The rise of fascism, Ukraine, America at war with the world – journalists must speak up.

JOHN PILGER: Danger of war exists if we don’t speak up now

Independent Australia, By John Pilger | 2 May 2023

“………………………………………………………………………………… 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 U.S., 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 of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

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

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

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

The university hired a leading KC 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………………………………………

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for the 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 U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’

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

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

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

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

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:

‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system…it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

…………………………………………………………. 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.’

……………………………….Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th Century, the U.S. 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 U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

……………………… In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”. Almost two-thirds of U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

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

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.  https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/john-pilger-danger-of-war-exists-if-we-dont-speak-up-now,17470—

May 5, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Impending NATO inductee Finland welcomes “significant military infrastructure” from Pentagon — Anti-bellum

NewsweekMay 3, 2023 U.S. Troops May Deploy to Finland Bases Amid Russia Threat American soldiers may soon be deploying to bases near Russia’s border with Finland if ongoing talks on a new defense cooperation agreement (DCA) between Helsinki and Washington prove successful. Finnish newspaper Helsinki Sanomat reported Monday, citing Finnish Foreign Ministry official Mikael Antell, […]

Impending NATO inductee Finland welcomes “significant military infrastructure” from Pentagon — Anti-bellum

May 5, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Backup generator at Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant fails, triggering special federal review

Maryland Matters, By Josh Kurtz, May 3, 2023

A massive backup diesel generator at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Southern Maryland was recently out of service for at least week, triggering an ongoing special inspection by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The backup generator is one of five at the nuclear plant in Lusby, which is operated by Constellation Energy and produces about 37% of all electric power in Maryland; two functioning generators are necessary to run the plant’s two nuclear towers if the regional electric power grid ever goes down.

While there was never any danger to the public, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Constellation say, the mechanical failure of the generator, which was discovered during a regular in-house inspection of the plant on April 24 and lasted until Monday, is leading to extra scrutiny of the plant by federal regulators………………………………………………… more https://www.marylandmatters.org/2023/05/03/backup-generator-at-calvert-cliffs-nuclear-plant-fails-triggering-special-federal-review/

May 5, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment