Tag Archives: NATO

Ukraine: Somewhere between Afghanization and Syrianization

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Ukraine is finished as a nation – neither side will rest in this war. The only question is whether it will be an Afghan or Syrian style finale.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Cradle

One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul – and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass – there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the ‘Afghanization’ of Ukraine.

With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine’s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.

Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the “tasks” of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads all the way to Odessa.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow’s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a ‘Syrianization’ process.

Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle – contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.

Let’s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib – and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory – are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.

The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they’re in Ukrainian territory – with plenty of success – is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.

Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.

So the battle will go on, destroying what’s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what’s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure.

What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.

Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds, the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism – conducted by Bandera worshippers – will continue to be the new normal in the capital.

The Kazakh double game

By now it’s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It’s certainly part of a War of Economic Corridors – as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia’s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).

Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.

The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it’s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That’s still far from “task” fulfillment – and it’s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.

It’s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.

The Telegram channel Rybar (with over 640k followers) and hacker group Beregini revealed in an investigation that Kazakhstan was selling weapons to Ukraine, which translates as de facto treason against their own Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Consider too that Kazakhstan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the EAEU, the two hubs of the Eurasian-led multipolar order.

As a consequence of the scandal, Kazakhstan was forced to officially announce the suspension of all weapons exports until the end of 2023.

It began with hackers unveiling how Technoexport – a Kazakh company – was selling armed personnel carriers, anti-tank systems and munitions to Kiev via Jordanian intermediaries, under the orders of the United Kingdom. The deal itself was supervised by the British military attaché in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital.

Nur-Sultan predictably tried to dismiss the allegations, arguing that Technoexport had not asked for export licenses. That was essentially false: the Rybar team discovered that Technoexport instead used Blue Water Supplies, a Jordanian firm, for those. And the story gets even juicier. All the contract documents ended up being found in the computers of Ukrainian intel.

Moreover, the hackers found out about another deal involving Kazspetsexport, via a Bulgarian buyer, for the sale of Kazakh Su-27s, airplane turbines and Mi-24 helicopters. These would have been delivered to the US, but their final destination was Ukraine.

The icing on this Central Asian cake is that Kazakhstan also sells significant amounts of Russian – not Kazakh – oil to Kiev.

So it seems that Nur-Sultan, perhaps unofficially, somehow contributes to the ‘Afghanization’ in the war in Ukraine. No diplomatic leaks confirm it, of course, but bets can be made Putin had a few things to say about that to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in their recent – cordial – meeting.

The Sultan’s balancing act

Turkey is a way more complex case. Ankara is not a member of the SCO, the CSTO or the EAEU. It is still hedging its bets, calculating on which terms it will join the high-speed rail of Eurasian integration. And yet, via several schemes, Ankara allows Moscow to evade the avalanche of western sanctions and embargoes.

Turkish businesses – literally all of them with close connections to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) – are making a killing, and relishing their new role as crossroads warehouse between Russia and the west. It’s an open boast in Istanbul that what Russia cannot buy from Germany or France they buy “from us.” And in fact several EU companies are in on it.

Ankara’s balancing act is as sweet as a good baklava. It gathers    economic support from a very important partner right in the middle of the endless, very serious Turkish economic debacle. They agree on nearly everything: Russian gas, S-400 missile systems, the building of the Russian nuclear power plant, tourism – Istanbul is crammed with Russians – Turkish fruits and vegetables.

Ankara-Moscow employ sound textbook geopolitics. They play it openly, in full transparence. That does not mean they are allies. It’s just pragmatic business between states. For instance, an economic response may alleviate a geopolitical problem, and vice-versa.

Obviously the collective west has completely forgotten how that normal state-to-state behavior works. It’s pathetic. Turkey gets “denounced” by the west as traitorous – as much as China.

Of course Erdogan also needs to play to the galleries, so every once in a while he says that Crimea should be retaken by Kiev. After all, his companies also do business with Ukraine – Bayraktar drones and otherwise.

And then there’s proselytizing: Crimea remains theoretically ripe for Turkish influence, where Ankara may exploit the notions of pan-Islamism and mostly pan-Turkism, capitalizing on the historical relations between the peninsula and the Ottoman Empire.

Is Moscow worried? Not really. As for those Bayraktar TB2s sold to Kiev, they will continue to be relentlessly reduced to ashes. Nothing personal. Just business.

Europe Commits Suicide-By-Sanctions

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Relentless Ukraine reporting helps conceal other conflicts

By Ron Paul

Source: Eurasia Review

A Swiss billboard is making the rounds on social media depicting a young woman on the telephone. The caption reads, “Does the neighbor heat the apartment to over 19 degrees (66F)? Please inform us.” While the Swiss government has dismissed the poster as a fake, the penalties Swiss citizens face for daring to warm their homes are very real. According to the Swiss newspaper Blick, those who violate the 66 degree heating limit could face as many as three years in prison!

Prison time for heating your home? In the “free” world? How is it possible in 2022, when Switzerland and the rest of the political west have achieved the greatest economic success in history, that the European continent faces a winter like something out of the dark ages?

Sanctions.

While long promoted – often by those opposed to war – as a less destructive alternative to war, sanctions are in reality acts of war. And as we know with interventionism and war, the result is often unintended consequences and even blowback.

European sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year will likely go down in history as a prime example of how sanctions can result in unintended consequences. While seeking to punish Russia by cutting off gas and oil imports, European Union politicians forgot that Europe is completely dependent on Russian energy supplies and that the only people to suffer if those imports are shut down are the Europeans themselves.

The Russians simply pivoted to the south and east and found plenty of new buyers in China, India, and elsewhere. In fact, Russia’s state-run Gazprom energy company has reported that its profits have increased by 100 percent in the first half of this year.

Russia is getting rich while Europeans are facing a freezing winter and economic collapse. All because of the false belief that sanctions are a cost-free way to force other countries to do what you want them to do.

What happens when the people see dumb government policies making energy bills skyrocket as the economy grounds to a halt? They become desperate and take to the streets in protest.

This weekend thousands of Austrians took to the streets in a “Freedom Rally” to demand an end to sanctions and the opening of Nord Stream II, the gas pipeline on the verge of opening earlier this year. Last week an estimated 100,000 Czechs took to the streets of Prague to protest NATO and EU policy. In France, the “Yellow Vests” are back in the streets protesting the destruction of their economy in the name of “defeating” Russia in Ukraine. In Germany, Serbia, and elsewhere, protests are gearing up.

Even the Washington Post was forced to admit that sanctions on Russia are not having the intended effect. In an article yesterday, the paper worries that sanctions are inflicting “collateral damage in Russia and beyond, potentially even hurting the very countries that impose them. Some even worried that the sanctions intended to deter and weaken Putin could end up emboldening and strengthening him.”

This is all predictable. Sanctions kill. Sometimes they kill innocents in the country targeted for destruction and sometimes they kill innocents in the country imposing them. The solution, as always, is non-intervention. No sanctions, no “color revolutions,” no meddling. It’s really that simple.

THE WEST’S FALSE NARRATIVE ABOUT RUSSIA AND CHINA

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Vladimir Putin meets with Xi Jinping in Beijing just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. Photograph: SPUTNIK/Reuters

By Jeffrey Sachs

Source: New Cold War

The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.
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The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War

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Permanent war requires permanent censorship.

War Inc. – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts. 

The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.

The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions. 

In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted. CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, long considered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed. 

There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.

War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, “is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society.” 

“The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion,” Melman writes. “When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.”

If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry’s funding of  politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government “sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power — often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the  Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace.”

Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, “has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.” 

This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls “the manufacture of consent,” is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation’s crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths — although we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population — to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis. 

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled. 

You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed “false” assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine’s military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press and Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the “green” rating” for truth and credibility.  (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.) 

The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for “failing” to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.

NewsGuard, established in 2018, “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former Director of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.

Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”

Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.

In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:

NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have  been kicked off Twitter. 

PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News’ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.  

CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.  

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media — only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news — is a sign of desperation. 

As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknecht reminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.

U.S.-BACKED UKRAINIAN OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO PROSECUTE JOURNALISTS FOR SPREADING TRUE INFO

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By Lee Camp

Source: Mint Press News

This past May, Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky, did something that made a lot of sense. Before a vote to send another $40 Billion to Ukraine, Paul demanded language that would create oversight for that money.

Most of Congress was furious with him for daring to put restrictions on U.S. funding for the proxy forces in Ukraine. One of his peers who was most upset with him was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes for Consortium News, three weeks after Schumer forced that bill through and got the money for the proxy war in Ukraine, something funny happened,

…[O]n July 14, Andriy Shapovalov, a Ukrainian civil servant whose salary was paid for by U.S. taxpayer monies, convened a “round table” in Kiev on ‘countering disinformation.’ Shapovalov …published a list of the names of 72 people whom he accused of deliberately spreading disinformation about Ukraine. Shapovalov labeled them ‘information terrorists,’ adding that Ukraine was preparing legislation so that such people can be prosecuted as ‘war criminals.’”

They want the power to call people war criminals for printing something Ukraine doesn’t like, and you can bet that the U.S. supports this outrageous policy.

Ritter continued,

The “round table’ was organized by the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global Ukraine), an ostensible nonprofit organization authorized by U.S. Congress to promote ‘international scientific and technical collaboration.’ It is supported by the U.S. State Department, some of whose officials sat in attendance.”

This committee was organized by a U.S.-backed nonprofit, and State Department officials were in the room.

Who exactly do they want to call information terrorists who should be prosecuted as war criminals? “One of the people singled out by Shapovalov as an ‘information terrorist’ targeted for criminal prosecution as a ‘war criminal’ was none other than Rand Paul,” reported Ritter. So Sen. Paul is being called a war criminal for trying to get some oversight on the billions of dollars sent to Ukrainian Nazis.

The senator from Kentucky isn’t the only U.S. politician on the list. An obscure New York Senate candidate named Diane Sare also appears on the list of information terrorists.

But how did she get on there?

Ritter wrote, “On May 31, Diane Sare, a LaRouche candidate challenging Schumer for his Senate seat in November, filed 66,000 signatures — well over the 45,000 required by law — with the New York State Board of Elections, thereby getting her name on the ballot.” Do you think, perhaps, that Sen. Schumer might have some say on that list?

Everyone in the U.S. should be repulsed at the idea of people being labeled “terrorists” or “war criminals” for standing up to U.S. propaganda about the proxy war in Ukraine. But beyond that, we should be more disgusted by the Senate Majority leader using taxpayer money to seemingly go after his political opponents.

Who is the U.S. and its proxy government in Ukraine to tell people what is and is not the truth? That’s like Fred Durst telling you what is and is not good music.

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

More Billions to Ukraine as America Falls Apart

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By Ron Paul

Source: Ron Paul Institute

There is a video clip making the rounds showing President Biden speaking at a recent NATO summit about the seven billion dollars the US government had – at that time – provided to Ukraine. Attached to that is another clip showing the horrific state of several US major cities, including in Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio. The video of American cities is shocking: endless landscapes of filth, trash, homelessness, open fires on the street, drug-addicted zombies. It doesn’t look like the America most of us remember.

Watching Biden bragging about sending billions of dollars to corrupt leaders overseas with American cities looking like bombed-out Iraq or Libya is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The Washington elites tell the rest of America that they must “promote democracy” in some far-off land. Anyone who objects is considered in league with the appointed enemy of the day. Once it was Saddam, then Assad and Gaddafi. Now it’s Putin. The game is the same, only the names are changed.

What is seldom asked, is what is in this deal for those Americans who suffer to pay for our interventionist foreign policy. Do they really think a working American in Ohio or Pennsylvania is better off or safer because we are supposedly protecting Ukraine’s borders? I think most Americans would wonder why they aren’t bothering to protect our own borders.

A reported 200,000 illegals crossed the border into the US in July alone. You can believe they are learning quickly about the free money provided by the US government to illegals. They’ll probably get a voting card as well.

Last Friday the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, it was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. Has there ever been a more idiotic US intervention in history?

Supporters of this proxy war may celebrate more aid to Ukraine, but the reality is that it is in no way aid to Ukraine. That’s not how the system works. It is money created out of thin air by the Fed and appropriated by Congress to be spent propping up the politically-connected military-industrial complex. It is a big check written by middle America to rich people who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Americans watch their budget being stretched to the limit while the Beltway fat-cats loosen their belts to continue enjoying the gravy train.

Bloomberg reported earlier this summer that inflation is costing the average American household more than $5,200 this year. Inflation is a tax on middle class and poor Americans. The wealthy – like those who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin – always get the new money first, before prices go up. The rest of us watch as the dollar buys less and less.

As Washington salivates over fighting Russia in Ukraine, the rest of America feels like we’re becoming Zimbabwe. How long until it takes a trillion dollars for a loaf of bread? Will there be a run on wheelbarrows?

There is a way out. It’s called “non-interventionism.” The war in Ukraine was caused by the US regime change in 2014 and the neocon insistence that Ukraine join NATO. The State Department and CIA thought it was a great victory to overthrow the elected government, but meanwhile the rest of us get the bill. No NATO and not one more penny for Ukraine!

War Propaganda About Ukraine Starting to Wear Thin

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By Chay Bowes

Source: Covert Action

More and More Are Seeing Through the Lies

As Amnesty International confirms the inconvenient truths, which many independent journalists and political observers already knew, about the Ukrainian army’s behavior in Donbass, it’s worth examining how manipulating the truth has become—not only an everyday occurrence but a central element of the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.

An increasing number of mainstream journalists, commentators and ordinary individuals who had rushed to “Stand with Ukraine ” are finding the inconvenient truths about the Zelensky regime and its Army harder and harder to ignore.

It was the icon of American democracy, President Abraham Lincoln that said “You can fool part of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.” Of course, even though Lincoln’s astute observation has been widely misquoted, it certainly has a particular resonance when we consider the recent misadventures and persistent foreign policy failures of his beloved United States.

Most particularly are American efforts to maintain an increasingly skeptical public’s support for its faltering and hugely costly geopolitical ambitions in Ukraine.

So far it hasn’t been too difficult to package a message for general consumption, a drive-through narrative if you will, that is easily accessible and digestible by a trusting public, particularly when that same public has been globally denied key factual insights into the background of a long running complex conflict into which they have been seduced as blindfolded supporters.

The current crisis in Ukraine is however different; it has seen the pro-Western media machine cultivate and disseminate disinformation, propaganda and fake news on a previously unseen scale. While the U.S. and its NATO allies prosecute their proxy conflict on the ground, in the air, and at sea, another illicit battle is being fought on social media, TV and radio.

Of course, propaganda and the winning of “hearts and minds” is nothing new when it comes to conflict. As far back as the 19th century Governments were aware of how important the narrative was at home, they actively sought to suppress details which they thought may be offensive or unhelpful to the home audience.

In the second Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902), when the British Army’s colonial war was failing it resorted to imprisoning Boer Women and children in vast ill equipped concentration camps where a stunning 26,000 of them would die from starvation, ill treatment and disease. The British actively considered creating a publicity campaign to hide the true horror of the hellish camps, including false reports and newspaper stories.

Again, during World War I the gruesome details of mass casualties in the horrendous and inhumane trenches of the western front were also sterilized and minimized for the home audience. As far as the public were concerned the Kaiser was the killer, the Germans ate Belgian babies and the repulsive Teutonic octopus had to be stopped at all costs.

Of course, the fact that the entire conflict was about imperial power, commerce and competition between the three grandchildren of the British Queen Victoria was conveniently ignored. In July 1916 British newspaper reports on the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, famously read “Our casualties are not heavy,” an utterly misleading headline which sounds disturbingly familiar today.

When we consider Americas most recent large-scale military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya these ill-advised and bloody failures have yet again been portrayed as the “good guys against the bad guys”, it’s the Cowboys against the Indians, the dangerous and untrustworthy Muslim savages against the very existence of Western civilisation.

The immeasurable human suffering that these wars have visited on the innocent populations seldom features. American complicity and responsibility for creating the very problems they now seek to “solve” is bizarrely entirely ignored in its client media.

Today’s conflict in Ukraine is no exception, a similar narrative is peddled with the historical truths about where conflict grew from remaining unreported. Some of the most critical facts relating to Ukraine are routinely and conveniently rendered invisible by the mainstream media, such as when this civil war began and most crucially, who paid for and built the scaffolding on which it is now burning.

It is of course unpopular in any instance to swim against the flow of the tide, to be the child suggesting the emperor has no clothes, and to challenge “realities” that have been broadly accepted by a trusting public. Despite the gross imbalance in the presentation of the facts, up to now at least dissent was something accepted as a privilege of western democratic society, that freedom of speech and opinion is however in grave danger, particularly if it is based on inconvenient truths.

The “Absolute Truth”

When it comes to Ukraine a new, dangerous and lavishly funded weapon in the counter truth war has been deployed by western governments and media, I call it “Absolute Truth”. The Absolute truth doesn’t tolerate any challenges, when its allegations are proven false those realities are suppressed and ignored.

It immediately and efficiently targets any dissent from the prescribed narrative and brands challengers as “enemies,” “foreign agents,” or “useful idiots.” Critically there is no room for debate of any kind, there is no analysis of facts, there is only their Absolute Truth.   

Should a journalist, State or individual question this Absolute Truth or merely suggest an objective analysis of the facts they are immediately and brutally marginalised and then targeted for retribution. This determined and choreographed punishment can range from the loss of a job to the isolation of an entire nation with threats of violence commonplace.

The fact that the West’s “Absolute Truth” narrative relies implicitly on mass censorship and the wholesale destruction of freedom of speech is apparently irrelevant to its architects and disciples, if these pillars of liberal democracy must be abandoned in this war against the facts, so be it.

Absolute truth also has a selective attitude when it comes to the behavior of its idols, when Mr Zelensky’s election with the assistance, cash and muscle of a corrupt oligarch is highlighted this is ignored, when his antidemocratic banning of all opposition and the imprisonment of its leaders comes up, its fine. if the Absolute Truth requires the acceptance and deployment of brutal Nazi militias against civilians, (previously designated by the west as terrorists) that is again entirely acceptable.

Indeed, the Absolute truth brigade have a magical ability to erase history, assign hero status to mass murders (Stepan Bandera) and demonise those that defeated Nazism in Europe. The Absolute Truth now defines the narrative, the facts do not, facts and independent evidence will be selectively deployed if at all, those that challenge this are immediately designated as collaborators, war mongers and enemies of democracy.

Another sinister element of the cult of Absolute Truth is the reluctance to correct the record or admit when you get it wrong, from the “massacre” at Snake Island that never happened to the fake headlines about the Mariupol maternity hospital to name but a few, there is never any attempt to correct the record which begs the question how sincere were the allegations in the first place?

Interestingly, when the internationally respected Amnesty international bravely countered the Absolute truth with indisputable facts, it was itself attacked by an increasingly paranoid Zelensky. There is now a distinct element of “the boy who cried wolf” about Zelensky’s persistent and now routine allegations of genocide, targeting of civilians and the apparent desire to “erase Ukraine from the map”.

Any cursory examination of the facts around the Ukrainian Army’s “counter terrorist” operation against its own people in 2014 in Donbas would suggest it was an increasingly radicalised Ukrainian military that first assaulted the ethnic Russian populations in the east in 2014.

As NATOs exceptionally costly and increasingly destructive proxy war against Russia grinds on, the prospect of any military victory for Ukraine fades almost hourly, the likelihood that Russia will seek settlement also fades by the day, any incentive to do so now strategically valueless.

Western support for Zelensky’s seemingly rudderless and incompetent regime is privately wavering as the impact of ham-fisted sanctions against Russia threatens social cohesion in Europe and America alongside a global energy crisis.

Promised counter offensives in the south have not materialized, the much vaunted “Million-man army” has failed to appear and yet again, the American and European press that presented this as fact have not rowed back on their outlandish claims.

The harsh reality of war is seemingly lost on the “absolute Truth” brigade who are happy to “stand with Ukraine” but will never stand in Ukraine.

The western public are a fickle audience, given the lack of initial scrutiny generally applied to the mainstream narrative on Ukraine it’s likely that as more of the inconvenient truths about Zelensky, his junta and the realities of this conflict appear, more and more westerns will be creeping into their yards in the dead of night to take down their hastily hoisted Ukrainian flags.

Contrary to the best efforts of those that have funded, molded and justified this proxy war the truth has a habit of resurfacing. It will be impossible to “manage” the oncoming tide of reality that will gush out of Ukraine as the western powers refocus on their self-inflicted domestic troubles this winter, Zelensky himself may become the fall guy for the failed NATO escapade in Ukraine.

That’s the thing about those inconvenient facts, they keep persisting under the surface, the truth doesn’t have a sell by date, and it is patient, the memory of the countless dead demands it to be.

And of course, as good old Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool part of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

Policy By Other Means

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By Helmholtz Smith

Source: Moon of Alabama

“Hybrid war”. Western propagandists love the expression “The bad guys are doing nasty underhand things to counter our clean-cut decent and wholly justified activities” but they are just making noise. As Clausewitz knew, however, there is an actual meaning:

We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses (…) for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

In this sense, all intelligently-conducted wars are “hybrid wars” advancing on many levels to achieve the “political object” by “other means”.

What is the “object”?Moscow knows that NATO/USA is the real enemy and that the wretched Ukrainians are its puppets and their looted and worn-out country is the arena. Putin himself has said that NATO’s threat to Russia must be stopped. NATO, and the European Union with which it is closely linked, must be exposed as useless, actively harmful to their members and their hostility defeated.

NATO, which loves to pose as peaceful (despite the five or six wars it’s started in the last quarter-century), cannot or will not understand Russia’s point of view. Moscow will shove its face in it. Putin says that he has many times tried other means (Munich 2007 being one of the earliest). Those means having failed, he’s using these means this time.

Far-ranging aims require a multi-front attack. Let us consider the fronts.

MILITARY FRONT. Putin has explained the aims – denazification and demilitarization Maybe they could have been achieved through negotiation – although years of Kiev ignoring the Minsk Agreements suggest not – but that didn’t happen. Maybe Moscow hoped that its feint on Kiev might prevent a bloody slog but that didn’t happen either. And so the battle of annihilation is on – Ukraine’s military power is being smashed and the Nazis killed.

It’s taking a long time for several reasons. Imagine the Western Front trench line but with three times as long to build it and concrete rather than sandbags and wood. Russia and its allies attacked with smaller forces. The allied forces are moving slowly to reduce their casualties and because they are in no particular hurry. The Ukrainians are resisting very tenaciously and NATO is egging them on. The Ukrainian forces are being methodically slaughtered, allied casualties are a fraction of that because “artillery conquers and infantry occupies”.

DIPLOMATIC FRONT. The West likes claim that Russia is isolated. But, in terms of population, the so-called “International Community” represents only 15 to 20 percent of the world and the Russians are well-received elsewhere. Here’s Lavrov very much in the thick of things at ASEAN, in Africa (note media attempts to spin it away) and the Arab world.

Russia isn’t isolated at all and its diplomacy is having effect. US diplomacy, on the other hand, is just threats – Africa is warned, China threatened.

ECONOMIC FRONT. When Moscow began its “special military operation”, it expected that Nordstream 2 would be stopped because it knew the West was stuck on the idea that the Russian economy is dependent on selling energy to Europe – “Russia cannot afford to cut its sales of oil“. Moscow had its response ready – hostile countries have to pay in rubles.

What’s Europe’s response? Hurt Putin by not showering. Don’t, he doesn’t care. Of course the price went up and Moscow has probably completely funded the operation out of the increased revenue. The West is discovering – and, advised as it is by people like Aslund, to its astonishment – that “the country that doesn’t make anything” is a big producer of lots of essential things.

Moscow knew Washington would stick Europeans with the check – just as Washington will fight to the last Ukrainian, it will sanction until the last European freezes. The economic war is doing more damage to Russia’s enemies. They will either figure this out and change their behavior or they won’t and they’ll suffer. Moscow waits knowing that it wins either way.

PROPAGANDA FRONT. It is a common sentiment that Moscow is losing the propaganda war but I’m not convinced. Propaganda has to have some basis in truth – instead we have the martyrs of Snake Island miraculously reviving, the ghostly Ghost of Kiev, million-man armies disappearing, Kherson counter attacks put off again, maternity hospital bombings exposed by the bombed-out mothers, bodies thoughtfully left out to be seen, Russia begging China, Iran or North Korea for weapons, another “game-changer” weapon.

Russia was running out of ammunition in March, April, June and July. You have to be pretty comatose to still believe this. The propagandists have lost their skills. And reality leaks out through the holes in these flimsy tales. Witness the reception of the Amnesty International report that Ukrainian tactics are “putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas“.

“Putin’s propagandists” chides The Times; “cannot be tolerated” says Zelensky; “Russian propaganda” as she quits. No news to us who have seen Azov fighters sheltering behind civilians in Mariupol, weapons hidden in shopping centers, troops setting up in schools. But it’s a shocker to believers of the Western narrative (especially Vogue readers!).

Skeptics know that the difference between a conspiracy theory and reported truth is a few months. In June it was Russian disinformation that corrupt officials were selling Western weapons, in August it’s news. Zelensky a hero then, corrupt now. Expect more “disinformation” transforming into truth.

JUDO. Putin is well known to be a judo master. Judo is the art of using the opponent’s movements against it. That’s what we are seeing. On every front Russia has time on its side and escalation dominance. The impotence of NATO and the EU – in fact the actual damage that membership in either brings – is more perceptible every day as winter approaches.

Europe’s, the West’s, predominance stood on three legs. The power to compel others. The captivating halo of success. The wealth to fund the other two. Watch this little video – not much respect there. I expect we will see more vignettes like this.

The statue is hollow, the Mandate of Heaven is shifting.