‘Poles, Russians, and Jews must be exterminated’: The bloody history of Zelensky’s heroes
On June 30, 1941, immediately after capturing Lviv, Bandera’s followers, led by Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State and formed a pro-German “government.” In its declaration of statehood, the OUN openly expressed the intention to collaborate with Nazi Germany, which “under the leadership of its Führer Adolf Hitler is creating a new order in Europe and assisting the Ukrainian people “
How the OUN-UPA embraced ethnic violence, collaborated with Nazi Germany, and became one of the most controversial movements of World War II
3 Jun, 2026 , Rt.com
Burned villages. Families slaughtered in their homes. Women, children, and the elderly hacked to death with axes and pitchforks. Thousands of Jews beaten, tortured, and murdered during pogroms that accompanied the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. These are some of the atrocities associated with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – movements whose legacy remains one of the most divisive issues in Eastern Europe more than eighty years after World War II.
For decades, supporters of the OUN-UPA have portrayed its members as freedom fighters who resisted both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in pursuit of Ukrainian independence. Opponents, however, point to a different record: collaboration with the Third Reich, participation in anti-Jewish violence, and the mass killing of Polish civilians during the Volhynia massacres of 1943-1944, which Poland today officially recognizes as genocide.
Far from being settled history, this debate has recently returned to the center of international politics. In 2026, a new diplomatic dispute erupted after Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky honored the UPA tradition at the state level, prompting outrage in Poland and reigniting long-standing accusations that modern Ukraine is rehabilitating organizations linked to fascism, ethnic cleansing, and wartime crimes. At the very moment when Polish and Ukrainian officials are working together to exhume the victims of Volhynia, disagreements over the legacy of Bandera, Shukhevich, and the OUN-UPA continue to poison relations between the two countries.
Below, we’ll talk about the origins of modern Ukrainian nationalism, the motives behind the mass killings of Poles and Jews by underground nationalist forces, and the reasons why OUN-UIA leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The ideology behind Ukrainian ‘heroes’
Ukrainian integral nationalism, which became the foundation of OUN-UIA ideology, owes much to the writings of Dmitry Dontsov. In the mid-1920s, he articulated a doctrine of Ukrainian nationalism that was heavily influenced by the fascist ideology of the time………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
During the 1930s, the OUN engaged in underground activities, particularly in Galicia. It was also during this period that Stepan Bandera emerged as a prominent figure among the nationalists. Young, ruthless, and determined, he quickly established himself as one of the recognized leaders of the OUN, gaining notoriety through violent acts against high-ranking Soviet and Polish officials……………………………………………………………………………..
A Polish court sentenced Stepan Bandera to death for organizing the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. During his trial, Bandera showed no remorse, and stated: “We know how to value our lives and those of others, but our idea is worth making millions of sacrifices for.”
Bandera’s imprisonment did not last long – he was released in 1939 after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and quickly rejoined the nationalist movement……………………………………………….
the collaboration with the Nazis did not distract the Ukrainian nationalists from what they considered more pressing tasks: eliminating ethnically foreign elements.
In a May 1941 directive, the OUN explicitly stated that Russians, Poles, and Jews were enemies of the Ukrainian nation and must be annihilated.
In the early days of Nazi Germany’s war with the USSR in June 1941, nationalists called on people to take up arms and “destroy the enemy,
And words soon turned to actions.
After German forces captured Lviv on June 30, 1941, Ukrainian nationalists unleashed a brutal pogrom against the city’s Jewish population. OUN militants, operating as part of the so-called Ukrainian People’s Militia and the Nachtigall Battalion, organized raids on Jewish residents. People were publicly beaten, tortured, and many were murdered right in the streets or executed after being tortured. Over the course of a few days, thousands of Jews were brutally killed. Similar atrocities occurred throughout the region; the occupying authorities encouraged anti-Semitic violence, which local nationalists eagerly participated in.
The OUN viewed Jews as “supporters of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime” and welcomed their extermination. Many members of the OUN later served in auxiliary police forces for the Nazis, actively participating in the Holocaust by herding Jewish people into ghettos and camps, escorting death marches to Babi Yar in Kiev, and personally executing prisoners.
Although later the UIA declared a fight against Germany, by early 1943 almost all Jews in Volynia and Galicia had been killed, with the active help of Ukrainian nationalists. Few managed to escape, and only a handful of people survived the war within the ranks of the UIA – these were mostly doctors or specialists who were tolerated for practical reasons.
Hunting for Poles
However, the primary targets of the ethnic cleansing efforts of the OUN-UIA were the Poles of Galicia and Volynia, whom the nationalists regarded as historical enemies and “occupiers” of Ukrainian lands that needed to be expelled or eliminated. Plans for these atrocities were devised long before the Volynian massacre: as early as 1938, the OUN’s internal doctrine outlined a project for an uprising aimed at “sweeping away every last Polish element” from Western Ukrainian territory.
……. in the spring of 1943 when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the military wing of the OUN) carried out the massive slaughter of the Polish population in Volynia.
The Volynian massacre of 1943 became one of the bloodiest crimes of WWII in Eastern Europe. UIA units and armed nationalist peasants attacked hundreds of Polish villages with the intent of physically annihilating all Poles living on “Ukrainian” land. Terror reached its peak in July 1943 during ‘Bloody Sunday’ on July 11, when dozens of settlements were simultaneously attacked by militants.
The methods of execution were unbelievably cruel. People were killed indiscriminately: women, the elderly, children, and infants; many were not just shot but hacked with axes, stabbed with pitchforks, or bludgeoned to death. The homes of Poles were burned to the ground, their property looted; entire villages vanished in flames and were reduced to charred ruins.
Historians estimate that 60,000-100,000 Poles were barbarically killed by the OUN-UIA in Volynia and the surrounding areas. Polish partisan groups later responded with retaliatory terror against Ukrainian villages; however, the initiative for the large-scale extermination of civilians belonged squarely to the Ukrainian nationalists.
The modern Polish Sejm and historians classify the Volynian massacre as an act of genocide. Numerous accounts indicate that the slaughter was premeditated by the leadership of the OUN, which sought to realize Dontsov’s vision of a “monoethnic” state at any cost.
As a result of the actions of the OUN and UIA, Poles in Volynia and Eastern Galicia were virtually annihilated. Waves of refugees fled their homes to escape the violence. The ethnic landscape of the region was radically reshaped through mass terror tactics. Repression was not limited to Poles and Jews: UIA militants also targeted Ukrainians who refused to support them or were suspected of “disloyalty,” labeling them as traitors.
Nazi collaborators
The activities of Ukrainian nationalists extended beyond the extermination of Jews and Poles. Under the command of Roman Shukhevich, the head of the OUN military branch, two diversionary Abwehr battalions were formed – the Nachtigall Battalion and the Roland Battalion. These Ukrainian units became part of the Wehrmacht and, in June 1941, crossed the Soviet border dressed in German uniforms and under German command, invading the territory of the Ukrainian SSR alongside the Nazis.
Subsequently, the Germans formed the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 from the Nachtigall and Roland battalions. It was dispatched to Belarus to combat partisans. This battalion was also commanded by Roman Shukhevich, who would later become the supreme commander of the UIA.
In 1942, the soldiers under his command participated in punitive expeditions aimed at “pacifying” Belarusian villages suspected of aiding partisans (in other words, burning down entire settlements along with their inhabitants).
Throughout this period, the OUN hoped to reap political benefits from its alliance with the Nazis.
On June 30, 1941, immediately after capturing Lviv, Bandera’s followers, led by Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State and formed a pro-German “government.” In its declaration of statehood, the OUN openly expressed the intention to collaborate with Nazi Germany, which “under the leadership of its Führer Adolf Hitler is creating a new order in Europe and assisting the Ukrainian people in liberating themselves from Moscow’s occupation.”……………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.rt.com/russia/640925-bloody-history-of-zelenskys-heroes/
How Far Right Fanatics Ruined Ukraine -Historian Tells the Story the West Hides | Marta Havryshko
The Burning Archive, 18 Apr 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuL6pInMWfs
Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko tells the story Western media hides – how far right ethnonationalism and war has ruined Ukraine. Marta Havryshko is a Faculty Member, Clark University, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Department of Contemporary History. She presents research on Holocaust, WWII, USSR, Russia-Ukraine war, far-right, neo-Nazis, Ukrainian nationalism, antisemitism, gender, sexual violence in war, and memory politics at https://x.com/HavryshkoMarta
How Israel Planned The Gaza Genocide Decades Ago
In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration
Jonathan Cook Substack, SCHEERPOSTJune 11, 2026
The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.
Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.
Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”
Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”
Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.
Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war – often referred to as the Six-Day War – not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.
The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.
None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza – levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population – is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.
Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” – the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.
Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.
Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.
Starvation policy
The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” – or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.
Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.
This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state…………………………………………………………………………..
Targeting innocents
The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives.
Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.
As the paper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”
Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task – as in 1948 – was to prevent their return…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Squeezed out
Israel’s 1967 campaign of expulsions in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it done on the spur of the moment. According to Haaretz, the policy had been carefully planned many years in advance.
Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s western leaders and their media chose to buy Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed – as well as providing the weapons and intelligence – to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their assistance.
Buoyed by this impunity, Israel has tried to spread the destruction further afield, with limited success in Iran and much greater success in south Lebanon.
As western politicians and media happily forget Gaza, Israel keeps up the relentless pressure and misery there. A so-called “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli military control over the destroyed enclave, an area off-limits to Palestinians, has gradually expanded from half the land to 70 percent.
The people of Gaza are quite literally being squeezed out of the ruins of their homeland, as Israel scrambles to find a third country – Egypt, or perhaps Somaliland – willing to take them in.
Erasing context
As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”
Which is precisely why western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present – in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.
Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response – and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that – to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.
An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland.
The October 2023 Hamas attack was not a turning-point or a rupture, as it is so often presented in the West.
In 1967 – that is, 56 years before the Hamas attack – Eshkol advised that unforeseen events might accelerate Israel’s stealthy programme of ethnic cleansing. A moment might arrive in the future – what he called an “unexpected luxury solution” – when Israel could rapidly realise its dream of a Palestinian-free Palestine…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Prisons of complicity
Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/11/how-israel-planned-the-gaza-genocide-decades-ago/
How The CIA Conjured Ukrainian Nationalism
Fast forward to now, and in response to Ukraine’s state-level glorification of the ultranationalist UPA and its lead genocidaire Andriy Melnyk, Polish President Karol Nawrocki has announced he will seek to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Warsaw’s highest honour, bestowed in 2023.
Kit Klarenberg, Jun 10, 2026, https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/how-the-cia-conjured-ukrainian-nationalism
A bitter row has erupted between Kiev and Warsaw, after Volodymyr Zelensky renamed a Ukrainian military unit the “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA – Ukrainian Insurgent Army – was an ultranationalist faction heavily implicated in the Holocaust, which slaughtered up to 100,000 Polish civilians during World War II. In addition to commemorating the mass-murdering militant group, the corpse of Andriy Melnyk, leader of UPA parent the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), was reburied in Kiev. At a grand accompanying ceremony, Zelensky declared:
“Today we all see that the Ukrainian idea can overcome what once seemed absolutely insurmountable. Now, when we are on Ukrainian soil, under our Ukrainian flag, to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, paying due tribute to our Ukrainian heroes, we feel in our hearts everything Ukrainians were forced to go through, everything our people had to endure.”
The unspeakable horrors inflicted upon Poles – and Communists, Jews, Romani and other “undesirables” – by Melynk and his fellow Nazi collaborators were of course unmentioned. So too that the genocidal nationalism practiced and preached by Melynk was covertly promoted and sponsored for decades by Anglo-American intelligence, within and without Ukraine. The ongoing proxy conflict is a direct product of this little-known spectral meddling, which was specifically concerned with promoting cultural and ethnic difference, and enmity, between Russians and Ukrainians globally.
As this journalist has previously revealed, in August 1957 the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for a US special forces invasion of Ukraine. Intended to collapse the wider Soviet Union, the Agency’s conspiracy depended heavily on recruiting local fascists as footsoldiers. A significant stumbling block to the Agency’s plot, however, was much of Ukraine’s population actually harbouring “few grievances” against Russians or Communism. “Points of conflict” between Russians and Ukrainians, which could be exploited by the CIA to foment a mass uprising, were scant.
The Agency lamented how “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” had resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life.” Moreover, the similarity of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds,” and the “great influence” of Russian culture in Ukraine, meant the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians felt “little national antagonism.” Yet, the CIA believed “important grievances exist,” and “under favorable conditions” Ukrainians would assist US invaders.
Unmentioned in the invasion planning documents, the CIA had since 1949 been covertly striving to create those “favorable conditions.” A key Agency asset used for the purpose was OUN-B chief Mykola Lebed. In 1943, he proposed to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory” – today’s western Ukraine – of its Polish population, to prevent any future Polish state from claiming the region. A post-war US Army counterintelligence report branded Lebed a “well-known sadist,” and Nazi collaborator.
The nucleus of Lebed’s international fascist agitation was Prolog, a New York-based publishing firm. A 1966 CIA memo noted this “cover organization” for the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (ZP/UHVR) was established to conduct “clandestine activity.” It approvingly added that Prolog’s work “contributes to Ukrainian nationalist ferment and to intellectual resistance to Soviet repression by exploiting existing and encouraging new deviationist tendencies” in Ukraine. Elsewhere, the Agency declared it was “important to continue to encourage divisive manifestation” of this sort. The explicitly stated objective was triggering “nationalist flareups” in the USSR:
“[ZP/UHVR] were sent from the Ukraine in 1945 by the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council to make contact with Western intelligence representatives and to act in behalf of the homeland…[ZP/UHVR] organized a net of collaborators throughout Western Europe and the United States…the feeling of nationalism is very much alive. ZP/UHVR has proved realistic in its approach to operational matters and its propaganda activity.”
‘Existing Suspicions’
A late 1953 Agency memo documents how the CIA for years broadcast “black radio transmissions” in Ukrainian from a secret CIA installation in Athens, Greece. “Soviet officialdom, Soviet military forces stationed in the Ukraine, the indigenous civilian population…the underground movement and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)” were an intended target audience of 40 million people, upon whom the Agency wished to have a “significant propaganda impact.” Produced by ultranationalist emigres who’d fled Ukraine after World War II, the project sought to foment insurrectionary anti-Communist violence:
“Furnish evidence of outside sympathy and understanding for the Ukrainian peoples; intensify anti-regime disaffection by encouraging resentment, bitterness, and distrust of the Soviet regime and its personalities; maintain national consciousness among the Ukrainians and urge them to maintain pride in the individuality and heritage of their culture; create dissatisfaction among Ukrainian military personnel within the Soviet armed forces stationed in the Ukraine; create and intensify dissatisfaction among the Ukrainian civil authorities to the Soviet regime.”
Publicly, the station’s US-made broadcasts – which included Ukrainian folk songs – were “attributed to a notional group of Ukrainian Anti-Communists.” There was no connection “actual or implied, with any established Ukrainian emigre group.” It was of the utmost importance too the CIA’s hand in creating and running the station was concealed – “every effort will be made to keep this risk at a minimum.” However, the operation’s ruinous spoils were considered well-worth the hazards.
“It will provide a wedge which can be driven deeper between the Soviets and the Ukrainians and would exacerbate existing suspicions and antagonisms between the two ethnic factions,” the CIA declared. The Agency also sought to create a wider “psychological climate” among Ukrainian audiences which would be “more favorable” to other anti-Soviet operations it was simultaneously conducting. Moreover, it was forecast “Soviet reaction to the broadcasts may indicate certain areas of vulnerability or sensitivity not heretofore recognized,” which could be further exploited.
‘Imperial Policy’
The CIA’s efforts to encourage Ukrainian nationalism and separatism endured throughout the Cold War. Via avowed CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, overt US assistance was provided to Rukh (The People’s Movement of Ukraine). One of Soviet Ukraine’s first opposition parties, Rukh is widely considered to have played a key role in securing Ukraine’s ‘independence’ in December 1991. Four months earlier, US President George H W Bush had visited Kiev and given an infamous speech in which he cautioned Ukrainians against embracing “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
His comments enraged Ukrainian nationalists, and Stateside anti-Soviet hawks. Yet, Bush’s fears were well-founded. By this point, Yugoslavia was rapidly disintegrating, engulfed by ever-violent fratricidal tensions. His administration was thus formally committed at this time to preserving the Soviet Union in some form, and undertook ill-fated measures in service of this goal. Too little, too late, that mission’s failure set Ukraine hurtling towards all-out conflict with Russia. As long-desired by the CIA, “antagonisms between the two ethnic factions” now run deep.
In a bitter twist, it was precisely because the NED-orchestrated February 2014 Maidan coup was led by rabidly anti-Russian nationalist elements that a majority of Ukrainians did not support the Maidan movement. As a contemporary Washington Post analysis noted, Viktor Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated mass support for the uprising. Surveys conversely showed “large majorities” of Ukrainians opposed the violent storming of regional governments by Maidan insurrectionists.
This hostility was spurred by “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism…not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.” Washington Post noted how Neo-Nazi party Svoboda was at Maidan’s forefront. Its leader Oleh Tyahnybok had infamously praised the UPA for fighting “against the Moskali [Russians], Germans, Zhydy [Jews] and other scum.” His words were not well-received by the 50% of Ukraine’s population residing in regions that had “strongly identified with Russia” for over two centuries. “Nearly all are alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols”:
“Anti-Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians. Electoral support for these views and for the political parties who espouse them has always been limited. Their presence and influence in the protest movement far outstrip their role in Ukrainian politics and their support barely extends geographically beyond a few Western provinces.”
Fast forward to now, and in response to Ukraine’s state-level glorification of the ultranationalist UPA and its lead genocidaire Andriy Melnyk, Polish President Karol Nawrocki has announced he will seek to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Warsaw’s highest honour, bestowed in 2023. Meanwhile, premier Donald Tusk has cursed the Ukrainian leader’s actions as “[wounding] our historical sensitivity,” and “worrying from the point of view of our relations.”
Authorities in Kiev appear entirely unconcerned their close neighbour and proxy war ally has been so egregiously insulted. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson claimed Zelensky had not wished to cause any offence. “Our history confirms only Moscow benefits from disputes between Ukrainians and Poles,” they said. Besides, for Ukrainian soldiers, “the struggle of the UPA symbolises strictly the opposition to Moscow’s imperial policy.” As the CIA always intended, two antithetical versions of history are now effectively at war in Donbass. A more devastating modern day example of divide and conquer in action one would be hard-pressed to identify.
Tortured US history with Iran goes back 73 years, not 47.
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL , 8 June 26
US neocons reveling in the current US war to destroy Iran tell the monstrous lie Iran has been at war with America 47 years. In their deranged world view it began with the 1979 Iranian revolution that disposed the hated US puppet ruler Mohammed Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran and took 66 US embassy hostages. Their lie claims that during that 47 years Iran killed thousands of Americans and no president defended America till Trump attacked Iran February 28.
These war lovers omit the current truth that Trump’s war is a total failure for 100 days now. Fourteen US service persons are dead. Hundreds injured. All US Gulf States bases damaged or destroyed. Israel suffered the worst destruction in its 78 years. US offensive, defensive missiles so depleted they will take years to replenish. America’s defeat is irreversible. Worst of all? The US forced closure of the Strait of Hormuz choking off a fifth of the world’s oil and vital economic supplies, likely risking worldwide recession, if not depression. Today’s neocon war was stupidity on steroids.
Their stupidity omits the historical truth that the US is the warmonger here, not Iran, going all the way back to 1953 when the US collaborated with the UK to depose the democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh. Patriot Mosaddegh sought to nationalize the British controlled Iranian oil industry being exploited by the UK for decades. To prevent this the Brits cooked up Operation Ajax and brought the US on board to overthrow Mosaddegh on the pretext he was a commie.
The US enlisted Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of premier US warmonger President Teddy. As a top CIA official, Kermit was tasked with exploiting fake anticommunist sentiment to oust Mosaddegh in a violent coup. Kermit used his contacts among Egyptian Anglophiles and pro Shah forces to get Mosaddegh’s removal started. But advance knowledge of the coup allowed Mosaddegh to prevail, so much so, Roosevelt’s CIA bosses demanded he leave Iran immediately. Instead, he conjured up the ghost of TR, inspiring him to instigate a second coup on his own that succeeded.
It became the model for CIA backed coups, both successes and failures, throughout the Cold War. A year later Ike secretly gave Kermit a National Security Medal for keeping Iranian oil safe for the West. Apparently, Ike didn’t want to go public with an illegal, immoral and criminal overthrow of a sovereign government.
Seventy-Three years on the neocons of today ditched coup for all out war to reclaim Iran for a new American sock puppet, one candidate of whom is Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah deposed in 1979. Unlike Kermit’s successful coup in ’53, Trump’s war is a colossal failure that signals the end of US hegemony in the Middle East and possibly the entire world. The Gulf States, looking at their shattered US bases and degraded oil infrastructure, will likely turn toward Russia, China, even Iran for security. Europe has largely given up on America. The Far East, seeing the US claw back its missiles for its Iran misadventure is also rethinking its defensive strategy.
Unlike the clever Kermit Roosevelt Jr., today’s coup plotters and warmongers, including Trump, Hegseth and Rubio, are blithering idiots.
128 years of US exploitation, degradation of Cuba continues on steroids
17 May 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Walt Zlotow , West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 128 years of US exploitation, degradation of Cuba continues on steroids – The Australian Independent Media Network
One must go back to 1898 for the last time the US was not exploiting Cuba and its people to benefit rapacious US capitalism and organized crime. That year the US cooked up fairy tale about Spain blowing up the US Maine, sent to Havana Harbor to intimidate Cuba’s Spanish ruler. The Maine did blow up but from an accidental internal explosion, not a Spanish mine. Those 261 sailors could not be said to have died in vain so President McKinley and his war party blamed Spain in order to declare war, kick Spain out of the Americas and take over Cuba for US exploitation.
But nothing in the previous 126 years compares to the diabolical cruelty, including death, the US has inflicted upon Cuba by President Trump and his bloodthirsty Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
This is not exaggeration. Need a lifesaving operation in Cuba under the Trump, Rubio oil blockade? Faggedaboudit. Much medical care is unavailable in oil starved Cuba when the lights go dark. Food and life sustaining supplies are becoming scares as farmers and merchants cannot get their wares to the people with a transport system largely shut down. Nearly a fifth of Cubans have fled the Trump, Rubio regime change operation.
Trump glories in their death and destruction he’s unleased. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Trump is expanding in more grotesque terms US policy to degrade Cuba into submission going back to 1960. A secret State Department memo back then under Eisenhower promoted overthrowing Castro thru:
“… a line of action, while adroit and inconspicuous as possible, denies money and supplies to Cuba to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the Castro government.”
Trump simply dropped the “adroit and inconspicuous” fig leaf.
Ironically, the first US embargo in Cuba was good for the Cuban people. In April, 1958, Eisenhower imposed an arms embargo on the Batista regime. The US had been supporting Batista’s murderous rule for 25 years to insure his support of US economic control, both legal and criminal that enriched US capitalists and Mafia enterprises to the detriment of the Cuban people. Eisenhower didn’t have an epiphany to help the Cuban people. He simply saw the inevitable triumph of Castro’s revolution and sought to curry favor with its eventual rulers.
Twenty months later Castro prevailed, Batista fled and Cuba finally ended 62 years of US cruelty and exploitation. Not quite. Within year the US imposed Cuban embargo 2.0 designed not to facilitate the inevitable revolution but to destroy it. Sixty-six years on, with the entire world community except Israel voting year after year in the UN for the US to stop, America’s endless lust to crush the Cuban revolution continues apace. And under the depraved Trump, Rubio oil embargo, it has become a monumental war crime against the 11 million sorrowful Cuban souls.
Cuba Has a Rich History of International Solidarity. US Wants to Extinguish It.
While tightening sanctions, the U.S, State Department has boosted funding for regime change programs.
A darling of the Cuban American right, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the latest drive to destabilize the island.
Ultimately, the blockade isolates Cuba precisely because its revolutionary idealism mocks U.S. imperial ambitions. The sanctions are the culmination of seven decades of coercion and obscene hypocrisy. An empire that spreads war is strangling a country that exports doctors. Indeed, a rich government that claims vaccines are dangerous is persecuting a poor society that not only invents vaccines, but shares them with the world. And while celebrating genocide and deportations, U.S. leaders throttle a nation for its defiant tradition of solidarity: Its refusal to tolerate the suffering of the exploited. Decades after the Cold War, Cuba remains an obsessive target of a U.S.-backed counterrevolution, as well as the storm-lashed epicenter of the struggle against U.S. imperialism
Trump’s economic powerplay and preparations for a potential invasion are only the latest moves in an ongoing saga of aggression toward Cuba
Washington has long deployed economic pressure to challenge Cuba’s fiercely independent social and foreign policies
By Jonathan Ng , Truthout, May 20, 2026 https://truthout.org/articles/cuba-has-a-rich-history-of-international-solidarity-us-wants-to-extinguish-it/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=073831ce6e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_05_20_08_57&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-073831ce6e-650192793
At night, the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba appears like a tangled string of Christmas lights along the coastline, casting colored silhouettes across the waves that lap ashore. Sailors and Marines pack the local sports bar blaring pop music. Others frequent the bowling alley or play video games under intense strobe lights. Yet in contrast to the brightly illuminated base, nighttime blots out the nearby town of Caimanera, as a result of the energy blockade on Cuba that President Donald Trump tightened this January.
Trump claims that the embargo is necessary to promote a democratic transition in Cuba. Similarly, U.S.-backed opposition leaders in Miami such as Rosa María Payá argue that “the Cuban people [are] grateful” for the sanctions, which will help “make Cuba great again.”
But the truth is far more bitter. Trump’s sanctions are accelerating a social crisis that has immobilized Cuban industry, gutted public services, and forced over 10 percent of the population to leave the island in recent years. Hospitals lack electricity, and grocery store shelves are empty amid rolling blackouts. Ratcheting up pressure, U.S. authorities issued a new raft of sanctions against senior Cuban officials this May, while conducting military reconnaissance flights off the coastline.
Trump’s economic powerplay and preparations for a potential invasion are only the latest moves in an ongoing saga of aggression toward Cuba. Rather than prioritizing democracy, Washington has long deployed economic pressure to challenge the island’s fiercely independent social and foreign policies — above all, its commitment to wealth redistribution, solidarity with liberation struggles, and opposition to U.S. imperial hubris.
Forming the Noose
Washington’s professed support for democracy in Cuba rings hollow when placed against the historical backdrop. In the 1950s, U.S. officials assisted the island’s dictator Fulgencio Batista, as he attempted to extinguish a popular revolution spearheaded by Fidel Castro. His regime tortured over 700 dissidents to death, dangling mutilated bodies from telegraph poles and tossing them into gutters. While training Batista’s forces, the CIA confided that they were “too enthusiastic” about torture. Nonetheless, Washington organized “to prevent a Castro victory,” fearing that his leftist agenda would undermine its vice-like grip over Cuban politics and commerce.
After taking power in January 1959, revolutionary leaders nationalized strategic industries, outlawed formal racial segregation, and pursued a breathtaking array of anti-poverty reforms. In response, the State Department promoted “economic warfare” by plotting to reduce access to oil and the U.S. sugar market. Officials emphasized that they should “disguise these actions” as peaceful. But their objective was clear: “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of [the Castro] government.”
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy escalated pressure by bankrolling terrorist operations and a failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He also armed counterrevolutionaries that targeted the revolution’s literacy campaign, butchering teachers for teaching peasants to read.
To defend Cuba, Castro stationed Soviet missiles on the island. At the brink of nuclear war, Kennedy vehemently opposed a “no-invasion guarantee” in negotiations with Soviet leaders, while refusing to even talk to Cuban officials. Privately, he was blunt: “our objective is to preserve our right to invade” in an emergency. After the Soviets withdrew the missiles, U.S. officials insisted that their “ultimate objective” remained “the overthrow of… Castro,” sponsoring attacks against industrial sites and “tighten[ing] the noose around the Cuban economy.”
Yet their most cynical ploy targeted Cuba’s youth. As relations deteriorated, the U.S. government organized Operation Peter Pan, which sowed chaos and fractured families by convincing Cubans to ship their children to the United States. To spark a mass exodus, the CIA published false propaganda announcing that authorities planned to abolish parental authority. Radio advertisements warned that socialists would seize and “indoctrinate” every minor. “Don’t let your child be taken!” broadcasts warned.
Meanwhile, the State Department colluded with Father Bryan Walsh and the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami, which oversaw the transfer of over 14,000 Cuban children to the United States. Many never reunited with their families. Walsh packed Cuban children into orphanages, foster homes, and makeshift facilities. One Peter Pan survivor, Alex López, recalled living for one year in a snake-infested camp in the Everglades. Residents slept in canvas tents and washed in the swamp. But the worst part was the priests. López described the sadistic cruelty of one of the camp rectors and “being raped by that horrible man.” Many others also experienced sexual abuse, violence, and neglect. Walsh himself forced campers to strip before beating them with paddles. In 2006, one survivor claimed that the priest raped him.
Today, Cuban American leaders cite Operation Peter Pan as an example of principled resistance against communist tyranny. In reality, the operation was a cruel microcosm of U.S. policy toward Cuba, revealing both the cynicism of the counterrevolution and rapacity of Washington. Although under siege, the island became the only Latin American country without malnutrition or illiteracy, prompting UNICEF to call it a “paradise for children” in the region in 2010. Yet it was precisely these reforms that infuriated the U.S. and Cuban elite, turning Cuba into an intolerable symbol of dignity and defiance.
The Reverse Passage
The United States has not only targeted Cuba because of its socialist system but also due to the country’s commitment to radical solidarity. Throughout the Cold War, Cuban leaders repeatedly challenged U.S. aggression abroad and efforts to assert Western supremacy in the Global South.
In particular, Cuba offered a model for decolonization, while actively supporting national liberation movements. In 1959, the Cuban-Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a solidarity trip to Gaza. Afterward, Cuba became a leading champion of Palestinian rights, offering substantial economic and military aid to the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also was a major ally to Vietnamese nationalists during the Vietnam War, sending equipment to build the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And Cuba became a safe haven for political refugees as U.S.-backed dictatorships ravaged Latin America through the 1980s.
Read more: Cuba Has a Rich History of International Solidarity. US Wants to Extinguish It.Most notably, half a million Cubans fought for decolonization in Africa. Their sacrifices helped Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, and other countries gain independence. Recognizing their contribution, the Algerian leader and herald of Pan-Africanism, Ahmed Ben Bella, declared that without the Cuban Revolution, “no place for justice, for dignity [would exist] in this world.”
Above all, Cuban support for Angola proved decisive. In 1975, U.S. officials encouraged apartheid South Africa to topple President Agostinho Neto and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had recently wrested independence from Portugal. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hoped that ousting Neto’s leftist government would enhance U.S. prestige. But as South African armor approached Luanda, Castro initiated Operation Carlota — airlifting thousands of Cuban troops to repel the invasion.
The historian Piero Gleijeses concludes that the operation embodied a genuine commitment to racial justice. It entailed a sort of reverse passage, as the Cuban descendants of African slaves crossed the Atlantic to vanquish white supremacy and the last vestiges of colonialism. Within months, Black Cuban and Angolan troops repelled the offensive. A South African military analyst lamented that “over 300 years of colonialism” was disappearing. “White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow.”
Within months, Black Cuban and Angolan troops repelled the offensive. A South African military analyst lamented that “over 300 years of colonialism” was disappearing. “White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow.”
In 1987, the United States again conspired with South Africa, as apartheid forces streamed across the border and cornered Angolan units at the town of Cuito Cuanavale. Cuba responded with a massive troop surge. “[W]e placed ourselves in the lion’s jaws,” Castro recalled, claiming that his soldiers maneuvered “like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with his right – strikes.” Against the odds, Cuban reinforcements secured a smashing victory. The counteroffensive not only preserved Angola’s sovereignty, but forced South Africa to grant Namibia independence and fatally weakened the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela concluded that Cuba’s victory was “the turning point for the liberation of our continent, and of my people, from the scourge of apartheid.”
In short, the island’s pugnacious opposition to imperialism made it a permanent target of U.S. aggression. Historically, Cuba has spent a greater proportion of its GDP on foreign aid than virtually any other country. And unlike the United States, it is famous for fighting colonialism and directing medical missions, treating millions of poor patients across the world. Demonstrating their anticolonial convictions, 32 Cuban security personnel died defending Venezuelan territory from Trump’s illegal invasion this January. For these reasons, Washington has regarded Cuba as a threat to U.S. imperial leadership and the geographical hierarchies — in Venezuela, Palestine, Africa, and elsewhere — that it aims to preserve.
Unrestrained Extremism
After the Soviet Union dissolved, Cuba lost an essential lifeline, and its economy slid into a prolonged crisis. Smelling blood, Cuban American conservatives lobbied to tighten the blockade in order to instigate regime change. Miami remained the strategic base of the counterrevolution, as right-wing residents flexed their political connections to block the normalization of relations, strengthen the embargo, and trigger an uprising.
Despite their pro-democracy rhetoric, conservative Cuban American activists had an embarrassing record. For decades, they had used Florida as a launching pad for violent operations against Cuba, while viciously attacking moderate voices — at one point, perpetrating 45 percent of all terrorist bombings in the world. Far-right community leaders such as Jorge Mas Canosa, Luis Posada Carriles, and Orlando Bosch strafed beaches with machine guns, planted explosives, and even bombed a Cuban airplane killing 73 civilians. “All of Castro’s planes are warplanes,” Bosch explained in a chilling deadpan.
Under Mas Canosa’s guidance, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) became the main powerbroker shaping policy. Although posing as an independent grassroots actor, the foundation maintained deep ties to the U.S. government. CANF co-founder Raul Masvidal explained that “the National Security Council wanted to start an organization that would help popularize” its campaign of economic pressure and diplomatic isolation against Cuba.
And the foundation was its answer. Over the 1990s and 2000s, CANF laundered federal funds for activists bombing the island and the electoral campaigns of hardline politicians. The godfather of the Cuban American exile community, CANF president Mas Canosa aimed to turn Cuba into an anarcho-capitalist paradise, promoting “a very aggressive privatization campaign” that “has to be radical and… immediate. Privatize everything.” In 1992, he revamped sanctions with the Cuban Democracy Act, which Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey), a leading recipient of foundation funds, designed to “wreak havoc on that island.”
Meanwhile, CANF financed Brothers to the Rescue, a self-identified humanitarian group of airplane pilots helping Cuban rafters reach the U.S. shoreline. Yet Fernando Morais’s book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War demonstrates that the Brothers were intensely political. Flying U.S. government aircraft, they frequently penetrated Cuban airspace to jam transmissions at Havana’s international airport, putting thousands of lives in danger. Director José Basulto boasted that pilots dumped a “tremendous amount” of propaganda exhorting citizens to “overthrow” the socialist state. The Brothers even passed reconnaissance information from flights to Cuban Americans planting bombs on beaches.
In 1996, Cuba shot down two of their aircraft, after persistently warning U.S. authorities against future incursions. Exploiting the incident, CANF pressed President Bill Clinton to sign the Helms-Burton Act, which drastically tightened the blockade. Facing an election year, Clinton signed the bill to win Cuban American votes, while privately recognizing that it violated international law. Beside themselves with victory, CANF then ramped up bombing attacks in Havana to undermine the tourist industry. Posada, who directed the strikes, admitted that Mas Canosa “controlled everything,” slipping him cash “[w]henver I needed money.”
Despite relentless harassment, Cubans successfully rebuilt their economy. Between 1999 and 2014, the election of left-leaning “Pink Tide” governments in Latin America allowed Cuba to escape its isolation, while securing new allies and trade partners. In 2015, President Barack Obama opened talks with Havana, taking the first step toward the normalization of relations. The diplomatic thaw eased restrictions on travel and remittances, relaxed controls on investment, and promoted bilateral cooperation in medical research and other areas.
More than anything, it signaled the failure of U.S. aggression. Since the 1990s, the Cuban American right had led a campaign to strangle the island, attempting everything from economic subterfuge to terrorism. Instead, its efforts revealed the revolution’s resilience, as well as the unrestrained extremism of its leading adversaries.
The Price of Dignity
The thaw did not last long. In 2017, the State Department claimed that Cuba launched “acoustic attacks” against its Havana embassy, harassing U.S. diplomats with a weapon that emitted a high-pitched noise powerful enough to inflict brain injuries. FBI investigators and medical specialists found no evidence that Cuba deployed such technology, or that the sci-fi device even existed. The most likely culprit for the sound was crickets chirping.
Yet Trump exploited the scandal to slam Cubans with heavy sanctions, which President Joe Biden later maintained, instigating a humanitarian crisis. In 2018, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was lower than the rate in the United States. Since then, it has increased 148 percent, as hospitals face acute shortages of medicine and equipment. The Center for Economic and Policy Research bluntly concluded this May that the blockade “has killed a lot of babies.”
While tightening sanctions, the State Department has boosted funding for regime change programs. Leaked documents reveal that officials have plotted in recent decades to build a militant opposition movement. They hope to respond “rapidly, discreetly, and opportunistically” to crises, “hastening a peaceful transition to a… market-oriented society.” The department has funneled illegal funding to government critics, sponsored dissident rappers, and attempted to create a social media platform to spark an uprising. To block access to foreign currency, it is even bullying poor countries into expelling Cuban doctors, depriving some communities of healthcare altogether.
A darling of the Cuban American right, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the latest drive to destabilize the island. Rubio grew up amid the rabid politics and violence of counterrevolutionary Miami. In his memoir, he fondly recalls buying baseball tickets with cocaine money from his brother-in-law, who smuggled drugs with a Bay of Pigs veteran. Since January, he has overseen the energy embargo that frequently plunges the island into darkness.
Claiming Rubio as “one of our own,” CANF debuted a “roadmap” for the island this May, promoting the privatization of healthcare and education, dismantling of welfare programs, and end to “restrictions on profit repatriation.” Authors portray the United States as “the salvation of Cuba,” while asking Cubans to accept Cuban American leadership since, they say, “We know how a capitalist system works.” As the humanitarian disaster worsens, CANF continues to champion hardline tactics, including the indictment against Raúl Castro announced by the U.S. on Tuesday for his role in the 1996 defensive operation against Brothers to the Rescue. Appealing to Cuban American extremists, Trump now speculates about “taking Cuba.”
Nevertheless, Cubans continue to challenge oppression worldwide. The Palestinian doctor Murid Abukhater, who recently studied medicine in Cuba, emphasizes that they educate Palestinians for free to “save the lives of our people” from genocide. This solidarity is breathtakingly poignant since the island’s population has itself lived “under a long siege, just like us in Gaza,” Abukhater explained.
Ultimately, the blockade isolates Cuba precisely because its revolutionary idealism mocks U.S. imperial ambitions. The sanctions are the culmination of seven decades of coercion and obscene hypocrisy. An empire that spreads war is strangling a country that exports doctors. Indeed, a rich government that claims vaccines are dangerous is persecuting a poor society that not only invents vaccines, but shares them with the world. And while celebrating genocide and deportations, U.S. leaders throttle a nation for its defiant tradition of solidarity: Its refusal to tolerate the suffering of the exploited. Decades after the Cold War, Cuba remains an obsessive target of a U.S.-backed counterrevolution, as well as the storm-lashed epicenter of the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
The author would like to thank Sarah Priscilla Lee of the Learning Sciences program at Northwestern University for reviewing this article.
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared
In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into
Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled
the pins and then left on his bicycle. How did he do it?…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Guardian 5th May 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/05/the-man-who-blew-up-a-nuclear-power-station-
Charles III and Britain’s pathological obsession with Russia
British political class has had a pathological obsession with Russia for nearly two centuries, and has been scheming to wage wars against her at least since the Crimean War of 1853. In all cases, Britain is always eager to lead such wars from behind and incite other powers to do the actual fighting. One of the most blatant examples was their weaponizing of Hitler’s Germany in preparation for the largest ever invasion force in 1941, counting over 3.8 million troops. This was not really a “German invasion” as our historical curriculum suggests; it was a German-led invasion.
Yesterday, Charles III called for World War III, echoing the 1945 “Project Unthinkable” Britain’s obsession with waging war on Russia is now a mortal danger to all of us.
Alex Krainer, Apr 30, 2026, https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/charles-iii-and-britains-pathological?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1063805&post_id=195907312&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
On Monday, 27 April, Britain’s king Charles III came to Washington for a four-day state visit to the United States hosted by President Donald Trump. His “majsesty,” is also known to his fans as late Jimmy Saville’s BFF and the brother of Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF Andrew, formerly known as prince.
Yesterday, Charles graced the joint session of U.S. Congress with an inspiring speech during which he found it appropriate to call on his American audience to get on with the business of World War III already. Thus spoke his majesty:
“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time, and the United Nations Security Council was united in the face of terror, we answered the call together as our people have done so for more than a century, shoulder to shoulder through two world wars, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and moments that have defined our shared security. Today, Mr. Speaker, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people.”
Glorifying wars of the past, particularly Afghanistan, and invoking NATO Article 5 which was “needed for the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people,” was a naked call for the United States to commit to war against Russia: another great war on the European continent.
Given that the last two World Wars resulted in some 70 million casualties, one would think that the king’s warmongering would prompt U.S. elected representatives to tar and feather the British royal and run him out of town on a rail, but of course, one would be wrong. King’s call for World War III elicited an enthusiastic standing ovation from the politicians, otherwise passionately supportive of the ‘no kings’ protests in their country.
Britain’s incurable Russia derangement
British political class has had a pathological obsession with Russia for nearly two centuries, and has been scheming to wage wars against her at least since the Crimean War of 1853. In all cases, Britain is always eager to lead such wars from behind and incite other powers to do the actual fighting. One of the most blatant examples was their weaponizing of Hitler’s Germany in preparation for the largest ever invasion force in 1941, counting over 3.8 million troops. This was not really a “German invasion” as our historical curriculum suggests; it was a German-led invasion.
The 3.8 million strong invasion force (which grew to six million within its first year of fighting) was sourced from nearly all European countries. Soviet Union repelled that invasion at a cost of 27 million casualties. One in 9 Russians died and almost every Russian family lost someone in that war. When it became clear that the invasion had failed and that Hitler’s army would be defeated, British Joint Planning Staff thought up “Project Unthinkable”: a new&improved plan to attack Russia.
The document was submitted to Winston Churchill on 22 May 1945 (it is available at this link) proposing a surprise attack against Russia, planned for July 1, 1945 by the combined UK and the US forces, supported by the Polish and German troops. The project’s political objective was to submit Russia “to our will”:
“A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not. … if they want total war, they are in the position to have it.”
The “elites” in London were dreaming up a new war against Russia even as World War 2 was still raging and the Soviet Union was finishing off Hitler’s Wehrmacht at the Eastern front. Britain was ostensibly allied with the USSR at that time, but the king and the cabal, as Winston Churchill named it, were secretly rooting for Hitler.
A total war is necessary
Britain’s Joint Planning Staff advanced two hypotheses: (1) that “a total war is necessary,” and (2) that “a quick success would suffice to gain our political objective.” However, the quick victory in a surprise attack might only yield a temporary result. A lasting one would require victory in a total war:
“The only way we can achieve our object with certainty and lasting results is by victory in a total war.”
However, this “total war,” as they well understood, would have to be a very long term project:
To achieve the decisive defeat of Russia in a total war would require, in particular, the mobilisation of manpower to counteract their present enormous manpower resources. This is a very long term project and would involve: the deployment in Europe of a large proportion of the vast resources of the United States; and the re-equipment and reorganization of German manpower and of all the Western allies.
It would be interesting to know what made the Joint Planning Staff believe that they could reorganize German manpower together with the “vast resources of the United States?” Whatever it was that they knew, they concluded that, “the only thing certain is that to win it would take us a very long time.”
Exactly how long was unclear, but perhaps it was the time needed to organize some form of a North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, to dismember the USSR and to weaponize at least one of its former republics, like Ukraine, as a battering ram to wield against Russia.
High cabal… has made us what we are
Two years after formulating “Project Unthinkable,” the British government drafted the “Fundamentals of Our Defence Policy,” reaffirming that, “The most likely and most formidable threat to our interests comes from Russia,” and that, “Ensuring that we have the active and early support of the United States of America and of the Western European States” was essential.
Well, as the war in Ukraine is now clearly headed for the same result as Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” active support of the United States of America is now quite urgent, and this is why king Chuck was busy charming his American audience to revive Project Unthinkable.
The king’s speech and his kingdom’s foreign policy over decades suggest that their obsession with waging a total war against Russia remains all consuming for the British political class. This poses a mortal danger to the whole world by now, and we can be sure their obsession won’t stop with a speech: furious lobbying and influence campaigns will be unleashed, perhaps only requiring a well-orchestrated false flag attack attributed to Russia.
If they are successful in their endeavor, we can expect a nuclear war. Recall, last year we learned that the UK was/is willing and ready to help Ukraine build a nuclear weapon. The criminal insanity of it is truly hard to fathom, calling to mind Winston Churchill’s cryptic quip upon learning about the allies’ brutal bombardment of Rotterdam: “Unrestricted submarine warfare. Unrestricted air bombings – this is total war… Time and ocean and some guiding star and high cabal have made us what we are.”
Collapsing Empire: Hezbollah Crushes ‘Greater Israel’
Kit Klarenberg, Global Delinquents, Apr 17, 2026
On April 8th, the Zionist entity struck a demonic blow to the heart of Beirut, dropping 1,000 pound bombs in densely packed residential areas, killing untold civilians and injuring many more. One of Lebanon’s most dire mass-killings since the end of the 1990 civil war, it marked the resumption of Israel’s avowedly genocidal invasion. With bombs raining down apace even as rare in-person talks between the pair near, Zionist Occupation Force-backed settlers are moving quickly to establish a permanent presence in the country’s south.
Whatever abrupt pause in the war on the Islamic Republic can be sustained by duelling Iranian and US blockades of the Strait Of Hormuz must be viewed in the context of the Zionist entity’s longstanding determination to annex Lebanese territory, in service of ‘Greater Israel’. Tel Aviv’s criminal incursion ignited March 16th, Orwellianly dubbed by officials a “targeted ground operation against key targets.” It was not until 10 days later that major news outlets deigned to call it an invasion.
On March 23rd, Tel Aviv’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – a self-proclaimed fascist – urged the ZOF to formally annex southern Lebanon. Since then, over a million people have been displaced, thousands killed, and civilian infrastructure razed en masse. While a significant chunk of the country is now occupied, the cost for Tel Aviv was substantial. Unrelenting Hezbollah fire produced heavy casualties and record equipment and vehicle losses, including 21 Merkava main battle tanks in a single day on March 26th.
On April 2nd, Israeli media openly advertised the impending ceasefire in the war on Iran. It was revealed the Zionist entity was preparing to intensify its air campaign against Lebanon, due to enormous damage inflicted by the Resistance upon the ZOF. Tel Aviv reportedly planned to “[reduce] the current focus on Iran,” in order to support “Israeli ground forces attempting to seize Lebanese territory.” Were it not for hell being unleashed from the skies, the ZOF would currently be in big trouble.
On April 5th, the ZOF’s Northern Command chief admitted Tel Aviv had grossly overestimated damage inflicted upon Hezbollah during its October 2024 invasion of Lebanon. Entity political and military chiefs had long-claimed the Resistance faction was obliterated by the illegal intervention. The ZOF estimated 70 – 80% of Hezbollah’s rocket capabilities were destroyed during the conflict. This reverie was comprehensively shattered by hundreds of the group’s projectiles successfully targeting Tel Aviv daily, throughout the Zionist-American war on Iran.
No wonder that conflict is now on hold. Hezbollah remains a redoubtable adversary, which can independently, and in tandem with its Resistance comrades, thwart Tel Aviv’s seizure of Lebanese territory, and permanently expel Zionist settlers from northern Palestine. This wreaks havoc with Greater Israel’s construction, which Benjamin Netanyahu openly yearns to be his enduring political legacy, and literal ‘get out of jail free’ card. Hence, southern Lebanon must be annexed, and Hezbollah neutralised. But attempting to do so will, as before, end in fatal catastrophe.
‘Forced Expulsions’
In June 1982, Zionist militants invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to drive Palestinian freedom fighters away from the entity’s claimed northern border. Quickly, it became apparent ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were the ZOF’s true goal. As a declassified July 1983 US National Intelligence Council assessment noted, ultra-Zionists then as now were aggressively demanding outright annexation of Lebanon’s south. Which is precisely what temporarily came to pass, until Hezbollah expelled the ZOF decisively in 2000. Along the way, obvious lessons weren’t learned by Tel Aviv.
The Council predicted the ZOF would create a puppet state in the south, to fulfil “some day-to-day governing tasks,” while “real power will remain in Israeli hands.” Despite judging the costs “of semi-permanent occupation” to be “not inconsequential,” they were nonetheless “manageable”, due to the entity’s “proven track record” of suppressing “unrest” in territory it illegally occupies. “Forced expulsions, use of local surrogates, and ruthless counterintelligence operations” by the ZOF were correctly forecast, which the NIC believed would negate “increasingly” hostile local opposition.
The Council assessed the ZOF would “[get] a handle on the guerrillas in the next six – 12 months.” This prediction couldn’t have been more wrong. Unmentioned by the Council, Hezbollah was quickly founded following the Zionist entity’s invasion. Inspired by the Islamic Revolution and assisted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the group rapidly gained in strength, spreading radical fervour among Lebanese citizens of every faith, until forcibly purging ZOF militants from Lebanon outright in May 2000.
Hezbollah’s success – repeated with an unprecedented battering of Zionist invasion forces in 2006 – inspired new generations of Resistance fighters, including Hamas. Today, the faction is the most popular and potent political and social force in Lebanon, embraced by citizens of every faith. Bashar Assad’s fall also did not, contrary to widely-held assumptions, make it remotely difficult for Iran to equip and coordinate with Hezbollah. A failure to comprehend these inconvenient truths has led the Zionist entity into disastrous ruin in Lebanon, yet again.
On March 27th, ZOF chief of staff Eyal Zamir issued a grave warning during a security cabinet meeting. Namely, Israel’s military “is going to collapse in on itself,” due to “mounting operational demands and a deepening manpower shortage,” which could rapidly prove catastrophic. Already, an infantry battalion intended to be deployed to Lebanon had been redirected to the West Bank, to “keep the peace” as armed settlers carried out violent if not murderous attacks on Palestinians. The ZOF would’ve struggled to field further forces in either Greater Israel theatre.
Then on April 3rd, the ZOF openly admitted “its goal of disarming Hezbollah” was “unrealistic, as it would require the military to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon,” which Tel Aviv wasn’t able to wage. In other words, the Resistance was undefeated, and Lebanese territory couldn’t be stolen. Having been engaged in perpetual, multi-front war since October 7th 2023, the exhausted Zionist entity lacked the muscle to achieve its Lebanese goals while also targeting the West Bank and Iran, contrary to intelligence, military and political forecasts.
‘Last Minute’
Israel was so ruinously overextended attempting to wage all-out war on the entire Resistance – without AnsarAllah even having fully joined the fight – it was reportedly considering an extraordinarily desperate solution. Namely, inviting Syria’s MI6-installed extremist government to battle Hezbollah. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime is maintained in power exclusively via a brutal, repressive domestic security and military apparatus. Forces could not be deployed in sufficient numbers to counter Hezbollah, without risking major domestic upheaval. However, Hebrew-language outlet Maariv reported April 5th this suicidal pact was being seriously contemplated:
Under the auspices of these “understandings”, the ZOF would “take over southern Lebanon, while the Syrians will act in northern Lebanon against Hezbollah.” However, the US reportedly “very much [preferred] not to reach such a scenario.” After all, it would be a deeply hazardous Faustian bargain, imperilling al-Sharaa’s already brittle rule. While he and his army of ISIS fighters may detest Hezbollah, the overwhelming majority of Syrians reject alliance with Israel, at a time local Resistance elements are growing in strength.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………. With Hezbollah supposedly dismantled, and Syria at last transformed into a doting Anglo-American puppet state, Greater Israel could be advanced without hindrance – or so Netanyahu thought. In reality, the “great opportunity” about which he boasted from the Golan Heights following Bashar Assad’s fall has become a dangerous trap. Unable to sustain a grand battle against the triumphant Islamic Republic even with US help, Israel is now overextending itself yet further in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah isn’t fazed one iota, and the Resistance is watching intently.
As history old and new amply shows, the Empire and its Zionist proxy underestimate AnsarAllah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the wider Resistance at their immense peril – but persist in doing so. Over and again across decades, the same failed strategies are applied without success, then aren’t subsequently revised. The Empire’s crushing past defeats by the Resistance are spun as victories, and/or promptly forgotten about. All along though, in the real world, the Zionist-American death machine is ever-weakened, and Palestine’s long-overdue liberation grows irresistibly closer. https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/collapsing-empire-hezbollah-crushes
Trump’s “New” Mideast: False Promises of Peace Through War
Daniel Martin Varisco, Informed Comment March 30, 2026 , https://www.juancole.com/2026/03/mideast-promises-through.html
On March 27 President Trump spoke in Miami to a Saudi investment conference and touted the “rise of the Middle East,” echoing what he said last October to the Israeli Knesset about the “historic dawn of a new Middle East.”
Imperial wars falsely advertised as a means to peace and stability are not, however, “new” in this region of the globe, nor in any other. Since the early uncivilized behavior of rulers in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt it has been the same old story: war for the glory of whoever was the local god or goddess. Sargon of Akkad, served by the wind god Enlil, went with his army from southern Iraq all the way to the Mediterranean over four millennia ago, destroying cities, slaughtering enemies and enslaving those who survived. Three and a half millennia ago the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III took control of Canaan at the Battle of Megiddo, the same location in what is now Israel that apocalyptic-minded Evangelical Christians think will take place between a returned Christ and the Devil’s last gasp at Armageddon.
The advent of the three major monotheisms did not prevent war in this region from being a constant. The Israelites, after wandering for forty years without a map in Sinai, were told by their Abrahamic God to drive out the Canaanites, in some cases slaughtering every man, woman and child (Joshua 8:24-25). The Babylonians and the Assyrians made life miserable for the descendants of Kings David and Solomon. It was Solomon who reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
In the year 70 CE the Romans destroyed the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem. Almost six centuries later Arab armies under the banner of the new religion of Islam conquered Jerusalem from Christian Byzantine control and guaranteed religious protection for the Jews and Christians there.
At the end of the 11th century Medieval Christian crusaders conquered Jerusalem, slaughtering the Jews and Muslims there in the name of their Abrahamic God. Less than a century later the Ayyubid leader Saladin reconquered Jerusalem, allowing the Christian Crusaders there to leave in peace.
The Buddhist Mongols came close to capturing Jerusalem in the 13th century, but were defeated by the Egyptian Mamluks, who were in turn overcome by the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century.
At the end of 18th century Napoleon led a massive French force that took over Egypt but failed to conquer Ottoman Palestine, thanks to the British. A century later the British assumed control of Egypt and its important Suez Canal.
The 20th century in the region was regularly punctuated by warfare. The first World War ended the Ottoman Empire and created a new map of what was transitioning from the Near East to the Middle East. The lines drawn by Europeans may have been new, but the problems created by the imposed borders brought up all kinds of old problems. The French denied Syria to the Hashemite Prince Faisal who helped Lawrence of Arabia defeat the Ottomans.
The British created space for two Hashemites hailing from Mecca to become kings in Jordan and Iraq. The French carved Lebanon out of Syria to create a Christian-majority country that Paris hoped would support their colonialism (in the 1940s the Christian Lebanese demanded independence along with everyone else in the country). The pre-oil Gulf States remained British Trucial States for the most part, and mostly desert Arabia was given to King Saud with his fanatical Wahhabi backers.
And, to top it all off, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 set policy for the British Mandate in Palestine, once it was conquered by British troops and awarded by the San Remo conference to London. The British commitment to flooding the Mandate with European Jews led to mounting violence within and outside Palestine. Then in 1948 the modern state of Israel was created, followed by major local wars the rest of that year and again in 1956, 1967 and 1973, along with almost constant tension and violence through the present. Today there is what many call genocide being committed by Israel’s right-wing government in Gaza, daily Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the recent invasion of southern Lebanon and the now four-week old Iran war that is or is not being called a war.
There may indeed be a “newer” Middle East, certainly considering the state of the region a mere century ago, but both the present and future are clouded by non-stop war, revenge and imperial interference that are as old as recorded time itself. Poor patriarch Abraham, who spiritually fathered the three religious rivals in the land where he shepherded his sheep, must be rolling over in his grave. One of the most quoted parables of Jesus in the Gospels, those New Testament books that talk a lot about peace and not about war, is about putting new wine into old bottles. It is worth quoting from the old English King James Version so beloved by those who insist Jesus is yet again about to come down to earth:
The rhetoric clothing war-talk as a prelude to peace can never cover the naked truth of the ongoing suffering of victims on all sides in the ongoing conflicts.
Yet another new wine justifying the horrors of war in a region that has known too much conflict only leads to more spilled blood.
Daniel Martin Varisco is an anthropologist and historian who specializes on Yemen’s agricultural heritage. He blogs at Tabsir.net.
Israel planned this war on Iran for 40 years. Everything else is a smoke screen.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyah……… gloated: “This combined effort allows us to do what I have hoped to achieve for 40 years: to crush the regime of terror completely. That’s my promise and this is what is going to happe
And all the while, Israel’s own arsenal of nuclear weapons, undeclared and therefore unmonitored, has been an open secret.
The embers of resistance – in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – have not been snuffed out. With the attack on Iran, they are being fanned into a fire
Jonathan Cook, Mar 06, 2026
It is near impossible to make sense – at least from the justifications on offer – of what US President Donald Trump really hopes to achieve with his and Israel‘s blatantly illegal war of aggression on Iran.
Is it to destroy an Iranian nuclear weapons programme for which there has never been any tangible evidence, and which Trump claimed just a few months ago to have “completely and totally obliterated” in an earlier lawbreaking attack?
Or is it intended to force Tehran back to negotiations on its nuclear energy enrichment programme that were brought prematurely to an end when the US launched its unprovoked attack – talks, we should note, that were made necessary because in 2018, during his first term, Trump tore up the original deal with Iran?
Or is the war supposed to browbeat Iran into greater flexibility, even though Trump blew up the talks at the very moment Oman, the chief mediator, insisted that Tehran had capitulated on almost every one of Washington’s onerous demands and that a deal was “within our reach“?
Or are the air strikes designed to “liberate” Iranians, even though the early victims included at least 165 civilians in a girls’ school, most of them children aged between 7 and 12?
Or is the aim to pressure Iran to give up its ballistic missiles – the only deterrence it has against attack, and which would leave it utterly defenceless against US and Israeli malevolent designs?
Or did Washington believe Tehran was about to strike first, even though Pentagon officials have confided to congressional staff that there was zero intelligence an attack was about to happen?
Or is the goal to decapitate the Iranian regime, as the strikes have already achieved with the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei? If so, to what purpose, given that Khamenei was so opposed to an Iranian nuclear bomb that he issued a religious edict, a fatwa, against its development?
Might Khamenei’s successor – having seen how utterly untrustworthy the US and Israel are, how they operate as rogue states unconstrained by international law – now decide that developing a nuclear bomb is an absolute priority to protect Iran’s sovereignty?
No clear rationale
There is no clear rationale from Washington because the author of this attack is not to be found in either the White House or the Pentagon. This plan was cooked up in Tel Aviv decades ago.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, admitted as much on Sunday. He gloated: “This combined effort allows us to do what I have hoped to achieve for 40 years: to crush the regime of terror completely. That’s my promise and this is what is going to happen.”
Those four decades, let us note, were also the timeframe for an endless series of warnings from Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that Tehran was only months away from developing a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu has been peddling this same urgent, nonsensical pretext for attacking Iran all that time. For 40 years, each year has been proclaimed the very last opportunity to stop the “mad mullahs” from obtaining a bomb – a bomb that never materialised.
And all the while, Israel’s own arsenal of nuclear weapons, undeclared and therefore unmonitored, has been an open secret.
Europe helped Israel develop its bomb, while the US turned a blind eye, even as Israeli leaders espoused a suicidal doctrine known as the “Samson Option“, which posited that Israel would rather detonate its nuclear arsenal than suffer a conventional military defeat.
The Samson Option implicitly rejects the idea that any other state in the Middle East can be allowed to acquire a bomb and thereby level the military playing field with Israel.
It is that very premise that, for decades, has guided Israeli policy towards Tehran. Not because Iran has shown an inclination to develop a weapon. Nor because its supposedly “mad mullahs” would be foolish enough to fire them at Israel were they ever to acquire them.
No, it was for other reasons. Because Iran is the largest and most unified state in the region, one with a rich history, a strong cultural identity and a formidable intellectual tradition. Because Iran has repeatedly shown itself – whether under secular or religious leaders – unwilling to submit to western, and Israeli, colonial domination.
And because it is looked to as a source of authority and leadership by Shia religious communities in neighbouring countries – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – that have a history of similarly refusing to bow to Israeli hegemony.
Israel’s fear was that, were Iran to follow North Korea and acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel would be finished as the West’s most useful militarised client state in the oil-rich Middle East.
Stripped of its ability to terrorise its neighbours, stoke sectarian division and help project US imperial power into the region, Israel would lose its rationale. It would become the ultimate white elephant.
Israeli leaders – grown fat on endless military subsidies paid for by US taxpayers and given licence to plunder the Palestinians’ resources – were never going to willingly step off their gravy train.
Which is why Iran has rarely been out of Israel’s sights……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The last time Iran had a democratic government, in the early 1950s, its secular, socialist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, outraged the West by nationalising Iran’s oil industry for the benefit of Iranians.
The CIA’s Operation Ajax toppled him in 1953 and reinstated the brutal Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as monarch, or Shah, allowing the US and Britain to take back control of Iran’s oil.
The backlash was 26 years coming. Islamic clerics rode an outpouring of popular hatred for the US and Israeli-backed Shah to launch their revolution…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Pact with the devil
Washington’s western allies may be privately uncomfortable at being visibly associated with another illegal US-Israeli war. But in supporting more than two years of genocide in Gaza, they already made their pact with the devil. There is no going back now.
Which is why Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia all dutifully lined up behind the Trump administration as the mayhem began………………………………………………………………………….
The embers of resistance – in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and potentially in new sites like Bahrain – have not been snuffed out. And now, with the attack on Iran, they are being fanned into a fire with every new crime, every new outrage, every new atrocity. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/israel-planned-this-war-on-iran-for?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=190093136&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=17yeb&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
.
The Toxic Legacy of Britain’s Nuclear Testing in Australia
The era of British nuclear testing in Australia was exrraordinary, and its secrets are still being uncovered. Because of ongoing British secrecy, we may not discover them all. In her talk Professor Tynan will examine the complex circumstances taht led the British first to Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, then Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia, to test their atomic weapons. The decision to do so followed the United States’ exclusion of Britain from nuclear weapons and energy R&D after World War II, ostensibly because of the detection of Manhattan Project spies. Australia acquiesced to the atomic tests without asking hard questions, and as a result considerable damage and suffering was inflicted, particularly on Indigenous people and service personnel.
Those hard questions only came decades later, and there are still many to be asked. The British conducted their testing with a greater emphasis on speed than safety. The recklessness of some of the tests carried out in Australia is stunning. Tynan will share specific stories of these dangerous tests and their deadly ramifications for Australians. She will also cover what happened after the British terminated the test series and deliberately misinformed the Australian government about the extent of contamination they left behind. All three test sites were abandoned without proper remediation. The aftermath led to a judicial enquiry, known in Australia as a Royal Commission, in the mid-1980s. This enquiry makred a major shift in Australian attitudes to the tests, and was an important mileestone in an era of uncovering and truth-telling that continues.
Professor Elizabeth Tynan is Head of the Professional Development Program at James Cook University’s Graduate Research School, where she teaches academic writing, editing, and critical thinking skills to postgraduate researchers. She is a former science journalist in both print and broadcast media. Her PhD from the Australian National University examined aspects of the British nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.
You Deserve Better, Iran
The Here and Now, Mar 03, 2026
I’ve spent the last three days obsessively refreshing the New York Times app. Every few minutes there are updates: missiles raining down in Tehran, nearly 200 girls massacred by a bomb “accidentally” hitting their school in southern Iran, retaliatory attacks carried out by the country’s (few) allies, the death of the tyrannical Ayatollah Khamenei. But nowhere on the screen—no matter how far past the fold I read—is there coverage of the Ebrahimi family and what has become of them. Instead, I find locations that have been bombed and I enter them into Google Maps, plotting how far they are from my family’s apartment. I look at the red, inverted teardrop pinpointing their building, and I wonder if they will make it through this alive………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
My anger reaches back to the past, all the way to 1953 and the coup. So few Americans know that Iran wasn’t always an Islamic regime. The democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil so that his country could benefit from their primary natural resource. The US couldn’t have that. So the CIA orchestrated a coup, overthrowing Mossadegh, and reinstalling Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah, who was essentially a puppet of the West. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was a direct response to this, and that’s when the Islamic Republic of Iran was born. And it has suppressed and terrorized its people ever since.
……………………………………………………………… From the constant fear of internal crackdowns and external war, to the failing economy and assault on civil liberties, Iranians haven’t known peace in decades. But they continue to stand up and fight for their rights, they continue to educate themselves to contribute to their society and the world, and they continue to sacrifice their lives so that their children can know a better day.
…………………………………………………………… I’m no historian or political scientist, but even I know that regime change cannot come from external forces. It has to come from within. Khamenei may have been killed, but there is no organized opposition coming to step in and rule, there is no charismatic leader around which the people can coalesce, there is no one to save the day and liberate Iran. Instead, there is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the military that protects the interests of the Islamic Regime, and it is still very much alive. No one knows how this war will play out, but the likeliest scenario is that the IRGC will retain control, and whoever they tap to lead Iran will be even worse than Khamenei.
………………….. I have a hard time believing that’s what this is. This is Epstein. This is midterm elections. This is a narcissist vying for a Nobel Prize. But most of all, to Trump and the others, this is a game. It even has a game’s name: Operation Epic Fury. They don’t give a fuck if their own people die, why would they care about some brown people halfway across the globe.
Year 4: The Timeline That Tells the Tale
Without historical context, which is buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand the war in Ukraine. Historians will tell the story, but journalists are cut short for trying to tell it now.
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, February 24, 2026
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, and the rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians today write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded the same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997 :: The only thing that could provoke a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response would be needless NATO Expansion Far East right till the border of Russia – Sen. Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hRW47hLL5y
— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) June 17, 2022
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“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. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
August 15, 2025: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Anchorage, Alaska for the first face-to-face meeting between U.S. and Russian leaders in more than four years. The Russians left believing Trump had thoroughly understood their position against a ceasefire and instead their desire to reach a comprehensive solution to the war that addressed the “root causes” and Russian security concerns, which have been outlined in this timeline. A series of follow-up diplomatic meetings have failed to advance that goal and the conflict continues to be decided on the battlefield with Russian gains as well as an increase in missiles being fired into each nations territory.
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
1 This Month
of the week- – THE ONENESS of HUMANITY
We the Nuclear Free North
1st July – Webinar Waste of Space: The Environmental Harm of Military and Civil Space Activity st July, 7 pm
Report Launch Online: We are seeing an increasing exploitation of space for military and commercial purposes. This must change.
Protect Sazan Island from the Trump family! https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/protect_sazan_island_from_the_trump_family_loc/?bqFCVab&v=174511&cl=22707147157&_checksum=5e9dde668860e8231c33699735e16a1fbf22ab2cb01da50c999fe8732b9775ef&utm_source=email&utm_medium=blast_email&utm_campaign=174511
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- June 2026 (258)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 