can you handle the truth… (about Ukraine, US foreign policy & the fate of humanity)?

One of the most celebrated quotes from modern cinema comes from the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992). Cross-examined during the court-martial proceedings, Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) has been called to testify as a witness by defence lawyer and subordinate Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise), and in a state of growing agitation growls his notorious retort…

Col. Jessup: I’ll answer the question. You want answers?

Lt. Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them.

Col Jessup: You want answers?!

Lt. Kaffee: I want the truth!

Col. Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!

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The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed cover the tirade by official English language spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo in which the deranged ex-Democratic Party activist threatened journalists and media figures who criticized Ukraine’s war effort with death:

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Barbarians at the gates?

In the West we value liberal democracy and look to our own liberal democracies as the true bastions of modern civilisation. It is an outlook doubtless culturally instilled, and enshrined with it, we were taught to have considerable faith in elected governments, the civil service, our courts of law, and the fourth estate provided by a free and independent press. Historically, we have indeed held faith in all these democratic institutions, which although admittedly flawed, were once revered by a good many or else more generally acknowledged as safeguards and regarded as necessary evils by the rest of us.

However, public trust in liberal democracy and its institutions has suddenly reached an historic low, and as our trust in the extant political systems continues to wane, growing numbers are seeing how the whole edifice of western democracy is currently rotting away from the top down. Commensurate to this, we are witnessing the somewhat abrupt and inexorable decline of western influence across the world; by extension, the troubling vision of a global retreat for “modern civilisation”. To steal a line from Marx and Engels generally quoted in the form of a translation of The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.”

In response, a schism has been widening between two apparently rival groups: those who are eager to restore public trust in state authorities, political institutions and establishment media, and others whose loss of faith is more final and absolute, and so have turned their backs fundamentally to all of the old organs of state. Both sides, for contrary but comparable reasons, show tendencies of know-all superiority, and meanwhile fall into alternative states of heightened anxiety, depression or worse, paranoia. There is a great deal to fear. In this regard, neither side is mistaken at all.

The one side sees only the unstoppable and merciless encroachment of a soulless and authoritarian state apparatus crushing all individual expression and freedom; the other side dreads an inexorable collapse into chaos and a populist anarchy. So one seeks remedies away from the blaring pronouncements of mainstream authority within receding corners of the internet – for some lost souls any alternative will do – while the other still regularly turns on the nightly news or pores over pages of the broadsheets with occasionally cheers for national security agencies that they once feared and loathed in turn. Both see the darkness coming and so clamber despairing towards any chinks of light.

Superficially this division is between liberal/democratic-statism as opposed to the apparently reactionary forces of nationalist-conservative/libertarianism. In fact, significance differences between the opposing camps are more nuanced, as evidenced by the placement of slashes uniting what would otherwise be competing political orientations within themselves. Nonetheless, this is a broadly accepted portrayal of how the political landscape is being reshaped.

In an attempt to keep this article reasonably brief while also covering a lot of ground, I shall try not to venture off into the weeds and the various related topics that range from Trump’s election victory, the shock Brexit result, Russiagate scandals, the covid response and so on. I have already dealt with all of these subjects extensively – so for readers who want to find analysis and my opinions on each of these matters I refer you to those earlier posts (follow the links provided). Instead, the point is simply to recognise and understand how we have entered such a period of factionalisation resulting in deep political bifurcation and the emergence of two distinct warring factions where – to paraphrase George W Bush – from the liberal perspective, you are either with us or with the enemy.

With this borne in mind, I appreciate that much that follows puts me inside this envisioned enemy camp for many readers on the liberal side. On the other hand, anyone who knows me personally, or who regularly follows this blog, understands that I have no time for Trump, no time for the majority of Brexiteers, no time for the “Covid-deniers” (while I hate the term, I use it for sake of convenience) and no time for the far right and nationalistic politics in general, whether of Putin, Netanyahu and the Likudniks, or the January 6^th protesters/rioters. Unapologetically, I remain a Corbynista. And if I were American voter, would today be campaigning for the election of RFK Jr. Quite possibly America’s last remaining hope:

Having swiftly addressed any doubts surrounding my political perspectives and questionable motivation for compiling this post, I now wish to return to the principle matter in hand, and delve headlong into the nitty-gritty. Not to discover the grubby truth of our contemporary political reality in its fullness, but to outline the most incontrovertible and thus strictly speaking non-partisan dirty truths, beginning with the smelliest and most grotesque truth of all. The most gargantuan and gnarliest pachyderm ever stuffed into the tightest corner of the most claustrophobic of rooms: how the ostensible US Commander-in-Chief is utterly incapable of commanding anything whatsoever…

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Joe Biden is incapable of running anything let alone the Free World

Here is Joe Biden on stage in Hanoi, Vietnam during a visit that also marked the end to the underwhelming G20 summit in India:

After bumbling on more or less incoherently from beginning to end for the entire speech, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre eventually interrupted Biden mid-sentence – perhaps fearing what he is about to say next – Biden’s mic was cut and soothing jazz music played over to cover the shock, as the US President forlornly meandered off the stage. Moments earlier, Biden had literally told his audience that he was about to go to bed!

Now here’s the rub. What happened last week in Hanoi has happened in countless places and earlier occasions. The fact is – and this is the first of many irrefutable actualities that many liberals find so hard to swallow – Biden is totally unfit to hold office. He is very obviously not compos mentis.

Moreover, the clear signs that Biden is suffering with some form of senility or dementia had been perfectly evident in the prior months leading up to his 2020 presidential victory and it is even something I have previously discussed on the blog. Yet despite the mounting evidence, the liberal media remained silent and actually rallied to Biden’s electoral cause – doubtless in determined efforts to prevent the re-election of Trump – but presumably as consequence of their own failures in this regard, have consistently covered up evidence of Biden’s steady mental decline.

All of which unavoidably leads to a question of nearly fathomless political importance. The elephant in the room besides Biden’s senility itself: if Joe Biden isn’t running America then who behind the scenes is ultimately pulling the strings? Like you, I do not have any definitive answer to this question. We probably all know who it isn’t however. Sit back down, Kamala Harris! Yet the sheer weight of this question can hardly be overstated, particularly in light of the evidently deteriorating politico-economic situation both on the US domestic front and abroad.

This obvious decline in American leadership is now leading the West as a whole into dire straits, while mainstream denial of the seriousness of the situation once again underlines the deficiencies of the establishment media. Joe Biden’s failing health should never have become a matter for public concern. It should have remained a private family matter. Neither should my next point of contention… but facts do still remain facts. And likewise, all of the issues raised below underscore a central concern, one I have also highlighted many times previously, that the fourth estate effectively died years ago. (Which is sadly a constant refrain on this blog.)

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The Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed in all of its military objectives

In early June, Ukraine launched its long overdue counteroffensive. Back then, fellow Europeans and Americans had been told to expect a rapid and sweeping assault that would cut off the Russian advance entirely as it reached the Sea of Azov, where the battles would culminate with the final liberation of Crimea. But all of these promises were soon forgotten. Instead the Western media has gradually withdrawn its focus from the stalled and evidently failed advancement of Ukrainian troops. And in this instance, no news very definitely means bad news.

Esteemed American political scientist and international relations scholar, John Mearsheimer speaking in a lecture back in June 2015 had already issued a grave caution to the Western powers, saying the US and Europe were “leading Ukraine down the primrose path”:

“What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” 1 [from 43:40 mins]

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Almost exactly eight years on, and three months into the counteroffensive, Mearsheimer now updates his stance and expounds upon just how catastrophic the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been [with his original footnotes retained throughout — although the links are not available]:

It is now clear that Ukraine’s eagerly anticipated counteroffensive has been a colossal failure.^[1] After three months, the Ukrainian army has made little progress pushing back the Russians. Indeed, it has yet to get beyond the so-called “grey zone,” the heavily contested strip of land that lies in front of the first main line of Russian defenses. The New York Times reports that “In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The toll included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.”^[2] According to virtually all accounts of the fighting, Ukrainian troops have suffered enormous casualties.^[3] All nine of the vaunted brigades that NATO armed and trained for the counteroffensive have been badly chewed up on the battlefield.

Nor is Mearsheimer alone in his unvarnished criticism, either prior to the counteroffensive or since. Although it has since become very hard not to acknowledge the basic fact that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is essentially over; its forces suffering unsustainable losses both in terms of equipment supplied by the Nato countries and sheer number of Ukrainian soldiers maimed or killed in action.

In a very recent article candidly entitled “Ukraine ‘in deep trouble’: Some experts say $1B more from US won’t matter”, USA Today reports that:

Steven Myers, an Air Force veteran, State Department advisory panel member and Russia expert, says the Biden administration “party line” is that Ukraine is winning and that Russia must yield to the West or become a “vassal of China.” Myers says new Ukraine Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, a Blinken pat on the back and the latest aid package won’t dramatically alter Ukraine’s struggle against its far-bigger neighbor.

The same piece continues with an altogether stark assessment of the realities on the ground and the unrealistic prospects of any further Ukrainian advancement:

“There is no effective counterstrategy available to the Ukrainians,” Myers said. “The Ukrainians are in deep trouble.”

Myers told USA TODAY the Ukrainians use “pin pricks” and news about taking back land to demonstrate progress to the West − but are less transparent about the cost in Ukrainian lives.

“They don’t talk about the counterstrikes by the Russians, who don’t care about gaining or holding ground in the kill zone and are experts at laying traps,” he said.

Ukrainian forays into Russian territory usually result in drones smashing high-rise windows in Moscow. A Russian rocket attack Wednesday the eastern Ukraine city of Kostiantynivka struck a downtown market, killing 17 civilians hours after Blinken arrived in Kyiv.

Ukraine and the West badly need an exit strategy, Myers said.

“Europe is in more economic trouble than we are. Germany’s in deep recession,” Myers said. “The Europeans are not going to shoulder more economic burden. They need an off-ramp.”

Again, Myers is not alone in taking this position. As the piece goes on to explain:

Sean McFate, a professor at Syracuse University and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council think tank, aligns with Myers. He supports the change in defense ministers, saying corruption claims forced the issue. But that won’t change the course of the war, he said.

McFate says the U.S. relied on conventional warfare tactics in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan − and lost. Yet the U.S. has not changed tactics in Ukraine, he says. Russia made the same mistakes early in Ukraine with its ill-fated blitz toward Kyiv, McFate told USA TODAY. Now the Kremlin is relying on more modern tools of war, he said, such as controlling information and mercenary troops.

“Things are going nowhere for Ukraine,” McFate said. “Wars are no longer won like World War II by taking the enemy’s land, killing their troops and flying your flag over their capital.”

Click here to read the full article written by John Bacon, published in USA Today on September 7^th.

Returning to John Mearsheimer’s analysis in his piece curtly entitled “Bound to Lose”, he summarises “the results so far” of Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy in these terms:

The counteroffensive has been an abysmal failure, contrary to the expectations of almost everyone in the West. Ukraine has suffered huge casualties and lost large amounts of weaponry in three months of fighting.^[47] In the process, its army has yet to reach the first line of Russia’s defense-in-depth; it remains bogged down fighting in the grey zone located in front of Russia’s main defense lines, where, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, “They were just waiting for us…prepared positions everywhere. It was a wall of steel. It was horrendous.”^[48] As noted, Western officials report that Ukraine lost about 20 percent of the weapons it employed on the battlefield during the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which included a good number of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles that the West had provided.^[49]

Continuing:

It is now widely recognized that the counteroffensive has failed and there is no serious prospect of Ukraine suddenly achieving success before either the fall rains or Ukrainian leaders shut it down.^[54] For example, The Kyiv Independent recently ran a story with the title: “Inching Forward in Bakhmut Counteroffensive, Ukraine’s Hardened Units Look Ahead to Long, Grim War.”^[55] Relatedly, The Washington Post published an article on 10 August that emphasized the dark mood in Ukraine: “Two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray. The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks…. Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.”^[56]

Concluding his latest assessment of what he finally regards as disastrous failure at the level of Western, and specifically, US foreign policy:

It is hard to imagine, for example, the US taking its gunsights off Russia in the foreseeable future. The most likely result is that that the war will go on and eventually end in a frozen conflict with Russia in possession of a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. But that outcome will not put an end to the competition and conflict between Russia and Ukraine or between Russia and the West.

Click here to read John Mearsheimer’s full article entitled “Bound to Lose” published on his Substack on September 2^nd.

Trickles of truth are very, very slowly gathering into streams. But if these streams of information ever seem likely to turn into a flood, then we can be quite sure that the establishment media will do their best to distract us with other news of events home and abroad. Distraction from unpalatable facts has become their forte.

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The war in Ukraine is not a Hollywood battle of good against evil

Ukraine is a divided nation. The western half, which is Ukrainian speaking, looks towards Europe; the Eastern half speaks Russian and prefers to keep its distance from the West. The opposition has been mostly portrayed as pro-EU (even when much of the sentiment is actually anti-Russia) and thus pro-democracy, which is a deliberate and calculated over-simplification.

Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine, the location of their homeland is key to winning what Arthur Conolly, an intelligence officer and captain of the British East India Company’s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, once called “The Great Game”, and what Zbigniew Brzezinski nearly two centuries later alluded to as “The Grand Chessboard”. Brzezinski helpfully subtitling his 1998 book of the same name, “American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”. In other words, the neo-con “Pax Americana” but by another name, with Brzezinski’s preferred approach more cloak-and-dagger than the full frontal assault of the PNAC crazies.

The major strategy of this updated quest for global hegemony (“The New Great Game” as some have called it), is again little different than during the days of Arthur Conolly: to seize control of Eurasia. And just as ‘the game’ itself hasn’t significantly altered in two centuries nor have the main competitors changed much either. Back in Conolly’s time, it was Britain in one corner against Russia in the other; nowadays America sits in for the UK.

In this pursuit of global dominion, the Ukraine is a vital stronghold. Firstly, it is located approximately at the hub of the Eurasian landmass. But additionally, Ukraine currently provides Russia with access to the Black Sea; the principal base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet being at Sevastopol – likewise, in Syria, the Russian fleet has its naval base at Tartus ensuring access to the Eastern Mediterranean. So capturing Ukraine weakens Russia militarily too, and would help in another way, therefore, to edge the world closer to Brzezinski’s stated goal of “American primacy”.

It is not by chance that Sevastopol, the second largest port in Ukraine, is located on one of the most well-known peninsulas in the world; that of the Crimea. A tongue of land jutting into the Black Sea and, like the rock of Gibraltar, of huge strategic importance. And no accident that the Crimea shares its name with an even more famous war. A war against the Russians between the years 1853–56 that is remembered, in part, for the real humanitarian courage of nurses like Florence Nightingale, but mostly because of gung-ho military campaigns such as the Battle of Balaclava (October 25^th 1854) which featured that suicidally reckless charge of the Light Brigade. Old-time military madmen commanding the six hundred to ride “into the valley of Death.”2

Conolly didn’t live to hear about the shambolic pawn sacrifice at Balaklava; part of a failed attempt to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, which was already Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea. Identified as a British agent, he had been executed a decade before – beheaded in a square in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. So Conolly was himself a victim of the Great Game, just as were more innocent and forgotten thousands, losing their lives in campaign after campaign, of which the Crimean War was one brief episode. And the scars of this centuries’ long face-off between empires have never healed, instead the wounds are routinely reopened. Indeed, that earlier age of imperialism never ended but has skilfully reinvented itself: the significant difference between old imperialism and more swanky neo-imperialism being one of image. In the modern world running up your flag above a defeated territory is no way to win respect or curry favour whether at home or abroad.

The above passages are reproduced almost verbatim from an extended article written and published back in February 10^th 2014 in the midst of the Euromaidan uprising and prior to the coup that ensued. The post is entitled “The New Great Game: ‘Pax Americana’ from Syria to Uzbekistan to the Ukraine.”

Shortly afterwards, I penned a follow-up article entitled “never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste…” published on April 22^nd in which I quote Zbigniew Brzezinski’s exact formulation of US geostrategy in which he states more precisely how US primacy ultimately hinges on gaining control over Ukraine:

In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.3

This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia has been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

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Ukraine is still full of Banderites, many also holding vital positions of power

Ukrainian journalist and exiled antiwar dissident Ruslan Kostaba has been jailed and brutally attacked by ultranationalists for his years of opposition to his government’s war in the Donbas that began in 2014, and his calls for peace with Russia.

A fortnight ago he spoke to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal about the growing movement in Ukraine against escalating the war, and the price his countrymen face for attempting to escape the war:

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Here is a screenshot taken from the recent England international against Ukraine that was played in Poland:

Behind the goal there are three centrally placed banners. The middle one is darker and harder to resolve, but if you look carefully you will notice the word Azov, which instantly provides a clue. On either side, however, the banners are far easier to recognise. They are Ukrainian flags centrally embossed with the Azov Brigade emblem. Except that’s not quite correct. Strictly speaking the official badge of the Azov Brigade is different and this is the emblem of its former incarnation the Azov Battalion which existed prior to its widely publicised de-Nazification and subsequent rebranding for Western consumption:

To quote directly from the current Wikipedia entry (from which the image is drawn), this older design features “a combination of a mirrored Wolfsangel and the Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS, over a small Tryzub. Since 2015, it is no longer in use as a symbol of the regiment.” [All links retained]

These old Azov banners immediately caught my eye as I was watching the game. How can it be, I wondered, that Ukrainian fans are able to roll out unambiguously Nazi emblems and no-one appears either to notice or care.

To put this into context, when Celtic fans raised Palestinian flags during a game, the flags were promptly removed and the club afterwards fined by UEFA. The football authorities generally clampdown on political displays of this kind, unless apparently… well, unless implicitly it sanctions them. Because this is generally what happens whenever Ukrainian nationalists unfurl their Nazi paraphernalia, as they are frequently in the habit of doing; the authorities just turn a blind eye to their own regulations, as did the production team and commentators working for the otherwise aching progressive Channel 4 throughout the two and a half hours of its live broadcast of the match.

Or here is another recent example that happened in London in response to an antiwar demonstration. An event that provided the opportunity for a different cohort of Ukrainian nationalists to fly literal Nazi flags directly opposite a World War II memorial:

How can this ever be permitted? Yes certainly, I am a firm advocate of freedom of speech, but flying a Wolfsangel – a variant of the Swastika – in central London in the close vicinity of a war memorial is a clear provocation… Is nobody else offended by any of this?

As veteran investigative journalist, war correspondent and ardent peace activist John Pilger wrote in an extended piece published on May 1^st:

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.

Click here to read John Pilger’s full article entitled “There is a war coming shrouded in propaganda. It will involve us. Speak up” published on May 1^st.

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The coming war with the rest of the world

While Britain’s political class is distracted by a Downing Street party, the world is at the most dangerous strategic juncture since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

These are the sobering thoughts of Daily Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, as expressed in the opening paragraph in his latest article entitled “The West’s nightmare: a war on three fronts”.

Under the strapline “There has never been a more unsettling strategic landscape in my lifetime – we must turn our attention to the prospect of conflict”, the same piece then continues:

The West faces escalating threat of conflict on three fronts, each separate but linked by unknown levels of collusion: Russia’s mobilisation of a strike force on Ukraine’s border, China’s “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Taiwan, and Iran’s nuclear brinksmanship.

Each country is emboldening the other two to press their advantage, and together they risk a fundamental convulsion of the global order.

You have to go back yet further to find a moment when Western democracies were so vulnerable to a sudden change in fortunes. Today’s events have echoes of the interlude between the Chamberlain-Daladier capitulation at Munich in 1938 and consequences that followed in rapid crescendo from Anschluss to the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Click here to find Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article published on December 9^th behind The Telegraph paywall.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, regular columnist Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Hoover fellow at Stanford University teamed up with Oleksiy Honcharuk, former Ukrainian Prime Minister under current President Volodymyr Zelensky, and member of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center in an article headlined “The best response to Russia’s threats is a closer relationship with Ukraine”, which states:

Since 1939, the specter of an all-out conventional war in Europe between two major militaries has never been greater.

Click here to read the full article published by the Washington Post on Dec 1^st.

It is quite easy, of course, to write off commentators like Evans-Pritchard and McFaul as alarmists, since what they are speculating on – even forecasting – is more or less unthinkable. War with Russia. War with Iran. War with China. War with all three simultaneously! This is absolute madness, and nothing good could possibly come from a war with any of these three rising powers.

However, if we accept Evans-Pritchard’s account this build up to the terrifying potential of full-fledged global conflict becomes very nearly inevitable, as an unavoidable response to the expansionism of Putin and Xi and/or the belligerence of the Iranians. To have stood by and done nothing, he compares directly with appeasement of Nazism – all three rivals to western hegemony duly compared to the most wicked and unassuageable enemy of humanity in modern times. Such unabashed reduction ad Hitlerum is always deemed permissible when enemies under scrutiny are ours!

Passages taken from another article this time published back on December 17^th 2021 as Russian troops assembled on the borders of Ukraine and while many in the West – myself included – still held out hope of a peaceful resolution.

Provocatively entitled “the coming wars with Russia, China and Iran – why the stakes are raised in the last days of the unipolar order”, the opening conflict – the now admitted US proxy war against Russia (see the brief Grayzone report below) – is well underway. Meanwhile, as the Nato-led Ukrainian counteroffensive falters and in the West some are seeking ways to freeze the conflict, another proxy war in Syria is brewing once again and meanwhile the major hawks in Washington, led by the deeply ensconced neocon faction, are already turning attention back toward China.

Warning: The Grayzone report below is based on entirely on mainstream news footage, however there is an image shown in the original report that is unusually graphic at about 1:40 mins.

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My article closes with a reminders of parallel historical events and ends with a defiant peace proposal; a conclusion that has become more pertinent today than when I wrote it almost two years ago:

America’s long-term geostrategic repositioning through the stealth expansion of Nato directly up to the borders of Russia and China is now combined with its ever more bellicose political posturing. Repeatedly under the threat of attack, loose defensive alliances have tightened between Russia, China and Iran, so a coordinated response becomes all the more likely. Should the West or Israel (with US consent) take the decision to declare “pre-emptive” war against any one of the three sovereign powers, the realistic expectation is wider war. Given the probable magnitude of a three-pronged retaliation and the genuine potential for a thermonuclear exchange, the prospect of wars against Russia, China and Iran is therefore absolutely unthinkable.

A century ago a detached and callous ruling class led a largely innocent and unwitting generation into the bloody technological hellhole of no-man’s land to slaughter one another for the glory of king and country and, importantly, for the sake of empire. Back then and ever since, we have rightly talked of “lions led by donkeys”. Astonishingly, the donkeys are back in charge again, except that this time around besides an imbecilic and unprincipled political class, we also have an atrophied antiwar opposition, a moribund fourth estate and an endlessly diverted populous, so the worry is that we may be dealing with donkeys virtually all the way down.

So forgive me when I hammer this point: war is in the air again, and not just any old war. WAR with Russia! WAR with Iran! WAR with China! WAR with all three simultaneously!

I make no apologies for my vulgar use of capitals. We all need to shout about this. What’s the alternative?

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Concluding thoughts

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I am not a pessimist by nature but my unconscious is now screaming on a nightly basis. I wake up regularly with visions of war. Last night I witnessed an entire flotilla of British warships being blown apart by unseen incoming missiles, and I feared to turn around and see the rising flames and smoke of mushrooms clouds. Then I woke up.

Is my unconscious being hysterical? That’s a rhetorical question in case you thought otherwise.

But I continue writing because I really do believe there is a chance to end this nightmare. We just need to accept the truth – to handle it fully – and take appropriate action. We need to talk to one another honestly again about the threat of nuclear annihilation, as we did during the Cold War days when I was a child. We need to acknowledge the dire truth about our political leadership and the unstated imperialist drive to maintain Western supremacy. If we cannot finally accept that a multipolar world is rising then we are doomed, because the only alternative is war – a war of such terrific ferocity and unimaginable scale that little if anything will survive the cataclysm. In the event, none of us will be able to handle the truth of what has occurred.

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Updates:

Col. Doug Macgregor has become one of the fiercest critics of US foreign policy and an outspoken advocate for a peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine. A fortnight ago he gave an interview for the Swiss German-language media outlet Die Weltwoche in which he outlined the already disastrous failures of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the escalating danger of the hawks in Washington doubling down on China:

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In another recent discussion uploaded on Friday 22^nd, Brian Berletic of The New Atlas spoke to Garland Nixon and Dr. Wilmer Leon about US political interference around the world and how the youth are specifically targeted. They compared strategies in different regions and considered the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in Taiwan in the context of how events have unfolded in Ukraine:

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On Thursday 21^st, Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke with former British diplomat, Alastair Crooke, who is also founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West.

They discussed the poor international reception to Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest statements at the United Nations framed within the broader context of rising domestic pressure on Joe Biden and in light of growing revelations of Ukraine’s exhausted and spent counteroffensive “that has achieved nothing at all and has decimated the army”:

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On the same day, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran reviewed Antony Blinken’s speech delivered at John Hopkins University on September 13^th and what they sardonically describe as the Blinken Doctrine. How on the one hand Blinken concedes the unipolar moment has ended and American power is significantly weakened, on the other he now calls for unrestrained belligerence towards American’s principle geopolitical rivals Russia and China:

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Additional:

Embedded below is an interview I gave with podcaster Richard Cox that was recorded about a month ago. We began with a discussion of the origins of the conflict and how the original victims of the war when it started in Donbass have never been given a voice in the Western media. We also considered the likely outcomes as the military offensive already appeared to have stalled and the possible long-term consequences of backing the Ukrainian ultranationalists and its extreme right-wing paramilitary groups:

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1 In fuller context:

“I think the facts are quite clear on this: that the west is responsible; and my aim is that the main deep causes – the aim of the United States and its European allies – is to peel Ukraine away from Russia’s orbit and incorporate it into the West. Our basic goal has been to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border and Russia says, “this ain’t happening. Period. End the story. And we will do everything we can to make sure it does not happen. That’s the deep cause… [from 10:45 mins]

What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.

And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side, and Nato on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way. Time is on our side. And, of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this and the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked.” [from 43:40 mins]

2    As then- poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously commemorated the incident in a narrative poem of the same title.

3    Extract from The Grand Chessboard, Chapter 2 “The Eurasian Chessboard”, p. 40, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1997. It is available at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

western media is (still) whitewashing far-right extremism in Ukraine

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Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.

There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing. It is especially disturbing given the current surge of neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.

From an article published in The Hill as recently as November 2017.

The same piece continues:

The most infamous neo-Nazi group in Ukraine is the 3,000-strong Azov Battalion, founded in 2014. Prior to creating Azov, its commander, Andriy Biletsky, headed the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, members of which went on to form the core of Azov. Biletsky had stated that the mission of Ukraine is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” […]

Azov’s neo-Nazi character has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Reuters, among others. On-the-ground journalists from established Western media outlets have written of witnessing SS runes, swastikas, torchlight marches, and Nazi salutes. They interviewed Azov soldiers who readily acknowledged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unambiguous headlines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. backing in Ukraine?” and “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russian propaganda? 1

In a subsequent article published in March 2018, The Hill reported:

A little-noticed provision in the 2,232-page government spending bill passed last week bans U.S. arms from going to a controversial ultranationalist militia in Ukraine that has openly accepted neo-Nazis into its ranks.

House-passed spending bills for the past three years have included a ban on U.S. aid to Ukraine from going to the Azov Battalion, but the provision was stripped out before final passage each year. 2

And yet, despite all of the damning evidence there are still ongoing attempts to draw western public attention away from the Nazi brigades fighting on the Ukrainian frontline and to dismiss the irrefutable facts as merely “Russia propaganda”. The latest standout example was written by David Axe and published last week by Forbes magazine.

Beneath a picture of a tank driven by member of the notorious Azov Battalion, David Axe writes:

The narrative the Kremlin advances to justify its brutal war on the Ukrainian people—that Ukraine is a far-right Nazi regime bent on destroying Russia—is a lie.

Continuing:

Yes, there really are far-right elements in Ukrainian society. But it’s unfair to describe Ukrainian military units—even those that orginally formed within fringe groups—as “right-wing.” Kyiv deliberately has de-radicalized these units.

The 98th Azov Battalion is one of several units that has undergone this transformation. Today the battalion essentially is indistinguishable from other Ukrainian formations. 3

However everything here is a lie, and worse than this, Davis Axe must presumably have known it was a lie. How can I make this bold accusation? Because as geopolitical analyst Brian Berlectic shows in the short video embedded at the top, the image from the article is actually a screenshot of a longer Azov parade in which the members of the regiment are seen not merely giving repeated Nazi salutes but driving military vehicles decorated with German WWII crosses as well as overtly Nazi symbols – one clearly has a Wolfsangel emblazoned on its flank.

David Axe concludes his Azov puff piece saying:

Expect Russian propagandists to shout “Nazis!” every time the 98th Azov Battalion makes a move. Don’t believe it.

But then like so many in the ranks our “liberal media”, he’s just carrying water for the hawks in Washington. He is right, of course, that we must all try to avoid being fooled by propaganda. So I agree that we ought to reject propaganda wherever we find it, including the sort Nazi-denying tripe that David Axe likes serve up. Just watch the video above and you can believe your own eyes instead.

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1 From an article entitled “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda” written by Lev Golinkin, published in The Hill on November 9, 2017. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality-of-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-is-far-from-kremlin-propaganda/  

2 From an article entitled “Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis” written by Rebecca Kheel, published in The Hill on March 27, 2018. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/  

3 From an article entitled “Ukraine Deradicalized Its Extremist Troops. Now The Might Be Preparing a Counteroffensive” written by David Axe published in Forbes magazine on December 16, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/12/16/ukraine-deradicalized-its-extremist-troops-now-they-might-be-preparing-a-counteroffensive/?sh=129735c2692d

‘Lviv is awash with fascists and mercenaries’ – interview with Steve Sweeney

Independent journalist Vanessa Beeley recently interviewed Steve Sweeney, international editor of The Morning Star. An anti-imperialist who founded Media Workers for Palestine, Sweeney is widely travelled and prefers to report on events directly from the ground. Here he speaks about his recent experiences during his time in Lviv which has been Nato’s hub for military training, the main route for western arms shipments and is the historical home of the most extreme “ultranationalist” factions in Ukraine [audio improves at about 15 mins].

Sweeney relates that: “My friend joked with me before I came in – he’s an American journalist and he’s based in Berlin and he laughed and told me, ‘Steve, you know your body is illegal in Ukraine!’ My body’s been many things, but illegal? That’s not one of them!

“I didn’t think about this at the time, but he said, ‘Well, you’ve got a tattoo.’ And well I didn’t think about this. You know I’m a communist so I have a tattoo of Marx, Engels and Lenin on my arm. I mean this is illegal because, you know, all communists been banned across Ukraine, and we know the communist party has been banned. And all this you know: the communists and the left and any sort of political opponents [are banned].

“So they knew that I was a communist and they said, ‘We know why you’re here’ and I said, ‘Okay why am I?’ They said, ‘You’re a spy.’ And you know I’m not a spy – I’d be a pretty useless spy I think – but no, I mean I’m not a spy. And they said, ‘You will be tortured. You will be arrested.’ And indicated that I would be executed. And they told me that I would never make it out of the country.

“Now obviously I did because I’m here speaking to you, but I think I was incredibly lucky to get out, and I got out in amongst a group of refugees actually. And I just decided not to speak. I took a package of food and water and walked through, and managed to get out. Then I escaped across the border and made it – I made it eventually to Berlin although there was a hairy moment when the armed police came on the train before we crossed into [Poland], but they seemed a little bit interested in me for a minute, but…

“But I mean my kind of treatment is nothing compared to the many thousands of leftists and journalists operating in the country at great risk, who are being disappeared or killed – placed on list like Eva [Bartlett]. So my situation doesn’t compare. But what I did find in the country when speaking to people – I mean what they were very clear about – I spoke to a woman called Maria from Mariupol (or just outside Mariupol) and she spoke to me in kind of broken English and… the first thing she did was she showed me a picture of what was her apartment block [now] completely obliterated. She was distraught, but she pointed and she said ‘Azov.’

“She told me then who was responsible for destroying her home. And she managed to get out of Mariupol with her daughter. Her son and her husband had remained in the city. I’m hoping that everything is okay with them, because you know the situation is very bad. But she explained that the people living in Mariupol were not afraid of the Russians – she said Russian soldiers gave them food, gave them water and helped them. They brought medicine, you know. I don’t think they had much of it, but they gave them. They felt safe. And, as she said, it was the Ukrainians they were terrified [of]. I mean you could see the fear and you could hear it in her voice.

“And she said that they tried to leave much earlier than they did when they got out, but they were threatened that they would be shot dead if they tried to leave by Ukrainians not by Russians. She told me that most people in that part of the country are fleeing to Russia because they feel safe, and she didn’t feel safe in Lviv because she’s a Russian speaker – she knows, I mean this is her country: she knows very well, but she was very clear that in Mariupol they’ve been terrorised for eight years by Nazis.” [from 19:00 mins]

Click here to watch the same interview as it appears in the original post on Vanessa Beeley’s The Wall Will Fall website.

Guardian gets in on the act of whitewashing Ukraine’s neo-Nazis

Denys Prokopenko is the commander of the “Azov Regiment” – the freshly but only partially rebranded neo-Nazi militia formerly known as the Azov Battalion with its badge that still proudly sports the Nazi wolfsangel insignia (a variation of the swastika) formerly worn by divisions of the Waffen-SS during World War II. The Azov Battalion also adopted the Nazi’s “black sun” emblem.

Prokopenko first enlisted with the Avoz Battalion at the start of the war in Donbass in 2014 around the time of its formation. In September 2007 he then took full command.

There is no reason whatsoever to doubt that Prokopenko shares the same Nazi ideology as Azov’s founder and original commander Andriy Biletsky. A former history student and amateur boxer, Biletsky once declared: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Azov Regiment never de-politicized. The current commander Denys "Redis" Prokopenko, has been with Azov since 2014, came, per "Redis" himself, from the milieu of Dynamo Kyiv soccer hooligans. The photos are from a 2014 rally. The cover is of Azov's own zine "The Black Sun". pic.twitter.com/IFHESSCrYo

— Oleksiy Kuzmenko (@kooleksiy) March 18, 2020

Back in February 2015, I posted an article that highlighted a BBC news report in which correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes had been embedded inside the Avoz Battalion while studiously he and the BBC kept silent about the group’s origins and its grotesque ideology. However, since the Russian invasion in February, the whitewashing of the Azov Regiment has become totally mainstream.

Here for instance is a CNN report from March featuring “a Ukrainian military commander”, who happens to be Denys Prokopenko:

Incredible. neo-Nazi Azov promoting Azov Regiment commander Denis Prokopenko’s appearance on @CNN. Everything is upside-down. https://t.co/x5iIkrPspL

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 21, 2022

And now the Guardian too is shameless in its promotion of the neo-Nazis of the Avoz Regiment. Published only last weekend, here is its latest puff piece which hopes to win our affection for “Mariupol’s defenders.” If you can’t read the caption, once again the square-jawed chap is Denys Prokopenko next to his doting wife Kateryna:

Scott Ritter speaks to Richard Medhurst about being banned by Twitter and related issues

“If Twitter had existed in 2002, oh boy I would have been banned for taking the position I did about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Think about that for a second. I’m not saying that I’m right today, I mean I believe I’m right, but my point is if Twitter applied the same standard that they’re using today to silence voices of dissent regarding the war in Ukraine then I would have been banned for telling the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. And if anything should send the shockwave through people about how stupid and counterproductive this Twitter policy is, it’s that they would have banned the only guy – not the only, but one of the few people out there telling the truth. Is that really the policy you want, Twitter? Is that really the policy you want? I think the answer is no. It should be no.” [from 34:50 mins]

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter puts into clearer perspective the dangers posed by the massive ongoing clampdown by social media platforms on freedom of speech after he was temporarily banned on Wednesday from Twitter on the spurious charge of “harassment” – reinstated within 24 hours in response to an anti-censorship outcry and immediate calls for the lifting of his suspension.

The circumstances behind his own ban, Ritter explains below in an extended interview speaking with independent journalist Richard Medhurst. The relevant section is transcribed beneath the embedded video (providing a permanent record in the event that Youtube subsequently removes the content.)

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Curiously, on the same day as Ritter’s ban, NBC published a story that candidly admitted “Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying intelligence as part of an information war against Russia… even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid”. Specifically, the article reveals:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

The fact that the chemical weapons story was unadulterated bunkum should not have surprised anyone who has been following world events during recent decades. Indeed, the entire “war on terror” was ignited by almost precisely this same lie. Moreover, the asinine, since entirely baseless, ‘intelligence claims’ of forthcoming Russian false flags is something I promptly debunked on this site.

Meanwhile, this peculiar piece of US State Department propaganda scantily dressed up as “journalism” tells us that all of the disinformation, the ‘fake news’, and the straight up mainstream lies are perfectly fine:

Observers of all stripes have called it a bold and so far successful strategy — although not one without risks.

If we had a free and independent press, of course, then there would be huge political risks in perpetrating such glaring lies; ones that come with democratic accountability. But as we see from the lack of widespread media reaction to these quite startling admissions, the truth as such has become largely irrelevant – something Scott Ritter returns to in his interview pointing out that:

“They don’t want the truth. They’re trying to shape perception. They’re trying to manipulate information to create a perception that is being manipulated to achieve a policy objective. So the truth, or the search for truth, becomes the enemy, and therefore it must be shut down.”

Twitter won’t be taking down any accounts that are linked to those who deliberately propagated the misinformation and/or lies formally acknowledged by the NBC article. Those lies remain accessible and having been validated by the ‘fact-checkers’ will very likely continue to spread in spite of these latest retractions – and so too all future lies. In the meantime, anyone who dissents from the official narrative, irrespective of its own self-confessed unreliability, can expect to be marginalised, shadow-banned and sooner or later deplatformed altogether.

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Here is a transcript of the relevant segments of Scott Ritter’s conversation with Richard Medhurst, beginning with Ritter’s account of the tweet he posted that led to his suspension:

“Even though Twitter is not the centre of the universe, I think it has the potential of being a very good platform for the exchange of ideas at 288 characters per go. I take it seriously, meaning that if I’m going to put a tweet out there with my name on it’s, you know… when you get involved in politics I don’t want to be someone (I have worked too long and too hard to be someone) that if I speak on an issue, on a subject, I want to be taken seriously; I want to be someone that people say, you know, he’s assiduous with his facts. It doesn’t mean I’m always right but it means I always try to be right. You know when you’re engaged in complicated issues it’s not so much about being right, it’s about being motivated to promote the pursuit of truth.

“And sometimes the pursuit of truth is accomplished best when you put out an idea, an interpretation, an assessment that challenges the mainstream media or the mainstream direction and forces people to say ‘hmm, let me think. Let me put on my thinking cap.’ And then they come up with their own opinion. Their opinion may differ from yours, which is a success, because they have empowered themselves with knowledge and information derived from their own work; they’re not parroting something somebody told them. And to me it’s that process of debate, dialogue and discussion that makes democracies viable; makes functional democracies possible. And so I view Twitter as a mechanism that encourages this process.

“So if I’m going to put a tweet out there about a serious non-cat or non-dog issue, I’m going to make sure that I’ve researched it, especially on a topic like Bucha and war crime. I can guarantee you that before I wrote down about the Ukrainian national police being the perpetrators of numerous crimes, that I researched the subject – that I dug into various images and videotapes of the dead people; I assessed it using whatever forensic evaluation that one can on something like this; and I saw, for instance, that many of the bodies had the green dry ration packaging of the Russian ration box. It’s a ration pack: the Russian soldiers can get them, but they’ve also been used extensively to support civilians in need. You see the Russians in their trucks handing them out.

“I also noticed that many of the bodies had the white armbands on that signify people who are not a threat to Russia and that the people that didn’t have the white armbands had their hands bound behind their backs using the material that looked awfully like armbands that are no longer on their on their shoulder. So just the first brush if someone said ‘okay, what is this scene telling you?’ The scene is telling me that these are pro-Russian, or Russian sympathisers, or people who have interacted with Russia; people who have been the benefactors of Russian humanitarian aid, and people who are heading in the direction of Russian troops.

“And so then you have to say ‘okay, who killed them?’ Well, I don’t know by looking at those pictures, but if you’re pro-Russian, or Russian sympathetic, equipped with humanitarian aid provided by Russia, the odds are that the Russians didn’t kill them. Now, that’s not enough now to jump to the Ukrainian national police, though that’s just setting the stage. The initial thought. But now I get the Russian orders – the orders from the Russian high command are to minimise civilian death, minimise damage to civilian infrastructure – so I see the commander’s intent going down to the Russian soldier normally will be translated into actions that reflect that intent. So if I’ve got some pro-Russian people coming at me, I’m not going to kill them. That’s the intent.

“What about the Ukrainians? We have the exact opposite. We have the Ukrainian government calling anybody who collaborates with Russia to include receiving these humanitarian care packages are now classified as collaborators and in the specific instance of Bucha, we have the Ukrainian national police issuing a bulletin speaking of ‘the cleansing of collaborators’ from Bucha on 1^st April. We have a senior Ukrainian government official female issuing instructions via social media telling the citizens of Bucha that there is a police action taking place, a cleansing  operation: stay in your [homes], stay indoors, don’t panic, she repeats this over and over and over again. And then we have videotapes that show these Ukrainian national police, including some who are directly affiliated with Azov happily hunting down and shooting people. So now when I look at all this data I have to say it’s more than likely that the Ukrainians are the perpetrators, because we have intent from their commanders saying treat all pro-Russian collaborators as the enemy; we have an instruction from the national police to carry out a cleansing operation; and then we have videotape of the cleansing operation taking place which involves gunfire from a Ukrainian national policeman towards civilians who aren’t wearing the blue armband.

“So if I were compelled to make a decision based upon this albeit incomplete data – because I still (if this was going to go to a court) would need some forensic data to back it up – but the first brush is Ukrainian national police have done this. Now why did I feel compelled to tweet because normally I wouldn’t tweet with incomplete data like this – because, you know, it implies I’m drawing a conclusion that normally I would like to associate a lot more hard facts behind before I put my name on it. But the Ukrainian national police are promulgating a story that says the Russians did it. The Ukrainian government is putting forth a story that said the Russians did it. The western media is putting forward a story that said the Russians did it. And then Joe Biden got out and said the Russians are doing it; they’re war criminals. And so I felt compelled to put a counter narrative out there saying ‘no it’s the Ukrainian national police who have committed these crimes and Biden – and the reason why I picked on Biden soon after he gave that speech (that announcement, the Pentagon came out and said ‘hey buddy, we can’t corroborate anything the Ukrainian government say… we’re not saying it’s false, but we’re saying we can’t say it’s true.’ So the President of the United States is out ahead of its intelligence, meaning he’s speaking – I won’t use the word – it’s coming out from an orphan citizen’s mouth.

“So therefore I felt obliged to say (and again I did the research): these words don’t come lightly. I looked up the Nuremberg tribunal. I looked up what a crime against humanity was. I looked for similar cases that were prosecuted against the Nazis, similar to what I believe the Ukrainian national police did, and they constitute crimes against humanity. So that’s what I said. I also looked up there’s a lot of Nazis that were hung by the neck until dead who never pulled a trigger, who never signed a document ordering death, but they were perpetrators, they were collaborators, they’re co-conspirators, because of the actions they took. And one of the things is to shift blame away, to try and minimise the impact of the crimes, which is exactly what Joe Biden was doing. So I used my words very carefully selected from the Nuremberg tribunal based upon parallel cases that were prosecuted as war crimes and so I didn’t take it lightly. When I said this about Biden, it’s because Biden’s actions mimic those actions that were condemned as war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal.

“Everything there was carefully researched. I mean literally that tweet took me about 30 minutes to research. I don’t know how many people spend 30 minutes to write a 288 character tweet but I do that all the time. So I’m doubly shocked that they decide to pick that tweet and say you’re violating standards, and in my appeal – and I wrote a lengthy appeal – and I broke it down just as I explained to you. Everything in that thing is fact-based.” [from 19:30 mins]

On Wednesday night’s edition of “On Balance With Leland Vittert”, investigative journalist Aaron Maté was asked to speak about the massacre of civilians in Bucha allegedly by Russian troops and gave reasons for why he believes a fully independent investigation is now needed:

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“It should be that when the United States says something, the world should say ‘yep believe them 100% because they’ve been right every time before. The United States always tells the truth.’ Right now the United States opens its mouth, if I were a betting man I would bet that they’re lying – you know if Vegas took that bet I’d be a rich man, because all the United States knows how to do is lie. We don’t know how to tell the truth anymore, because it’s all a game of public perception, shaping perception. We’re afraid of reality. Sometimes reality is complex. Sometimes reality is nuanced. Reality isn’t black and white. It’s grey. That’s okay. Just tell the truth. People are smart enough once they receive the information to understand what the right thing to do is. You really don’t have to explain it. You just have to be honest with people; trust them, empower them with the information, and they will, by and large, tend to make the right decision. But we don’t trust anybody. We want to manipulate everything.”

Richard Medhurst: “Do you think that’s why they banned you from Twitter? Why they’re banning others – because you tell the truth and they’re afraid of people finding out?”

“Well, you know I have to be careful by saying ‘I tell the truth.’ I want to tell the truth, but you know this isn’t a situation like Iraqi WMD where I was literally empowered with a near totality of the information, so that when I said something you could take it to the bank. On the issue of Ukraine, I try to research it. I try to think it through. I try to put it through various tests. I want it to be the truth. I’m truthful in the way that I present it. But the last thing I want to leave with people is that when I say something about Ukraine that it carries the same weight as a claim I would make, for instance, about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. With WMD, if I said it you could bank on it. It was right. With Ukraine, it’s an opinion. It’s an assessment. I could be right. I think I’m right. I want to be right. But I could be wrong.

“So I don’t think that they fear the absolute correctness of my analysis, because I’m not in a position to be absolutely correct. What they fear is the consequences of allowing me to present my data and my thinking, and the consequences of allowing you to do what you do. The consequences of allowing George Galloway to do what he does. And Chris Hedges to do what they do. Because it’s not that all of us have, you know, we don’t have absolute say over what truth is. I mean I don’t think you’re arrogant enough to say that everything that comes out of your mouth is 100% accurate and truth. You want to be accurate. You want to be truthful, but you know, you do the best you can, and I think people respect that. And if you stumble, people say ‘okay, stumble, but you didn’t do it with ill intent, you did it because you were trying to pursue the truth.’

“But that’s the problem. Is that you’re trying to pursue the truth. You’re trying to do the right thing. You’re trying to inject integrity. You’re trying to inject honesty into a process, which we know they don’t want that. We know, based upon the quote you put up there in the statement made, they don’t want the truth. They’re trying to shape perception. They’re trying to manipulate information to create a perception that is being manipulated to achieve a policy objective. So the truth, or the search for truth, becomes the enemy, and therefore it must be shut down.

“They’re not shutting me down because I have a corner on the market for absolute 100% accuracy. No, they’re shutting me down because I dare challenge what they’re putting out there, and they fear me because my process is actually one that has far more integrity when it comes to the pursuit of truth than their process. Their process isn’t the pursuit of truth, it’s the pursuit of an outcome based upon the manipulation of data. And frankly speaking, it is the easiest thing to pick apart. I mean proving American lies is very easy if you’re assiduous with the pursuit of fact-based evidence. They fear this and that’s why they shut down my Twitter account. That’s why they’ll go after yours.” [from 1:32:00 mins]

the truth about Nazism in Ukraine: and why the media is (now) covering it up…

Russian President Putin has claimed that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “denazify” its government, while Western officials, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, have called this pure propaganda, insisting, “There are no Nazis in Ukraine.”

In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relations with extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi parties has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the carpet.

The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off the 2014 coup and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in Eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as it attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for. 1

The paragraphs above form the introduction to a comprehensive and insightful piece written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies entitled “How the U.S. Has Empowered and Armed Neo-Nazis in Ukraine” published by Counterpunch on Friday 11^th.

I will return to the conclusion of the article below but also encourage readers to follow the link to read it in full.

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In the summer of 2019, TIME Correspondent, Simon Shuster travelled to Ukraine to investigate the white supremacist militias that are recruiting people to join their fight:

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Embedded below is a speech made by Yevhen Karas, the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi faction and youth wing C14 that he delivered on February 5^th about a fortnight ahead of the Russian invasion.

Sat beside an effigy of notorious Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stepan Bandera, Karas brazenly dispels many of the narratives promoted by the mainstream media, European Union and US State Department claiming amongst other things that Ukraine is being armed as pawns of the West in order to destabilise Russia because “we have fun killing and we have fun fighting”:

 “LGBT and foreign embassies say ‘there were not many Nazis at Maidan, maybe about 10 percent of real ideological ones,’” Karas remarked. “If not for those eight percent [of neo-Nazis] the effectiveness [of the Maidan coup] would have dropped by 90 percent.”

The 2014 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” would have been a “gay parade” if not for the instrumental role of neo-Nazis, he proclaimed.

Karas went on to opine that the West armed Ukrainian ultra-nationalists because “we have fun killing.” He also fantasized about the balkanization of Russia, declaring that it should be broken up into “five different” countries.

During the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Ukraine’s elected president in 2014, C14 activists took over Kiev’s city hall and plastered its walls with neo-Nazi insignia before taking shelter in the Canadian embassy.

As the former youth wing of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, C14 appears to draw its name from the infamous 14 words of US neo-Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

By offering to carry out acts of spectacular violence on behalf of anyone willing to pay, the hooligans have fostered a cozy relationship with various governing bodies and powerful elites across Ukraine. 2

The extracts above are taken from a recent Grayzone article which also reminds us of events that took place in early 2018 after Karas’ C14 gang signed an agreement with Kiev’s city government to patrol its streets. Months later it began a campaign of pogroms against Romani camps:

A March 2018 report by Reuters stated that “C14 and Kiev’s city government recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a ‘municipal guard’ to patrol the streets,” effectively giving them the sanction of the state to carry out pogroms.

As The Grayzone reported, C14 led raid to “purge” Romani from Kiev’s railway station in collaboration with the Kiev police.

https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1498191420703883264

Not only was this activity sanctioned by the Kiev city government, the US government itself saw little problem with it, hosting [C14 activist Serhiy] Bondar at an official US government institution in Kiev where he bragged about the pogroms. C14 continued to receive state funding throughout 2018 for “national-patriotic education.”

Karas has claimed that the Ukrainian Security Serves would “pass on” information regarding pro-separatist rallies “not only [to] us, but also Azov, the Right Sector and so on.”

“In general, deputies of all factions, the National Guard, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Internal Affairs work for us. You can joke like that,” Karas said.

Click here to read the full article entitled “How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia” written by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal published on March 4^th by The Grayzone.

*

Eight years ago as the ugly truth about the Maidan slowly began to emerge even BBC Newsnight featured a handful of reports on the rise and influence of the “ultranationalists” including this segment (currently still available on Youtube) in which reporter Gabriel Gatehouse investigates the tightening links between the new Ukrainian government and neo-Nazis:

Halfway into his report, Gatehouse actually interviews Yevhen Karas about the role of his C14 movement when visiting its new base which had been the former headquarters of the Communist Party, but that had since been occupied by the far-right. Following the coup, the political party Svoboda, which is affiliated with C14, actually controlled four ministries in the new government including the Ministry of Defense. Two of its MPs had also been photographed brandishing well-known Nazi paraphernalia [5:00 mins into the report].

Karas told Gatehouse:

“Our general mission is to totally ruin chains that connect our country with the imperial power from the past.”

Gatehouse then prompts him: “… and that being Russia?”

Yes, said Karas, “Weaken the Russians –  not only Russia, Soviet Union.”

“Are you a Nazi?” Gatehouse asks directly. No, Karas replies smiling, “I don’t think I’m a Nazi – I’m a Ukrainian nationalist.”

Gatehouse prompts again: “And what does that mean?”

Karas continues: “The main confrontation is about that some ethnic groups have control: many business structures; some economics and political forces.”

Gatehouse again: “Which ethnic groups?”

Karas: “Russians and Jews. And it may be some non-Ukrainian group control a huge percent of some economic or political power.”

Finally, Gabriel Gatehouse rounds off the Newsnight report essentially confirming the opinion of Yevhen Karas with respect to the pivotal role played by neo-Nazis in the success of the coup:

“It’s clear that it was the radical groups who kept up the pressure on Viktor Yanukovych and many of them feel that this really is their victory – the question is how much power will that give the far-right in the new Ukraine.” [from 5:35 mins]

He adds: “With their anti-Russian rhetoric, events in Crimea will almost certainly play into the hands of the nationalists. No one knows exactly how strong they are in terms of numbers, but the influence of the far-right in Ukraine is growing.”

Eighteen months on, Gabriel Gatehouse then presented a follow-up BBC Newsnight report from Ukraine featuring arguably the most extreme “ultranationalist” group Pravyi Sektor (or Right Sector) as they marched on Kiev with neo-Nazi banners and chants of “Glory to Ukraine!”

At one point a commander of the Right Sector militia tells him: “I know the Chief of General Staff and all the armed forces, apart from a few generals; in principle they support us. The army will never go against us.” [from 7:00 mins]

Towards the end of his report, Gatehouse inspects a Right Sector banner which bears the Wolfsangel insignia saying “That’s a Nazi symbol, isn’t it?”

No, Dmytro Semen tells him disingenuously, “It means ‘idea of the Nation’, it’s not Nazi.” [from 7:35 mins]

As Gatehouse also acknowledges: “The revolution which is known here as Maidan overthrew the government and then set this country hurtling towards war. Just as it did during Maidan, the Right Sector has played a key role in the fighting in the east. Its members are more motivated than Ukraine’s conscripted regular army and the government relies on them to bolster their strength. Now they’re flexing their muscles.” [from 2:15 mins]

In April 2018, BBC Newsnight correspondent Jonah Fisher also reported on the increasing visibility of far-right groups in Ukraine. The National Militia brown shirts patrolling the streets and smashing up the premises of local businesses shouting “Glory to Ukraine”. Fisher acknowledges:

“The National Militia tell us they’re working alongside the police, but they have also on several occasions fought them. Here they brawled and used pepper spray on officers as they tried and failed to pressure a judge into keeping an allegedly corrupt politician in custody.”

Continuing:

“The National Militia are part of a group called Azov. Initially a volunteer military battalion, it has well established links to the far-right. Its founder this man Andriy Biletsky has in the past expressed racist and antisemitic views, and its logo [the Wolfsangel and Black Sun] has clear Nazi overtones.” [from 3:50 mins]

Vyacheslav Likhachev of the National Minority Rights Monitoring Group tells Jonah Fisher sardonically: “My favourite quote from Andriy Biletsky is that: ‘the destiny of the Ukrainian nation is to be in a vanguard in holy war of white people against under-humans [i.e., untermenschen] led by semites.’” [from 4:25 mins]

Fisher then explains that Biletsky “now denies he ever said that, but as this oath-making ceremony shows he’s not running away from the dubious imagery.”

Continuing: “Azov has now started a political party as well as launching the National Militia. The toxic racism has in public, at least, been replaced by patriotic nationalism.”

Speaking with leader of the National Militia, Ihor Mykhailenko, Fisher asks: “Do you now reject those values that you had in the past?”

Mykhailenko replies: “It’s been a long time, a lot has changed in Ukraine. We have always declared our lawful demand and desire that the country is governed by indigenous people.” [from 5:00 mins]

Deputy of Cherkasy City Hall, Olesksander Radutskyi, who has witnessed the takeover of his own council assembly by a gang of National Militia thugs, tells Fisher: “Cherkasy is now a training ground for a military coup in Ukraine.”

He continues: “This sort of thing can’t exist in Ukraine without the Interior Ministry’s approval. If [Arsen] Avakov decided that the National Militia with their balaclavas and uniforms shouldn’t exist, then it wouldn’t exist.” [from 6:45 mins]

Fisher points out that “Ukraine’s ambitious Interior Minister… links to the Azov group are well known. He’s put their fighters on the payroll of his ministry and appointed one of their commanders, Vadim Troyan, as his deputy.”

He continues: “The National Militia may well be the extreme right’s first move ahead of Ukraine’s elections next year, but it’s the uncertainty over who’s behind them that’s worrying people. Confidence in politicians and the police here is low, and for whatever reason the National Militia appear to have been given the nod to act outside the law.

Deputy of Cherkasy City Hall, Olesksander Radutskyi tells Fisher:

“History is repeating itself. If we look what happened in Germany when fascism was just rising up in the 1930s. That’s what I would compare this to.” [from 9:35 mins]

And Fisher concludes the report saying: “It’s an apocalyptic warning but, it’s a reminder that four years after Ukraine turned away from Russia towards Europe the struggle for its soul is far from over.”

*

Here’s a report by Vice International released in May 2018 with the description: “In 2014, Ukraine was under siege and the military was unprepared. Desperate, the government urged anyone to get to the front and fight the Russian-backed separatists. As the war drags on, Ukraine claims their military is now in control and the volunteers have all been disbanded. But we tracked down some rogue volunteers still out there fighting, not prepared to hand over their weapons anytime soon.”

What the description above and the report curiously fails to mention is that these “rogue militia” and “volunteer brigades” are actually Right Sector neo-Nazis. The reporter, Ben Makuch, somehow manages to skirt around this issue entirely, even while showing fighters who are openly flaunting their “Blood and Soil” red and white flags and banners. Moreover, Oleksandr Turchynov who is interviewed close to the beginning of the film is a bit more than just “a controversial guy” who served as acting Ukrainian Prime Minister (2010) and then Chairman of the Verkhova Rada (Ukrainian parliament) in 2014 under President Poroshenko. In 2014 Turchynov also founded the ultranationalist People’s Front party along with Andriy Parubiy (Chairman of the Rada 2016–2019), who in turn had previously founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine (yes, the clue is in the name!) together with Oleh Tyahnybok.

Concluding his report, Ben Makuch joins a torchlight procession through Kiev on the annual “Day of the Defender” with thousands marching beneath neo-Nazi Right Sector and Svoboda banners, but still he only sees “a lot of angry yelling youths in masks and various forms of balaclava”. “What could possibly go wrong?” he asks rhetorically, while taking a selfie!

*

And this is a Guardian report uploaded in September 2017 with the description: “In Ukraine, the far-right Azov militia is fighting on the frontline – and running a summer camp for children. The Guardian visited the camp and followed 16-year-old Anton through his experiences. Is Azov really a modern Hitler Youth organisation, or is it trying to prepare young Ukrainians for the tough reality that awaits them?”

*

As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies remind us in their latest Counterpunch article:

Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups, increasingly linked to the Azov Battalion, have maintained power on the street in Ukraine, and in local politics in the Ukrainian nationalist heartland around Lviv in Western Ukraine.

After President Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky had run for election as a “peace candidate,” but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas leaders, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

Continuing:

During Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine, and Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk by force.

The civil war has combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies to create fertile ground for the extreme right. The post-coup government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Ukraine received a $40 billion IMF bailout and, as part of the deal, privatized 342 state-owned enterprises; reduced public sector employment by 20%, along with salary and pension cuts; privatized healthcare, and disinvested in public education, closing 60% of its universities.

Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class, and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-coup government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. After a nearly 25% fall in GDP between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine is still the poorest country in Europe.

As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism, and now the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of Al Qaeda and ISIS. U.S. and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria ten years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost when they spawned ISIS and turned decisively against their Western backers.

Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, but we should not be surprised when the U.S. alliance with neo-Nazi proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

Click here to read the full article by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies entitled “How the U.S. Has Empowered and Armed Neo-Nazis in Ukraine” published by Counterpunch on Friday 11^th.

***

The following piece written by independent journalist Saj Awan was originally published on his website Burning Blogger on Saturday March 5^th. It is reprinted below in full with all links and images retained.

In December 2021 – just a few weeks before the Russian military incursion into Ukraine – something incredibly interesting happened.

A United Nations resolution was presented, its purpose being to condemn Nazism or the ‘glorification of Nazism’. Only two countries voted AGAINST the resolution. Guess which ones? It was the United States and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Britain, Australia, Canada and the countries of the European Union were among those who abstained.

Just process this again, please. The US and Ukraine refused to condemn Nazism. While Canada, the UK and various European nations simply ‘abstained’ from having to do so. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Mere weeks later, Vladimir Putin is making a speech about ‘denazifying’ Ukraine (for which he was widely ridiculed in Western media), Russian forces were invading, and this whole disastrous situation unfolding.

Why would any government or nation, in this day and age, refuse to condemn Nazism – or even abstain from such a vote? Shouldn’t it be a simple, cut-and-paste matter? Apparently not.

Weeks later, all the world’s attention was fixed on the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the wake of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, a concerted and calculated propaganda programme has encompassed all of Western media and commentary: one that has sought to completely whitewash Ukraine of any controversies or of any unsavoury elements – and to present all of Ukraine, including its militias and armed groups and its politicians, as absolute Good Guys and the Russians as the Absolute Villains.

The programme, in short, has been to present Ukraine as entirely untainted and those within the Ukrainian state and its society as being entirely devoid of any failings, wrongdoings or blame for the state of affairs that preceded the current crisis.

This is all about Russia’s aggression and Putin’s mania – and nothing else. Putin is the new Hitler.

That’s the programme: and every single major news broadcaster, media outlet or newspaper has adopted this narrative. Across all of both mainstream/corporate media and online social media, this whitewashing operation has been in full swing.

*

Now, I will preface this article the same way as every other I publish on this subject: which is to clarify that I am not being a Putin apologist and I am not endorsing or defending the military violation of one sovereign state by another.

This article isn’t about endorsing the military offensive in Ukraine: or all of the destruction and casualties that inevitably go along with such an operation.

What it is about is exposing and confronting the mass media whitewashing of the Ukraine situation: and the highly selective narrative that is being presented by both media and governments.

In this article, we will establish that:

1. this mass media whitewashing is deliberate; and even could be considered sinister, given that,
2. there absolutely is a Nazi presence in Ukraine, and
3. NATO governments absolutely know this: and are in fact covering for it.

Anyone reading this is of course entitled to disagree with those conclusions: but you will probably find it very difficult to.

*

As for this whitewashing, it is absolute: every measure has been taken to present a highly sanitised image of Ukrainian society and politics.

In recent days, Facebook has reversed its ban on posts praising the Azov Batallion: it had previously (and correctly) regarded Azov as being in the same category as groups like Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan – but, of course, the recent onset of pro-Ukraine mania in the West has seen the social media giant change its mind, apparently.

Moreover, Facebook and Instagram have both been hosting dozens of accounts that are raising funds and selling merch for openly Nazi and extremist groups. As reported, ‘the network of accounts’ promoting Nazi and white supremacist merchandise are ‘linked to two extremist groups operating out of Ukraine: Azov Battalion and Misanthropic Division’.

Here are a couple of fine examples: note the Nazi/SS ‘wolfsangel’ symbol in the second item.

You can buy your Azov merchandise all over the place these days, by the way: try here or here, for example. Now that everyone is all about celebrating the Ukrainian heroes, I suspect some of this merchandise is going to be selling really well.

Get your Azov merch, folks: it’s the hip new thing.

I’ve written about Azov before: here, for example. An openly Neo-Nazi organisation that has been involved in violence, hate crime and the Russia conflict ever since the events of 2014, in which the US/Western-backed ‘revolution’ helped create the situation that has existed in Ukraine to the present day.

When we’re talking Azov Battalion, remember that this is the same organisation whose mission (according to its founder) is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led subhumans”.

Remember that. When someone says ‘oh, but they’re patriots and nationalists who are fighting for Ukraine’s independence’. Sure: and how precisely does fighting for Ukraine’s independence relate to leading ‘the white races of the world in a final crusade against sub-humans’…?

I mean, just a suggestion here: but couldn’t you fight for Ukrainian independence and, you know, NOT lead the white race in a final crusade against sub-humans?

And, just a reminder, get more Azov merch here. And here. Support the Heroes of Ukraine!

*

Alright, so let’s recap a little bit about the Azov Battalion.

Azov was apparently founded by Andriy Biletsky, who – during the Maidan Revolution in 2014 – was actually freed from prison to take part in the ‘revolution’: having been otherwise serving a sentence for murder. So that’s a good start right there, isn’t it?

Among various other ultra-right-wing groups in Ukraine (Right Sector, Svoboda, National Corps, etc, all of which are basically connected), the Azov Battalion stood out because of its brazen brandishing and adoption of Nazi imagery and because of some of its reportedly brutal behaviour.

Ukrainian officials, Azov supporters and apologists, all like to say the regiment is misunderstood.

This is clearly bullshit. The regiment’s symbols, including wolf’s hook (or wolfsangel) and black sun, were Nazi SS symbols during World War II. Everyone knows this. Azov members have frequently been shown wearing Nazi insignia, riding around with swastika flags or patches, and making Nazi salutes.

Apologists like to say the Azov and other Nazi militias are not state actors, but individuals and rogues. A few bad apples, right? Not true. Azov Battalion was formally incorporated into the National Guard and operates under the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Azov and other Nazis are therefore part of the state apparatus, legitimised by elements of the Ukrainian state.

If officials in Ukraine were embarrassed by or ashamed for the Nazis in their midst, why the hell would they incorporate them into the state? How can they be ‘rogue’ if they’ve been made part of the system?

Azov ‘patrols’ and the like also became commonplace, with members of the militia basically acting like a police force: in some cases to enforce the law, while in other cases to (predictably) intimidate or persecute ethnic minorities (including ethnic Russians).

If this is sounding a lot like a white/European version of ‘ISIS’, that’s something I’ve pointed out before: I argued back in 2018, in fact, that Ukraine is being turned into a European Syria-like situation, with Azov and other white nationalists being empowered to be the ‘white power’ equivalent of ISIS and other jihadists. Only instead of waving the ISIS black flag, they’ll be waving swastikas and wolfangel symbols.

As Michael Colborne wrote four years ago:

‘Azov is trying – as one of their higher-ups has told me personally – to build a far-right “state within the state,” running everything from nationalist study groups and mixed martial arts training to free gyms for youth and programs for the elderly. They’re also trying to turn Kiev into a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world to visit…’

Apologists also like to say that the Neo-Nazi militants and white supremacists are a minority and have very little influence. This is also bullshit.

As this article from TIME magazine as recently as January explained:

It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police… [Its military wing] has at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armoured vehicles to artillery pieces

This isn’t some small network of troublemakers. Azov and its related far-right groups have connections across Ukraine’s institutions: including security services, police, military and government. They are prevalent across the society.

The Nazi-inspired ideology has apparently been quite prevalent too. Whether a group like Azov is a minority presence or not, it obviously has supporters and collaborators in all the places that matter – not just in Ukraine, but abroad.

But the involvement of foreign intelligence services and governments is something we’ll come to shortly.

And Azov, in fact, is only the most blatant and visible tip of the Nazi iceberg: this isn’t just about Azov.

As Atlantic Council noted in 2018:

Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country.

The authors advised:

Government agencies at all levels should stop cooperating with far-right groups. In addition to the Youth Ministry’s problematic funding, C14 and a Kyiv city district recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a “municipal guard” to patrol the streets; three such militia-run guard forces are already registered in Kyiv, and twenty-one operate in other cities as well…

While we’re on the subject of ‘C14‘, the group’s leader, Yevhen Karas, was filmed giving a speech in early February at a Svoboda event.

You really need to listen to what he’s saying here, as it really does reveal the true nature of the Maidan events in 2014 and what’s happening now: because the media is certainly not going to show any of this type of stuff (“we have fun killing” is my favorite part). Basically, among other things, he boasts about all the weaponry Western allies have sent to them, gets excited about all the fighting that’s going to happen, and – crucially – explains that the ultra-right really was the chief beneficiary of Maidan.

Svoboda, for the record, is widely acknowledged as a Neo-Nazi party, and was founded by Oleh Tahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, the latter of whom was the chairman of Ukraine’s parliament until 2019 (and was invited to address the US Congress three years ago), and the former having been famously photographed with Senator John McCain during the events of 2014.

*

To demonstrate just how omnipresent the fascist element is, the current Ukrainian President (and now worldwide hero) Volodymyr Zelensky (originally a comedy actor playing the fictional president of Ukraine in a TV show and then subsequently becoming the real president of Ukraine) has been presented as a heroic leader and figure since the events of the Russian incursion.

And not without justification. His actions have been admirable, brave and – for ordinary Ukrainians – inspiring. It’s no surprise he has suddenly becoming an iconic figure worldwide.

However, it was reported as recently as April 2021 that the ostensibly ‘liberal’ Zelensky wanted to appoint one Serhiy Sternenko (a former leader of the Neo-Nazi ‘Right Sector‘) as the head of the SBU (the Secret Service in Ukraine).

This despite Sternenko being under investigation for murder and for involvement in a massacre during the events of 2014.

If even Zelensky – the current and apparently ‘liberal’ president – is willing to be in alliance with Nazis and murderers (let alone to seek to place a Nazi and murderer in charge of, of all things, the Secret Service), then how much of a ‘minor problem’ or ‘minority’ presence can the Neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists really be?

So then you might argue, ‘well, okay, there’s Nazis – but Ukraine isn’t a totalitarian state, at least’.

Well, sure, okay.

But, as the Georgetown Security Studies Review reminds us:

[I]n 2015 Ukraine passed a law recognizing controversial nationalist groups… as “independence fighters” and making it illegal to question the legitimacy of their actions.

It’s illegal to question the legitimacy of groups linked to white supremacy and Nazism? Well, that doesn’t sound promising, does it?

It’s not as if this stuff has been well hidden.

A key figure in Azov’s political wing, the National Corps Party, is Volodymyr Zelensky: who has been photographed with the swastika flag and doing a Hitler salute. She was invited to be a visiting fellow at the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences.

https://twitter.com/edolinsky/status/1348544168742817792

The evidence of Nazism or fascism in the Azov group and other related groups in Ukraine is endless: there’s been so MUCH of it that it became impossible to cover up or deny a long time ago. Hell, its members and supporters don’t even bother covering it up, they’re open about it, proud of it: that’s the whole point – for them, it’s all part of the glorious national (and racial) struggle.

They’ve held public marches and gatherings – out in the open. Often with state officials in attendance. These people aren’t in hiding. On January 1^st this year, hundreds gathered in Kiev to celebrate World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for example.

Yet, somehow, Western media and commentators are managing to ignore it entirely right now: the media line that been adopted since Russia’s build-up of military forces has been to pretend none of this is significant.

As Fair.org has pointed out, Western media has almost completely whitewashed the fascists from their coverage of the Ukraine crisis. As I’ve said, they’re presenting only a very measured and binary narrative of Russian aggression and Ukrainian heroism.

Remember the images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, the 79-year-old Ukrainian grandmother learning to handle an AK-47? Those images went viral in mid-February, as everyone applauded the brave Ukrainian citizens taking up arms to help defend their country.

And what could be more poignant than a sweet old lady doing it? It was practically begging to go viral, right? And of course it did – with hundreds of thousands of people sharing the story.

But, as discussed in the article here on Friday, almost all of the media outlets running the story failed to mention that the sweet old lady was being instructed by members of the Azov Battalion.

As the Fair.org piece points out:

The BBC (2/13/22), for instance, showed a clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an ammunition magazine…

It continues:

The printed press fared little better. On February 13, UK newspapers the London Times and the Daily Telegraph ran front-page spreads showing Konstantynovska preparing her weapon, without any reference to the Azov Battalion running the training course.

As the article points out, this is all the more perverse because both The Times and the Telegraph, along with the BBC and other organisations, had already in the past reported on the Nazi presence in Ukraine’s security apparatus and its militias, as well openly calling the Azov group a Nazi organisation.

I can attest to this: having read numerous mainstream news outlets in 2014 and 2015 acknowledging the true nature of groups like Azov and the involvement of Nazi groups and ideology in the new Ukraine. This included a number of BBC Newsnight reports from the time (which can still be found on YouTube: here’s an example).

And, again, if something as mainstream as TIME published an article on the matter as recently as January, then clearly the mainstream media establishment cannot claim ignorance. The Guardian, The New York Times, and various other major media companies have – at various times in the last several years – published articles addressing this fascist element in Ukraine: and yet, suddenly, no one wants to acknowledge the issue anymore.

Which means simply that they’ve all decided – in lockstep – to omit that information and context as of February 2022 and the Russian invasion.

To be clear, this means that the major media organisations across the Western world are acting in unison to present a manufactured and incomplete narrative. In effect, this is war-time propaganda we’re now seeing: where broadcasters like the BBC were once at least willing to acknowledge the presence of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in this equation, now they’re covering it up completely.

This can only be policy: a policy of omission that has apparently been adopted across all Western media – in order to make sure this Russia/Ukraine conflict is presented in only a very specific way.

Not that the disease of Nazi-inspired ideology in Ukraine is in itself a justification for Russian invasion: but when Putin referred to the Nazi issue in his speech a week ago, the media and Western politicians decided to mock his claims and essentially suggest Putin is mentally unhinged – instead of confronting or debating the issue.

In effect, the argument is that any time Putin mentions ‘Nazis’, he is obviously either delusional, suffering from psychological issues, or a fantasist living in the Soviet past.

As a case in point, while both social media and mainstream media is presently filled with stories about Russian aggression (somewhat justifiably, given that Russia has launched an invasion: though it’s worrying that even the term ‘war crimes’ is being used a lot now too) and being contrasted to the apparently heroic struggle by the Ukrainian resistance, possible dynamics that don’t fit this neat-and-tidy narrative are being removed from all discussion.

For example, during the Russian assault on Mariupol, which has a strong ethnic Greek population living there, one Greek resident told Greek City Times that ‘Ukrainian “fascists” are killing people for trying to leave the city.‘

Regarding the ongoing siege in Mariupol (where Azov is based), other claims to a similar effect have been reported: albeit mostly from Russian media sources, which admittedly makes them biased and unreliable. But the Greek source quoted above seems to be more independent.

Now, of course we don’t know if those stories are true or not: but, if they were true, would the media tell us about it? Or would they cover it up and keep bombarding us with headlines about indiscriminate Russian shelling and civilians being targeted, etc?

Again, in the fog of war and under war-time propaganda conditions, the truth is always difficult to ascertain. And, regardless, none of this necessarily justifies Russia’s military assault on Ukrainian cities: invading a sovereign state is still a breach of international law.

And what is happening to ordinary people in Ukraine, caught in the midst of all of this, is terrible.

*

But why is the fascism problem in Ukraine being covered up?

And, coming back to the question we started this article with, why did Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and others refuse to condemn Nazism in the UN in December?

Meanwhile, the reality – and obvious danger – of the Azov Battalion and other white supremacist groups that are pervasive in the Ukrainian sphere isn’t just limited to Ukrainians. The Azov group and related fascist entities in Ukraine have been attracting foreign recruits for years.

We talked about this before: about Russia in fact complaining to various European states about the ‘volunteers’ going over to Ukraine to fight alongside the militias.

As explored in this older piece on the subject, this included people like Brenton Tarrant – the Australian who would go on to carry out the Christchurch Massacre in New Zealand: an act (a massacre at a mosque) that is entirely in keeping with ideology of Azov and other white supremacist militias.

Security expert Ali Soufan told TIME magazine that more than “17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.”

Remind you of anything? Yeah, the Islamic State again, right? Hell, they even look the same, don’t they?

As for the foreign fighter element, that’s going to increase exponentially now that the war is happening in Ukraine: and now that Zelinsky has called on foreign ‘volunteers’ from everywhere to come to Ukraine to help in the fight against the Russians. One British security expert has warned, in response to Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s apparent encouraging of British ‘volunteers’ to go fight in Ukraine, that the danger of far-right terrorism coming back to the UK as a result of this is significant.

That is in fact precisely the scenario I predicted in this older article: that Ukraine would become the white supremacist equivalent of the ISIS ‘caliphates’ – a bloody battleground in which militants belonging to the same ideology can come and get real-world experience of warfare and violence… and then export that violence across the continent.

Whereas the ISIS fanatics did it in the name of the fundamentalist Islamo-fascist ‘caliphate’, the Neo-Nazis will do it to, as Biletsky said, “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…”

Everything I’m seeing right now, as this current crisis unfolds, is reinforcing my longstanding suspicion that this has been part of the long-term plan of the various agencies or parties involved in this business.

Michael Colborne, writing for Foreign Policy in 2019, seemed to agree, and described Ukraine as “a dangerous neo-Nazi-friendly extremist environment” with “global ambitions“.

And remember that earlier quote too: that they are ‘trying to turn Kiev into a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world to visit…’

You can probably see then, if you didn’t already, why I was so bitchy the other day about the ‘Glory To Ukraine’ memes and hashtags that are all over social media since the Russian military operations began. Again, “Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava!” (“Glory to Ukraine, glory to the Heroes!”) is a slogan that goes back to the 1930s and Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators who, among other things, were involved in genocide.

As this Georgetown Security Studies Review article from 2018 explains:

Rather than leave it as the people’s unofficial rallying cry, the Ukrainian government pushed to have it become the official greeting of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’: a proposal that was made law in October of 2018.

While it’s worrying enough, given all of the other context laid out in this article, that this phrase – with its connotations – has literally been made the official greeting of Ukraine’s Armed Forces: it’s even more disturbing to now see it being nonchalantly adopted by so many people around the world, most of whom don’t understand the context.

But then that brings us back to the fact that the mass media is deliberately failing to inform the general public of the full context of these things: and, more generally, the full context of the present crisis that we’re seeing reported on every day and night on our televisions.

*

As for any notion that the Maidan Revolution or the ousting of Victor Yanukovych (whether he was a corrupt oligarch, a Russian puppet or whatever else) was a purely domestic affair, this was contradicted from the very beginning by the United States’ Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

Nuland, who was on the scene for the Maidan protests (not unlike how the likes of Hillary Clinton were on the scene in Libya, parading with Libyan rebels), was public about the fact that America had spent five billion dollars on the regime change programme in Ukraine.

And everyone knew about the fascists and Nazis in the midst of things. Again, ignorance cannot be claimed.

The ‘revolution’ was co-opted and guided by those very groups: and it was always the fascists and ultra-nationalists who benefited most from those events. And just as the likes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain were in Libya meeting with so-called Libyan Rebels (often Al-Qaeda) trying to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011, in 2014 McCain was pictured in Kiev with Oleh Tyahnybok, a Nazi-saluting founder of the Svoboda party.

Like a great many Syrians and Libyans before them, any progressive or well-intentioned Ukrainian protesters involved in Maidan in 2014 were always going to be disappointed to find that the ‘revolution’ in fact was being stolen from them: that it didn’t really belong to them at all.

Ever since then, it’s been the thugs and militias that have had the run of the roost.

As Atlantic Council noted in this 2018 article, Amnesty International had warned that:

“Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”

Also it has to be borne in mind that the current state of affairs – the conditions created by the Russian military incursion – are exactly the kind of scenario the Neo-Nazi groups and militias have been waiting for. This situation – and the urgent need to defend Ukraine – will give them the opportunity to fully expand their influence and position within the society: even beyond that which the events of 2014 had already given them.

It’s exactly the same model by which Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other jihadist groups were able to thrive in the chaos and subsequent violence brought about by the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.

Remember what C14 leader Yevhen Karas said in the video from earlier: ‘We have fun killing, we have fun fighting…’

And now it’s all about the fight: the ‘heroic struggle’. These fighters – and their foreign backers – have been preparing for this Russian incursion for a long time.

As far back as May last year, Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs (and affiliated with the Azov Battalion and other Nazis) was calling for ‘patriots’ to prepare to protect the Motherland from Russia. This Russian operation was clearly fully expected.

Moreover, the Nazi or fascist elements in Ukraine are not a rogue factor being overlooked by Western governments or intelligence services. The mass media’s current whitewashing of the Ukrainian situation is precisely to provide cover for our covert operations involving groups like the Azov Battalion and other fascists.

Research by the Institute for European Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University revealed – as recently as September last year (PDF here) – that Canadian military were training Ukrainian students connected with the fascist organisation called ‘Centuria‘.

As this article from December informs us:

‘In April 2021, Centuria’s leaders boasted on Ukrainian social media that they “actively cooperate with foreign colleagues… participating in military exercises with France, Great Britain, Canada, the USA, Germany and Poland…” The same month, the group participated in a march glorifying the exploits of the 14th Division of the Nazi Waffen-SS, the “Galicia Division,” which was comprised of Ukrainian fascists. It honors this Nazi division because it “beat the Bolshevik contagion…”…’

Let’s reiterate that last bit: a march glorifying the Nazi Waffen-SS and its Ukrainian fascists. And again, this march – and others like it – have been held openly in Ukraine. These aren’t covert.

The same group also attacked an LGBTQ event in 2019, claiming to be defending the streets “from perverts”.

Concerning this Canadian and foreign military operation in Ukraine, WSWS.org reports that:

[T]he Ottawa Citizen reported that military and Defence Department officials attempted to conceal a 2018 meeting between a group of Canadian “officers and diplomats” and members of the Azov Battalion, an openly fascist group with members embedded in the Ukrainian National Guard. Fully briefed in 2017 on its Nazi ideology, Canadian officials were concerned only that the meeting remain secret. It was exposed when Azov boasted about it via social media…

We’re further informed that the ‘Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which openly defends these Nazi veterans and glorifies the fascist World War II Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera, wields considerable influence in Ottawa. The Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland… is the granddaughter of one of the Waffen-SS Galicia division’s principal promoters, Mihailo Chomiak, the editor of a pro-Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland...’

This is true, about Chrystia Freeland – Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister: I didn’t know that until recently.

So Canadian military and defense officials not only were engaged with the Nazi Azov Battalion, but tried to cover it up.

Something virtually identical also happened with the British military.

Declassified UK revealed that ‘Ukraine’s National Guard says that in meeting last year the UK military agreed to start training its forces…’

As the piece shows, photos and details concerning this meeting in Kiev were published on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard – which includes the Azov Battalion. Despite this, the UK Ministry of Defence was angry that this ‘private’ meeting was publicised in Ukraine. And, as the Declassified UK article tells us, ‘There is no mention of the meeting in any UK records that are publicly available.’

This too was published in September 2021 – just a few months before this current Russian invasion.

Not that Western military agencies’ collaborations with Azov and other Ukrainian militias is new. In March 2015, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov had announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.

In fact, the US State Department has classified the Azov Battalion as a terrorist group. In 2018, the US House of Representatives passed a provision blocking training of Azov members by American forces, due to its Neo-Nazi links. However, extraordinarily, this ban was quietly lifted due to pressure from the Pentagon.

Obama had in fact blocked armed sales to Ukraine, presumably worried about the arming of Neo-Nazi units: but Trump and now Biden reversed this policy. Trump in fact approved the $39 million sale of defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine.

As noted in my 2018 article here, Israel was also reportedly selling weapons directly to the Azov group: that’s Israel selling weapons to Neo-Nazis. What a world.

Now, of course, in light of the current events, all kinds of weaponry is being openly sent to Ukraine. Everyone is sending weapons to Ukraine now (just look at this list) – even including countries like Germany and Finland.

Which is logical on one level – obviously everyone wants Ukraine to be able to defend itself against an invading aggressor. But you also have to ask precisely whose hands all the weapons are going to end up in: because, as we once saw with the Islamic State group, it’s usually the worst-case scenario.

It is clear, at any rate, that Western intelligence and military groups have been supporting and engaging with groups like the Azov Battalion: in spite of their openly Nazi ideology. No one is under any illusions about this.

It is now looking increasingly like Special Forces from various countries are arriving in Ukraine to fight the Russians. Israeli special forces, it is reported, are in Ukraine: so are Canadian special forces. And British SAS personnel are said to be headed to Ukraine. You know, let’s just assume everyone’s ‘special forces’ are arriving in Ukraine.

My question. given everything else, is how many of them are going to be colluding with the likes of Azov.

*

To conclude here: no, Ukrainians aren’t all Nazi-loving white supremacists. Of course they’re not. It’s a country of 40 million people: most of them I’m sure have no affinity with the extremists, just as most people in Mosul had no affinity with the Islamic State militants.

But the evident and obvious Nazi presence in the affairs of the Ukraine/Russia/NATO conflict is too big and too significant to be so completely removed from the equation in the way the media is doing. The general public in most Western nations are not particularly versed in the details of the Ukraine/Russia situation or the recent history leading up to this present state of affairs: and generally do not know much about the Nazi resurgence or about the nature of groups like Azov – or our governments’ collusion in these matters.

And the mass media is making sure it stays this way: presenting the general public only with the context and ‘information’ that suits the present propaganda agenda. This policy of omission is either stupidly short-sighted or it’s actually sinister: draw your own conclusion as to which it is.

Click here to read the same article as it was originally published by S. Awan on his official website Burning Blogger on March 5th.

*

1 From an article entitled entitled “How the U.S. Has Empowered and Armed Neo-Nazis in Ukraine” written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies published in Counterpunch on March 11, 2022. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/11/how-the-u-s-has-empowered-and-armed-neo-nazis-in-ukraine/

2 From an article entitled “How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia” written by by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal published in The Grayzone on March 4, 2022. https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/ 

the united colours of Bilderberg — a late review of Montreux 2019: #2 (un)stable strategic order

This is the second of a sequence of articles based around the ‘key topics’ to last year’s Bilderberg conference discussed in relation to the prevailing political agenda and placed within the immediate historical context.

This piece focuses on issues relating to China and Russia:

A schematically enhanced version of last year’s ‘key topics’

*

The price of “full spectrum dominance”

“I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.” [from 38:30 mins]

These sobering words come from Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Dying from cancer and confined to a wheelchair, Pinter courageously seized the occasion and used it as a final opportunity to speak truth to power.

He continued:

“The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

“The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.” 1

In March 2018 ‘Democracy Now!’ interviewed former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, author of “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq”. Kinzer reminds us of just a few of the many U.S.-backed coups and invasions beginning with the overthrow of Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya (1909) to the toppling of democratic Prime Minister Mosaddegh in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état to the Dominican Republic to Honduras to Cuba. He also discusses the radical anti-imperialism of Mark Twain:

*

During the decade and a half that has passed since Pinter gave his impassioned speech, the US State Department under Hilary Clinton pressed for the disastrous Nato-led regime change operation to topple Gaddafi in Libya (2011), while under the pretext of fighting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the same Obama administration simultaneously waged war on Yemen, a conflict that since 2015 was further escalated under a Saudi-led and US-backed coalition. 2

A UN report on Yemen released in September accuses the Saudi-led coalition of killing tens of thousands since 2015 and of starving to death a further 85,000 children as a deliberate war tactic. It further accuses America, Britain and France, who have armed and provided logistical support and intelligence to the Saudis, of complicity in those war crimes:

Tamer Kirolos, Country Director of Save the Children said:
“It’s unacceptable that those responsible for the killing, maiming and other grave violations against thousands of Yemeni children are yet to face any consequences. The report even notes the use of starvation as a weapon of war, resulting in thousands of children facing severe malnutrition. Children are not only dying from bombs and bullets, they are being smothered silently because they are denied food.” 3

[Bold highlights as in the original]

Meanwhile, under Timber Sycamore and other clandestine operations, the US and its Gulf State allies has also supplied weapons, training and funding directly to Islamist terrorist groups in repeated efforts to destabilise Syria.

And today, as Trump and the neo-con faction surrounding him continue to heighten tensions with Iran, the US already has forces, many of which are private contractors, deployed widely across the Middle East, Africa and further afield:

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

The extract above is taken from a recent article written by John Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People, who continues:

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053. 4

Click here to read John Whitehead’s full article entitled “Come Home America: Stop Policing the World and Waging Endless Wars” published by Counterpunch.

On Monday 13^th, Taya Graham of ‘The Real News Network’ spoke to CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin about why special interests are promoting conflict with Iran, the nearly inevitable veto of the War Powers resolution vote, and the urgent need for popular antiwar resistance:

*

Sanctions against China: the flagrant lies and double standards

On December 3^rd, the US House of Representatives passed by a vote of 407 to 1 the Uighur Intervention and Global Humanitarian Unified Response Act (UIGHUR Act), a stronger amended version of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019, which had previously passed the Senate by unanimous consent on September 11^th. This revised bill is now awaiting approval by the Senate:

[The bill] adds provisions that require the president to sanction Chinese government officials responsible for the repression of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and places restrictions on the export of devices that could be used to spy on or restrict the communications or movement of members of the group and other Chinese citizens. […]

Among other provisions, the bill requires the president to submit to Congress within 120 days a list of senior Chinese government officials guilty of human rights abuses against Uighurs in Xianjiang or elsewhere in China. That list would include Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo and officials responsible for mass incarceration or “re-education” efforts that single out Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.

The president would be required to impose visa and financial restrictions on the listed individuals under the Global Magnitsky Act. 5

Click here to read the full article published by Bloomberg on December 3^rd.

A fortnight earlier on November 20^th, the House had passed Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 (HKHRDA) by 417-1 which again allowed for targeted sanctions.

The justification for the introduction and tightening of sanctions on China is twofold. Firstly it is to protect human rights protesters in Hong Kong and secondly to protect the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim population who live in the Xinjiang province of the north-west.

I have discussed the Hong Kong protests in previous articles (for instance here) and the evidence is overwhelming that genuine grievances have been deliberately inflamed by agencies working on behalf of the US State Department. Such strategies for fomenting colour revolution are tried and tested and other recent examples have included the failed coup attempt in Venezuela and the victorious Maidan in Ukraine. Today neo-Nazis from Ukraine who have flown out to Hong Kong are actively helping out:

With their flamboyant waving of US and British colonial flags and tendency to belt out the American national anthem on megaphones, anti-China separatists in Hong Kong have made themselves a magnet for the US far-right. Staff of the website InfoWars, right-wing social media personality Paul Joseph Watson, and the ultra-conservative group Patriot Prayer are among those who have made pilgrimages to the protests.

The latest collection of extreme-right activists to reinforce the ranks of the Hong Kong separatists are from Ukraine. They call themselves Gonor and have tattoos on their upper torsos with undeniable symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

These extremists previously fought in a notoriously brutal neo-Nazi militia called the Azov Battalion, in Ukraine’s war against pro-Russian militants. 6

Click here to read the full report by Ben Norton published in The Grayzone.

No mention of this is ever reported by the corporate media, of course; just as the neo-Nazi presence during the original Maidan was deliberately downplayed and ignored. You do not want to have your colour revolution spoiled by uncomfortable facts leaking out.

Which brings me to consider another often-repeated mainstream story: how the Chinese government has arrested and detained a million or more Uyghur, who are being held and tortured inside secret “re-education camps”. Such is the sheer scale of this alleged programme of ethnic cleansing that it encourages comparison to the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. So what is the hard evidence and how reliable are sources?

The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region is repeated with increasing frequency, but little scrutiny is ever applied. Yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.

While this extraordinary claim is treated as unassailable in the West, it is, in fact, based on two highly dubious “studies.”

The first, by the US government-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, formed its estimate by interviewing a grand total of eight people.

The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports “scriptural spanking” of children, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China. 7

Adrian Zenz is considered an expert in DC. His research influenced the Uyghur Human Rights Act that sanctioned China.

But he’s also a Rapture-ready evangelical who says he’s “led by God” against Beijing.

I challenged him on Capitol Hill.

More here: https://t.co/HPJUcHddle pic.twitter.com/czZtxxvXxO

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 22, 2019

The assessment is made by investigative journalists Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal writing in The Grayzone. The same piece continues:

The “millions detained” figure was first popularized by a Washington, DC-based NGO that is backed by the US government, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).

In a 2018 report submitted to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – often misrepresented in Western media as a UN-authored report – CHRD “estimate[d] that roughly one million members of ethnic Uyghurs have been sent to ‘re-education’ detention camps and roughly two million have been forced to attend ‘re-education’ programs in Xinjiang.” According to CHRD, this figure was “[b]ased on interviews and limited data.”

While CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals.

[Bold highlights as in the original]

Continuing:

In its mounting pressure campaign against China, the US is not only relying on CHRD for data; it is directly funding its operations. As Ben Norton and Ajit Singh previously reported for The Grayzone, CHRD receives significant financial support from Washington’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

For anyone who remains unfamiliar with the work of the NED, please read this earlier article.

Click here to read the full article which provides a detailed profile of born-again Christian, Adrian Zenz, who:

“recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. ‘I feel very clearly led by God to do this,’ he said. ‘I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.’”

*

The fact that Beijing operates a repressive authoritarian regime is not in dispute. There is also irrefutable evidence that China incarcerates many thousands of political prisoners, amongst whom members of the Uygher minority are disproportionally targeted. Others are secretly executed. Why then would the West bother to engage in a campaign that exaggerates the level of human rights abuses taking place?

The short answer is that China is now singled out because America and its close allies wish to isolate and impose sanctions just as they have done previously with Russia, Syria and, most recently, Iran. Sanctions are, of course, the basic tool for economic warfare.

The slightly longer answer is that in order to satisfy their objective, Chinese human rights abuses need necessarily be portrayed as categorically different from the crimes of Western allies. This falsehood is maintained in large part by comparative silence concerning, for instance, the human rights violations under the totalitarian rule of military dictator Abdel el-Sisi in Egypt; the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kashmir carried out by Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi; or the daily crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel and Saudi Arabia…

Saudi Arabian dissidents do not expect to live for very long. Instead they expect to be tortured, beheaded and ‘crucified’. Or in the case of Washington Post correspondent, Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered alive with a bonesaw on the personal orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Meanwhile, under Israel’s apartheid system, which was formalised after the passing of the Nation-State Law in 2018, one third of the five million registered Palestinian refugees, born of families who lost their homes when their land was ethnically cleansed at the time of the 1948 Nakba, remain crammed into permanent refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Another third (1.85 million to be exact) exist under a constant economic blockade inside Gaza’s open-air prison and are subjected to periodic military assaults which Israeli strategists and hardliners casually describe as “mowing the lawn”. Those brave enough to protest against these dire conditions are routinely shot at with live ammunition. During the last two years Great March of Return, nearly two hundred unarmed people including many women and children have been killed by IDF snipers, while another six thousand are now maimed for life.

So this becomes a numbers game, with the figures for Uygher victims necessarily measured in excess of the less deserving victims of Egypt, India, Israel or Saudi Arabia, whose plight is correspondingly under-reported and forgotten. Moreover, although the unrelenting war and blockade of Yemen has caused a prolonged cholera epidemic and mass starvation that amounts to actual genocide, this grotesque crime against humanity is seldom if ever mentioned in the news, which prefers to reserve hyperbolic comparisons to Nazi Germany for China rather than India and Saudi Arabia (or allies Britain and France).

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The grey zone

On June 13^th, BBC Newsnight broadcast a report on a new mission for the SAS and other UK special forces, which, should ministers choose to authorise it, is set “to counter Russian and other forces around the world.”

As Newsnight’s Diplomatic and Defence Editor, Mark Urban, reported in a related BBC news article:

The plan [called ‘Special Operations Concept’] is currently being considered by military chiefs, Whitehall insiders tell me, and will soon be sent to ministers and is likely to be approved.

The Ministry of Defence has said it does not comment on the UK Special Forces.

UK Special Forces are meant to provide more options for low-profile actions in places where overtly committing conventional troops would be difficult.

For example, under the new plan, an operation might be mounted in a Baltic republic or African country in order to uncover and pinpoint Russian covert activities. […]

The new missions would take UKSF units in a less “kinetic” or violent direction – after almost 20 years of man-hunting strike missions in the Middle East and Afghanistan – and into closer cooperation with allied intelligence agencies and MI6.

The same piece continues:

The role of the SRR [Special Reconnaissance Regiment: one of the three main elements of the UK’s Special Forces working along the SAS and SBS], which carries out covert surveillance, would grow under the Special Operations Concept.

Military chiefs believe Russia has been using its military intelligence arm, the GRU, effectively in Ukraine, Syria and Africa.

“Right now, you do nothing or you escalate,” one senior officer says. “We want to expand that competitive space.”

Adding:

At a London conference earlier this month, Chief of General Staff General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith referred to “authoritarian regimes” rather than mentioning Russia by name, noting they had managed to “exploit that hybrid space between those two increasingly redundant states of ‘peace’ and ‘war’”. 8

The quote drawn from Sir Mark Carleton-Smith’s speech delivered at RUSI is startling: “those increasingly redundant states of ‘peace’ and ‘war’”; and the tone is made all the more alarming due to the placement of quotation marks around the words ‘war’ and ‘peace’. Is this really what the Chief of General Staff intends when he talks about “the grey zone”: that ‘war’ and ‘peace’ now have purely relative meanings and signify nothing at all in any absolute sense? It is hard to imagine anything more Orwellian than this. Moreover, the leaked plans to redeploy Special Forces in preemptive action against other states are very likely in breach of the UN Charter, as the Russian embassy in London subsequently pointed out:

“In fact, this would mean that UK defense agencies are paving the way for removing the existing restrictions imposed by the international law and to claim the right to carry out military operations beyond the limits of self-defense, which constitutes a direct breach of the UN Charter,” the embassy said. “This would not just become a yet another step towards deliberately destroying the world order based on the international law, but also create major risks of those ‘hybrid’ operations evolving into full-fledged armed conflicts as a result of various coincidences and misunderstandings.” 9

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Russia & cyber threats

Having returned from Montreux, National Security Correspondent for The New York Times, David E. Sanger, quickly put together a piece that helps us to better understand the interconnecting parts of another two of last summer’s Bilderberg key topics (Russia & Cyber Threats):

The United States is stepping-up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. 10

‘Current and former government officials said…’ Pompeo and Petraeus by any chance? Just taking a wild guess, of course, because there were others mingling in Montreaux with specialist knowledge who arguably better fit the bill as sources: take for instance, James H. Baker, the Director of the Office of Net Assessment; or alternatively, Matthew Daniels from New Space and Technology Projects, another whose post is under the aegis of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

James H. Baker, the Pentagon's top wargamer (official Orwellian title: Director, Office of Net Assessment), goes for a melancholic stroll outside #Bilderberg. I asked if he was having a good meeting. He turned on his heel & went gloomily back inside. Reminded me of Charlie Brown. pic.twitter.com/QjTgJ0CT3B

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) June 1, 2019

Just as plausibly, Sanger may have got the lowdown from Matthew Pottinger, Senior Director of the National Security Council (NSC) while partaking of some of the fine comestibles with NSC colleague and Director for China, Matthew Turpin. And if you’re wondering whether the colleagues at NSC were officially booked into adjacent rooms with a view, do please take note that:

“Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity” (according to the Bilderberg website) 11

On the same basis we must therefore surmise that US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was driven to this year’s summit by his own fleet of black limousines!

"Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity", says the #Bilderberg website. Here's Mike Pompeo arriving as an "individual" at the venue. He's inside at this point. You can't see the other dozen cars. pic.twitter.com/2xuvrSs87C

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) June 1, 2019

…Although attended by, as Charlie Skelton wryly observes, “a small army of secret service bodyguards, a bunch of State Dept staff and advisors, and the US Ambassador to Switzerland.”

the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, drops in for "informal talks" at #Bilderberg 2019, with a small army of secret service bodyguards, a bunch of State Dept staff and advisors, and the US Ambassador to Switzerland. pic.twitter.com/trxxg9mRE2

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) June 2, 2019

Officially at least, the White House mustn’t have known two of their senior staffers were even going to Montreux!

two members of Donald Trump's National Security Council are strategising with Jared Kushner at #Bilderberg this year: Matthew Turpin (Director for China, NSC) & Matthew Pottinger (Senior Director, NSC). Ex-CIA director David Petraeus is also here. Pompeo might drop by for nibbles pic.twitter.com/BmSKhst0iI

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) May 31, 2019

David Sanger’s article continues:

Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.

But it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.

Adding:

Power grids have been a low-intensity battleground for years.

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before. It is intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.

What the article casually describes as “the daily digital Cold War”, if true, is actually nothing of the sort. The Cold War did not involve daily attacks on enemy infrastructure, which is part of the reason why thankfully it remained a cold war. Such an admission of US attacks is again in clear breach of international law, and yet coolly reported as mundane tit-for-tat exchanges justified on the back of entirely unsubstantiated rumours of Russian sabotage.

The article continues:

Mr. Trump issued new authorities to Cyber Command last summer, in a still-classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, giving General Nakasone [head of United States Cyber Command] far more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without receiving presidential approval.

But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”

Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval. […]

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Which is the single aspect of Sanger’s article that we can know without doubt is true, since under section 1632 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2019 (H.R. 5515) which passed the Senate on August 1^st 2018, and which Trump subsequently signed into law on August 13^th, he thereby removed the need for his own presidential authorisation to launch a cyberattack:

Affirming the authority of the Secretary of Defense to conduct military activities and operations in cyberspace. 12

It is a piece of legislation that conjures to mind the essential plot device in Dr Strangelove: a presidential pre-delegation of first-strike nuclear weapons use that grants permission to demented General Jack D. Ripper of Kubrick’s satire to personally launch his nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. 13

On the other hand, claims that Russia and America have already inserted viruses inside each other’s primary infrastructure demands evidence, and without any, the story clearly lacks credibility. So besides fearmongering, what would be the aim of putting out these purported ‘leaks’?

Well, it may help in the construction of a pretext for a genuine attack. A prospect which brings us to consider this admission (quoted again from Sanger’s NYT piece):

In a previous post, General Nakasone had been deeply involved in designing an operation code-named Nitro Zeus that amounted to a war plan to unplug Iran if the United States entered into hostilities with the country.

Given the current climate Iran would seem to be a more likely target then Russia – it is also the country most conspicuous by its absence from this year’s Bilderberg ‘key topics’. Did Mike Pompeo really spend the weekend at Bilderberg and not talk about Iran? When indeed was the last time the region of the Middle East failed to feature in Bilderberg’s published agenda? (I cannot remember a single occasion.)

In support of this alternative thesis, the article also contains this curious and conspicuous passage:

Both General Nakasone and Mr. Bolton, through spokesmen, declined to answer questions about the incursions into Russia’s grid. Officials at the National Security Council also declined to comment but said they had no national security concerns about the details of The New York Times’s reporting about the targeting of the Russian grid, perhaps an indication that some of the intrusions were intended to be noticed by the Russians.

Noticed by the Russians, the Chinese, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians too presumably… leaks of alleged “intrusions” that the public would know literally nothing whatsoever about were it not for the fact that the whole matter was conveniently brought to the attention of NYT-Bilderberg insider David E. Sanger by those “officials at the National Security Council”. Leaks much to the advantage of those with an interest to heighten tensions and incubate the new cold war.

Author of the piece David Sanger, on the list of Bilderberg participants as it was originally released on May 28^th, has since gone missing.

By Friday June 1^st, and with the conference well underway, his name was expunged.

As these screenshots show:

Like Mike Pompeo, he is another of last year’s Bilderberg disappeared.

*

A reconstructed world order

On the day of the anniversary of the D-Day landings, as Angela Merkel joined fellow western leaders to commemorate the sacrifice of the allied soldiers during the Second World War, two nations fighting alongside the victors were quietly snubbed. Russia and China each lost more than twenty million lives in their struggles against Germany and Japan respectively; the Russian Red Army doing more than all of the other allied forces to halt the march of the Nazis, battling alone against four-fifths of the Wehrmacht and forcing their thousand mile retreat from Moscow to Berlin.

However the isolation and the US-led encirclement of Russia and China has had the inevitable if unintended consequence of forging a closer alliance, and so as British, French, Canadian and American dignitaries laid wreaths on Normandy’s beaches, uninvited leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were instead meeting in Moscow – it would be their thirtieth get-together in just the past six years – a tightening Eurasian partnership that has been relatively under-reported by the western press.

The following is taken a BBC news report:

The alliance between the two countries has intensified since both Moscow and Beijing feel alienated by Europe and especially the US.

Moscow’s relationship with the West turned sour when Russia was put under sanctions for its involvement in the Ukraine conflict five years ago. It has also been criticised for assisting the Assad regime in Syria in 2015.

China’s ties with the US have deteriorated since the Trump administration appeared to turn its back on globalisation in favour of economic national protectionism.

The two countries are currently embroiled in a trade war and tit-for-tat tariffs that intensive talks have so far failed to resolve.

With a shared sense of rejection from the West, Russia and China have hence moved closer together, both in economic and military cooperation, observers say.

The partnership has already seen an increase in trade, which grew by 25% in 2018 to hit a record $108bn (£85bn) according to the Kremlin. 14

There is no mention of the D-Day snub, of course, although the same piece does include a useful breakdown of the burgeoning economic ties between the two superpowers along with this observation:

During Xi’s visit to Moscow, the two sides have promised to deepen military and economic cooperation in the future.

Among the business deals signed there is one that stands out: Russian telecoms company MTS will allow controversial Chinese tech giant Huawei to develop a 5G network in Russia.

Click here to read the full BBC news report entitled “China’s Xi praises ‘best friend’ Putin during Russia visit”.

Such deals represent a direct response to, on the one hand, the West’s sanctions imposed on Russia ostensibly for its annexation of Crimea, and on the other, Trump’s imposition of tariffs on China. As the trade war against both counties is ratcheted up, once again it is inevitable that they are pushed into forming closer mutual ties. Moreover, Trump’s blustering has effectively backed America into a corner, as economist Michael Hudson explains:

The US is making impossible demands for economic surrender – that no country could accept. What appears on the surface to be only a trade war is really a full-fledged Cold War 2.0.

At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity. […]

The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade “partners” pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys monopoly pricing “rights” for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade “partner” surrenders.

The best approach left open to China according to Hudson is to “stand aside and let the US self-destruct”, although he also advocates, albeit a little tongue-in-cheek, that Xi should nominate Trump for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize:

We know that he wants what his predecessor Barack Obama got. And doesn’t he deserve it more? After all, he is helping to bring Eurasia together, driving China and Russia into an alliance with neighboring countries, reaching out to Europe.

Trump may be too narcissistic to realize the irony here. Catalyzing Asian and European trade independence, financial independence, food independence and IT independence from the threat of U.S. sanctions will leave the U.S. isolated in the emerging multilateralism. 15

Click here to read Hudson’s full article entitled “Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0” published on June 13^th.

*

On July 8^th Ross Ashcroft, host of RT’s ‘Renegade Inc’, was joined by the journalist and Middle East based commentator Sharmine Narwani to discuss how Iran and the Middle East is reshaping the world order. Narwani explained how the battle over Syria (which she refers to as ‘Ground Zero’) has marked a turning point in the large-scale, two-decade long, neo-colonial ‘third world war’ raging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa:

*

Additional: Iraq, Soleimani and the threat of petroyuan

The following is an extended extract from a recent article entitled “How a Hidden Parliamentary Session Revealed Trump’s True Motives in Iraq” by Whitney Webb published in Mint Press News:

[T]he use of the petrodollar has created a system whereby U.S. control of oil sales of the largest oil exporters is necessary, not just to buttress the dollar, but also to support its global military presence. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the issue of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and the issue of Iraq’s push for oil independence against U.S. wishes have become intertwined. Notably, one of the architects of the petrodollar system and the man who infamously described U.S. soldiers as “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy”, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has been advising Trump and informing his China policy since 2016.

This take was also expressed by economist Michael Hudson, who recently noted that U.S. access to oil, dollarization and U.S. military strategy are intricately interwoven and that Trump’s recent Iraq policy is intended “to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves,” and, as Hudson says, “to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (ISIS, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar.”

Hudson further asserts that it was Qassem Soleimani’s efforts to promote Iraq’s oil independence at the expense of U.S. imperial ambitions that served one of the key motives behind his assassination.

“America opposed General Suleimani above all because he was fighting against ISIS and other U.S.-backed terrorists in their attempt to break up Syria and replace Assad’s regime with a set of U.S.-compliant local leaders – the old British “divide and conquer” ploy. On occasion, Suleimani had cooperated with U.S. troops in fighting ISIS groups that got “out of line” meaning the U.S. party line. But every indication is that he was in Iraq to work with that government seeking to regain control of the oil fields that President Trump has bragged so loudly about grabbing. (emphasis added)”

Hudson adds that “…U.S. neocons feared Suleimani’s plan to help Iraq assert control of its oil and withstand the terrorist attacks supported by U.S. and Saudi’s on Iraq. That is what made his assassination an immediate drive.”

While other factors — such as pressure from U.S. allies such as Israel — also played a factor in the decision to kill Soleimani, the decision to assassinate him on Iraqi soil just hours before he was set to meet with Abdul-Mahdi in a diplomatic role suggests that the underlying tensions caused by Iraq’s push for oil independence and its oil deal with China did play a factor in the timing of his assassination. It also served as a threat to Abdul-Mahdi, who has claimed that the U.S. threatened to kill both him and his defense minister just weeks prior over tensions directly related to the push for independence of Iraq’s oil sector from the U.S.

It appears that the ever-present role of the petrodollar in guiding U.S. policy in the Middle East remains unchanged. The petrodollar has long been a driving factor behind the U.S.’ policy towards Iraq specifically, as one of the key triggers for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in Euros opposed to dollars beginning in the year 2000. Just weeks before the invasion began, Hussein boasted that Iraq’s Euro-based oil revenue account was earning a higher interest rate than it would have been if it had continued to sell its oil in dollars, an apparent signal to other oil exporters that the petrodollar system was only really benefiting the United States at their own expense.

Beyond current efforts to stave off Iraq’s oil independence and keep its oil trade aligned with the U.S., the fact that the U.S. is now seeking to limit China’s ever-growing role in Iraq’s oil sector is also directly related to China’s publicly known efforts to create its own direct competitor to the petrodollar, the petroyuan.

Since 2017, China has made its plans for the petroyuan — a direct competitor to the petrodollar — no secret, particularly after China eclipsed the U.S. as the world’s largest importer of oil. As CNBC noted at the time:

“The new strategy is to enlist the energy markets’ help: Beijing may introduce a new way to price oil in coming months — but unlike the contracts based on the U.S. dollar that currently dominate global markets, this benchmark would use China’s own currency. If there’s widespread adoption, as the Chinese hope, then that will mark a step toward challenging the greenback’s status as the world’s most powerful currency….The plan is to price oil in yuan using a gold-backed futures contract in Shanghai, but the road will be long and arduous.”

If the U.S. continues on its current path and pushes Iraq further into the arms of China and other U.S. rival states, it goes without saying that Iraq — now a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — may soon favor a petroyuan system over a petrodollar system, particularly as the current U.S. administration threatens to hold Iraq’s central bank account hostage for pursuing policies Washington finds unfavorable.

It could also explain why President Trump is so concerned about China’s growing foothold in Iraq, since it risks causing not only the end of the U.S. military hegemony in the country but could also lead to major trouble for the petrodollar system and the U.S.’ position as a global financial power. Trump’s policy aimed at stopping China and Iraq’s growing ties is clearly having the opposite effect, showing that this administration’s “gangster diplomacy” only serves to make the alternatives offered by countries like China and Russia all the more attractive. 16

[Bold highlights as in the original]

Click here to read Whitney Webb’s full article published on January 17^th.

*

1 Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video on December 7, 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. A complete transcript is available here: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/ 

2

Although the Trump administration vastly escalated the counter-terrorism war in Yemen, the war began under President Obama. Over his entire presidency, President Bush had conducted only a single strike in Yemen in 2002.

From an article entitled “Drone Strikes: Yemen” written by Peter Bergen, David Sterman and Melissa Salyk-Virk, published in New America https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/americas-counterterrorism-wars/us-targeted-killing-program-yemen/ 

3 From a statement released by Save the Children entitled “Time to Bring Killers of Children in Yemen to Justice” published on September 3, 2019. https://www.savethechildren.net/news/statement-time-bring-killers-children-yemen-justice

4 From an article entitled “Come Home America: Sop Policing the World and Waging Endless Wars” written by John W. Whitehead, published in Counterpunch on January 13, 2020. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/13/come-home-america-stop-policing-the-world-and-waging-endless-wars/ 

5 From an article entitled “U.S. House Passes Xinjiang Bill, Prompting Threat From China” written by Daniel Flatley, published in Bloomberg on December 3, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/u-s-house-ramps-up-china-tensions-with-uighur-human-rights-bill

6 From an article entitled “Ukrainian neo-Nazis flock to the Hong Kong protest movement” written by Ben Norton, published in The Grayzone on December 4, 2019. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/04/ukrainian-nazis-hong-kong-protests/ 

7 From an article entitled “China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing” written by Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal, published in The Grayzone on December 21, 2019. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/

8 From an article entitled “UK’s special forces set for new Russia mission” written by Mark Urban, published in BBC news on June 13, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48624982

9 From a report by Tass entitled “Russian embassy alarmed by London’s plans to shift focus of UK special forces” published on June 15, 2019. https://tass.com/world/1063933

10 From an article entitled “U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid” written by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, published in The New York Times on June 15, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html

11

The Bilderberg Meeting is a forum for informal discussions about major issues. The meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor any other participant may be revealed.

Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions.

https://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/meetings/meeting-2019/press-release-2019

12 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/hr5515/text

13

As declassified U.S. documents show, such pre-delegation existed beginning in 1956 when then U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized U.S. air defenses to use nuclear weapons to defend against Soviet bomber forces in the event of an attack. This was further solidified with Eisenhower approving pre-delegation instructions for the use of nuclear weapons in 1959. Some form of nuclear pre-delegation existed at least until the end of the 1980s, as Bruce G. Blair has shown.

Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level nuclear war planner in the 1960s, notes in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner that during the Cold War years, pre-delegation was seen as an integral part in the nuclear arms race with the Soviets for a simple reason: Its absence would undermine nuclear deterrence. Ellsberg writes: “The theatrical device represented by the president’s moment-by-moment day-and-night access to the ‘football’, with its supposedly unique authorization codes, has always been that: theater — essentially a hoax.”

From an article entitled “Dr. Strangelove and the Insane Reality of Nuclear Command-and-Control” written by Franz-Stefan Gady, published in The Diplomat on January 5, 2018. https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/dr-strangelove-and-the-insane-reality-of-nuclear-command-and-control/ 

14 From a report entitled “China’s Xi praises ‘best friend’ Putin during Russia visit” published by BBC news on June 6, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48537663

15 From an article entitled “Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0” written by Michael Hudson posted on his own website on June 13, 2019. https://michael-hudson.com/2019/06/cold-war-2-0/

16 From an article entitled “How a Hidden Parliamentary Session Revealed Trump’s True Motives in Iraq”  written by Whitney Webb, published in Mint Press News on January 17, 2020. https://www.mintpressnews.com/hidden-parliamentary-session-revealed-trump-motives-iraq-china-oil/264155/

the ‘crisis’ in Ukraine has never ended, but it has become an embarrassment…

Paul Moreira is an acclaimed French filmmaker. Yet even before his latest documentary “Ukraine, les masques de la révolution” [Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution] was premiered on February 1^st by Canal+ he already faced fierce criticism having provoked outrage both in Ukraine and France. You can read an English translation of Moreira’s response to his critics here and watch the film embedded below:

http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=746f31a732b5

Ulrich Heyden is a German journalist and author. Since 1992, he has been a freelance correspondent in Moscow for German media, including for Telepolis. He was co-producer of the 45-minute documentary film (sub-titled in English) released in February 2015 and entitled “Wildfire: The Odessa atrocities of May 2, 2014″.

This film again interviews eyewitnesses of the arson attack on the Trade Union House in Odessa which left 48 people dead on that day, and asks whether the massacre was a pre-planned operation to quell opposition to the new government that came into power two months earlier following the “Euromaidan revolution”.

Most prominent of those alleged to have orchestrated events is neo-Nazi Andrey Parubiy, a co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine and leader of the “self-defence forces” of the Maidan, who was afterwards invited as a guest to Ottawa and Washington and more recently was welcomed by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

*

Before continuing, I would also like to direct attention to an alternative article – one published back in March 2014 by antiwar.com shortly after the massacre in Independence Square and entitled “What Color is Ukraine’s ‘Color Revolution’?” Here are just a few extracts drawn from the beginning, middle and end:

As the real nature of Ukraine’s “democratic” and allegedly “pro-Western” opposition becomes all too apparent, the pushback from the regime-change crowd borders on the comic. The War Party is stumbling all over itself in a frantic effort to cover up and deny the frightening provenance of the neo-fascist gang they’ve helped to seize power in Kiev. […]

Outside the “we are all Ukrainians now” bubble, however, people are sitting up and taking notice. A Reuters piece spotlights the general uneasiness about the exact color of this latest US-sponsored “color revolution”:

“When protest leaders in Ukraine helped oust a president widely seen as corrupt, they became heroes of the barricades. But as they take places in the country’s new government, some are facing uncomfortable questions about their own values and associations, not least alleged links to neo-fascist extremists.” […]

I don’t know which is more alarming: the entrance into government of a party that traces its origins back to a fighting battalion affiliated with Hitler’s SS, or the sight of US officials whitewashing it. They’re flying the Confederate flag and the Celtic cross in Kiev, and the first African American President is hailing them as liberators. That’s one for the history books! 1

Click here to read the full article.

And here to read an extended post also from March 2004 in which I analysed the facts and misinformation as available at the time of Maidan.

*

Ukraine has been thrust into a new political crisis after the economic minister and his team tendered their resignations complaining of ingrained corruption, which has replaced the simmering separatist conflict as the country’s main obstacle to reform.

The economic minister, Aivaras Abromavičius, resigned on Wednesday [February 3^rd], and was followed on Thursday by his first deputy, Yulia Kovaliv, and the rest of his team. Two deputy ministers and Ukraine’s trade representative have also resigned. The parliament has reportedly begun debating whether to accept the resignations.

writes Alec Luhn in an article entitled “Economic minister’s resignation plunges Ukraine into a new crisis” published by the Guardian in February. The same piece continues:

A former fund manager born in Lithuania, Abromavičius was one of a group of reform-minded foreign officials hired for their international experience and lack of local corruption networks after a pro-western government took power in 2014.

His resignation letter on Wednesday marked a major blow to the president, Petro Poroshenko, and the coalition government, who have come under increasing fire for the slow pace of reforms. The International Monetary Fund has been holding up a $1.7bn bailout to demand harsh cuts to the pension system and a stronger fight against corruption. 2

A fortnight later and the crisis took another turn when President Petro Poroshenko asked Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to resign, saying “he has lost the support of the governing coalition”:

In a statement, Mr Poroshenko said it was “obvious” that there was demand for a “complete reset of the cabinet”.

“The cabinet has lost the coalition’s trust,” he said.

“To restore this trust, therapy is not enough. One should resort to surgical means,” the president added, saying a new cabinet could be formed by the existing parliamentary coalition. 3

From a BBC article published on February 16^th which includes this image:

What the original caption to this BBC image fails to point out is that “the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party” pictured is neo-Nazi.

At the time of the Maidan, Arseny Yatsenyuk (or “Yats”) had been the preferred choice of Victoria Nuland and the US State Department. 4 Then, once Yatsenyuk was appointed Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister, Washington’s man quickly asserted himself, saying:

 “We are to undertake extremely unpopular steps as the previous government and previous president were so corrupted that the country is in a desperate financial plight,” Mr Yatsenyuk told BBC Ukrainian.

“We are on the brink of a disaster and this is the government of political suiciders! So welcome to hell,” he added. 5

The kamikaze mission Yatsenyuk had in mind involved the unleashing of Greek-style austerity measures, served up very much to the satisfaction of the IMF and EU. So welcome to hell indeed!

But Yatsenyuk was already paying a hefty price for leading Ukraine on his admitted “suicide mission” and soon became one of the most despised elected leaders anywhere in the world. Worse, he made himself unpopular inside the Verkhovna Rada, and particularly so after he branded opposition MPs “morons” during a debate last December. Their response was a now familiar one – a periodic Rada brawl ensued (Yats is the one with the bouquet!):

On April 14^th, Yatsenyuk, Nuland’s favourite and head of the Open Ukraine Foundation, which is in turn partnered by Nato, the US State Department, Chatham House, and the National Endowment for Democracy among other organizations 6, was finally forced out of office. He had been Prime Minister for a little over two years.

A month later, on May 20^th, under the banner “National requirement – no surrender”, thousands of troops from the far-right Azov Brigade (one of the militias leading the battle against anti-Kiev separatists) gathered on the streets of Kiev and surrounded the Rada to demand an end to the Minsk accord and to block concessions allowing local elections in Donbass. Unsurprisingly, the western media turned a blind eye to events, but you can find an extraordinarily downplayed account in Ukraine Today beneath the tagline “Activists set off firecrackers but no clashes reported”:

According to Ukraine’s police, nearly 2,000 people took part in the rally, whereas organizers said about 8,000 activists were brought together. The march resulted in a rally outside Ukraine’s Parliament building (Verkhovna Rada). The protest was held in a peaceful manner, but from time to time the activists would set off firecrackers and flares. 7

Meanwhile, Russia Today reported:

If the Kiev authorities hold elections in the Donbass region, the activists will remove the entire Ukrainian parliament and Petro Poroshenko’s government, and will find new members of parliament, said Andrey Biletsky, the founder of the nationalist Azov battalion.

Quoting Biletsky, as cited by RIA Novosti, saying:

“Today is just the beginning, but it is not the last rally. We must be vigilant, to expect this betrayal [Donbass elections] every second, because they [Kiev authorities] will try to hold these elections quietly … In case of treacherous elections, we will oust the parliament and the presidential administration, and find new deputies.” 8

Then, a few days later on May 25^th, an even more shocking event took place:

Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots.

Although the single major media outlet in the western world that actually reported on the story was The Times of Israel.

The report continues:

The minute was observed on May 25, the 90th anniversary of Petliura’s assassination in Paris. National television channels interrupted their programs and broadcast the image of a burning candle for 60 seconds, Ukraine’s Federal News Agency reported.

Adding:

Separately, the director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, said in a statement on Monday that Kiev will soon name a street for two other Ukrainian nationalists — Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych — who are widely believed to be responsible for lethal violence against Jews. […]

Bandera and Shukhevych collaborated with Nazi forces that occupied what is now Ukraine and are believed to have commanded troops that killed thousands of Jews. Once regarded by Ukrainian authorities as illegitimate to serve as national role models because of their war crimes against Jews and Poles, Petliura, Bandera and Shukhevych are now openly honored in Ukraine following a revolution spearheaded by nationalists in 2014. 9

Click here to read the full report in The Times of Israel.

Meanwhile, on the same day [May 25^th], again slipping silently under the radar of the vast majority of the western mainstream media – failing to attract the attention of journalists at the BBC, the Guardian and The Independent – was a breaking story of more immediate Ukrainian atrocities:

The United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) has suspended its visit to Ukraine after being denied access to places in several parts of the country where it suspects people are being deprived of their liberty by the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU.

“This denial of access is in breach of Ukraine’s obligations as a State party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. It has meant that we have not been able to visit some places where we have heard numerous and serious allegations that people have been detained and where torture or ill-treatment may have occurred,” said Sir Malcolm Evans, head of the four-member delegation.

The statement released by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, continues:

“The SPT expects Ukraine to abide by its international obligations under the Optional Protocol, which it ratified in 2006. We also hope that the Government of Ukraine will enter into a constructive dialogue with us to enable the SPT to resume its visit in the near future and so work together to establish effective safeguards against the risk of torture and ill-treatment in places where people are deprived of their liberty,” said Sir Malcolm 10

Which brings us to last Friday [June 3^rd], when the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a 53-page report detailing violations of human rights committed by both sides in the conflict.

The International Business Times broke the silence and reported:

The Ukrainian spy agency the SBU is torturing pro-Russian rebel sympathisers and as the conflict in the east of Ukraine rages on, Kiev is demonstrating an entrenched disregard for human rights, the United Nations has said.

For the first time, revelations have emerged of a Ukrainian government-backed torture regime and the UN details five secret government detention centres. The report also outlines prisoner abuse and murders by pro-Russian rebel groups. 11

The same article also links to The Times, seemingly the single major western newspaper to report on this UN report:

Ivan Simonovic, UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, said that in some areas Kiev’s “disregard for human rights” had become entrenched and systemic and needed to be urgently addressed.

The UN report documents hundreds of cases of illegal detention, torture and ill-treatment of detainees — both by pro-Russian armed groups and by government agencies.

It draws attention to prisoner abuse and murders by pro-Russian rebel groups, but also exposes the scale and brutality of Ukraine’s government-backed torture programme for… 12

But to read the rest of the report which is entitled “Kiev allows torture and runs secret jails, says UN”, you will need to log in.

So here is part of the preliminary statement of the United Nation’s report (all bold highlights are added):

Since mid-2014, OHCHR has, recorded some 1,500 accounts from victims, witnesses and relatives. These accounts show that all parties are responsible for human rights violations and abuses and violations of international humanitarian law. Above all, these testimonies – and the civilian casualty data collected – demonstrate that civilians have paid the greatest price for this conflict. [p6 §2]

Since the start of the security operation, hundreds of people accused of involvement in or affiliation with the armed groups have been detained and charged under existing counter-terrorism provisions. Individuals detained by Ukrainian authorities in connection with the armed conflict have been tortured and ill-treated, and continue to face systematic violations of their due process and fair trial rights. In many cases, criminal proceedings against individuals charged with terrorism offenses have brought the lack of independence and impartiality of the judiciary and legal profession into harsh relief. Further, in conducting the security operation and armed conflict, Ukrainian authorities have often run afoul of the principle of non-discrimination through adopting policies that distinguish, exclude, and restrict access to fundamental freedoms and socio-economic rights to persons living in the conflict-affected area. The Government has applied special measures to the conflict zone, lowering human rights protection guarantees and derogating from a number of international treaty obligations. [p6–7 §4]

Reprinted below is a further selection that details a few of the worst abuses and atrocities committed by the Ukrainian police, army, secret service (SBU) and other groups affiliated to the Ukrainian government including neo-Nazi brigades such as the so-called ‘Azov Battalion’.

One note of caution before continuing: the report primarily distinguishes between Ukrainian government forces and “the armed groups”, which is the chosen label used to distinguish anti-Kiev rebel forces. However, given that no formal distinction is made in the report, we are left to infer that every mention of “armed groups” attaches only to the rebel groups and never to forces allied with the government. Since the war has largely been fought by “armed groups” on both sides (Azov and related far-wing militia spearheading the pro-government offensive), as a choice of phraseology, this unfortunately permits an unnecessary degree of ambiguity:

The armed conflict between the Government of Ukraine and the armed groups of the ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ and ‘Luhansk people’s republic’ continues to be fought without due regard for civilian protection. [p9 §13]

Ukrainian armed forces and armed groups continue to lay landmines, including anti-personnel mines, despite Ukraine’s obligations as a State party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Credible estimates indicate that mines contaminate large areas of agricultural land in east Ukraine, often in areas which are poorly marked, near roads and surrounding civilian areas. This has resulted in civilians being killed and maimed, often while walking to their homes and fields. These risks are particularly acute for people living in towns and settlements near the contact line, as well as the 23,000 people who cross the contact line every day. [p9 §14]

Water filtration stations and other essential infrastructure have been damaged in hostilities in the shelling of densely-populated civilian areas, as the parties to the conflict have failed to take all feasible precautions in attacks to protect and prevent the destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. [p10 §15]

Ukrainian armed forces and armed groups have appropriated residential property of local residents for military use… In many cases, this has forced the owners or residents to leave their homes and in some cases, their communities. [p10 §16]

Due to ongoing heavy shelling in the western outskirts of Donetsk near the contact line, some residents still use bomb shelters on a regular basis, sleeping in damp, damaged basements on a nightly basis. [p11 §19]

On 27 April 2016, civilians waiting to cross a checkpoint in Olenivka village, on the road between Mariupol and Donetsk city, were hit by shelling at night. Four civilians were killed and eight others injured. According to OSCE crater analysis, the mortar rounds were fired from the west-south-westerly direction. This indicates the responsibility of the Ukrainian armed forces. [p11 §20]

As of 1 April 2016, 3,687 criminal cases had been initiated by the National Police of Ukraine into cases of missing people in Donetsk and Luhansk regions since the beginning of the security operation. Besides, 2,755 criminal investigations into abductions or kidnappings had been initiated. The whereabouts of the majority of the missing or abducted persons have been established; hundreds of people, however, remain missing or believed to be in detention (recognized or secret) by the armed groups or Ukrainian authorities. [p13 §26]

Since 1 April 2014, 1,351 unidentified bodies have been recovered in Government-controlled territories of the conflict zone. As of 1 April 2016, 523 of these bodies have been identified while 828 were pending identification. The armed groups have also publicly reported on a number of unidentified bodies in morgues or buried in unmarked graves on the territories they control. In early April 2016, a dozen of bodies of Ukrainian servicemen and members of armed groups were recovered in the Government-controlled territories and in the territories controlled by the armed groups. There are still many bodies of fallen soldiers and members of armed groups that have not yet been recovered. In the ‘Donetsk people’s republic’, at least 430 families are looking for their missing relatives. [p13 §27]

OHCHR received allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, torture and ill-treatment committed by Ukrainian law enforcement. Among these were over 20 cases of arbitrary detention and ill-treatment. [p14 §30]

The majority of cases documented during the reporting period concerned incidents in the conflict zone. While the cases from 2014 and early 2015 suggest that volunteer battalions (often in conjunction with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)) were frequent perpetrators, information from the late 2015 and early 2016 mostly implicate SBU. Many of these cases concern incommunicado detention in unofficial detention facilities where torture and ill-treatment are persistently used as means to extract confessions or information, or to intimidate or punish the victim. SBU continued to deny practicing secret or incommunicado detention, the mere existence of unofficial detention facilities, and the whereabouts and fate of individuals who were forcibly disappeared. SBU officials continue to maintain that allegations documented by OHCHR are “unfounded insinuations” made by criminals trying to portray themselves as victims. [p14 §31]

On 20 February 2016, a Mariupol resident was transferred to Donetsk as part of a simultaneous release of detainees. Since March 2015, he had been held incommunicado at the Kharkiv SBU. He was apprehended in Mariupol on 28 January 2015 and kept in an illegal detention facility. There, he was reportedly severely tortured and electrocuted by three men who wanted him to identify supporters of the ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ in Mariupol. [p14 §32]

A resident of Mariupol was detained by three servicemen of the ‘Azov’ battalion on 28 January 2015 for supporting the ‘Donetsk people’s republic’. He was taken to the basement of Athletic School No. 61 in Mariupol, where he was held until 6 February 2015. He was continuously interrogated and tortured. He complained about being handcuffed to a metal rod and left hanging on it, he was reportedly tortured with electricity, gas mask and subjected to waterboarding and he was also beaten in his genitals. As a result he confessed about sharing information with the armed groups about the locations of the Government checkpoints. Only on 7 February, he was taken to the Mariupol SBU, where he was officially detained. [p20 §59]

Oleh Kalashnikov, an opposition politician from the Party of Regions affiliated with President Yanukovych, was assassinated on 15 April 2015. After one year, no suspects have been identified and there has been no progress in the investigation.

Similarly, the killing of chief editor of Segodnya newspaper, Oles Buzyna, on 16 April 2015, continues to be investigated. Buzyna was a critic of the Maidan protests and a proponent of close ties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The investigation into his killing, which has been going on for over a year, has been marred by procedural irregularities. The case has not yet been submitted to court.

Two suspects arrested on 18 June 2015 were released from detention in December 2015, subject to summonses to appear in court. In April 2015 the Minister of Internal Affairs stated that he would personally oversee investigations into the death of Oleh Kalashnikov and Oles Buzyna. OHCHR observes a lack of progress in criminal cases involving persons affiliated with or perceived as political and ideological supporters of the Government of President Yanukovych. It is essential for justice to be impartial and to hold those responsible for the killings to account. [p23 §70]

Then we have the massacre in Odessa a little more than two years ago on May 2^nd, 2014:

OHCHR is also concerned about the lack of progress in the investigation into the House of Trade Unions fire and the failure of the fire brigade to respond. It took the Office of the Prosecutor General almost six months to open a criminal investigation into the negligence of the State Emergency Service of Odesa region and another five months to charge its head under article 135 (leaving in danger) of the Criminal Code. On 1 March 2016, the suspect fled after his deputy and two other subordinates were detained by the police on the same charges. He has since been put on a wanted list. [p25 §79]

OHCHR welcomes the progress made in the investigation into failure of the police to ensure public safety on 2 May 2014. On 26 February, the Office of the Prosecutor General filed an indictment against former Head of Odesa Regional Police, Petro Lutsiuk. He is accused of committing crimes under articles 136 (failure to provide assistance to people whose life is in danger), 364 (abuse of authority or office) and 366 (forgery in office) of the Criminal Code. He is also accused of not implementing a special plan (‘Volna’ – wave) aimed at counteracting public disorder at mass assemblies and gatherings, which led to the death of 48 people and injuries of more than 200. He is also accused of intentionally leaving people in danger. However, as of the date of this report, the court has not completed the preliminary hearing due to procedural delays caused by the absence of the parties to the trial and failure to duly notify all victims about the date of the court hearing. The relatives of victims of the violence and the defendant’s lawyers denounced the poor quality of the indictment in the case and have requested that the court return it to the prosecution for revision. [p25 §80]

The full report can be found here:
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_14th_HRMMU_Report.pdf.

Click here to read a slightly later post from April 2014 entitled “never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste…” in which I investigate the underlying motives for the West’s involvement in the overthrow of Yanukovych.

*

1 From an article entitled “What Color is Ukraine’s ‘Color Revolution’?” written by Justin Raimondo, published by antiwar.com on March 12, 2014. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/03/11/what-color-is-ukraines-color-revolution/

2 From an article entitled “Economic minister’s resignation plunges Ukraine into new crisis” written by Alec Luhn, published in the Guardian on February 4, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/economic-minister-resignation-ukraine-crisis-aivaras-abromavicius

3 From an article entitled “Ukraine crisis: Poroshenko asks PM Yatsenyuk to resign” published by BBC news on February 16, 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35585651

4

In a leaked conversation posted on YouTube, the state department official Victoria Nuland revealed the White House’s frustrations at Europe‘s hesitant policy towards pro-democracy protests in Ukraine, which erupted late last year. Nuland was talking to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. […]

In the tapes, Nuland and Pyatt discuss the upheavals in Ukraine, and Yanukovych’s offer last month to make the opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk the new prime minister and Vitali Klitschko deputy prime minister. Both men turned the offer down.

Nuland, who in December went to Independence Square in Kiev in a sign of support for the demonstrators, adds that she has also been told that the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, is about to appoint a former Dutch ambassador to Kiev, Robert Serry, as his representative to Ukraine.

“That would be great I think to help glue this thing and have the UN glue it and you know, fuck the EU,” she says, in an apparent reference to differences over their policies.

“We’ve got to do something to make it stick together, because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it,” Pyatt replies.

In the phone call, Nuland suggests that Klitschko, the former world champion boxer, is not yet suited to take a major government role, in contrast to Yatsenyuk.

“I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government,” she apparently said.

“I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, he’s got the governing experience,” she adds. [bold emphasis added]

From an article entitled “Angela Merkel: Victoria Nuland’s remarks on EU are unacceptable” written by Ed Pilkington, Luke Harding “and agencies”, published in the Guardian on February 7, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/07/angela-merkel-victoria-nuland-eu-unacceptable

5 From an article entitled “Ukraine crisis: Yatsenyuk is PM-designate, Kiev Maidan told” published by BBC news on February 26, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26359150

6 http://openukraine.org/en/about/partners

7 From an article entitled “Azov Battalion marches in Kyiv against local elections in Donbas (video, photos)” published in Ukraine Today on May 21, 2016. http://uatoday.tv/society/azov-battalion-marches-in-kyiv-against-local-elections-in-donbas-652411.html

8 From an article entitled “1000s of Ukraine nationalists vow to oust Poroshenko administration over Donbass elections” published by Russia Today on May 20, 2016. https://www.rt.com/news/343756-ukraine-nationalists-kiev-parliament/ 

9 From an article entitled “Ukraine honors nationalist whose troops killed 50,000 Jews” published in The Times of Israel on May 31, 2016. http://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-honors-nationalist-whose-troops-killed-50000-jews/ 

10 From a statement entitled “UN torture prevention body suspends Ukraine visit citing obstruction” released May 25, 2016. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20017&LangID=E&version=meter+at+1&module=meter-Links&pgtype=article&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click

11 From an article entitled “Ukraine’s spy agency torturing pro-Russian sympathisers in the Donbass alleges United Nations” written by Brendan Cole, published in the International Business Times on June 3, 2016. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ukraines-spy-agency-torturing-pro-russian-sympathisers-donbass-alleges-united-nations-1563545

12 From an article entitled “Kiev allows torture and runs secret jails, says UN” written by Maxim Tucker, published in The Times on June 3, 2016. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/kiev-allows-torture-and-runs-secret-jails-says-un-vwlcrpsjn

BBC now in bed with Kiev’s fascist Azov Brigade

I have just had the displeasure of watching a BBC news report in which correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has been embedded with the Azov Brigade. This is shocking because the Azov Brigade (‘Battalion’ is a glorification) is an unashamedly Nazi unit. Here, for instance, is the badge of the Azov Brigade. Their emblem features not only a wolfsangel (more later) but also a Nazi sunwheel or “Black Sun” (please read this earlier post):

The Azov Brigade flag (pictured below) also features the wolfsangel, which is a form of swastika:

Nor is it any coincidence that the wolfsangel is the adopted symbol of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (SNA), an association of ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations and groups founded in 2008, which shares not just an obscene ideology, but the desire to build a “social-national state” in Ukraine. After all, the Azov Brigade’s commander is Andriy Biletsky:

A former history student and amateur boxer, Mr Biletsky is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly. “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” he wrote in a recent commentary. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Click here to read the full Telegraph article entitled “the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists” from which the above extract is taken.

So pray tell us, editors at BBC news, why is the word ‘Nazi’ completely absent from Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’ report? And why does he quite deliberately play down the issue of overt fascism, whilst playing up the dangers they face?

The impression Rupert Wingfield-Hayes paints is of brave volunteers and defenders of their homeland. “They may only be a few hundred strong,” he says softly, “but if the rebels do attack Mariupol, these men [of the Azov Brigade] will be crucial to the city’s defence.” Thus the portrait is of a merry and courageous band of brothers, but if it helps to understand them better, then here they are parading in front of an actual swastika:

 

Please note: This image was removed. I recovered it again from this site, which includes a careful forensic analysis of the photo and surrounding evidence.

During the last twelve months of the “Ukraine Crisis”, the mainstream media (and the BBC are certainly no exception) have very studiously turned a blind eye to the fascists in Kiev. But now the BBC have sunk to a new low.

*

Update:

The Guardian was also recently caught playing down the overt Nazism of Ukrainian fighters, as Stacy Herbert (from Keiser Report) spotted and tweeted:

The Guardian wants you to admire this woman. The Guardian, however, does not want you to know what 1488 means. http://t.co/cVnXqEKE4E—
Stacy Herbert (@stacyherbert) March 05, 2015

The meaning of the number 1488 (above her right shoulder) can be found on wikipedia [original footnotes retained]:

The Fourteen Words is a phrase used predominantly by white nationalists. It most commonly refers to a 14-word slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.”[1] It can also refer to another 14-word slogan: “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.”[2]

Neo-Nazis often combine the number 14 with 88, as in “14/88” or “1488”. The 8s stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet (H), with “HH” standing for “Heil Hitler”.[3]

 

Guardian deleting polite comments pointing out nazis in their article offguardian.org/2015/03/05/the… http://t.co/qoa2eVmhRW—
Stacy Herbert (@stacyherbert) March 05, 2015

Oh, what a lovely war…! Gaza, ISIS and Ukraine

The continuing slowness of economic growth in high-income economies has prompted soul-searching among economists. They have looked to weak demand, rising inequality, Chinese competition, over-regulation, inadequate infrastructure and an exhaustion of new technological ideas as possible culprits.

An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.

The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards. Some of the recent headlines about Iraq or South Sudan make our world sound like a very bloody place, but today’s casualties pale in light of the tens of millions of people killed in the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Even the Vietnam War had many more deaths than any recent war involving an affluent country.

So says Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, writing an opinion piece for The New York Times.

Not enough war! – at first glance Cowen’s argument might appear not just shocking, but plainly nonsensical (or “counterintuitive” as Cowen puts it), although that’s mainly because ordinary folk (such as you and I) are in the habit of forgetting how war is extremely good business – if only for those in the business of war. What Cowen’s article reveals above all, therefore, is a cold calculating detachment that has always been secretly preferred by those moving within select circles. A moral relativism that has come to dominate in our degenerate age of coldly calculating neo-liberal orthodoxy. Cowen is unabashed in telling it like it (i.e., as he wishes to find it), because the vision of a better, saner alternative has been totally abandoned by his type.

He writes:

It may seem repugnant to find a positive side to war in this regard, but a look at American history suggests we cannot dismiss the idea so easily. Fundamental innovations such as nuclear power, the computer and the modern aircraft were all pushed along by an American government eager to defeat the Axis powers or, later, to win the Cold War. The Internet was initially designed to help this country withstand a nuclear exchange, and Silicon Valley had its origins with military contracting, not today’s entrepreneurial social media start-ups. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred American interest in science and technology, to the benefit of later economic growth.¹

Reading Cowen’s case for war causes me to remember Orson Welles’ famous speech in The Third Man:

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

It reminds me too of the less celebrated scene that leads into Orson Welles’ most famous soliloquy. When high over postwar Vienna, gently rocking in a cabin on that famous old Ferris wheel, Harry Lime (played by Welles), who is racketeering in penicillin, justifies his actions to his old friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), saying that he really shouldn’t worry so much about what happens to ‘the dots’:

“Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

*

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is tiny. Twenty-five miles long and less than ten miles wide, yet home to nearly two million Palestinians. Unsurprisingly then, it is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It also happens to be one of the poorest.

Since 2007, Gaza has been blockaded on all sides. And with its air space tightly restricted and regularly patrolled by Israeli fighter jets and drones it is not so much a reservation for Palestinians, the majority of whom are forced to live in refugee camps composed of concrete shacks and open sewers, but also their de facto internment camp. For Gaza as a whole might better be thought of as the world’s largest prison:

Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force. And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade, and with the further goal of ensuring that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement that will grant these rights will be nullified.

So begins Noam Chomsky in an article he entitled “Impressions of Gaza” published in late 2012. Chomsky continues:

Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: they voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas. Demonstrating their passionate “yearning for democracy,” the US and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, at once imposed a brutal siege, along with intensive military attacks. The US also turned at once to standard operating procedure when some disobedient population elects the wrong government: prepare a military coup to restore order.

Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and military attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-9, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory, as a defenseless civilian population, trapped with no way to escape, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems relying on US arms and protected by US diplomacy.²

The Gaza War, as Operation Cast Lead is also known, cost the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians at least 900 of whom were civilians. Over 4,000 homes were destroyed and more than 50,000 residents displaced. On the Israeli side, ten soldiers were killed (four due to friendly fire) and three civilians also lost their lives. These figures alone show how this previous “Gaza War” was actually no war at all, but a one-sided, single-minded slaughter.

Then, in 2012, there was Operation Pillar of Cloud (sometimes translated, presumably to heighten the absurdity, as Operation Pillar of Defense). A blitzkrieg of aerial bombardment that ended with more than a hundred Palestinian civilians dead. Pillar of Defense – hardly. Pillar of something most definitely… and yet another tissue of lies.

And now, less than two years on, we are in the midst of another massacre being carried out under the even more risibly named Operation Protective Edge. To date more than 1,700 Palestinians have been killed (a number that grows by the hour), the majority of whom are again civilians, and predominately women and children.

For what happens every few years is simply this: the Israeli generals, at the behest of their government, make the decision to “mow the lawn”. Meanwhile, the official pretext remains, that the escalating spiral of violence is solely the fault of Hamas and that hostilities will end only once the firing of Hamas rockets on Israel is stopped. The fact is, of course, that Israeli hostilities are never-ending. That those hostilities will end once Gaza is no longer a prison camp, which is a decision only Israel can make. Meanwhile, the regular collective punishment of the Palestinians for the crimes of Hamas can neither be morally nor legally sanctioned, and from a strategic point of view it is inexpedient in the extreme – presuming that the long-term aim really is to bring an end to the cycles of violence. For whilst clearly in violation of international law, this current outrage is not just extremely damaging to Israel’s international reputation, but also, and inevitably, it is bolstering support for Hamas, and just as their influence was beginning to wane. We must conclude therefore that those in charge of Israel are either remarkably stupid, or that they are more intent on keeping the conflict going, as well as keeping Gaza under siege, rather than seeking any offers of lasting peace.

*

After writing this, I came across an article entitled “Into the fray: Why Gaza must go” written by Martin Sherman, Head of the Israeli Institute of Strategic Studies, and published in the Jerusalem Post. In the piece, Sherman unflinchingly calls for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. He writes:

‘Mowing the lawn’ won’t cut it

The reluctance to face unpalatable realities has spawned new terminology to paper over intellectual surrender, and mask unwillingness to accept the need for regrettably harsh but essential policies.

First, we were told that since there was “no solution” to the Israel-Arab conflict, we should adopt an approach of “conflict management” rather than “conflict resolution.”

Now we have a new term in the professional jargon to convey a similar perspective: “mowing the grass.” This is the name for an approach that entails a new round of fighting every time the Palestinian violence reaches levels Israel finds unacceptable.

Its “rationale” – for want of a better term – was recently articulated by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, as: “The use of force, not intended to attain impossible political goals, but rather [as a] long-term strategy of attrition designed primarily to debilitate the enemy capabilities.”

Sadly, what we have seen is that far from “debilitating the enemy capabilities,” because said enemy keeps reappearing, spoiling for a fight, ever bolder with ever-greater capabilities.

It is an open question just how many more rounds of “mowing” the residents of southern Israel will endure before losing confidence that the government will provide adequate protection and choose to evacuate the area.

No, periodically mowing the lawn is not a policy that can endure for long – it simply will not cut it. The grass needs to be uprooted – once and for all.³

Click here to read Martin Sherman’s full article.

*

ISIS

“Where did ISIS come from?” a friend asked a few months ago. Well, although they first spread their obscene wings in the war on Syria, I reminded him, and in common with all factions within al-Qaeda, you can actually trace their ugly origins right back to Saudi Arabia. Then there is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was al-Baghdadi who officially founded the group he called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – now translated, for reasons unknown to me, as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (or ISIS) – during April last year. Back then, ISIS were closely affiliated with another al-Qaeda faction known as Jabhat al-Nusra but soon afterwards bloody factional infighting caused a rift and a formal separation from the rest of al-Qaeda.⁴

More recently again, in fact just a month ago, al-Baghdadi called on other Muslims to rush to the aid of his pan-Islamic caliphate, now simply called ‘Islamic State’, whose caliph is, somewhat unsurprisingly, al-Baghdadi himself.⁵ At the time indeed the news was full of it – constantly repeating those promotional videos for ISIS. There is a growing concern that British Muslims may be attracted to the Jihadist cause by these glossy new commercials, we kept hearing… like a commercial.

Aside from having generous sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar – and fingers have been pointed toward Saudi Prince Adbul Rahman al-Faisal in particular⁶ – many in the ranks of this latest batch of Islamists were also more directly assisted with training courtesy of the British, French and US across the border in Jordan. This is denied, of course, since officially we only trained “ the moderates”. But then prior to the well-advertised emergence of ISIS, western powers had become remarkably candid in their disinterest when it came to making careful distinctions between the various “rebel forces”. Any enemy of Assad was a friend of ours.

And, in reality, the moderates in the Syrian conflict had been rather quickly squeezed out (as I pointed out in a number of previous articles), so that when groups like al-Nusra and then ISIS moved in to spearhead the continuing offensive, the West had knowingly continued to back them (I refer the reader again to previous posts and recommend following the “al-Nusra” tag).

Not that this feckless approach to foreign policy is particularly novel. Al-Qaeda was always an American formulation, having been purpose-built to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Since which time, its growth has been encouraged less directly thanks to power vacuums which followed in the wake of attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria. Added to which, weapons and forces from Libya were more deliberately transported into Syria as Seymour Hersh, amongst others, has since exposed. So, and to answer my friend’s question more fully, ISIS is to a very great extent our own monster. For it is western foreign policy that has allowed ISIS to establish itself, and without continued support from the Gulf States – our allies – ISIS might now be rather promptly eradicated.

If the aim is to stop al-Qaeda in their tracks (or at least their latest branch, ISIS), then it would be very much more profitable to pull the whole operation out by its roots – roots that lie fully exposed in Saudi Arabia. So instead of drone attacks or air strikes on Iraq (and in the likely future Syria), why aren’t we sending our ultimatum to the Saudis?

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Ukraine

The conflict over Palestine goes back some seventy years to the very formation of Israel, and whilst the rise of al-Qaeda across wide expanses of Iraq and Syria can easily be traced to the illegal Iraq War that was ignited by Bush and Blair more than a decade ago (and which has never properly ended), the immediate origins of today’s escalating “crisis” in Ukraine take us back just a few months.

Divisions between East and West regions, pro- and anti-Russia, that had been festering but were mostly dormant found a new expression. What was then widely presented as a grassroots pro-European uprising in fact turning out to be nothing other than a EU-inflamed and US-coordinated colour revolution ending in a bloody coup. Not a glorious liberation from oligarchy, but simply the replacement of one oligarchical coterie with another, more western-oriented oligarchical coterie. Worse, for this new clique were openly affiliated with leading members of the extreme right. The fascist party Svoboda now linked arms with the even more odious Right Sector as both sought a share of power; grabbing the chance of appointing one another into office.

Embedded below is an uncharacteristically candid BBC report about who really seized power in Kiev. It was broadcast in February on Newsnight:

Has the subsequent election (which was not even recognised as legitimate in many Eastern regions) of chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko as President of Ukraine helped to reign in the extremists? Well, this is the situation as it currently stands: three members of the cabinet including Vice Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych are Svoboda representatives, whilst the speaker of parliament, Oleksandr Turchynov, more recently announced the complete dissolution of the Communist Party faction in the Verkhovna Rada. The banning of political parties is one measure of how far Ukraine is from functioning like a democratic state. Another being the monthly fist fights that take place inside the Rada.

This was April:

And this happened just a few weeks ago:

There is also President Poroshenko himself. The following is taken from a Guardian report published on Sunday July 13^th , little more than one month after he had assumed office:

Over the weekend there was an escalation of both military action and rhetoric in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, as Ukrainian jets carried out air strikes against separatist positions. On Friday, 23 Ukrainian servicemen were killed in an attack using Grad missiles.

“For every soldier’s life, the militants will pay with dozens and hundreds of their own,” said Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, after Friday’s attack.⁷ [bold emphasis added]

Hardly the voice of reconciliation. And lastly, a more recent report, this time from BBC news, which delves into who exactly is fighting on the pro-government side of the conflict:

Mikael Skillt is a Swedish sniper, with seven years’ experience in the Swedish Army and the Swedish National Guard. He is currently fighting with the Azov Battalion, a pro-Ukrainian volunteer armed group in eastern Ukraine. He is known to be dangerous to the rebels: reportedly there is a bounty of nearly $7,000 (£4,090; 5,150 euros) on his head. […]

As to his political views, Mr Skillt prefers to call himself a nationalist, but in fact his views are typical of a neo-Nazi. […]

Mr Skillt believes races should not mix. He says the Jews are not white and should not mix with white people. His next project is to go fight for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad because he believes Mr Assad is standing up to “international Zionism”.

Leaving Mr Skillt’s sordid opinions to one side, what are the thoughts of his comrades in arms?

Not all of Mr Skillt’s views are widely shared in the Azov Battalion, which is about 300-strong in total.

He says his comrades do not discuss politics much, though some of them may be “national socialists” and may wear swastikas. On the other hand, “there is even one liberal, though I don’t know how he got there”, he adds, with a smile in his voice.⁸

So much for freedom and democracy in Ukraine, an already latest benighted region suffering from an extreme economic crisis, and now deeply fractured by a terrible civil war from which, the UN reports, a hundred thousand refugees have already fled⁹, and where another thousand civilians have so far lost their lives.¹⁰

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For months, the US-backed regime in Kiev has been committing atrocities against its own citizens in southeastern Ukraine, regions heavily populated by Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. While victimizing a growing number of innocent people, including children, and degrading America’s reputation, these military assaults on cities, captured on video, are generating intense pressure in Russia on President Vladimir Putin to “save our compatriots.” Both the atrocities and the pressure on Putin have increased even more since July 1, when Kiev, after a brief cease-fire, intensified its artillery and air attacks on eastern cities defenseless against such weapons.

The reaction of the Obama administration—as well as the new cold-war hawks in Congress and in the establishment media—has been twofold: silence interrupted only by occasional statements excusing and thus encouraging more atrocities by Kiev. Very few Americans (notably, the scholar Gordon Hahn) have protested this shameful complicity. We may honorably disagree about the causes and resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, the worst US-Russian confrontation in decades, but not about deeds that have risen to the level of war crimes.¹¹

So writes Stephen Cohen, who is professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, in an article published by The Nation magazine on June 30^th. A few weeks later, on July 18^th, Cohen appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss the ramifications of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and the loss of all 298 lives on board. Asked: “what do you think we should understand about what has taken place?”; Cohen began:

The horror of it all, to quote Conrad, watching your reports on Gaza, knowing what I know but what’s not being reported in the mainstream media about what’s been going on in eastern Ukraine cities—these cities have been pounded by Kiev—and now this. “Emeritus,” as you call me, means old. I’ve seen this before. One function of cold war is innocent victims. The people who died, nearly 300, from many countries, are the first victims, nonresidential victims, of the new Cold War. This crash, this shootdown, will make everything worse, no matter who did it.

There are several theoretical possibilities. I am not a conspiracy buff, but we know in the history of the Cold War, there are provocations, people who want to make things worse. So, in Moscow, and not only in Moscow, there are theories that somebody wanted this to happen. I just can’t believe anybody would do it, but you can’t rule anything out.

The other possibility is, because the Ukrainian government itself has a capability to shoot down planes. By the way, the Ukrainian government shot down a Russian passenger jet, I think in 2001. It was flying from Tel Aviv to Siberia. It was an accident. Competence is always a factor when you have these weapons.

Another possibility is that the rebels—we call them separatists, but they weren’t separatists in the beginning, they just wanted home rule in Ukraine—that they had the capability. But there’s a debate, because this plane was flying at commercial levels, normally beyond the reach of what they can carry on their shoulders.

There’s the possibility that the Russians aided and abetted them, possibly from Russian territory, but I rule that out because, in the end, when you don’t know who has committed a crime, the first question a professional investigator asks is, “Did anybody have a motive?” and the Russians certainly had no motive here. This is horrible for Putin and for the Russian position.

That’s what we know so far. Maybe we’ll know more. We may never know who did this.

Click here to read the full transcript or watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.

Most of the news media went into a rapid and sustained feeding frenzy after the downing of flight MH17, but the question of whether or not it was the Russian separatists who shoot down the plane using “Putin’s Missile” remains hanging. One very laudable exception to the rule was tenacious Associated Press reporter Matt Lee. Here is Lee questioning US State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, about the lack of evidence being presented. His main question: is there anything besides those uploads on social media? Her flustered answer can be summed up succinctly as no:

In defending the inherent flimsiness of the US position, which is that it’s suddenly common sense to trust in social media, Marie Harf told Lee that the State Department does have other evidence which proves the separatists were responsible, though she intimates that it is too sensitive to be released. But then the same US State Department made identical claims a mere twelve months ago, and had they been believed, we might have been rushed to launch air attacks against Damascus. As it turned out, however, the White House was lying and deliberately exaggerating the evidence they really held about the sarin attack on Ghouta. Contrary to what Marie Harf asserts, therefore, it is common sense to presume that the State Department would be prepared to deliberately lie again.

Click here to read Seymour Hersh’s subsequent disclosure of the US evidence relating to the gas attack on Ghouta.

As the civil war in Ukraine worsens, we have been constantly reminded that this is Putin’s war. Just as the cause of the tragedy of MH17 was “Putin’s missile!” Not that Putin organised the overthrow of an elected government in Kiev, nor that Putin ordered a missile strike against a passenger plane, nor even that Putin’s “separatist” forces are deliberately shelling homes in Eastern Ukraine – the shelling of homes, as in Gaza, is the work of government forces. Putin is not presumed guilty on any of these counts even by his most vehement opponents, but he is found guilty on the grounds that he is covertly backing the anti-Kiev rebels (as we might alternatively call them), and arming them. Guilty, in other words, of doing what the West have done and are very likely still doing in Syria.

I take no pleasure in defending Putin, who is rightly vilified on so many other counts, but the facts remain and should speak for themselves. And it is Russia, not Putin, that we should be talking about in any case. For Russia has her own interests, and so long as Nato continues its encirclement, whoever holds office in the Kremlin will be held to account for protecting those interests. But we are being encouraged to obsess over Putin. What was once Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden… is now Putin, Putin, Putin!

Meanwhile, the facts surrounding the crash of MH17 are still unclear. Not only do we not know which army fired the missile, but, with absolute certainty, we still do not know whether it was a missile that brought down the plane. Until a full and independent forensic investigation can establish the truth of what happened, we will continue remain in the dark.

Click here to read an article by Jason Ditz, writing for antiwar.com [July 22nd], which outlines the flimsiness of the evidence thus far presented by the US State Department.

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Final thoughts

I was exploring the byways of the web recently, scrolling across old territory and keeping a careful eye out for neglected news stories and offbeat opinions, when I came across a Guardian article from a decade ago that firmly arrested my attention. The article began as follows:

Vladimir Putin yesterday rejected Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein already possesses weapons of mass destruction and told Tony Blair that the best way to resolve the conflict of evidence is not war, but the return of UN inspectors to Iraq.

With a tense Mr Blair alongside him at his dacha near Moscow, the Russian president took the unusual step of citing this week’s sceptical CIA report on the Iraqi military threat to assert: “Fears are one thing, hard facts are another”.

Times were rather different then, of course – as the closing statement in the same article reminds us:

Mr Blair called Mr Putin “a critical partner for ourselves and the whole of the western world.”

And times were different in another way too:

In his remarks Mr Blair, very much the bridge between the hawks in Washington and wider global scepticism, again said that “conflict is not inevitable” but that the international community must give a “strong and clear signal” to Baghdad to comply with its demands.¹²

Conflict was indeed not inevitable, but it happened anyway. And as the leaked ‘Bush-Blair memo‘ later revealed, only months after meeting with Putin, Blair had been scheming with Bush on plans to launch their invasion – including a discussion of ways they might provoke Saddam Hussein into a confrontation. In the finish, however, no provocation was needed; barefaced lies would be enough.

Today marks a moment precisely a hundred years since the western world first went mad for war. The centenary of the start of that “war to end all wars”. Which didn’t happen: the wars go on. The blood-drenched mud of the trenches providing fertile ground for the rotten fruit of fascism to grow upon. The interwar period turning out to be just a lull before the still greater storm of carnage which was the Second World War – the bloodiest war that the world has ever known. Since when, with a Cold War promptly established against our former ally Russia, conflicts have constantly flared up in places far and wide. For sadly, no other century in history can compete with this last one when it comes to war.

It appears that pressure is rising again, with the many on-going regional wars worsening and spreading, and so one wonders with horrible trepidation where all this might be leading. Especially now that we are giving a “strong and clear signal” not to Baghdad but to Moscow. For what is the West’s real objective when it comes to tightening sanctions on Russia? Is the aim simply to pressure Putin with the hope of unseating him (an unlikely outcome given his current popularity), or will this eventually lead to a full-blown economic war. Sanctions in the past have opened the way for military conflict, so does war against Russia remain unimaginable… well yes, for the sane it does!

But there are also those who dream along the lines of Tyler Cowen. They view war as an opportunity, more than a threat, because they know that war is good for business. “Victims?” says Harry Lime, “Don’t be melodramatic.” Lime is a villain, but he knows the score.

War is a Racket is a pamphlet that was written by America’s most highly decorated soldier, General Smedley Butler. In it Butler explains, in painstaking detail, who actually won the First World War. The major corporations and financiers were its only real victors, he tells us, pointing out how the same can be said for all of the many other wars he helped to fight in. And so, as today we solemnly remember the sacrifice of the millions who laid down their lives a century ago, let this be the lasting lesson we take from that war. “War is a racket. It always has been.” Lest we forget.

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Update:

Israel’s month-long assault has so far left at least 1,865 Palestinians dead. As Israel pulled its ground forces from the Gaza Strip under the 72-hour ceasefire, Democracy Now! spoke with Jewish author, historian and political activist Norman Finkelstein, to discuss the events of the last month, and what in light of the new ceasefire, the likely outcome of talks will be. He began:

Well, the first thing is to have clarity about why there is a ceasefire. The last time I was on the program, I mentioned that Prime Minister Netanyahu, he basically operates under two constraints: the international constraint—namely, there are limits to the kinds of death and destruction he can inflict on Gaza—and then there’s the domestic constraint, which is Israeli society doesn’t tolerate a large number of combatant deaths.

He launched the ground invasion for reasons which—no point in going into now—and inflicted massive death and destruction on Gaza, where the main enabler was, of course, President Obama. Each day he came out, he or one of his spokespersons, and said, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Each time he said that, it was the green light to Israel that it can continue with its terror bombing of Gaza. That went on for day after day after day, schools, mosques, hospitals targeted. But then you reached a limit. The limit was when Israel started to target the U.N. shelters—targeted one shelter, there was outrage; targeted a second shelter, there was outrage. And now the pressure began to build up in the United Nations. This is a United Nations—these are U.N. shelters. And the pressure began to build up. It reached a boiling point with the third shelter. And then Ban Ki-moon, the comatose secretary-general of the United Nations and a U.S. puppet, even he was finally forced to say something, saying these are criminal acts. Obama was now cornered. He was looking ridiculous in the world. It was a scandal. Even the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, was now calling it a criminal act. So finally Obama, the State Department said “unacceptable,” “deplorable.” And frankly, it’s exactly what happened in 1999 in Timor: The limits had been reached, Clinton said to the Indonesian army, “Time to end the massacre.” And exactly happened now: Obama signaled to Netanyahu the terror bombing has to stop. So, Obama—excuse me, Netanyahu had reached the limit of international tolerance, which basically means the United States.

The youtube clip embedded above is a slightly truncated version of the original. Click here to read the full transcript and to watch the interview on the Democracy Now! website.

Tuesday’s [Aug 5th] Democracy Now! also interviewed Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security at MIT and a leading missile expert, who believes there is no convincing evidence that Israel’s much-vaunted missile interception system Iron Dome is effective. This has not stopped President Obama signing a bill on Monday which grants an additional $225 million in emergency funding for Israel to replenish its arsenal of interceptor missiles for Iron Dome. American “foreign aid” that will be transferred directly into the pockets of one of America’s largest weapons companies, Raytheon. Postol doesn’t describe this as a racket, but if the Iron Dome is really as unreliable as he claims, then what else can such an enormous transfer of money from public to private hands be called…?

Click here to read the same interview on the Democracy Now! website.

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To hear more about the rise of ISIS, I also recommend the following Democracy Now! interview with Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Patrick Cockburn, speaking on August 13:

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1 From an article entitled “The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth” written by Tyler Cowen, published by The New York Times on June 13, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/upshot/the-lack-of-major-wars-may-be-hurting-economic-growth.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1

2 http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20121104.htm

3 From an article entitled “Into the fray: Why Gaza must go” written by Martin Sherman, published in The Jerusalem Post on July 24, 2014. http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Why-Gaza-must-go-368862

4 http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/al-qaeda-disavows-any-ties-with-radical-islamist-isis-group-in-syria-iraq/2014/02/03/2c9afc3a-8cef-11e3-98ab-fe5228217bd1_story.html

5 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/02/rome-conquer-islam_n_5550646.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

6 http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/smoking-gun-saudis-running-jihadists-in-syria/

7 From an article entitled “Ukraine’s shelling could have irreversible consequences, says Russia” written by Shaun Walker, published by the Guardian on July 13, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/13/ukrainian-shell-russian-border-town-donetsk

8 From an article entitled “Ukraine conflict: ‘White power’ warrior from Sweden” written by Dina Newman, published by BBC news on July 16, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28329329

9 “Since the start of 2014, approximately 110,000 Ukrainians had arrived in Russia – with only 9,600 requesting asylum – while more than 700 others went to Poland, Belarus, Czech Republic and Romania.”

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=48159#.U96_7qOg6Uk

10 http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/more-than-1000-people-killed-in-ukraine-conflict-since-april-un-30464563.html

11 From an article entitled “The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities” written by Stephen F. Cohen, originally published in The Nation magazine on June 30, 2014 (revised on July 7 and July 17). http://www.thenation.com/article/180466/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities#

12 From an article entitled “Putin demands proof over Iraqi weapons” written by Michael White, published in the Guardian on October 12, 2002. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/12/russia.politics