s office) Portland, OR.
Portland – Saturday starting at 11:30 am and will join the action listed above after an hour. At the Hawthorn Fred Meyers, corner of Hawthorn and Ceasar Chavez blvd, Portland Oregon.
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia – Saturday from 4 to 6 pm. Entrance to Ben Franklin Bridge Philadelphia Side. By Peace, Justice, Sustainability NOW.
Rhode Island
Providence – Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Rhode Island State House– Mall Side Gaspee St & Francis St, Providence, RI 02903.
Tennessee
Nashville – Saturday from 2:00 to 4:00 pm. Federal Building Broadway & 8th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37203.
Texas
Dallas – Saturday from 3:00 to 4:00 pm. Grassy Knoll, 411 Elm St Dallas, TX 75202.
San Antonio – Saturday at 4:30pm at New Braunfels Gate of Fort Sam Houston to say No to NATO and US aggression towards Russia! Endorsed by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, ANSWER Coalition, About Face Veterans Against the War South Texas, National Nurses United, Workers World Party, FIRE (Fight for Migrants Everywhere), and Veterans for Peace (San Antonio).
Vermont
Manchester Center – Saturday from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm Eastern. large roundabout near Langway. Manchester Center, VT 05255. Hosted by CODEPINK.
Washington, DC
WDC – Saturday at 2:00 pm in Lafayette Square. Abolish NATO. No war with Russia.
Washington State
Bothell – Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Intersection of Routes 527 & 522, Bothell, WA.
Seattle – Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. MLK & Rainier Ave. S, Seattle, WA 98144.
Wisconsin
Milwaukee, WI – No War with Russia over the Ukraine Rally. Saturday, Noon-1 PM. Capitol and Teutonia, Milwaukee, WI.
Israel is greatly concerned about the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) effort that seeks: 1) to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians; and 2) to pressure Israel to comply with international law. Israel claims that this campaign is a threat to its legitimacy. Unsurprisingly, Israel doesn’t want to acknowledge that it is its own repeated flouting of international law, including its numerous war crimes, that threaten its legitimacy.
Given Israel’s misperception, it is waging a campaign to limit any discussion about its illegal and immoral actions. Unfortunately, even without any Israeli campaign, the US corporate media already aids Israel through its lack of coverage or its downplaying the effects of Israeli violations.
For example, there is limited coverage of the desperate conditions in Gaza under a seldom mentioned illegal Israeli siege (abetted by Egypt and the US) since 2007. The major Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014 also greatly damaged hospitals, the sanitation system and other infrastructure, schools and apartment buildings. This siege has made it nearly impossible to bring in materials and supplies to repair the devastation. These Israeli war crimes and the siege have combined to make life a living hell for the approximately 2 million people surviving in the Gaza Strip.
In addition, the frequent criminal behavior of the illegal Israeli occupiers of Palestinian land in the West Bank is rarely reported. The Israeli military/police seldom arrests these illegal occupiers, sometimes allows the criminal behavior to continue and sometimes is complicit in the crimes. Moreover, Israel has destroyed, and continues to destroy, Palestinian homes in the West Bank including East Jerusalem. Israel uses very questionable excuses as a pretext to illegally remove more and more Palestinians from their homes. There is also little media coverage of the disgraceful arrest and imprisonment of Palestinian children. The corporate controlled media also downplayed the finding that Israel is an apartheid state by the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem as well as by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The US corporate media’s coverage of Israeli acts against US interests leaves much to be desired. One of the most blatant and poorly covered actions was the Israeli attempt in 1967 to sink the USS Liberty, a lightly armed intelligence-gathering ship. This attack killed 34 and wounded 171 US sailors.
On another front, in the early 1990s then CIA Director James Woolsey told a Senate Government Affairs Committee that Israel had been selling U.S. secrets to China for about a decade. These sales have continued at least through 2013 when the US again confronted Israel over its sale of sensitive military equipment to China.
In addition to the media complicity, Israeli supporters have mounted campaigns in universities and at the state and national levels that attempt to suppress supporters of Palestinian anti-occupation activism and BDS. In 2015 the Palestine Legal Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights issued a report documenting widespread attempts to stifle the free speech of Palestinian supporters in the US. There are also international efforts to ban support for BDS or opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
Fortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union helped stop legislation in Congress that would have silenced criticism of Israel nationally. Unfortunately, too many politicians have been willing to stifle free speech. As of 2021, 35 states have passed bills or executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel.
Given Israel’s damning record, it’s clear why it would want to limit free speech on its policies. In particular, if Americans understood the depth of Israel’s war crimes and gross human rights violations, it would be hard to continue to support US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions against these crimes. Moreover, it would be difficult to rationalize the US providing almost $4 billion in military aid annually to Israel, a wealthy nation that has long had one of the world’s strongest militaries.
