Voltaire famously stated, “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” It is helpful to see the following full quote in which this line appears, to understand the meaning of this oft-cited maxim:
“Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God‐given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”
In other words, being compelled to believe untruths, and indeed obvious untruths which you know in your heart are untrue, and then living your life as if these untruths are true, can have a morally corrosive effect and prime you to conform with terrible crimes.
George Orwell illustrates this phenomenon well in his novel ‘1984’, in which he explains that the dictatorial and brutal government at the center of this story rules the population and gains its buy-in to the awful system in which it lives by forcing the people to believe in and even repeat absurd, nonsensical slogans such as “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.”
Today, one of the real-life versions of these types of absurdities that large swaths of the population are being forced into believing is that our biological sex does not matter; that whether we have XX or XY chromosomes (or the incredibly rare variation between the two, which is often referred to as being ‘intersex’) is irrelevant to whether we are actually women or men. The most extreme version of this cult-like belief system is that people are merely ‘assigned’ one of the two sexes at birth by doctors and midwives – of course based on obviously visible sex characteristics – but that this designation is ultimately random and subject to change at any time by any individual, including young children whose brains have not fully developed, who may decide they are the opposite gender, or something in between the male-female binary, or even something else entirely.
Many even advocate – and indeed some jurisdictions are passing laws requiring – that birth certificates not include the sex of a newborn baby because we simply cannot know what that is until the individual decides his or her gender at a later stage. And, when this individual makes this decision, it is everyone’s obligation to accept this for every and all purposes, lest one be accused of bigotry.
The chief Orwellian slogan of this belief system is the mantra: ‘transwomen are women’, which means that biological males are women for any and all purposes if they identify as such, which has resulted in women becoming a mere subset of their own sex category. A shorthand for this, then, is that ‘men are women’, at least when they claim to be.
Under this new ideology, men can freely enter into womanhood, and women’s spaces and sports, based simply on how they identify. What’s more, it is not only that ‘transwomen are women’, but that transwomen are somehow superior to biological women who identify as women, the latter being given the additional qualifier of ‘cis women’ whether they accept this moniker or not.
That is, this ideology goes well beyond advocating that trans-identifying people be treated with dignity, respect and fairness – something which I fully agree with – and instead upends the basics of what up until very recently we all believed about the nature of our biology and indeed our very selves.
Taken as one hundred percent true, this mantra leads to absurd and even atrocious results, such as biological male sex offenders being housed in women’s prisons and women’s domestic violence centers, making women vulnerable to abuse and even rape. And if women speak up about such atrocities, they may be labelled ‘bigots’ and ‘transphobes’ and therefore deserving of maltreatment, including beatings and threats of rape and murder.
Here we see the belief in absurdities leading to the commission and defense of atrocities. But this process, as predicted by Voltaire and Orwell, does not end here. Rather, it continues into other realms. Thus, with people primed to accept one set of absurdities and atrocities, it is now easier to make them go along with other absurdities and atrocities.
For example, it is now easier to convince people to go along with what at one time would have been unthinkable – e.g., overlooking or even supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine,applauding a former Waffen SS soldier in the liberal Canadian House of Commons, and even going casually along with a war which could lead to nuclear annihilation.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Western liberals, who historically have been more critical of and oppositional to war than conservatives, but who are more accepting of the new ‘transwomen are women’ slogan, are much more apt than conservatives to approve of support of the Ukrainian military, even if that means supporting literal Nazis.
It is my own observation that there is a very strong correlation between people being critical of gender ideology (whether those people are on the left or on the right) and also being critical of Western support for Ukraine. And often, the two subjects come up quickly in the same conversation, showing that there is more than a tangential connection between these seemingly disconnected issues.
And this brings us to Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, the American identifying as a transwoman who had previously worked as a journalist and combat medic, and until recently served as an official English-language spokesperson of the Ukrainian military.
Some found the choice by the Ukrainian military of Ashton-Cirillo as a spokesperson a bit confounding, given the Ukrainian regime’s less-than-stellar treatment of the LGBTQ community in Ukraine.
However, from the point of view of trying to garner and maintain support in the West – at least among liberals – for NATO’s war effort in Ukraine, this choice makes sense. In the minds of Westerners who accept the prevailing gender ideology, Ashton-Cirillo’s advocacy for Ukraine gives instant legitimacy to Ukraine, even when Ashton-Cirillo advocates for horrendous policies.
One example of this is when Ashton-Cirillo was recently suspended by the Ukrainian military for stating that “Russia’s war criminal propagandists” – that is, journalists who have a different view on the war than the Western establishment press – will be “hunted down.”
Publications such as Advocate – a liberal, LGBTQ advocacy magazine – expressed concern that Republican US Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio had sent a letter to the Biden administration complaining about Ashton-Cirillo’s statements, writing, “I worry American resources could be supporting violence or the threat of violence against people for speaking their mind.” Advocate pointed out Vance’s “history of being anti-LGBTQ+,” but said nothing about the fact that Ashton-Cirillo was advocating for actual war crimes.
Ashton-Cirillo has said other concerning things, such as “Russians are not European… Russians are Asian. Ultimately, they do come from the Mongols, they come from a grouping of people who want to be slaves.” In this and other statements, Ashton-Cirillo repeats the tropes of the Nazis about Russians which they used, and continue to use, to justify mistreating and even killing them. But again, the fact that this casual racism comes from an individual identifying as a transwoman helps this bad medicine go down easier with vast sectors of the West.
Of course, for writing this piece, and stating what I believe to be obvious truths, but truths which we are aggressively urged to deny, I will be attacked and vilified. Possibly, I will be called a ‘fascist’ or even a ‘Nazi’ for questioning the prevailing gender orthodoxy, including by people who themselves have been led into supporting their government in aiding literal Nazis in Ukraine. But it is my belief that we must always tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts. It is only in doing so that we preserve our moral compass and indeed our very soul and that we are able to resist the atrocities we are being led to accept.
After serving as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainian propagandists in occupied Poland, Michael Chomiak joined thousands of Nazi collaborators on the ratline to Canada during the 1950s.
Following Chomiak’s death in 1984, his granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications.
Freeland was an early contributor to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which was edited by her grandfather’s former boss in Poland, the Nazi collaborator and ethnic cleansing advocate Volodymyr Kubijovyč. Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where Chomiak had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.
During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainian nationalist candidates.
She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia. When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia.
Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.
For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.
After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Ottawa has a history of covering for Nazis, from World War II to present-day Kiev
Whether Trudeau (and his Stepan Bandera-sympathizing deputy PM Chrystia Freeland) knew about Yaroslav Hunka or not, the question remains: why was he never brought to justice? He, or any of the other 2,000 SS Nazis Canada reportedly took in in the years following WW2. Having been accepted as anti-communist refugees with little to no scrutiny, these suspected war criminals and collaborators have been allowed to live out the rest of their days in peace, and most of them have done so openly under their own names, as the Simon Wiesenthal Center has repeatedlyreported.
The stomach-churning scene of the Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation three days ago to a former Waffen SS Nazi has by now made the rounds on the internet.
During Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s visit to Canada, and following his predictably bombastic pan-handling speech, House Speaker Anthony Rota went on to gush praise over a Ukrainian-Canadian in parliament that day: Yaroslav Hunka, a World War II-era Nazi, calling him “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero” and thanking him for his service.
Two days later, Rota issued an apology for lauding the man, saying he had “recognized an individual in the gallery” and had subsequently become aware of “more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so.”
Just to be clear – since Rota was not – the individual he meekly referred to was Yaroslav Hunka, and the information which made Rota remorseful was that Hunka had been a voluntary member of 1st Galician Division of the Waffen SS – you know, the one accused of mass murdering Poles, Jews and Ukrainians in Ukraine and Poland, as well as committing other atrocities.
Whereas Rota claims he was unaware of Hunka’s service as a Nazi, given that he had also praised Hunka for fighting “for Ukrainian independence against the Russians,” one can assume this is the service he referred to.
In his apology, Rota stated, “no one, including fellow parliamentarians and the Ukraine delegation, was aware of my intention or of my remarks before I delivered them.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office denied any knowledge of Hunka and his Nazi service, stating, “The Speaker had his own allotment of guest seating at Friday’s address, which were determined by the Speaker and his office alone.” It seems highly unlikely, however, that the Canadian government would allow anyone into parliament without thorough pre-emptive screening when Zelensky, a visiting president, was speaking.
Whether Trudeau (and his Stepan Bandera-sympathizing deputy PM Chrystia Freeland) knew about Yaroslav Hunka or not, the question remains: why was he never brought to justice? He, or any of the other 2,000 SS Nazis Canada reportedly took in in the years following WW2. Having been accepted as anti-communist refugees with little to no scrutiny, these suspected war criminals and collaborators have been allowed to live out the rest of their days in peace, and most of them have done so openly under their own names, as the Simon Wiesenthal Center has repeatedlyreported.
There is much to be said about Canada’s history with Ukrainian Nazis. Not only did it take them in after WW2, but the government-backed Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which, until recently, listed Nazi-collaborator veterans organizations as members, as well as government-funded Ukrainian ‘youth centers’ that celebrate Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich. There are even monuments honoring Nazi collaborators and Ukrainian Insurgent Army criminals still standing in Canadian cities.
Canada has also supported modern-day Nazis in Ukraine itself, by training members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion on Canadian soil, although Canadian corporate media has in recent years attempted to downplay this.
Radio Canada reported in April 2022 that the Canadian Armed Forces, “did contribute to the training of soldiers of the Azov regiment in 2020, to the point where this unit is now boasting of being able to train its own soldiers according to Western standards.” The Ottawa Citizen, writing about this report, cited a 2017 briefing by Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine as saying, “Multiple members of Azov have described themselves as Nazis.”
In November 2021, the same Ottawa Citizen journalist wrote about Canadian officials meeting with leaders from the Azov Battalion in June 2018. Canadian officers and diplomats, “did not object to the meeting and instead allowed themselves to be photographed with battalion officials despite previous warnings that the unit saw itself as pro-Nazi.”
Canada (together with the US and Ukraine itself) has repeatedly refused to support UN resolutions against the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and racial discrimination, as they were seen as targeting Kiev. An overwhelming majority of member states has supported these resolutions, with Kiev’s other Western backers (like all the EU member states) and their allies (like Japan and New Zealand) abstaining.
If you’ve followed Canada’s unrepentant support to Nazis, the parliament’s standing ovation for a former SS member becomes less surprising. It set off a small storm, with outrage expressed not only by Jewish rights activists and Moscow, but also by the Polish ambassador in Canada.
One can only hope that there were members of parliament who were sincerely appalled to learn they’d cheered for a Nazi. However, now that the apologies have been made, the outrage will most likely simply die down and Ottawa will continue supporting the same kind of people, as long as they are on the same side in the West’s proxy war against Russia.
After all, as Canadian researcher Tamara Lorincz noted, while everyone applauded the Ukrainian Nazi, “Not one MP called for peace, ceasefire & negotiations.” That’s the quiet part few are willing to say out loud – just as Canada apparently accepted SS “refugees” because they were fighters against the Soviet Union’s communism, just as Canada (and other Western powers) are willing to support terrorists if they are fighting against an “undesirable” government in the Middle East, so will Canada continue to cover for, give support to, and pretend to not notice a resurgence of one of history’s most atrocious ideologies as long as its adherents can be used against the current adversary – Russia.
For his part, Zelensky praised Canada for always being on the “bright side of history.” Just to recap: Canada helped destroy Libya, Canada indirectly supported terrorists in Syria against the country’s elected president, Canada housed 2,000 Nazis after WW2, and Canada supports Nazis in Ukraine now. Zelensky’s definition of the bright (or right) side of history is peculiar to say the least.
The leaders of Bandera “Ukraine” are increasingly talking about the need to “bring all Russians to account” (it is clear that by “Russians” they mean the entire population of our country, regardless of nationality). It happened somewhere before, didn’t it?
Bandera Ukraine is supported by almost all the leaders of Western countries. Therefore, Biden, Trudeau, Sunak, Scholz, Macron and Meloni, as well as the leaders of villainous Poland, the animalesque Scandinavian countries, militaristic Japan, marsupials from Australia and New Zealand and other plague-carrying fleas like the Baltic states are direct and obvious accomplices of the Nazis. And they need to be treated in the same way as the leaders of the countries of the Nazi coalition.
And no more indulging in sweet dreams about how we will someday make peace and live as a large polyamorous family with non-binary genders.
In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.
“We see how in certain countries they ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers, demolish monuments to great commanders, create a real cult of the Nazis and their proxies, erase and demonize the memory of true heroes. Such profanation of the feat and sacrifices of the victorious generation is also a crime, an outright revanchism on the part of those who were cynically and blatantly preparing a new march on Russia and who brought together neo-Nazi scum from around the world for this.”
“We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human.
They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression. They seem to have forgotten what the Nazis’ insane claims of global dominance led to. They forgot who destroyed that monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives to liberate the peoples of Europe.”
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power’.
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.
‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’.
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice’, wrote Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since, America has gone to war with the world.
According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.’
‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein‘s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’.
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people.
‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’
This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’.
In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose’.
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.
Russia could not stand idly by when Kiev started eliminating people just for associating themselves with Russian culture, language and traditions, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday as he explained the reasoning behind Moscow’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine.
Russia could not stand idly by when Kiev started eliminating people just for associating themselves with Russian culture, language and traditions, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday as he explained the reasoning behind Moscow’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine.
Speaking at an event dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the breakthrough of the blockade of Leningrad, Putin noted that the Donetsk and Lugansk regions were “historical territories” of Russia and that he ultimately made the decision to launch the military operation in order to end the eight-year-long war in Donbass and to protect its people.
“We endured for a long time, tried to reach an agreement for a long time. But, as it turns out now, we were simply led by the nose, deceived,” the president added, apparently referring to the admissions by former German chancellor Angela Merkel and former Ukraine president Pyotr Poroshenko that the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, designed to bring peace to Donbass, were a ruse by Kiev to buy time in order to build up its forces.
“It’s not the first time this has happened,” Putin admitted, stating Russia had done its best to resolve the situation by peaceful means. “It is now clear that this was, by definition, impossible. The enemy was preparing to transfer the conflict into an acute, hot phase. We had no choice but to do what we are doing now,” Putin explained.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia will consider its objectives in Ukraine fulfilled when no military infrastructure that poses a direct threat to Moscow remains. He also stated that, in order to bring the conflict to an end, Kiev must stop harassing and discriminating against Russian speakers.
What hegemon USA created, Russia is systematically annihilating.
And there’s nothing that the empire of lies and its Western vassals can do to change the course of history.
In challenging Russia militarily, they bit off more than they can chew and swallow.
Russia is a preeminent military power, China heading in the same direction — while the US-dominated West is in decline.
The battle to demilitarize and NeNazify Ukraine is proceeding as planned.
Russia’s liberation of Soledar assures deNazification of Artyomovsk to follow.
These triumphs hasten the end of Nazi occupation throughout Donbass, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Kharkov and demise of the US-created Ukraine monster overall.
Yet the collective West and its MSM co-conspirators can’t bear to admit what’s indisputable.
According to NYT fake news, “Ukraine denied the claim that Soledar” was liberated from Nazified occupation.
And this from the UK’s owned and controlled disseminator of state-approved propaganda, the BBC.
Defying reality on the ground, its so-called “reality check team (sic)” falsely claimed the following, saying:
“Russia has not taken a key town or city in Ukraine for months (sic), despite intense efforts to achieve military gains (sic).”
“Ukraine’s (US-installed puppet) is adamant (in falsely claiming that Russia is) not succeeding in (its) push to capture” Soledar.
Like other Western instruments of state-approved propaganda, the beeb can’t bring itself to admit that Russia liberated Soledar from the scourge of Nazified occupation.
Nor can US-installed puppet Zelensky, falsely pretending that the battle for Soledar continues despite its liberation by Russia.
Commander of Russia’s Troy volunteer special forces unit, Vladimir Novikov, explained the following:
Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk hospitals are overflowing with wounded regime troops from the battle for Soledar alone.
The regime suffered huge losses of its “most capable forces,” including its elite 46th airmobile brigade — wiped out by superior Russian firepower.
By its own admission, Ukraine lost 14 battalions of troops in its futile defense of Soledar.
How many more cannon fodder troops will be lost in the futile attempt to prevent Russian liberation of Artyomovsk and other Nazi-occupied parts of Donbass?
According to analyst Larry Johnson:
Soledar’s liberation “means that (Artyomovsk) is expected to fall under Russian control in the next few days.”
“Russian forces are moving from the South, the North and the East and are creating a potential cauldron that will leave Ukrainian soldiers in (the city) surrounded.”
Separately in its latest fake news edition, the Times, like other MSM, reported the following perversion of reality, falsely claiming:
“Russia replaced the general in charge of its trouble-plagued war against Ukraine (sic), amid signs of dissension among President Putin’s top allies (sic) — a shake-up that critics (sic) said would not address what ails the Russian military (sic).”
Reality check:
On Wednesday, Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, announced the following:
“Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov has been appointed as commander of the integrated group of troops (forces).”
“His deputies are: Commander-in-Chief of the Aerospace Forces Army General Sergey Surovikin, Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces Army General Oleg Salyukov, and Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Colonel-General Alexey Kim.”
“The higher level of military command in the special military operation is related to the broader scope of missions tackled in its course and need to organize closer coordination between military branches and services of the armed forces and also the increased quality of all types of logistics support and efficiency in command and control of the groups of troops.”
No change of command occurred because of Surovikin’s performance as commander of Russia’s integrated SMO forces.
It’s been exemplary.
The above-explained command restructuring likely signals a major Russian escalation ahead as part of an overarching aim to slay the made-in-the-USA Ukraine monster.
With Surovikin in charge of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, Russian airpower will likely play a greater role ahead.
Gerasimov is a brilliant strategist and tactician.
Ukraine’s military commander, Valery Zaluzhny, praised his expertise, saying:
“I read everything he wrote.”
“He is the most intelligent of men, and my expectations of him were enormous.”
He “learned from Gerasimov.”
Increased Russian naval operations may be coming.
On Wednesday, Russian warships, including submarines, left their Black Sea base — most likely toward positions to strike Ukrainian targets.
At the same time, Russia increased its military presence in Belarus.
Because of what’s going on, Gerasimov was put in charge of coordinating Russian forces ahead of a likely major escalation of war on Ukraine to follow.
Whether it’s to slay the US-created Ukraine monster more quickly or methodically continue to grind it down daily remains to be seen.
Either way, there’s no ambiguity about how things will turn out.
Russia’s triumph over the scourge of Nazi-infested Ukraine was certain from day one of its liberating SMO.
Ukraine should not be placed on a pedestal in the West’s attempts to support the country in its conflict with Russia. That’s according to Andrew Milburn, founder of the ‘Mozart Group’, which has been providing training for Kiev’s forces.
The retired Marine commander shared his experience and conclusions from working in Ukraine during an appearance on the Team House podcast last month. Attention to the video, which had only amassed some 20,000 views since it was posted, was drawn by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal on Monday.
During the podcast, Milburn stated that Ukraine is a “corrupt, f****d-up society.” While he stressed that continued Western support for the country was important and justified by the need to uphold “global norms,” he suggested that the whole point was “not about Ukraine.”
“I have a Ukrainian flag tied to my bag, but I’m not like ‘oh my God, Ukraine is so awesome,’ because I understand that there are plenty of f****d up people running Ukraine,” Milburn said, admitting that he’s really “not a big fan” of the country.
He also stated that “a number of things” that Kiev’s forces do with Russian POWs violate the Hague convention on the laws of armed conflict, especially when it comes to filming interrogations of captured Russian soldiers and posting them online.
Milburn noted that the trainers from Mozart Group don’t condone such acts and have always tried to distance themselves from any unit that showed them videos of killing Russian POWs. “We’ve been shown those videos plenty of times,” he said, adding that “there were plenty” of atrocities being committed by Ukrainian forces and “all kinds of atrocities to go around.”
He did stress, however, that most of the groups his trainers have dealt with were “very professional” and did not resort to such acts.
While Milburn’s Mozart Group claims charity status, it is considered to be among the largest private military companies currently working in Ukraine and has been providing military training to Ukrainian soldiers since the early days of the conflict. However, it has also been the source of several damning reports on the dark underbelly of Kiev’s armed forces.
Back in August, Milburn was quoted by CBS news in a since-deleted report that revealed how Western-supplied weapons were disappearing in Ukraine and popping up on the black market. Recently, he was also quoted by Newsweek in a report revealing that the Ukrainian military was seeing casualty rates of 70% or more, contrary to official Kiev’s claims.
Readers of the New York Times were perplexed by a crossword puzzle in the Sunday edition of the paper that appeared to be shaped like a swastika. Adding insult to injury in the minds of some was the fact that the puzzle was printed on the first day of Hanukkah
Several public figures used twitter to draw public attention to the controversial layout and ask the ‘newspaper of record’ how such an oversight made it to print on the day that one of Judaism’s most important holidays begins.
Donald Trump Jr., the son of former President Donald Trump, chimed in to claim that the outrage in the US would have been much bigger if an outlet “not ideologically aligned” with the readership of the Times had published it.
The newspaper’s subscribers traditionally lean left, with nine in ten people who cite it as their main news source identifying as Democrats, Pew Research reported in 2020.
The Jerusalem Post noted that this was not the first time the Times has come under fire for publishing crossword puzzles bearing a supposed swastika-likeness. Similar oversights happened in 2014 and 2017, the Israeli newspaper said.
In 2017, the NYT’s gaming section tweeted in response to accusations: “It’s NOT a swastika. Honest to God. No one sits down to make a crossword puzzle and says, ‘Hey! You know what would look cool?’”
The reason why the US wants a war with Russia is first and foremost that the poor policy choices of the US political leadership over the last five decades ended American economic and political dominance somewhere around 2008. Starting in the 1970s, market fundamentalist ideology became the American tool of choice for extracting wealth from poor and working people and nations around the globe. The political class, acting at the behest of industrialists and Wall Street, believed its own fantasy that ‘nature,’ and not imperialist looting, had made rich Americans rich.
…the cost is being paid by others. Russians and Ukrainians (and Poles, etc.) are dying to raise profits for ‘American’ corporations. And the Ukrainians that manage to survive the war will rue the day that they handed control of Ukraine to the Americans.
The ongoing US war against Russia has elevated American-allied Nazis to the international stage as ‘freedom fighters,’ resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, raised the risk of nuclear war, ended any effective international cooperation on environmental issues through rekindling energy geopolitics, assured Europe of one or more Great Depression type winters with limited heating fuel, and more probably than not will soon produce the total annihilation of Ukraine as a modern state by the Russians.
The ‘American view’ towards the war, informed domestically by an absence of the political violence that the US so regularly visits upon innocents around the globe, rank ideology, state propaganda, ignorance of world history, and the narrow economic interests of American oligarchs, imagines that it is fighting Frankenstein’s monster when it is that monster. What is the strategic interest of Ukraine to the US? More importantly, is it worth a potentially world-ending war?
In recent history, the US could have abided by the 1991 promise made by the George H.W. Bush administration to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. The US could have negotiated a security agreement with the Russians— as they have regularly requested over the last three decades. The US could have made Ukraine abide by the Minsk Accord(s) to which the Ukrainians and Russians had in principle agreed. There have been so many requests from the Russians to negotiate a lasting peace with the US that there is no convincing argument that the US didn’t want this war.
And yet the American anti-war left continues to insist, with decades of evidence to the contrary, that German and French guardians of the oligarchs (Scholz, Macron) would / could have overridden the (Joe) Biden administration’s drive to war when, as I predicted here in 2019, Biden was brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. Biden was up to his eyeballs in the US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014, was subsequently appointed to be the American prefect in Ukraine; and began preparing for war the day he entered office.
The reason why the US wants a war with Russia is first and foremost that the poor policy choices of the US political leadership over the last five decades ended American economic and political dominance somewhere around 2008. Starting in the 1970s, market fundamentalist ideology became the American tool of choice for extracting wealth from poor and working people and nations around the globe. The political class, acting at the behest of industrialists and Wall Street, believed its own fantasy that ‘nature,’ and not imperialist looting, had made rich Americans rich.
The result since the 1970s has been a shift from political leaders governing to the ideological use of government to serve business interests. The logic is that business makes ‘us’ rich, despite the fact that most of ‘us’ aren’t rich. The insight that emerged from the Great Depression— that unhindered capitalism was both unstable and destabilizing, was flipped to the disproven logic that it is government that destabilizes capitalism. In economic terms, this shift placed American liberals well to the political right of the historical American political right.
The response from power was to redefine left and right in terms that flattered power. Capitalism could be made ‘just’ by making it fairer, went the new political project of the liberal – left. This, despite half-a-millennium of capitalism causing the very illiberalism that it is now expected to ameliorate. This imagined flat society, where one ‘equal’ earns a few billion dollars a year scamming widows and orphans while another ‘equal’ begs for money on a highway off-ramp, defines the political project of this new left.
To the social democracy that young liberals eternally call for, the US had that in the 1970s, just before it was abandoned by liberals. The (Ronald) Reaganite effort to shift resources, and with it, power, from the public sphere to the private was matched by liberals using an ideological market fundamentalism to accomplish similarly motivated outcomes from a better-hidden position. Wall Street and the largely privatized US military were re-elevated to be the economic bludgeon / capital allocation device of militarized capitalist-imperialism.
More to the point, social-democratic governments have been the vanguard of neoliberalism since the 1970s. Recall, the Biden administration was going to broaden economic distribution through raising the minimum wage, govern on the side of labor, enact environmental programs that might actually stabilize, or even reverse, environmental decline, and it was going to keep the US out of forever wars. While Democrats may need another twenty or thirty years to acquaint themselves with their actual policies, the other 80% of the country has already come to different conclusions.
In the meantime, the US has two political parties to represent the interests of capital and the radical right, but none to support the interests of ‘the people’ more broadly considered. Quickly, what are the metrics by which quasi-privatized public schools (Charter Schools) are measured? Well, most have been exempted from having to demonstrate that they are successfully educating students for a decade or more. How about healthcare? Since the ACA was implemented in 2015, 3 – 5 million Americans have died who wouldn’t have if the US had a functioning healthcare system.
The point is that, as these metrics suggest, raising profits for ‘American’ corporations has been the singular goal of social-democratic policies in the US, and similarly in Europe. The easiest way to sell ruling class interests as those of ‘the people’ is to claim that they are for the people— while setting them up to benefit only executives and oligarchs. Question: if Americans understood that the American war against Ukraine was provoked by the Americans, would they still support it? If so, why are the Biden administration and the state-affiliated press (NYT, WP) continuing to lie about the causes of the war?
With Ukraine being supplied with weapons by the US; being central to American oil geopolitics in Europe; and key to the neo-colonial wealth extraction from Ukraine that the US imagines it will exert after the conflict ends, US arms and materiel makers started shopping for larger houses the day that Joe Biden was elected president. But again, the cost is being paid by others. Russians and Ukrainians (and Poles, etc.) are dying to raise profits for ‘American’ corporations. And the Ukrainians that manage to survive the war will rue the day that they handed control of Ukraine to the Americans.
An historical analogy: during WWII the OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists- Bandera) had Ukrainian nationalists join with the German Nazis to commit racist / antisemitic atrocities across Eastern Europe and ultimately, to attack the Soviets. These Banderites—followers of Ukrainian nationalist and enthusiastic Nazi Stepan Bandera, imagined that Adolf Hitler would want like-minded Nazis to rule Ukraine as a racialized Nazi state. Surprise: Hitler was using the Banderites to further the Nazi goal of defeating the Soviets. The German Nazis reportedly shot OUN-B leaders when they dared to suggest that they be allowed to rule Ukraine.
This brings us to the current geopolitical predicament. The American war against Russia comes as the US political leadership tries to recover a functioning economy using the same logic and institutions that produced the dysfunction in the first place. Deindustrialization? Check. Financialization? Check. Militarization? Check. The American economic and political leadership spent five decades ending what it was that America ‘does’ without any apparent plan to address the (predictable) consequences that are now upon us.
The American war against Russia has been framed by the Americans in terms of oil geopolitics and humanitarian intervention. A seven-year-old with a map of the world could see easily enough that geography favors the Russians in terms of both prosecuting a major war in Europe and providing oil and gas to Europeans and to European industry. The effort by the American political and military leadership to cleave Europe from Russia faces this insurmountable problem of geography. Add 4,000 miles of supply lines, the distance from the US to Germany, to the Nazi Siege of Leningrad for insight into the nature of the problem.
Moreover, the American plan reeks of desperation. The explanation given by the Biden administration, by CIA linked commercial news outlets like the New York Times, and by what is claimed to be a dissident left in the US, depends on a stopping point in history that few outside of the US find plausible. The Russians were rebuffed by the Americans for three decades as they tried to negotiate security guarantees, including immediately prior to the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) and again in April 2022, when UK PM Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian political leadership that the Americans had refused any negotiations.
(Here is a background history of the US – Russia conflict that I wrote a couple of weeks after the conflict started. Here is where I correctly predicted in 2019 that Joe Biden would be brought to power by the national security state to launch a war against Russia. And here is a history of the American alliance with German and Ukrainian Nazis for purposes of enticing them to commit terrorist attacks against the Soviets, now the Russians, since the mid-1940s).
(Here is American historian and Cold Warrior George Kennan explaining US President Woodrow Wilson’s use of the American Expeditionary Force in 1919 to launch a stealth American war against the Bolsheviks with the goal of reversing the October Revolution. As ideologically and constitutionally inconvenient as this might be for American liberals and ‘the left,’ there is history to the US – Russia relationship that preceded the launch of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022.
Likewise, American claims of Ukrainian sovereignty are almost too stupid to countenance. Starting in 2013, the US State Department, likely with direct or indirect assistance from the CIA and its stealth cut-outs like NED (National Endowment for Democracy), stoked a burgeoning uprising by the Ukrainian people to turn it into an American regime change operation. Around this same time Ukrainian Nazis from Right Sector and Svoboda committed suspiciously well-timed atrocities against Ukrainian citizens that de-legitimated the democratically elected president of Ukraine to install a government chosen by the American State Department.
The ‘American view’ has it that the Ukrainian people ousted the Ukrainian President, after which Ukraine returned to being the liberal democracy that it never was. In fact, an early act by the US was to retain predatory and potentially extractive loans from the IMF for Ukraine that the Ukrainian people are on the hook to repay. From 2014 forward the US was arming, supplying, and training Ukrainian militias, including significant contingents of self-described Nazis, to fight in the civil war that the US instigated.
At the time of the launch of Russia’s SMO, US-armed Nazis had surrounded Russian ethnic enclaves in Eastern Ukraine and were preparing to ethnically-cleanse Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine. This followed eight-years of civil war where the Americans supplied, armed, and trained Ukrainian Nazis to do exactly that. Why Russia’s SMO doesn’t qualify as ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the American view, while far more destructive American interventions in Syria, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. do, would be a puzzle if it were a puzzle.
For those who missed it, here is the infamous ‘fuck the EU’ call from 2014 where former US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, lays out US plans to install a US-allied puppet government to run Ukraine following the US-led coup there. To my knowledge, this (link above) is the only clip that includes mention of Joe Biden’s future role as the American prefect in Ukraine. Recall: the first Trump impeachment was over Trump halting weapons shipments that the US was sending to Ukraine to commit terrorist attacks against Russia with.
While Joe Biden appears to have played largely a figure-head role in the coup and subsequent CIA / Nazi civil war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, what he represents to not-Americans is the persistence of an adversarial foreign policy towards Russia that re-emerged when US President Bill Clinton reneged on the George H.W. Bush administration’s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border. Biden’s response has been to censor press accounts that contradict the official storyline while using state propaganda to convince gullible liberals that Nazis doing the bidding of American capital are ‘freedom fighters.’
The question for most of us is: why? What possible interest does American capital have in destroying Ukraine? Well, there is the means— weapons and materiel ‘lent’ to the Ukrainian-Nazi leadership by the Americans that they (the Ukrainians) will spend the next several decades paying for. There is the replacement of Russian oil and gas with more expensive and environmentally-destructive-to-transport ‘American’ oil and gas. There is the rebuilding of Ukraine by American corporations at Ukrainian expense after it has been destroyed. And there is the regional control over Europe currently imagined to accrue to the Americans from the war.
But how realistic is this? If the Americans can blow up the Nord Stream pipeline supplying Russian LNG to Europe, why can’t the Russians blow up LNG transport ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean to deliver ‘American’ oil and gas to Europe? More to the point, how will European industry be affected by rising energy prices that disproportionately affect it? Reminder: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. Is another Great Depression in Europe really what the Americans want?
The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 raised very basic questions regarding the future role of the US in the world. The child-like / aggressively implausible stage of neoliberal capitalism (1980s – today), where the US abandoned its industrial policy while deindustrializing the nation in order to foster money-manager capitalism where bankers allocate capital— mostly to themselves, raises the question of what it is that Americans ‘do?’ In history, the trajectory ran from manufacturing to service jobs to gig jobs.
Joe Biden has been a part of every bad policy decision that the American political leadership has made from the 1970s to today. The neoliberal turn? Check. Resources wars for ‘American’ business interests? Check. Repressive social policies to create the largest carceral population in world history? Check. Promoting George W. Bush’s lie that Iraq possessed WMDs? Check. Privatizing and cutting Social Security? Check. Funding executive bonus pools under the guise of solving environmental problems? Check.
Biden was elected to start a war with Russia. If you follow the history, he has been in place at critical junctures to do just that. That he was a right-wing, neoliberal, war hawk for forty-eight of his fifty years of public self-service— until he ran for president in 2020, should have been a clue that he was the wrong politician for this time. And while the warm embrace of American liberals with self-described Nazis is no surprise here, the broader political context suggests that those interested in political solutions should stop calling each other names and end the war.
This written, the US is in a bad way. And it will remain so no matter who is president. These problems will be intractable until the existing distribution of wealth and power has been reconsidered (redistributed). As long as Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon rule the nation, ‘public’ policies will be for their benefit, not ours. Younger readers don’t have twenty or thirty years to figure this out. The problem with low and mid-level conflicts that persist is that they can escalate in the blink of an eye. This war has to be ended quickly. The Americans need to end the bullshit and negotiate a peace.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.
Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone