Netanyahu promises a massacre of biblical proportions: are you comfortable with that? asks George Galloway

The following is a full transcript of George Galloway’s powerful opening statement broadcast on yesterday’s Mother of All Talkshows (MOATS) with relevant links included and the uploaded podcast also embedded below.

Benjamin Netanyahu comes from the Jabotinsky side of Zionism. There’s nothing religious about that side of Zionism and they have never pretended otherwise.

Jabotinsky was the acme of a virulent nationalist movement. He was openly modelling his movement, of which Netanyahu is the heir, on the fascist formations in Italy in Spain, and even in Germany.

Jabotinski spawned the likes of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who murdered British soldiers and civil servants in the King David Hotel, or hanging by wire in the orange groves around Jaffa. The people who murdered Count Bernadotte of Sweden, the United Nations Special Envoy to then Palestine. They murdered them in cold blood and then became Prime Minister of Israel.

They murdered Lord Moyne from the British Parliament. They were narrowly thwarted several times in trying to murder Winston Churchill, even whilst Churchill battled with the Hitlerite hordes as the Prime Minister of Britain, a Spitfire pilot narrowly thwarted a bid to blow up the British Foreign Office.

Modern-day terrorism was invented by the Jabotinski-Shamir-Begin-Netanyahu side of Zionist politics.

You don’t need to know all that. You don’t need to recall, as I unfortunately have and must recall, every blow that was struck in the terrorist campaign against Britain and against the Palestinian people mounted by this noxious political movement. But the one thing you do need to remember is there was nothing religious about it.

Indeed the entire Zionist project was founded by people under the leadership of Theodor Herzl who had no religion at all. Virtually every single one of them was a declared and avowed atheist.

*

Why does that matter it? It matters for two reasons: one historical and one contemporary, this very day.

It matters historically, because all these atheists were united on only one thing: they didn’t believe that God existed, but they believed that God promised them the land of the Palestinians – that was called Palestine on every map, every title deed of every square inch of land, was entitled ‘Palestine’. The people who lived there whether they were Muslims Christians or Jews were all Palestinians. You can still see now on the iron covers of the drains the word ‘Palestine’. You could still see until recent decades postboxes marked ‘Palestine’ and indeed with the King’s arms – the King’s logo – upon them.

It’s important contemporaneously because this is what Netanyahu, the party-going premier of Israel, said today: “You must remember what the Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible,” says Netanyahu. He doesn’t of course complete the quote, which I will from I Samuel 15:3, quote:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. [KJV]

So there you have it. Benjamin Netanyahu using your money, and with the support of your government, is going to kill all the men, women, children, suckling infants, cattle, sheep camels and donkeys in the Gaza Strip. Are you comfortable with that?

Are you comfortable Joe Biden with that?

Not that the Palestinians were the Amalekites, of course, they no longer exist, but the Palestinians in Gaza will do, because they are determined – as documents leaked today make clear – to drive all 2.2 million Palestinians into the desert – the Sinai desert. Sounding more and more Old Testament with every sentence that I utter isn’t it. Are you comfortable with that?

All you Christians out there. You comfortable with that?

Are you comfortable with that all that, you Muslim leaders, never done warning and threatening, wagging your fingers if we’re lucky?

You comfortable with that, the so-called Western World?

You comfortable with the fact that there is going to be a Biblical massacre and the extirpation – the extermination – let me use the word properly in relation to an open-air concentration camp: the extermination of 2.2 million people.

You comfortable with that? Because it’s being done in your name.

Don’t blame Netanyahu, he’s a known mass murderer. That’s like blaming Peter Sutcliffe for his latest murder. Sutcliffe was a mass sadistic murderer, and so is Benjamin Netanyahu, and he’s been showing it for decades.

And all you liberal journalists who were not shy of saying so, even just a few weeks ago, even in the month of October before the 7^th of October. You were not shy in giving your support to the mass movement on the streets of Israel to get rid of this mass sadistic murderer called Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s just told you what he’s going to do: put to death men, women, children, suckling infants, cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys.

So don’t say that you were not warned! Don’t say that he deceived you!

He tells you what he’s going to do and your government gives it diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Gives it money. Billions upon billions of money. Gives it weapons and sends your soldiers there to help him do it.

There are 47 warships of the NATO powers currently in the Eastern Mediterranean. Bit of target practice coming up there, I predict.

And even in the next hours coming from well, you know, where – the American Special Forces, the Delta Force – are actually in Israel, because crazy Joe Biden took a picture of himself shaking hands with them in Israel.

A three-star American general is sitting in the Israeli war cabinet. Other generals are advising on the success of Fallujah in Iraq, where using poison gas and slaughtering thousands with Earth shattering and world changing consequences in the impulse to the creation of ISIS and the alphabet soup of Islamist fanaticism. The Americans in charge of Fallujah are now in Israel advising on how to storm the refugee camps of Gaza. You comfortable with that?

You’re paying for it. You’re propagandizing for it. Your media is the mouthpiece for it. Your regulatory authorities are taking down the television stations that dare to show what’s actually happening.

Al-Jazeera, owned by the King of Qatar, who in turn owns about 30% of the blue chip property in London. A western satrapy which houses the biggest American military base in the whole world, which has normalized its relations with Israel. It has a television station called Al-Jazeera and the British just took it off the air.

[Note that: as I post this, Al-Jazeera is back on air in the UK, so perhaps its temporary disappearance was a glitch or an outside attack of some kind?]

You’ve got to go online looking for it, if you want to watch Al-Jazeera. That’s having taken down many other television stations; closed down many other voices for peace and justice in the Middle East over these last months. You comfortable with that?

These people that were never done telling you how civilized they were – how the West was a garden – have now begun reign of terror against its own citizens, the right to know what’s being done on their dime, in their name. Their own citizens’ right to protest in their own streets, wearing whatever clothes they determine to wear. You comfortable with that?

Now in the time available to me, I want to give you a potted history lesson, because I am sick of the sheep-like baaing – actually more like a rat-like squeak – that I hear and read on social media. Hamas! Hamas! Hamas! It’s Hamas! It’s all down to Hamas…

I want to give you some facts, not least because I’ve always been an opponent of Hamas, and I was there a veteran of Palestinian affairs before Hamas ever existed.

Here’s some things you DO need to retain and use:

The Nakba – the catastrophe – which befell the Palestinian people was in 1948. Write these numbers down. Nineteen Forty-Eight.

800,000 Palestinians were driven from their land, from their houses, from their fields. Many of them – most of them – from their country altogether. Others were massacred in infamous massacres like Deir Yassin. Others slaughtered in smaller numbers; their villages burned and broken and new Israeli settlements ultimately built on top of them. Nineteen Forty-Eight.

The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] was not formed until 1964 almost 20 years later.

In that almost 20 years, Israel carried out ethnic cleansing on a grand scale against the Palestinian people when they had no fighting organisation, even a twinkle in the eye of Yassar Arafat. An undefended Palestinian people between 1948 and 1964 were ruthlessly, brutally extirpated where possible.

Then the PLO came along. It was entirely secular. I know, I was as close to it as it was possible to be. Yasser Arafat was like my older brother, even my father. I sat a thousand times in his company. They were a secular mass movement rooted in the then-resurgent liberation struggle in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America.

They were a part of the camp of Patrice Lumumba. They were a part of the People of Ban Bella. They were a part of the people of Sandino [i.e., the Sandanistas in Nicaragua]. They were a part of the liberation movements FRELIMO and MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola] and other freedom fighters all over the world. There was nothing Islamist about them at all. That was in 1964.

Three years later, all of the West Bank, all of East Jerusalem, and all of the Gaza Strip was illegally, violently, militarily occupied by the state of Israel in 1967. Write that number down.

Nineteen Sixty-seven. Still no Hamas.

PLO, 3 years-old and not remotely able to rise up to their responsibility of defending the territories that were conquered illegally by Israel three years later in 1967, and which have been held in illegal military occupation ever since 1967. It’s now towards the end of 2023.

Between 1967 and the foundation of Hamas in 1987, a full 20 years later, the Palestinian population in the occupied territories seized in 1967 were ruthlessly extirpated – annihilated – driven into refugee camps, many of them in Gaza, until this day and night until that refugee Camp too is destroyed.

There was no Hamas. There were no Islamists. But that didn’t stop Israel imprisoning, deporting, murdering, torturing and disinheriting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

There was no Hamas to blame then, because Hamas didn’t exist.

Until – when I was there at the delivery. I was in Gaza whilst the new baby Hamas was being delivered in plain sight in 1987. I was there.

All the PLO people were in jail, or in the graveyard, or in exile. Declared totally illegal. Unable to show their faces, or lift their heads, but Hamas were facilitated by the Israeli occupation during that period, running out to the foundation of Hamas in 1987. Everywhere: vans, minibuses, kindergartens, clinics, schools of the Islamic movement called Hamas under the nose of the Israeli occupation.

Why did Israel do that? They wanted to divide the Palestinian people. They wanted to split the support for the PLO and divert a part of it to the Muslim Brotherhood School of Islam of which Hamas was then, and is now, a part.

Hamas are not ISIS. Hamas are not al-Qaeda. They’re the Muslim Brotherhood which the British helped to bring into being in Egypt in the 1950s in order to weaken President Nasser, another leftist nationalist figure.

You’re beginning to see a pattern here. But just like Dr Frankenstein, of course, once they had built Hamas, it quickly moved out of their control and became the dominant military political force defending the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza.

So don’t try and tell me this is all about Hamas, or this is all about Islamism, because Israel was committing ALL of these crimes long before Hamas or Islamism ever existed in the Palestinian arena.

And bringing it quickly up to date, Israel is murdering people in the West Bank right now, this minute. There’s no Hamas in the West Bank. They’re in Gaza. If Israel’s fighting Hamas, why are they killing people in the West Bank every single day?

And I have only time to say less than I wanted about one emblematic person who sums up this story I have just told you. Shireen Abu Akleh [pictured above] was a Christian Palestinian-American woman journalist who was murdered by the Israeli forces on the West Bank last year, who then attacked her coffin on its way into the church. I’m sure you saw that footage if you’re a regular viewer here.

It is also embedded below and while there are no graphic images shown, Youtube have since placed it behind an age-restriction barrier:

If they were fighting Hamas, why did they murder a Christian Palestinian-American woman broadcast journalist, and then attack and desecrate her funeral, causing her coffin almost to fall down (her body, God forgive me, rattling about inside her coffin)? Why did they do that, if their enemy was Hamas?

And do you know what they did two days ago? They invaded the very street where they murdered Shireen, tore down any sign of her, and broke her monument into pieces.

So no more! I don’t want to hear your mindless prattle about Hamas.

*

Additional: A potted history of Revisionist Zionism and its terrorist and fascist origins

In 1948 Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook amongst them, had no compunction in calling Menachem Begin’s party, recently formed out of the membership and followers of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘fascist’. They furthermore considered it tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism had refused to condemn Begin’s visit to the US at that time.

Republished below, the letter they wrote to the New York Times which published it on 4^th December 1948:

Letter to the New York Times:
New Palestine Party:
Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed

To the Editors of the New York Times:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

 The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants, 240 men, women, and children and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ, HANNAH ARENDT, ABRAHAM BRICK, RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO, ALBERT EINSTEIN, HERMAN EISEN, M.D., HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D., H.H. HARRIS, ZELIG S. HARRIS, SIDNEY HOOK, FRED KARUSH, BRURIA KAUFMAN, IRMA L. LINDHEIM, NACHMAN MAISEL, SEYMOUR MELMAN, MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY, SAMUEL PITLICK, FRITZ ROHRLICH, LOUIS P. ROCKER, RUTH SAGIS, ITZHAK SANKOWSKY, I.J. SHOENBERG, SAMUEL SHUMAN, M. SINGER, IRMA WOLFE, STEFAN WOLFE.

New York, Dec. 2, 1948

Click here to find the same piece archived on the Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) website.

*

In November 2022, Electronic Intifada spoke with British left-wing activist and writer, Tony Greenstein, a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement in the UK, about his new book Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation.

Tony Greenstein says the founding ideology of Zionism did not view the establishment of a Jewish state as a necessary way to provide a safe haven for Jews threatened by persecution, but instead as an inherently ethnonationalist project that would be needed to ensure the racial purity of a people:

“You have to see Zionism as a racial project to perpetuate the Jewish people, you can’t understand it any other way. It wasn’t a refuge, to create a refuge for Jews or anything else. It was a perpetuation of the Jewish nation-race. And that’s why today – I’ve given examples in my book – assimilation is compared to the Holocaust. Why? Because if you assimilate, if you marry out and you’re a Jew, to a non-Jew and disappear, that’s the same as disappearing in the gas chamber. That’s the logic. And in fact, [the Israeli organization] Lehava has a slogan “Assimilation is a Jewish Holocaust,” or intermarriage is a Jewish Holocaust. So they are quite open about it. And I give quite a number of examples of it in the book.”

Click here for more details and the full transcript available at the Electronic Intifada website:

Volodymyr Zelensky and Justin Trudeau lead ovation for Waffen SS veteran in Canada’s parliament

Update:

Norman Finkelstein is an historian and political scientist who specialises in Israel-Palestine relations and the Holocaust. He is the son of Holocaust survivors. Both his mother and father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. His father was also a survivor of Auschwitz.

On September 29^th, Aaron Maté and Katie Halper invited Norman Finkelstein on to their weekly news show Useful Idiots to talk about his reaction to the Canadian Parliament and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s applause for Ukrainian Banderite veteran and Waffen SS war criminal Yaroslav Hunka.

*

Of the “wake-up call for people who will never wake up” Finkelstein says:

“It’s very funny now to read the coverage of it because one of the Canadian officials said the biggest crime that was committed that moment in the parliament was we forced Zelensky to raise his fist – and that’s the horror.

“Now, number one, nobody forced Zelensky to do anything! His raising of his fist was of his volition. Number two – and you guys can correct me – but his raising of the fist came after the speaker said that [Hunka] fought against the Russians during World War II.

“Now, Zelensky knows English. If he heard that this fellow fought against the Russians in Ukraine during World War II then a bulb had to go on in his head. If he fought the Russians he must have been on the Nazi side. Or, it’s true that the Banderites swivel off from the Nazis in a certain point, but they were still ideologically of the same type as the Nazis, so when he raised his hand, this Jew – this Jew as we’re constantly told – from Ukraine, he was lending himself to the Nazi cause. Nobody took his arm and told him to hold it up.” [from 20:55 mins]

The original article begins directly below the asterisk.

*

The headline to this post is taken from the Morning Star. It is a statement of simple fact that encapsulates the impudence and the decline in Western values with exact clarity. Moreover, the Morning Star, to its tremendous credit, was one of just a handful of media outlets that originally reported on the story at all – although the mainstream has now caught up issuing its insincere apologia:

*

On the CBC news report embedded above, for instance, correspondent J P Tasker says he has tried to contact Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year old Ukrainian Nazi veteran, who “defended his War service in the past calling it a fight for Ukrainian independence.” Tasker then goes on to add that: “Regardless Russian propagandists have already pounced, using his presence in Parliament to malign Ukraine and Canada’s support for their war effort.”

It is hard to know how to respond to such nonsense. There was a time – and not very long ago – when the idea that anyone in the West might rush to the defence of a Nazi collaborator was completely unthinkable. So here we are witnessing something absolutely grotesque and truly abominable. Now let’s think more carefully about what just happened here and what it actually means.

Last Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky travelled to Canada and gave a speech in front of Canada’s parliament. Afterwards, the speaker of the parliament had his own comments to make and as he was talking about World War II, he introduced a World War II veteran: a World War II veteran who proudly declared he had fought the Russians. A Ukrainian who fought the Russians in World War II, which means very clearly he is a Nazi, even if you know nothing else about World War II.

Let’s glance at Wikipedia‘s entry on World War II:

If you just read the basic summary of World War II and go down to the main participants – presuming you didn’t already know this – you will see who the main Allied leaders were and the list includes Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, which obviously includes Russia. And who were they fighting against? The Axis which included Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, Emperor Hirohito of Japan and Benito Mussolini of Italy. This is such a basic level of historical understanding that it is something we all probably learnt at primary school.

So if you were fighting against Russia, it meant you had to be fighting with one of the Axis powers and it turned out that this Ukrainian veteran that the entire floor of the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to was a literal Nazi, who at one point routinely performed the Sieg Heil salute, quite possibly to the actual Adolf Hitler when he was still alive.

Genuine democracy requires an informed electorate, and if the head of the Canadian Parliament is this profoundly ignorant about something like World War II, who the participants were, and he accidentally invited a literal Nazi into the Canadian Parliament and gave him a standing ovation, what does that tell you about the intellectual capacity of Western leaders right now in the West?

We will keep hearing about how Nazis in Ukraine is a Russian propaganda talking point. That if you bring attention to this, somehow you are just repeating Russian propaganda. And yet we also see incidents happening over and over again – in fact, whenever the Western media goes into Ukrainian held territory and take videos or pictures of Ukrainian soldiers – and we find they’re covered in Nazi symbols. So what’s the chance that you invite a World War II veteran to the Canadian Parliament and he turns out to be an actual Nazi? What are the chances of that happening accidentally, unless Ukraine has a serious Nazi problem?

The other thing we always hear is that Ukraine cannot possibly have a Nazi problem, because their President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Well, watch the video again. See what the Jewish president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, does when the Canadian head of parliament introduces a World War II veteran who was fighting the Russians. Let’s watch his reaction:

Standing and clapping for a literal Nazi. So if you want to know how Ukraine can have a Jewish president and the country still be completely infested past and present by Nazis that is exactly how; because of the profound ignorance and apathy running across the entirety of the West and their Ukrainian proxies.

As the Morning Star concludes its report:

Following the incorporation of openly neonazi units like the Azov and Aidar battalions into the Ukrainian military, the incident underlines the way the war is being used to rewrite history and rehabilitate fascist collaborators while depicting the Soviet Union as the aggressor in World War II.

Monuments to the Red Army, in which millions of Ukrainians fought against Nazism, have been torn down in Ukraine as well as in other eastern European states including Latvia, Bulgaria and Poland.

Speaking to the Morning Star last year, former East German leader Egon Krenz argued that rightwingers across Europe were using the passing of the last generation that fought in World War II to “erase the popular memory” of the Soviet role in liberating Europe and “assert that everything about European socialism was illegitimate.”

Yaroslav Hunka’s invitation to the Canadian Parliament was no mere accident. The ovation that he received was no accident either. Doubtless, many of the MPs cheering him to the rafters did so through outright ignorance and in sheep-like acquiescence. For this is the only defence any of them can have and it is a wretched defence. By contrast, the pitiable Zelensky (and let us not forget, he is a Jew) cannot offer up even this much of a pathetic excuse to his own defence.

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!

*

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:

***

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…

*

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.)

*

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]

*

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.

*

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.”

 *

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:

*

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.

*

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.

*

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?

*

Concluding thoughts

*

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.

*

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:

*

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:

*

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”:

*

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:

*

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:

***

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

German court convicts CJ Hopkins for satirical book cover

Satirist and author CJ Hopkins was recently found guilty and sentenced to 60 days in prison or a €3,600 fine by a German court for publishing two tweets.

In the first tweet, he had straightforwardly challenged the mask mandates, saying in effect “the masks are ideological conformity symbols and that’s all they are, that’s all they’ve ever been, so stop pretending they’re anything else and get used to wearing them”.

In the second, he then responded to German government’s former covid advisor Karl Lauterbach (also current German health minister) who had told Die Welt “The masks always send a signal out”. Hopkins simply quoted Lauterbach’s words above the cover art from his own book, The New Normal Reich, which in turn references the historical chronicle The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by American journalist, William L. Shirer, reworking the original cover image with swastika, now instead partially veiled by a mask.

*

Hopkins says: “Those are my hate crimes.”

Adding: “This is a quote: I’m charged ‘with disseminating propaganda, the intention of which is to further the aims of a former National Socialist organisation’, end quote.

“So basically I’m charged for these two tweets. I’m charged with, you know, supporting and furthering the cause of the Nazis.” [from 4:10 mins]

Yesterday [Aug 31^st] CJ Hopkins joined The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal to discuss his conviction for violating Germany’s unusual speech codes and what it says about the future of liberal democracy in Europe. He ended the conversation (which is embedded above) with the following plea to fellow leftists and liberals:

“We’re at a point where we’re organising to try to defend our fundamental democratic right to free speech. That’s how dire the situation is folks. This basic fundamental right, which is the foundation of all of our other rights, is under serious threat. It is under attack and if I can just urge people – and I’m talking about people, you know… people who hate my guts, who think that I’m horrible, and you know think nasty things about Roger [Waters]; you don’t have to like me – to think about this principle; this fundamental democratic principle. If we allow this to be destroyed, you know, then we’ve got nothing. All of our democratic rights (our other democratic rights) mean nothing, if we’re not free to express ourselves, and to report things, and to disagree with each other publicly.

“It’s my current focus right now, Max, because I feel that it is seriously under attack and if we lose it – if this succeeds – we’re really headed down a dark road. And I don’t think most people are apprehending where we are and where we’re headed yet. I’m just urging people to pay attention and to look into this stuff regardless of whether you think I’m a you-know “covid-denier,” or “conspiracy theorist,” or whatever. Forget about me. Look into this stuff yourself. Look at these bills. Look at the repression of free speech that’s being carried out, and think about it. Are you willing to lose this fundamental democratic right because somebody said something that offends you?

“I have to believe that even a lot of the folks who’ve been calling me names and you know wanted to put us in camps – I have to believe that somewhere down there, Max, somewhere down there, there’s still a respect for these democratic rights. I may be wrong, but I’ve got to believe it.”

[from 52:25 mins]

Click here to read more about CJ Hopkins’ case in an article written by Matt Taibbi entitled “Madness: American Satirist C.J. Hopkins Sentenced in German Speech Case”.

Note that: The tweets quoted above are paraphrased from the original German purely on the basis of Hopkins’ translations provided in the interview.

*

Additional:

Max Blumenthal spoke later to Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper on their Useful Idiots show. They discussed how the collaboration of Silicon Valley tech firms hand-in-glove with national security agencies is increasingly used to target alternative media sites, dissident individuals and grassroots political movements, not only through direct censorship, but also by means of the financial seizure of funds:

The Coming War — Time to Speak Up | John Pilger

In this new essay published on May 1^st, John Pilger recalls the ‘electric’ opposition of writers and journalists to the coming war in the 1930s and investigates why today there is “a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda” as the two greatest powers draw closer to conflict.

Dec. 20, 2008: Protesters in Montreal threw shoes at a target poster of President George Bush outside the U.S. Consulate to show support for the Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeizi , who threw his shoe at the real Bush. (Anirudh Koul, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

*

There is a war coming shrouded in propaganda. It will involve us. Speak up

In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power”.Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda:

“The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:

On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.

“Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. “Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean.

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.

“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?”

*

Post-Modernism in Charge

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?

Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.

The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020. (A1/Wikimedia Commons)

*

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.

A march of Azov veterans and supporters in Kiev, 2019. (Goo3, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

*

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist”, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

*

Silence of Intimidation 

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligensia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide – a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading Queen’s Counsel to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “important issue of academic freedom of expression” and found “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech”. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”.

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice”, wrote Eagleton.

Where did post-modernism – the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent – come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as “the movement”, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had failed and only “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.

Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.

As for “the movement”, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

George Floyd protesters in Miami react to police firing chemical irritants on May 30, 2020. (Mike Shaheen, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

*

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was “at least” 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, “could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.”

“At least” one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.

*

No One Knows How Many Killed 

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush – and Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Jack Straw, John Howard et al – were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied. “If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been “duped”, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.

Mock coffins placed near the offices of military contractors during a protest against the Iraq war in and around Washington. March 21, 2009. (Victor Reinhart, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

*

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as “special operations” as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target”.

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, “but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”

In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.

Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!”

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” – including the Benghazi massacre story.

The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

Under Obama, the US extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission”, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.

In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China”, in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose”.

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. And the maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

*

Click here to read John Pilger’s article as it originally appeared on his official website.

And here to find the same piece on Consortium News with images and links retained above.

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

*

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.

*

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

‘Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works’ | John Pilger

“We see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.” — John Pilger

*

In an address to the Trondheim World Festival in Norway given on September 6^th, John Pilger charts the history of power propaganda and describes how it appropriates journalism in a ‘profound imperialism’ and is likely to entrap us all, if we allow it.


The article below is an edited transcript published by John Pilger on his official website on September 8^th:

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.

She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.  It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.’

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.’

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the ‘hypnosis’ he referred to was the ‘submissive void’ described by Leni Riefenstahl.

‘It’s the same,’ he replied. ‘It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.’

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called ‘forever wars’: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are – not that Joe Biden’s theft of $7billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan – and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war.

It says: ‘Nato’s enlargement has been an historic success’.

I read that in disbelief.

A measure of this ‘historic success’ is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American ‘defender’ missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s ‘promise’ to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.  This was the final straw.

On the same day, Russia invaded – according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

On 25 April, the US Defence Secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation – the word he used was ‘weaken’. America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no ‘buts’ – except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera.  The New York Times called the thugs ‘nationalists’.

‘The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,’ said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, ‘is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.’

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed ‘news monitors’ (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.

In less than a decade, a ‘good’ China has been airbrushed and a ‘bad’ China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs.  In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid.  It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. ‘Defenestrated’ is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking.  When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important ‘papers of record’, he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Biden called him a ‘hi-tech terrorist’. Hillary Clinton asked, ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange – the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it ‘mobbing’ — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, Counter Punch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

(This article is an edited version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway, on 6 September, 2022)

Click here to read the same article as it originally appears on John Pilger’s official website.

And here to read the same republished by Counterpunch.

‘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:

Ukraine on Fire | Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary

Available for free on Youtube and embedded below for as long as it remains uploaded, here is the documentary “Ukraine on Fire” directed by Igor Lopatonok and produced by Oliver Stone, who also conducted the interviews for the film.

Framed within a broad historical context, the film reminds us of Nazi collaboration during WWII before bringing us sharply up to date with the 2004 Orange Revolution, followed by the bloody events of the 2013–4 Maidan culminating in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, the onset of civil war in the Donbass and the tragic downing of MH17.

Peaceful at the outset and covered throughout by western media as a people’s revolution, we are reminded of how the Maidan became increasingly violent before climaxing in a coup d’état staged by far-right groups that was partially scripted by the US State Department.

In efforts to consolidate power, ultranationalist elements newly ensconced within the government then cracked down on pockets of anti-Maidan activists, some of whom gathered to protest outside a trade union building in Odessa. The massacre that ensued has received scarcely any attention in the West although it hugely inflamed growing tensions within the population of ethnic Russians and immediately accelerated the self-declared secession of the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Watching the events unfold today, it is staggering to see so many of the central protagonists from eight years ago still in place – Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden and of course Vladimir Putin. History doesn’t repeat, the film reminds us (quoting Mark Twain), but it rhymes.

Drawing to its close, the film takes us back to the first Cold War with the ever-present threat of major escalation between nuclear powers, asking if the events in Ukraine have laid the ground for a new Cold War. For this alone it could hardly be more prescient:

*

The documentary is also currently available on Vimeo for a small fee.

*

Update:

Note that Vimeo has since deplatformed the video upload linked to above, however, the film is also available on other platforms including Rumble and Odysee.