Stockpiling nuclear weapons? That will do nothing for national security, Keir Starmer

Until the UK and other nuclear states are brave enough to disarm, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking towards midnight.
Until the UK and other nuclear states are brave enough to disarm, the Doomsday Clock will keep ticking towards midnight

Jeremy Corbyn, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/05/stockpiling-nuclear-weapons-national-security-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn

Seventy-seven years ago, a group of scientists created a symbolic Doomsday Clock to measure humanity’s proximity to self-destruction, or “midnight”. The hands move closer to – or further away from – midnight, depending on what existential threats exist at that particular time. Addressing the UN general assembly last year, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, announced that the clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight, declaring that humanity was perilously close to catastrophe. “This is the closest the clock has ever stood to humanity’s darkest hour,” he said. “We need to wake up – and get to work.” Guterres named three perilous challenges. One, extreme poverty. Two, an accelerating climate crisis. And three, global nuclear war.

“Lie flat in a ditch and cover the exposed skin of the head and hands.” In 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s government published a pamphlet, Protect and Survive, advising people what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. In what was in essence a DIY handbook, people were instructed to hide under a table, place bodies of dead relatives in another room or, if outside, lie on the floor and hope for the best. Adopting an optimistic attitude toward our extinction, the 32-page booklet was ridiculed by a population that knew there was no survival kit for nuclear annihilation.

The government no longer distributes booklets that advise us how to survive nuclear war. Instead, it buries its head in the sand entirely, turning a blind eye to the fact that we are getting closer and closer to midnight. After a period of gradual decline that followed the end of the cold war, the number of operational nuclear weapons has risen again. There are now more than 12,500 warheads around the world, with 90% belonging to Russia and the United States alone.

Which brings us to Keir Starmer’s most recent speech. “National security will always come first,” he said, as he pledged to increase defence spending and update Britain’s nuclear arsenal. He is right that security is important, but endless escalation is not the answer. What about standing up to the fossil-fuel giants jeopardising the security of our planet? Or abolishing the two-child benefits cap to end atrocious levels of food insecurity across our country? If he really cared about global insecurity, he would defend a foreign policy of peace and human rights, to ensure we get on with our neighbours in pursuit of a more stable world.

Ever since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many of us have warned of the rising risk of nuclear escalation – a risk that was heightened last year when Russia announced plans to halt participation in New Start, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US. In a recent worrying development, Kyiv intelligence sources have reported that a Ukrainian drone has targeted a long-range radar deep inside Russia, the primary function of which is to alert the security forces of a nuclear attack.

It is estimated that a nuclear war between Russia and the US could kill 200 million people in the near term. The former defence secretary Ben Wallace has previously said he expects the UK to be at war by the end of this decade, which is used as a basis for a continued increase in our already bloated defence budget. The Labour party has also signalled it will raise defence spending. But why can’t our media ask politicians some simple questions: what are you doing to prevent the descent into a protracted, all-out-war with Russia? Why can’t you learn from Latin American and African countries and establish zones of peace?

Meanwhile, nuclear threats have loomed over the Middle East because our political leaders lack the ability and willingness to facilitate de-escalation and diplomacy. Our government could have called for a ceasefire in Gaza from the very beginning. They instead ignored warnings from the anti-war movement for de-escalation – and came far too close to an all-out conflict with Iran. Even without the involvement of more global players with nuclear capabilities, the human consequences of such a war would have been catastrophic for the entire world. Remember, doomsday need not be nuclear for it to be an extinction-level event; the first two months of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza produced more greenhouse gases than the annual emissions of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries combined. The only winners are the arms companies making huge profits from death and destruction.

Many justify their entertainment of the prospect of mass extinction with the myth of nuclear deterrence. There are several examples that show the threat of nuclear retaliation has failed to deter an invasion. And there are several factors to explain why, when war has been averted, it was not the threat of destruction that got people to the negotiating table. Ultimately, we should not have to debate the failures of deterrence theory. Just speaking to the descendants of the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki – known as the hibakusha – should be enough to dissuade our political class from their red-button grandstanding.

Some may say that war is a bad time to talk about nuclear disarmament. In reality, there is no better time to do so. If the next government wants to be a global leader, it would advance the cause for nuclear disarmament by signing the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which bans the development, production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons. Currently, it cannot even honour the treaties it has already signed. Our government claims it is still committed to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (signed by Harold Wilson in 1968), but its stockpiles speak louder than words.

Security is not the ability to threaten and destroy your neighbour. Security is getting on with your neighbour. It’s giving children a habitable future. It’s ensuring people have a roof over their head. And it’s when everybody has enough resources to live a happy and healthy life. A report from 2020 calculated that the government spent £8,300 every minute on nuclear weapons that year. Imagine if we instead spent that money on renewable energy, social housing, public healthcare, schools and lifting children out of poverty?

Many of us grew up with the real and terrifying threat of nuclear destruction during the cold war. I don’t want our children learning how to duck and cover in preparation for its return. Those who beat their chests in the name of national security must know that, in the event of a nuclear war, nobody wins. If our politicians care about the legacy they leave behind, they may want to consider the following possibility: if they carry on down this path, there may not be anybody around to remember them at all.

Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour party from 2015 to 2020

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Jeremy Corbyn was smeared for rejecting the use of nuclear weapons – but he was right,

Corbyn was smeared for rejecting the use of nuclear weapons – but he was right https://leftfootforward.org/2020/01/corbyn-was-smeared-for-rejecting-the-use-of-nuclear-weapons-but-he-was-right/, Kate Hudson

– It’s time to smash the narrative that using nuclear weapons is ‘patriotic,

A recurrent trope in the post-election analysis has been Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed lack of patriotism. It’s worth examining.

Rather than arriving at this conclusion by demonstrating that Corbyn doesn’t love his country – for which there is no evidence whatsoever – it seems largely to be based on his unwillingness to commit to killing millions of innocent civilians at the touch of a button.

The media seemed hell-bent on pushing this approach during the election (and it’s resurfacing in the leadership debate). Fortunately others in the public eye, footballer Gary Lineker for one, have more common sense. ‘Nuclear thing is bonkers’ he tweeted, ‘We’re all f**ked if they’re ever used.’

Quite so. And he went on to say – in a twitter debate with TV presenter Piers Morgan – that Trident should be scrapped. Morgan tried to assert the strange logic that because we had them they hadn’t been used. Lineker quite sensibly pointed out that nuclear weapons would not have been used if there were no nuclear weapons.

This is a point we have been making for some time. It reminds me of a debating point made by some pro-nuclear advocates that ‘we have them in order not to use them’. Clearly a silly approach – we could save ourselves £205 billion by not having them in order not to use them!

But having blighted the election with a knee-jerk prime ministerial virility test this is now resurfacing during the Labour leadership contest. Candidates – most notably and recently, Rebecca Long Bailey on Tuesday’s Today programme – are again being asked their position on the use of nukes. Because willingness to press the button has come to falsely symbolise strong leadership, patriotism and a commitment to Britain’s status in the world, who is going to say no?

Nothing could show more clearly the urgent need to have a genuine debate about nuclear weapons, what they are and what their use would mean. We also need politicians to realise that nuclear weapons are not something to posture wildly about – they are indeed weapons of mass destruction. There will be no life worthy of the name after their use. Survivors will envy the dead.

Most concerning is the fact that unquestioning attachment to a totemic but anachronistic weapons system prevents a real assessment of what is needed to meet our security needs in the 21st century – and what we need to spend our defence budget on.

It is an open secret that the MoD is overcommitted on ‘big ticket’ projects. Yet no one seems to dare to question Trident, presumably on the grounds that they would be immediately characterised as a lily-livered traitor.

National security strategies since 2010 have identified cyber warfare, terrorism, climate change, pandemics and organised crime as some of the key contemporary threats we face. Nuclear threats have actually been downgraded in risk level but nevertheless Trident replacement is proceeding – with significant opportunity cost to other higher level defence priorities.

Even former advocates of nuclear weapons, like Lord Des Browne, are speaking out. He was the Defence Secretary who pushed the decision on Trident replacement through parliament in the Blair years. Now he has raised serious concerns about the impact of new technology on Trident and its replacement.

When Trident was launched in the 1990s it was the gold standard of nuclear weapons, undetectable under the waters, 24/7. Now, he states, the replacement will be obsolete before it’s launched: the rapid development of underwater drone technology will render subs fully detectable and advanced hacking skills will jeopardise the security of targeting and missile use.

So this is the problem with reducing serious questions about our national security to the level of a ‘will they/won’t they press the button?’ game show, trapping politicians in a ridiculous zero-sum game where actually everyone loses. Our real security needs are ignored and underfunded. It’s time for change – rethinking our security is well overdue.

Kate Hudson is General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Reference archives, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

NATO plans Europe-wide escalation of war against Russia

Alex Lantier

© Daily MailSince the failure last year of the Ukrainian army’s “counteroffensive” against Russia, NATO countries have relentlessly escalated their war with Russia in Ukraine, authorizing the Kiev regime to launch missile strikes on Russia and pledging to send their own troops to Ukraine. An interview with top NATO officials published yesterday in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, titled “NATO land corridors could rush US troops to front line in event of European war,” highlights that NATO plans to escalate the war from Ukraine across Europe.

Examining the Telegraph article puts paid to arguments that NATO’s escalation against Russia aims to defend Ukraine’s borders or European democracy. NATO is preparing a continental war, sending hundreds of thousands of troops for operations along Russia’s entire western border, from Finland to the Balkans. Even if the implementation of NATO’s plans did not immediately trigger nuclear war, which is a very real danger, it would plunge Europe into mass slaughter on a scale unseen since World War II.

Lt. General Alexander Sollfrank of NATO’s Logistics Command told the Telegraph that NATO plans to take over Europe’s port and ground transport infrastructure in order to send US troops arriving in Europe’s Atlantic ports across the continent to Russia. In these transport corridors, which NATO expects would face devastating air attacks, local laws would be suspended.

The Telegraph published a diagram of planned “transport corridors” across Europe. Initial NATO plans call for US troops to land in Rotterdam or Hamburg, in northwestern Europe. However, they can also arrive at the western Italian ports of Genoa or La Spezia; in Athens; in the Norwegian port of Bergen; or in Turkish ports. NATO military officers would take over key road and rail infrastructure to send US troops across Europe to the Russian border. The Telegraph wrote:

NATO is developing multiple ‘land corridors’ to rush US troops and armour to the front lines in the event of a major European ground war with Russia. American soldiers would land at one of five ports and be channelled along pre-planned logistical routes to confront a possible attack by Moscow, officials told The Telegraph. … But arrangements are also being made behind the scenes to expand the routes to other ports to ensure the ground line of communications cannot be severed by Moscow’s forces.

“In these corridors, national militaries will not be restricted by local regulation,” the Telegraph added, “and will be free to transport consignments without normal restrictions.”

These plans for military rule and war are the outcome of Ukraine war planning that has gone on for at least a year, behind the backs of the people. The Telegraph noted:

Logistical routes have become a key priority since NATO leaders agreed to prepare 300,000 troops to be kept in a state of high readiness to defend the alliance at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, last year.

Russia has thousands of high-precision ballistic missiles with nuclear or conventional warheads, and NATO expects its “land corridors” would be under relentless attack. “NATO only has 5 percent of the necessary air defences to cover its eastern flank,” the Telegraph stated. Indeed, Sollfrank told the Telegraph that the task of defending Europe’s major ports and transport hubs is all but hopeless.

“With regards to air defence, it’s always scarce. I cannot imagine a situation that you have enough air defence,” he said.

Observing and assessing the Russian war in Ukraine, we have observed Russia has attacked Ukraine’s logistics bases. That must lead to the conclusion that it is clear that huge logistics bases, as we know them from Afghanistan and Iraq, are no longer possible, because they will be attacked and destroyed very early on in a conflict situation.

NATO therefore plans to disperse US troops across other, unidentified European ports, even before the main ports are destroyed. Given the likelihood that “NATO forces entering from the Netherlands are hit by Russian bombardment, or northern European ports are destroyed,” the Telegraph said, “arrangements are also being made behind the scenes to expand the routes to other ports to ensure the ground line of communications cannot be severed by Moscow’s forces.”

These lines in the Telegraph reveal the mood of criminal recklessness that is spreading over the entire political and media establishment in the NATO countries. The firebombing of Rotterdam by the Nazis and Hamburg by the British air force were horrific imperialist war crimes of World War II. Yet the Telegraph casually mentions these ports’ destruction, without asking the cost in lives, the catastrophic impact this would have on Europe’s economy — or, above all, what could be done to avert an escalation towards such an outcome……………………………………………………………………..more https://www.sott.net/article/491990-NATO-plans-Europe-wide-escalation-of-war-against-Russia

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Corporate lobbying heats up around governments’ nuclear power plans despite concerns from anti-nuclear advocates

“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them. You have, for example, nuclear industry people that get jobs in the government. It’s a revolving door.”

Critics say nuclear too costly and slow to build while supporters back it as a climate solution

Investigative Journalism Foundation, KATE SCHNEIDER, 6 JUNE, 24

“…………………………….. Fears of nuclear meltdowns have long stymied the expansion of nuclear power across Canada. However, with Canada newly committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, the past few years have spurred a new wave of support for nuclear power development.

Yet, some opposition MPs and analysts worry that the recent embrace of nuclear power by governments in Canada has been a result of lobbying by an influential industry more intent on turning a profit than hitting climate targets.

“We’ve got a very, very powerful nuclear special-interest lobby, and we don’t have politically powerful lobbies for energy efficiency or wind or solar,” said Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and a former Toronto Hydro commissioner. “As a result, our political leaders are making bad decisions.”

Last July, the Ontario government announced the largest expansion of nuclear power in Canada in decades. It intends to add a 4,800-megawatt extension to the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, one of the biggest nuclear power plants in the world.

The site is located on Lake Huron in the northern Ontario municipality of Kincardine — just over 200 km northwest of Toronto — and, while owned by the provincial government, is operated by private company Bruce Power.

Last week, Bruce Power registered a new lobbyist in the province to discuss the “successful refurbishment of Ontario’s nuclear fleet” as well as what it sees as overly onerous regulations, offering to help the government “identify areas for red tape reduction in several sectors.”

The lobbyist, Daniel Levitan, is currently employed by government relations firm Rubicon Strategy. Like several other nuclear industry lobbyists identified by the IJF, Levitan previously worked for the government. He worked for 10 years in external relations for Hydro One, Ontario’s largest electricity distribution utility, starting in 2013. Before that, he was a director of communications and senior policy adviser for several Ontario government departments.

Neither Bruce Power nor Daniel Levitan responded to requests for comment.

Competition for the contract for new nuclear reactors at the Bruce site has also spurred on a lobbying battle between AtkinsRéalis (formerly known as SNC-Lavalin) and Westinghouse, as reported by The Logic last month.

AtkinsRéalis employs both Jean Chrétien, the former Liberal prime minister, and Mike Harris, the former Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, as the co-chairs for their public relations campaign.

The biggest surge in lobbying, however, has perhaps been around funding for small modular reactors (SMRs)……………..

In February last year, Natural Resources Canada launched a funding program offering $29.6 million to encourage the development of SMRs.

Companies working on the technology are eager to take advantage of federal funds. Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), a Seattle-based nuclear technology company, lobbied the government on eight different occasions last year seeking money for “Canada’s first small modular nuclear reactor.”

BWXT Canada Ltd., a nuclear reactor manufacturer, is also registered to lobby at the federal level, hoping to “examine new funding opportunities for nuclear energy and its operations in Canada.”

BWXT Canada has lobbied key ministers and government officials this year, including Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of energy and natural resources; Mairead Lavery, president and CEO of Export Development Canada; Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of public services and procurement; and Ben Chin, one of the prime minister’s top advisers.

BWXT Canada announced in April that it was investing $80 million to expand its Cambridge, Ont. headquarters, increasing its manufacturing capacity to meet the growing demand for nuclear technologies, including SMRs.

BWXT said, “We are interested in updating all levels of government about our operations in Canada, our expansion project at our Cambridge facility and how we are supporting Ontario’s nuclear projects and Canada’s clean energy targets.” USNC did not respond to a request for comment.

“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them.” – Susan O’Donnell, St. Thomas University

Industry groups such as the Canadian Nuclear Association and the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries have also been lobbying officials in the past year, as have several unions including the International Union of Operating Engineers. The Ontario Society of Professional Engineers is also registered to lobby in Ontario.

Reached for comment, Snigdh Baunthiyal, a spokesperson for the Canadian Nuclear Association, provided a statement to the IJF that said, “We have asked for the Federal government’s support to accelerate the deployment of strategic tools such as ITCs [investment tax credits] and CMT [corporate minimum tax] to ensure Canada retains its leadership role and meets its domestic and international climate and energy security objectives.”

None of the other organizations responded to requests for comment.

In total, four nuclear power plants currently operate across Canada, producing about 12.7 per cent of Canada’s electricity. Three plants — with 16 operational reactors — are located in Ontario, while a fourth housing a single reactor is in Lepreau, New Brunswick.

Alongside the privately operated Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, the other two Ontario-based plants in Pickering and Darlington are operated by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), a Crown corporation.

OPG has lobbied the federal government 21 times so far this year regarding “issues pertaining to federal legislation, policies and programs with respect to OPG’s existing nuclear operations or new nuclear opportunities including small modular reactors,” according to its lobbying registration.

The Darlington site is already halfway through a refurbishment costing $12.8 billion while the Ontario government recently announced plans to refurbish four of the reactors at the Pickering plant starting in 2027.

Construction of an SMR at Darlington is scheduled to be completed in 2028. Last July, the Ford government announced that this SMR would soon be followed by an additional three at the site, projected to go online by the mid-2030s.

Jennifer Stone, a spokesperson for OPG, said that these projects will help the province “meet the growing demand for clean electricity for decades to come.

“As OPG helps secure Ontario’s clean energy future, these projects also generate good jobs and drive economic growth across the province both at our facilities and through Ontario’s robust nuclear supply chain,” added Stone.

NB Power plans to build an SMR at its Lepreau site in conjunction with ARC Clean Technology Inc.

NB Power acknowledged the IJF’s request for comment, but said it would be unable to provide a response before deadline.

While Canada’s only operating nuclear plants are in Ontario and New Brunswick, the uranium used to fuel them comes entirely from Saskatchewan, largely via uranium mining giant Cameco.

Cameco engaged in a lobbying campaign in March targeting various federal government officials, including those at Natural Resources Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. According to its most recent lobbying registration, Cameco wants to “advocate for the federal government to include nuclear energy as a major component in Canada’s greenhouse gas/carbon reduction strategy.” Cameco is also registered to lobby in Saskatchewan.

Dale Austin, Cameco’s director of government relations and one of its registered lobbyists, previously worked as a director of the policy analysis and coordination division for Natural Resources Canada as well as a director of policy coordination for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

Susan O’Donnell is an adjunct research professor at St. Thomas University and a core member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick. O’Donnell said the influence of the industry extends beyond what appears in the official lobby registry.

“‘Do they even need to lobby?’ is what I would say. Because they’ve got all their people in the government,” said O’Donnell.

“The nuclear industry and the government are so tightly entwined that you would have difficulty finding some kind of air space in between them. You have, for example, nuclear industry people that get jobs in the government. It’s a revolving door.”

Worries over safety risks and environmental implications of nuclear power have been around for decades, embodied by incidents like the Chornobyl and Fukushima disasters.

However, the concerns expressed today by anti-nuclear advocates seem to revolve more around nuclear being too costly or excessively slow to build.

“It just doesn’t make any economic sense. And it doesn’t make any climate sense,” said Gibbons. “Wind and solar, combined with storage, can keep our lights on at less than half the cost of new nuclear reactors.”

…………………………………O’Donnell said that given Canada’s commitment to decarbonize its electricity grid by 2035, the idea that new nuclear power projects, especially SMRs, will be ready in time is simply unrealistic.

New nuclear reactors typically take 10 to 15 years to build. And besides the first Darlington SMR, no other SMRs in Canada will be operational until at least the early 2030s.

“On the other hand, we do have mature technologies, which are wind and solar, we do have [storage] technology that’s coming along tremendously,” said O’Donnell. “We’ve got the technology now if we’re serious about meeting our targets.”…………….. https://theijf.org/nuclear-power-lobbying

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

What’s Next for Battlefield America? Israel’s High-Tech Military Tactics Point the Way

“I did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face. [But Israel has] been watching us for years from the sky with their drones. They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”—Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet

If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.

Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.

We’ve already seen many of these military tactics and technologies deployed on American soil and used against the populace, especially along the border regions, a testament to the heavy influence Israel’s military-industrial complex has had on U.S. policing.

Indeed, Israel has become one of the largest developers and exporters of military weapons and technologies of oppression worldwide.

Journalist Antony Loewenstein has warned that Pegasus, one of Israel’s most invasive pieces of spyware, which allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone and get all the information from that phone, has become a favorite tool of oppressive regimes around the world. The FBI and NYPD have also been recipients of the surveillance technology which promises to turn any “target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”

Yet it’s not just military weapons that Israel is exporting. They’re also helping to transform local police agencies into extensions of the military.

According to The Intercept, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, “one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here,” as part of an ongoing exchange program that largely flies under the radar of public scrutiny.

A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”

“At the very least,” notes journalist Matthew Petti, “visits to Israel have helped American police justify more snooping on citizens and stricter secrecy. Critics also assert that Israeli training encourages excessive force.”

Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”

That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.

As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”

This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.

In Minority Report, police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs in order to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

While Blomkamp’s Elysium acts as a vehicle to raise concerns about immigration, access to healthcare, worker’s rights, and socioeconomic stratification, what was most striking was its eerie depiction of how the government will employ technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace, especially dissidents.

With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.

For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.

Facial Recognition

Fiction: One of the most jarring scenes in Elysium occurs towards the beginning of the film, when the protagonist Max Da Costa waits to board a bus on his way to work. While standing in line, Max is approached by two large robotic police officers, who quickly scan Max’s biometrics, cross-check his data against government files, and identify him as a former convict in need of close inspection. They demand to search his bag, a request which Max resists, insisting that there is nothing for them to see. The robotic cops respond by manhandling Max, throwing him to the ground, and breaking his arm with a police baton. After determining that Max poses no threat, they leave him on the ground and continue their patrol. Likewise, in Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens and preemptively target suspects for interrogation and containment.

Fact: We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers. This is exactly how Palestinian poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha found himself, within minutes of passing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza with his wife and children in tow, asked to step out line, only to be blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, then imprisoned in an Israeli detention center for two days, beaten and further interrogated. Toha was finally released in what Israeli soldiers chalked up to a “mistake,” yet there was no mistaking the AI-powered facial recognition technology that was used to pull him out of line, identify him, and label him (erroneously) as a person of interest.

Drones

Fiction: In another Elysium scene, Max is hunted by four drones while attempting to elude the authorities. The drones, equipped with x-ray cameras, biometric readers, scanners and weapons, are able to scan whole neighborhoods, identify individuals from a distance—even through buildings, report their findings back to police handlers, pursue a suspect, and target them with tasers and an array of lethal weapons.

Fact: Drones, some deceptively small and yet powerful enough to capture the facial expressions of people hundreds of feet below them, have ushered in a new age of surveillance. Not even those indoors, in the privacy of their homes, will be safe from these aerial spies, which can be equipped with technology capable of peering through walls. In addition to their surveillance capabilities, drones can also be equipped with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, tear gas, and tasers.

Biometric scanners and national IDs

Fiction: Throughout Elysium, citizens are identified, sorted and dealt with by way of various scanning devices that read their biometrics—irises, DNA, etc.—as well as their national ID numbers, imprinted by a laser into their skin. In this way, citizens are tracked, counted, and classified. Likewise, in Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on a suspected would-be criminal, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database. The end result is that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide to escape the government’s all-seeing eyes.

Fact: Given the vast troves of data that various world governments, including Israel and the U.S., is collecting on its citizens and non-citizens alike, we are not far from a future where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In fact, between the facial recognition technology being handed out to law enforcement, license plate readers being installed on police cruisers, local police creating DNA databases by extracting DNA from non-criminals, including the victims of crimes, and police collecting more and more biometric data such as iris scans, we are approaching the end of anonymity. It won’t be long before police officers will be able to pull up a full biography on any given person instantaneously, including their family and medical history, bank accounts, and personal peccadilloes. It’s already moving in that direction in more authoritarian regimes.

Predictive Policing

Fiction: In Minority Report, John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime, finds himself identified as the next would-be criminal and targeted for preemptive measures by the very technology that he relies on for his predictive policing. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.

Fact: Precrime, which aims to prevent crimes before they happen, has justified the use of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and snitch programs. As political science professor Anwar Mhajne documents, Israel has used all of these tools in its military engagements with Palestine: deploying AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories; utilizing facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians; subjecting Palestinians to facial recognition scans at checkpoints, with a color-coded mechanism to dictate who should be allowed to proceed, subjected to further questioning, or detained.

Making the Leap from Fiction to Reality

When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.

Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.

Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.

What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we may not be an occupied territory, but that does not make the electronic concentration camp being erected around us any less of a prison.

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Putin warns West over Ukraine armaments, nuclear arsenal in news conference

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/5/putin-warns-west-over-ukraine-armaments-nuclear-arsenal-in-news-conference

Russia’s president reiterated that attacking NATO countries was a ‘crazy’ idea but warned against Ukraine interference.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country would not rule out using nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or territory were threatened.

On Wednesday, Putin met in person with leaders from international news agencies, including Reuters and The Associated Press, for the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He answered questions ranging from the threat of nuclear war to possible repercussions for countries that support Ukraine’s efforts to launch attacks within Russian territory.

When asked about the prospect of using Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Putin said it was not out of the question.

“For some reason, the West believes that Russia will never use it,” Putin responded, pointing towards the country’s 2020 nuclear doctrine

It authorises the Russian government to consider nuclear options if a weapon of mass destruction is used against the country or if “the very existence of the state is put under threat”.

“We have a nuclear doctrine. Look what it says. If someone’s actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible for us to use all means at our disposal. This should not be taken lightly, superficially.”

“You should not make Russia out to be the enemy. You’re only hurting yourself with this, you know?” Putin said at the news conference.

Article 5 of the treaty establishes that an attack against one country in the organisation is considered an attack against all members.

Putin has repeatedly dismissed the idea of launching an attack on NATO, despite tensions with its member states.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CBS News earlier this year that Putin’s “aggression” could reach Europe, prompting a NATO response. And in April, Germany’s top military leader said “an attack against NATO soil could be possible” in five to eight years.

Still, Putin reiterated his stance on Wednesday. “They thought that Russia wanted to attack NATO,” he said. “Have you gone completely crazy? That is as thick as this table. Who came up with this? It is just complete nonsense, you know? Total rubbish.”

Putin issues warning over Russia strikes

However, Putin also hinted at the possibility of heightened tensions – and even “asymmetrical” military steps – if Western countries like Germany and the United States were to supply Ukraine with weapons used on Russian soil.

He explained that the use of certain weapons, including the use of advanced missile technology, would be tantamount to participation in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“That would mark their direct involvement in the war against the Russian Federation, and we reserve the right to act the same way,” he said.

“If they consider it possible to deliver such weapons to the combat zone to launch strikes on our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply weapons of the same type to some regions of the world where they can be used to launch strikes on sensitive facilities of the countries that do it to Russia?”

His remarks came after Germany decided in January to supply Leopard 2A6 battle tanks to Ukraine. And last month, both Germany and the US agreed to allow Ukraine to use certain missiles to hit targets inside Russia.

The Associated Press reported earlier on Wednesday that Ukraine has indeed used US weapons to strike within Russia, though Washington restricts which arms can be used.

Advanced weapons like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and other long-range missiles remain off-limits.

Asked about the prospect of a wider range of Western missiles being approved for Ukraine’s use in Russia, Putin was defiant: “We will improve our air defence systems and destroy them.”

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Russia | Leave a comment

China: US nuclear weapons in South Korea would undermine its security

VOA, WASHINGTON — June 04, 2024 By Christy Lee. 4 June 24

China said it opposes a deployment of nuclear weapons to South Korea as it would pose danger to regional countries. Beijing was reacting to a report suggesting the United States should take such a measure to enhance deterrence against threats from North Korea.

“If the U.S. deploys tactical nuclear weapons in Asia-Pacific region, it will be a dangerous move that will seriously threaten the security of regional countries and undermine regional peace and stability,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

“We will continue to handle Korean Peninsula affairs based on their merits and our own position,” he said in a statement sent to VOA on Monday. The embassy spokesperson described China’s position on the Korean Peninsula as ensuring peace and stability and advancing political settlement that suits the common interests of all parties.

The remarks were made in response to a report released May 29 by U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling for a major boost to U.S. military buildup and readiness against countries such as North Korea and China………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.voanews.com/a/china-us-nuclear-weapons-in-south-korea-would-undermine-its-security-/7643297.html

June 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | South Korea, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

The basic system works like this: First, Congress takes exorbitant sums of money from us taxpayers every year and gives it to the Pentagon. Second, the Pentagon, at Congress’s direction, turns huge chunks of that money over to weapons makers and other corporations via all too lucrative contracts, gifting them tens of billions of dollars in profits. Third, those contractors then use a portion of the profits to lobby Congress for yet more Pentagon contracts, which Congress is generally thrilled to provide, perpetuating a seemingly endless cycle.

Freeing Ourselves from the Monster Destroying Our Planet and Our Futures

TomDispatch, BY DAVID VINE AND THERESA (ISA) ARRIOLA, 2 June 24

We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics. As those companies have profited, the MIC has sowed incomprehensible destruction globally, keeping the United States locked in endless wars that, since 2001, have killed an estimated 4.5 million people, injured tens of millions more, and displaced at least 38 million, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

The MIC’s hidden domination of our lives must end, which means we must dismantle it. That may sound totally unrealistic, even fantastical. It is not. And by the way, we’re talking about dismantling the MIC, not the military itself. (Most members of the military are, in fact, among that the MIC’s victims.)

While profit has long been part of war, the MIC is a relatively new, post-World War II phenomenon that formed thanks to a series of choices made over time. Like other processes, like other choices, they can be reversed and the MIC can be dismantled.

The question, of course, is how?

The Emergence of a Monster

To face what it would take to dismantle the MIC, it’s first necessary to understand how it was born and what it looks like today. Given its startling size and intricacy, we and a team of colleagues created a series of graphics to help visualize the MIC and the harm it inflicts, which we’re sharing publicly for the first time.

The MIC was born after World War II from, as Eisenhower explained, the “conjunction of an immense military establishment” — the Pentagon, the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and others — “and a large arms industry.” Those two forces, the military and the industrial, united with Congress to form an unholy “Iron Triangle” or what some scholars believe Eisenhower initially and more accurately called the military-industrial–congressional complex. To this day those three have remained the heart of the MIC, locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of legalized corruption (that also features all too many illegalities).

But the MIC is more complicated and insidious than that. In what’s effectively a system of legalized bribery, campaign donations regularly help boost Pentagon budgets and ensure the awarding of yet more lucrative contracts, often benefiting a small number of contractors in a congressional district or state. Such contractors make their case with the help of a virtual army of more than 900 Washington-based lobbyists. Many of them are former Pentagon officials, or former members of Congress or congressional staffers, hired through a “revolving door” that takes advantage of their ability to lobby former colleagues. Such contractors also donate to think tanks and university centers willing to support increased Pentagon spending, weapons programs, and a hyper-militarized foreign policy. Ads are another way to push weapons programs on elected officials.

Such weapons makers also spread their manufacturing among as many Congressional districts as possible, allowing senators and representatives to claim credit for jobs created. MIC jobs, in turn, often create cycles of dependency in low-income communities that have few other economic drivers, effectively buying the support of locals.

For their part, contractors regularly engage in legalized price gouging, overcharging taxpayers for all manner of weapons and equipment. In other cases, contractor fraud literally steals taxpayer money. The Pentagon is the only government agency that has never passed an audit — meaning it literally can’t keep track of its money and assets — yet it still receives more from Congress than every other government agency combined.

As a system, the MIC ensures that Pentagon spending and military policy are driven by contractors’ search for ever-higher profits and the reelection desires of members of Congress, not by any assessment of how to best defend the country. The resulting military is unsurprisingly shoddy, especially given the money spent. Americans should pray it never actually has to defend the United States.

No other industry — not even Big Pharma or Big Oil — can match the power of the MIC in shaping national policy and dominating spending. ……………………………

Endless Wars, Endless Death, Endless Destruction…………………………………………………………………………..

The Environmental Toll…………………………………………..

Endless Wars at Home

As the MIC has fueled wars abroad, so it has fueled militarization domestically. Why, for example, have domestic police forces become so militarized? At least part of the answer: since 1990, Congress has allowed the Pentagon to transfer its “excess” weaponry and equipment (including tanks and drones) to local law enforcement agencies…………………………………..

An Existential Threat…………………………………………………………………….. members of the MIC are increasingly encouraging direct confrontations with Russia and China, aided by Putin’s war and China’s own provocations. In the “Indo-Pacific” (as the military calls it), the MIC is continuing to cash in as the Pentagon builds up bases and forces surrounding China in Australia, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines……………………………………………

The Urgency of Dismantling

The urgency of dismantling the military-industrial complex should be clear. The future of the species and planet depends on it.

…………………………………………………….In short, we’re working on the answers. With the diverse group of experts who helped produce this article’s graphics, we’re exploring, among other ideas, divestment campaigns and lawsuits; banning war profiteering; regulating or nationalizing weapons manufacturers; and converting parts of the military into an unarmed disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure force……………………………………………………… we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death. https://tomdispatch.com/the-military-industrial-complex-is-killing-us-all/—

June 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

UK Labour talks up nuclear weapons to banish Corbyn’s shadow

Keir Starmer says he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons, unlike his predecessor.

JUNE 3, 2024 BY ANDREW MCDONALD, https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-labour-talks-nukes-escape-jeremy-corbyn-shadow/—

LONDON — Want to show you’ve moved on from your far-left predecessor? Try a nuclear strike.

Labour leader Keir Starmer on Monday told reporters he would push the button on Britain’s nuclear deterrent if necessary, as the party aims for election victory on July 4 and tries to demonstrate it’s moved on from the tenure of former party chief Jeremy Corbyn.

“On the nuclear deterrent, it is fundamental, it is a vital part of our defense — and of course that means we have to be prepared to use it,” Starmer said.

In keeping with Western nuclear doctrine, Starmer did not set out the circumstances in which he would actually use the U.K.’s nuclear arsenal — at the center of which is the Trident program of nuclear submarines based in Scotland.

But the commitment alone was an eye-opening moment in the campaign — and an important one for Starmer, who has sought to define himself in contrast to Corbyn, the NATO skeptic and lifelong opponent of nuclear weapons who shifted Labour to the left from 2015 to 2019.

Distance from Corbyn

Corbyn was a long-time supporter of the anti-nukes Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and voted against renewing Trident in 2016, after giving his MPs a free vote on the issue. Despite his own views, however, he did not shift his party’s overall position on the nuclear deterrent, and Labour manifestos under Corbyn did not commit to scrapping Trident.

But Corbyn did come under fire when, in one of his first interviews as Labour leader in 2015, he said he would instruct the U.K.’s defense chiefs never to use nuclear weapons if he became prime minister. “I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons,” he said at the time. “I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons. I want to see a nuclear-free world. I believe it is possible.”

Starmer, who served under Corbyn as a shadow minister, has tried to distance himself from his former boss since becoming leader — despite initially talking up the policies of his “friend” while running for the party leadership in 2020. Corbyn has since been expelled from the party.

Speaking Monday, Starmer sought to hammer home the party’s new direction under his leadership.

With my changed Labour Party, national security will always come first,” Starmer said.

The Labour leader also stressed that his top team is fully behind him in supporting the nuclear deterrent — even though his Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Deputy Leader Angela Rayner joined Corbyn to vote against the renewal of Trident in 2016.

“I lead this party, I’ve changed this party … and I’ve got my whole shadow cabinet behind me,” Starmer said.

June 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

“In Ukraine, a war for memory.”

In defense of what is remembered. At Savur–Mohila hill, Horlivka province. (Guy Mettan.) Report from Donbas, Part 2.

The Floutist, JUN 03, 2024

To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the world.…………………….

Guy Mettan

It is now two years and several months since the Russian military began its intervention in Ukraine. And between Russia and the West, between the Ukrainians in Kiev and the former Ukrainians who have become Russians again, the battle is not just a military struggle. It is also a struggle in defence of memory against those who would obliterate it.

In the West, the 80^th anniversary of the D–Day landings on 6 June will be commemorated without the Russians. This is an official if symbolic denial that the victory over Nazi Germany was first and foremost a Soviet victory and that Operation Overlord could not have succeeded without the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in the east, to hold off German tank divisions.

Attempts to erase the past in this manner are not at all new. One finds cases of it throughout history. But in the lands to Europe’s east and the Russian Federation’s west it has greatly intensified since 2014, a decade back, when, some months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev, the Western powers marked the 70^th anniversary of the D–Day landings and refused to invite Russians to the ceremonies held on the Normandy beaches—this while inviting representatives of the former enemy, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and in Ukraine in particular, history is being turned upside down. Historical statues and war memorials honouring those who defeated the Reich in the Second World War are being demolished to erect steles, inscribed stone pillars, that commemorate not the Soviet’s hard-won victory but the victims of the Soviets. These monuments are also intended to mark the glory of the nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis and massacred Jews, such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevich.

Every day, monuments are taken down and others erected in their place—on the sly, in the silence of the Western media. We seem to forget, to take but one example of many, that the Treblinka death camp was run by a group of some 20 German SS troops and that the exterminations were carried out by a hundred Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards.

This rewriting of history amounts to a war on the past of a people. And if it is waged not on battlefields but at sites of memory, the outcome of this struggle is comparably important. To destroy the collective memories of a people is to destroy their common identity. In this way it also destroys their understanding of their place in the world and their ability to act effectively—and so their ability to go forward. If you have no past you have no future, it has been said: This is the ultimate objective of those who attack the shared memories of others.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the people of Donbas. And, true to their motto, “Never forget, never forgive,” they are in response redoubling their commemorative faith and monuments to fallen heroes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

It is estimated that 75,000 to 102,000 people were massacred at 4/4–bis from the end of 1941 to September 1943, two or three times as many as at the better documented massacre in 1941 at the ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar. The entire Jewish community of Donetsk (called Stalino at the time) was thrown into the pit, along with tens of thousands of others. …………………………………………………….

A visit to No. 4/4–bis is all it takes to understand why the people of Donbas rose up against Kiev in April 2014, when the regime that emerged from the U.S.–backed Maidan coup wanted officially to ban their language while sending the heirs of their forebears’ executioners to suppress them. This region has a strong tradition of resistance to any kind of invaders, from German Nazis to west–Ukrainian ultranationalists in Nazi–style uniforms. If No. 4/4–bis is about remembering, it is also about determination.

You can destroy monuments, but not memories.

Seventy kilometres northeast of Donetsk, in the direction of Bakhmut, in the province of Horlivka, the monumental Savur–Mohila cenotaph is another testimony to the battles of the last century. It is erected at the top of the highest hill in the Donbas, on the site of one of the great clashes of the Second World War. That took place in July–August 1943, at the same time as the famous tank battle of Kursk, which was to break the Wehrmacht……………………………………………………………………………….

This battle to preserve memory against its destruction is probably most intense in Lugansk. I’m welcomed there by Anna Soroka, a historian who has been fighting in the republic’s regiments since 2014.

The first monument she shows me commemorates the 67 children killed by Ukrainian militias from the Kraken and Aïdar battalions, both of them neo–Nazi, who tried to take the city in 2014, failed, and then proceeded to shell it until the Russian intervention in 2022. It was built in the middle of a park that serves today as a kindergarten. Several kids were killed there by targeted Ukrainian shelling—targeted, surely, as the surrounding buildings were not hit.

Children are the objects of an unrelenting information war on both sides. The Ukrainians have filed war crimes charges against the Russians, and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s children’s affairs agency, Maria Lvova–Belova, for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children. Western propaganda repeats these accusations over and over, in media and in the cinema: A full-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson–Rath, featured these allegations and has just won this year’s Oscar for best documentary.

Western media reports naturally fail to pass on the point of view of the inhabitants of the Donbas—who say it is the Ukrainians who are taking children hostage. There is, in fact, a volunteer organization in Ukraine called the White Angels, modelled on the infamous Syrian White Helmets, who, as you will recall, were far from the neutral rescue workers they posed as and, in fact, were covertly funded by Western intelligence and acted in behalf of jihadist groups.

These White Angel detachments were formed in February 2022 by a certain Rustam Lukomsky. The Western (or Western-backed) press has mentioned them on several occasions. The Kyiv Independent (24 March 2024), Le Monde (7 February 2023), the BBC (30 January 2024) are among the media that have reported on this group. “Amid the thud of explosions and rattle of gunfire,” a typical report reads, “a special police unit called the White Angels goes door-to-door helping evacuate the town’s remaining civilians.” Lukomsky, whose background remains unclear, is portrayed invariably as a hero of these operations.

For those in Donbas, the White Angels are something very different. The group’s aim, residents here say, is to force parents in front-line areas to separate from their children under the pretext of protecting them. The children are thus isolated and “taken to safety” in the rear, where they are used as a means of blackmail against their families.

These families are in this way torn between two equally unbearable choices: Either they abandon their homes to join their children, or they remain near the front and are forced to collaborate with the Ukrainian army, which invites them to denounce or sabotage the movements of the Russian army………………………………

The second Lugansk monument is located in a wood just outside the city. Like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it does not appear on our search-engine result pages. And like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it commemorates the site of the massacre of Lugansk’s Jewish community. About 3,000 mainly Jewish women and children and 8,000 adults of various faiths were executed here by the Nazis during the Wehrmacht’s occupation of the city.

“We can’t understand why, today, Kiev is honouring the descendants of those who killed so many of our people during the Second World War,” Anna Soroka, the historian and soldier, tells me as we tour the site. It has been abandoned to brambles since 1991, when Luhansk Oblast, which was previously part of the USSR, became part of Ukraine following the referendum on independence. The new authorities of the republic decided recently to cut the bushes and to restore it.

A little further along, on the other side of the road, the republic’s authorities have erected a vast memorial honouring the combatants and civilians killed in the 2014–2022 war. Nearly 400 graves are lined up on either side of a walkway that leads from a Rodin-inspired statue near the entrance to a column and a small chapel at the centre of the site.

Anna personally knew most of the people buried here………………………………………………………………..

On our way back into Lugansk we pass a large monument to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the city in 1943. And then, after a few more miles, we come upon a Ukrainian tank decorated with flowers and set on a concrete base beside the freeway: Local inhabitants put it there as a reminder that this tank bombed their homes 10 years ago. Below, there is a field still littered with mines where people are strongly advised against walking.

The last monuments on this mournful tour of the city are perhaps the most emblematic of the tragic fate of Donbas over the last hundred years. These comprise the Hostra Mohyla memorial, which is set on a small hill southeast of the city…………………………………………………………………………….

The largest of these memorials, which crowns the top of the complex, holds the key to the psychology of the region’s inhabitants. I studied it carefully.

It features four giant statues of soldiers, heroes-in-arms of the four wars that mark the collective consciousness of Donbas: There is a bronze fighter from the Civil War of 1917–1921, a Soviet soldier from the Great Patriotic War, a militant from the anti–Kiev resistance of 2014–2018, and, finally, a fighter from the war of liberation of the oblast that began in 2022 and continues to the present day. Again, the past lives on and informs the present.

More erasure: For the Hostra Mohyla site, as for others, there is absolutely no information to be found on Western search engines despite its popularity with the locals. Google and Wikipedia ignore or have banned these sites from their directories. Only the German Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, provides any information on the Jewish victims……………………. https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/in-ukraine-a-war-for-memory?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=112164&post_id=144941821&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

June 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Peace talks without Russia ‘laughable’ – John Mearsheimer

https://www.rt.com/russia/598638-mearsheimer-zelensky-peace-talks/ 3 June 24
Vladimir Zelensky’s Swiss ‘peace conference’ will achieve nothing without Moscow’s involvement, the professor argues.

Vladimir Zelensky’s so-called ‘peace conference’ in Switzerland is “not serious” – only face-to-face talks between Moscow and Kiev will settle the Ukraine conflict, American political scientist John Mearsheimer has said.

The Ukrainian leader’s summit is scheduled to take place on June 15-16 at the Burgenstock Resort near Lucerne. Russia has not been invited to the conference, China has declined to attend and US President Joe Biden is reportedly skipping the event to attend a fundraising gala with George Clooney in Hollywood.

“This is not serious,” Mearsheimer told American podcast host Daniel Davis this week. “If you’re going to have a meaningful set of peace negotiations where you’re going to try and settle this war, it’s going to have to involve the Ukrainians directly negotiating with the Russians.”

Since the conflict began in 2022, Mearsheimer noted that only two peace initiatives have made “substantial progress” – Turkish-brokered talks in Istanbul that March, and separate back-channel negotiations mediated by then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Under preliminary terms agreed in Istanbul, Ukraine would have become a neutral state with a restricted military in exchange for international security guarantees. However, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson convinced Kiev to withdraw from the talks, according to multiple media reports and an admission by David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation.

Bennett has also claimed that any chance at peace in 2022 was torpedoed by the US and its allies, which ordered Ukraine to “keep striking [Russian President Vladimir] Putin” and “blocked” the Istanbul agreement.

Zelensky will likely use this month’s conference to promote his proposed roadmap for ending the conflict with Russia. The ten-point document demands a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from all territories Ukraine considers its own, for Moscow to pay reparations, and for Russian officials to present themselves to war crimes tribunals.

Russia has dismissed the plan as “detached from reality.” Speaking to journalists last month, President Vladimir Putin stated that while Moscow is ready for serious talks, Kiev plans to “gather as many nations as possible, convince everyone that the best proposal is the terms of the Ukrainian side, and then send it to us in the form of an ultimatum.”

“This conference is completely without prospects… because getting together and seriously discussing the Ukraine conflict without [Russia’s] participation is absurd,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RT on Tuesday.

“The Ukrainians and the Russians have to be face to face talking about what will be an acceptable deal to both sides,” Mearsheimer told Davis. “The idea that you can have peace negotiations in Switzerland without the Russians is laughable.”

A professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Mearsheimer has drawn intense criticism in the West for arguing that NATO’s post-Cold War expansion was the primary cause of the Ukraine conflict. Mearsheimer has argued since 2014 that “encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians” would end in their country getting “wrecked.”

June 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Journalist, critic of U.S. Ukraine policy, pulled off plane, U.S. seizes his passport

Judge Napolitano of Judging Freedom was also escorted off the plane according to some reports.

https://www.rt.com/news/598711-us-seizes-scott-ritters-passport/, 3June 24
The RT contributor was stopped from visiting Russia

The US State Department has seized the passport of former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he told RT on Monday.

Ritter was on his way to Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) when he was pulled off the plane and had his documents confiscated.

“I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said ‘orders of the State Department’. They had no further information for me,” Ritter told RT. “They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.”

“Was this done in accordance with the First Amendment, or the Fourth,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, commenting on the news. The first amendment to the US constitution protects freedom of speech, press and assembly, while the fourth bars the government from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, who later served as the US and UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He is also a RT contributor, writing about international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation.

He most recently visited Russia in January, spending time in Chechnya, Moscow and St. Petersburg, among other places.

The most recent post on Ritter’s Telegram channel put the Clooney Foundation for Justice on notice for its alleged crusade against “Russian propagandists.”

“Here I am. In your face. If telling the truth about Russia makes me a propagandist in your book, then I accept the title,” he wrote. “Bring it on. I’ll school you on the First Amendment.”

“You have zero concept of what free speech is. Try and arrest me and you’ll find out. In spades. It’s war,” he added.

June 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Senior U.S. Diplomats, Journalists, Academics and Secretaries of Defense Say: the U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine

Progressive Memes, by Donald A. Smith, PhD 3 June 24

It took some years for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about the war in Vietnam. Thanks to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and thanks to the antiwar movement, Americans eventually learned about the injustices and failures of that war.

Likewise, it took several years after the starts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about those wars as well.

Americans are just now starting to realize that they’ve been lied to about the war in Ukraine. (The propaganda effort has been quite effective, with the New York Times, in particular, acting as a mouthpiece for the government’s position.) More and more mainstream publications are exposing the lies, and a majority of Americans now oppose further arming of Ukraine.

This essay is a summary of what the U.S. government has been hiding about the war in Ukraine, with links to sources for further information.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, U.S. military actions since 9/11 directly killed over 900,000 people, with an additional 3.5 million people dying from indirect effects. The wars cost Americans at least $8 trillion and displaced over 38 million people from their homes. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, if you count all expenditures.

If we go back to the 1960s, the number killed by U.S. wars includes the several million killed in the Vietnam war, the approximately 1 million killed by U.S. support for Indonesian military’s attacks on left wing groups, and the hundreds of thousands, at least, killed in proxy wars and government overthrows in Latin America.

The wars, overthrows, and associated sanctions caused mass migrations worldwide — particularly in Europe and at the southern U.S. border — and destabilized politics. Yet almost nobody (except for whistleblowers) was held accountable for these disasters; indeed, many of the same people are in Congress or work for the government or the weapons industry.

Moreover, the U.S. government lied about almost all the wars — in particular, about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also about the war in Yugoslovia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine and here. (In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA, and U.S. propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the U.S. intervention.)

So, it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, claims by President Biden and others that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked” are greatly exaggerated.

Read what these diplomats, secretaries of Defense, journalists, academics, and politicians have to say:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock says in Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided:

“Interference by the United States and its NATO allies in Ukraine’s civil struggle has exacerbated the crisis within Ukraine, undermined the possibility of bringing the two easternmost provinces back under Kyiv’s control, and raised the specter of possible conflict between nuclear-armed powers. Furthermore, in denying that Russia has a ‘right’ to oppose extension of a hostile military alliance to its national borders, the United States ignores its own history of declaring and enforcing for two centuries a sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere.”

Diplomat and historian George Kennan, quoted in Thomas Friedman’s This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders, discussing NATO expansion:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, wrote How the US Lost Russia – and How We Can Restore Relations in Sept. of 2022:

“Many have pointed to the expansion of NATO in the mid-1990s as a critical provocation. At the time, I opposed that expansion, in part for fear of the effect on Russian-U.S. relations….Still, the first step in finding a solution [to the war in Ukraine] is acknowledging the problem and recognizing that our actions have contributed to that hostility.”

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, in We Always Knew the Dangers of NATO Expansion:

“[T]rying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching, … recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”

Ambassador Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell: in Newsweek‘s Lessons From the US Civil War Show Why Ukraine Can’t Win:

“Before the war, far right Ukrainian nationalist groups like the Azov Brigade were soundly condemned by the US Congress. Kiev’s determined campaign against the Russian language is analogous to the Canadian government trying to ban French in Quebec. Ukrainian shells have killed hundreds of civilians in the Donbas and there are emerging reports of Ukrainian war crimes. The truly moral course of action would be to end this war with negotiations rather than prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people in a conflict they are unlikely to win without risking American lives.”

Christopher Caldwell: in the New York Times‘ The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the US Deserves Much of the Blame:

“In 2014 the United States backed an uprising – in its final stages a violent uprising – against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian.”

Chas W. Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council, says in The Many Lessons of the War in Ukraine: “Less than a day after the US-engineered coup that installed an anti-Russian regime in Kyiv in 2014, Washington formally recognized the new regime… The United States and NATO began a multi-billion-dollar effort to reorganize, retrain, and re-equip Kyiv’s armed forces. The avowed purpose was to enable Kyiv to reconquer the Donbas and eventually Crimea…. Crimea was Russian-speaking and had several times voted not to be part of Ukraine.” And: “From 2014 to 2022, the civil war in Donbas took nearly 15,000 lives.” Freeman says that the U.S. undermined several possible peace deals. “Ukraine is being eviscerated on the altar of Russophobia” but Russia has not, after all, been weakened. See this.

William J. Burns, then Ambassador to Russia, current director of the CIA, wrote in a 2008 cable, as revealed by Wikileaks:

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.

MFA: NATO Enlargement “Potential Military Threat to Russia”

Thomas Friedman: in the New York Times‘ This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders:

“The mystery was why the US – which throughout the Cold War dreamed that Russia might one day have a democratic revolution and a leader who, however haltingly, would try to make Russia into a democracy and join the West – would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak. A very small group of officials and policy wonks at that time, myself included, asked that same question, but we were drowned out.”America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders [from the title]

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy said in an interview in 2014:

“With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines. We have been very much involved. Members of the Senate have been there, members of the State Department who have been on the square …. I really think that the clear position of the United States has been in part what has helped lead to this change in regime…. I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovich from office.”

Henry Kissinger in an interview with The Wall Street Journal:

“We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

Neoconservative Robert Kagan writes in an otherwise hawkish Foreign Affairs essay from May, 2022, The Price of Hegemony: Can America Learn to Use its Power?:

“Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’ inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. …. the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.”

Fiona Hill, former official at the U.S. National Security Council during the administration of George W. Bush, in the New York Times’ Putin has the U.S. right where he wants it:

“At the time, I was the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, part of a team briefing Mr. Bush. We warned him that Mr. Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action. But ultimately, our warnings weren’t heeded.”

Pope Francis in Yahoo News’ Pope Francis Says NATO Started War in Ukraine by “Barking at Putin’s Door”:

The real “scandal” of Putin’s war is NATO “barking at Putin’s door.”

James W. Carden, journalist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State, in Simone Weil Center’s America’ Crisis of Reality and Realism: A Symposium (Part I):

“The de facto alliance of Ukrainian westernizing liberals and the fascist Ukrainian far-Right which together drove the so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14 ignored their obligation to respect the democratic process.”

John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago

“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to be wrecked.” (2015)

Former Ambassador Thomas Graham, who served under six U.S. presidents and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Was the Collapse of US-Russia Relations Inevitable?: “US hubris and Russian paranoia undermined partnership.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a weakened Russia sought closer ties to the West and even helped George W. Bush fight the war on terror. But instead of helping Russia fight Chechen rebels, which Russia considered to be terrorists, the U.S. lent support to those rebels. The U.S. pressed its advantage, aggressively expanding NATO, instigating regime change operations in countries friendly to Russia, and undermining Russian energy exports.

Finally, in light of the growing problems with Russia in the former Soviet bloc, the US push in 2008 to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was ill-advised at best. It tied together the two strands of the Bush administration’s hedging policy—NATO expansion and Eurasian geopolitical pluralism—in a way guaranteed to provoke a powerful Russian backlash. Key allies, notably France and Germany, were adamantly opposed. Bush’s own ambassador in Moscow warned that extending an invitation to Ukraine would cross the “brightest of red lines” and elicit sharp condemnation across the political spectrum.

NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, in Opening remarks at the joint meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE):

Putin “went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

Stephen M. Walt, professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, in an essay in Foreign Policy:

“This war would have been far less likely if the United States had adopted a strategy of foreign-policy restraint…. The Biden Administration and its predecessors are far from blameless.”

Michael Brenner, professor at University of Pittsburgh, in How to Think about the Ukraine War after 18 Months:

“[T]he provocations as you enumerated them were very great. And whether there was any alternative for Russia other than this recourse to a military solution, is a difficult question.”

Richard Sakwa, Professor at Univ. of Kent and author of multiple books on Russia and Ukraine in Book Talk: The Lost Peace:

“The argument that the invasion was unprovoked is completely false.”

“The global north, once again, it’s got this obsession, obsessive tendency to fall into war, endlessly. So the global north clearly is shooting itself in the foot. Blowback is going to be massive.”

Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute in The US and NATO Helped Trigger the Ukraine War. It’s Not ‘Siding With Putin’ to Admit It:

“One can readily imagine how Americans would react if Russia, China, India, or another peer competitor admitted countries from Central America and the Caribbean to a security alliance that it led – and then sought to add Canada as an official or de facto military ally. It is highly probable that the United States would have responded by going to war years ago. Yet even though Ukraine has an importance to Russia comparable to Canada’s importance to the United States, our leaders expected Moscow to respond passively to the growing encroachment.They have been proven disastrously wrong, and thanks to their ineptitude, the world is now a far more dangerous place.”

Alfred de Zayas, a former senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says in The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter:

“The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.”

George Beebe, former director of the CIA’s Russia analysis group and former advisor to Dick Cheney, writes in When does NATO actually promote US interests?:

“NATO’s eastward expansion exacerbated the threat of Russian aggression that the alliance was originally intended to prevent. …. While not the sole cause of Medvedev’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the desire to block a Western military presence in these key states was a fundamental Kremlin motivation.”

Beebe said that NATO was unwilling to “respect Russia’s concerns.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

………………………………………………………….For copious detail about U.S. provocations see How the U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine: A Compendium.

The propagandists who continue to push for arming Ukraine say that the people of Ukraine were eager to join the West and that the Maidan Revolution was a grassroots expression of pro-Western sentiment. Instead, there is evidence that the revolution was largely the creation of U.S. regime change meddling, aided by the so-called National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA offshoot); see the Compendium above for documentation. Certainly, most of the people in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea did not want closer ties with the West. (Carnegie Endowment for Peace and Foreign Affairs documented that a majority of the people of Crimea welcomed Russia’s annexation of their territory in 2014: Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov’s My Country, Right or Wrong: Russian Public Opinion on Ukraine (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 7, 2022); John O’Loughlin, Gerad Toal and Kristin M. Bakke’s To Russia With Love: A Majority of Crimeans are Still Glad for Their Annexation (Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2020).) Likewise, in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Chechnya and elsewhere, the U.S. instigated military and interference operations to bring down pro-Russian governments.

So, the U.S. intervened to aid “liberation” movements against Russian allies in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria — allying with Muslim extremists to do so — but the U.S. condemns Russia for intervening to aid Russian-speaking people along Russia’s own borders, in a conflict against Nazi militias supported by the U.S. and driven by aggressive NATO expansion.

Moreover, the U.S. occupies one third of the sovereign nation of Syria, with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. In fact, the U.S. allied with al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Syria, as reported here, here and here.

Likewise, U.S. troops remain in Iraq, despite the opposition of the Iraqi government. So, it’s quite hypocritical for the U.S. to reject a ceasefire which allows Russia to occupy Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine which voted overwhelmingly for closer ties with Russia.

These facts and opinions do not justify Russia’s brutal invasion, but they certainly give the lie to statements by President Biden and others that the invasion was “unprovoked.” Even the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 was provoked: it occurred after, and partially in response to, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.

And the facts expose amazing hyprocrisy. The U.S. launched numerous unjustified wars and proxy wars; surrounded Russia and China with pro-US allies and military bases (about 800 worldwide); exited multiple arms treaties; and increased military spending to about $1 trillion a year despite $34 trillion in debt and dire domestic needs. Yet we accuse Russia and China of being the aggressors.

Both sides can be at fault in a conflict. The U.S. too has blood on its hands.

Finally, the facts are strong reasons why the U.S. should not be arming Ukraine to the teeth, pushing it to fight to the last Ukrainian and risking a nuclear war. Instead, it should push for a negotiated end to the war.
https://progressivememes.org/senior-US-diplomats-academics-journalists-and-secretaries-of-defense-say-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html

June 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Reference, Russia, Ukraine, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

How Nato seduced the European Left. The anti-war movement has fallen for a progressive circus.

UnHerd, Lily Lynch, MAY 16, 2023

In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a leader in this effort.”

This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership. Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war — that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be singing is “Give War a Chance”.

The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call “Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new technologies, and youth influencers.

Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts” and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or the 2007 feature film HQ, produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions and identities.

No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the “Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The “Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.

…………………………………………………………………………………. Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”, the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.

Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

…………………….. Nato’s “Protect the Future” campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.

The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left organised mass protests attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute. https://unherd.com/2023/05/how-nato-seduced-the-european-left/

June 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | culture and arts, EUROPE | Leave a comment

The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JUN 01, 2024,

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/the-us-empire-isnt-a-government-that?r=cqey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense. You won’t understand why military operations are being waged which don’t seem to benefit the American people in any way, and which if anything actually harm the national security interests of the United States. You won’t understand why US foreign policy remains the same no matter who’s in office, regardless of party or platform. You won’t understand why the US and its allies do crazy things that otherwise make no sense for governments to do, like backing an increasingly unpopular genocide in Gaza, starting a cold war with China, or tempting nuclear armageddon with Russia.

And the answer is that these aggressions are not happening because they benefit the US as a nation, or even because they serve the political agendas of any elected officials. The nonstop violence is a means to a completely different end, and is almost an end in and of itself — benefiting war profiteers, shoring up geostrategic control, and expanding the sphere of the US empire’s particular brand of global capitalism.

There’s the nonstop worldwide military operation, and then there’s the theatrical set pieces of an official government slapped together in the foreground which we’re all meant to pretend has something to do with all the wars and militarism we are seeing. In reality the war machine just does what it’s going to do while the official elected suits in Washington put on these performances where they argue about abortion and Donald Trump to make it look like the US has a real government that’s making real decisions.

It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine. The local inhabitants of the hub of the globe-spanning empire are kept too propagandized, entertained, distracted, busy, poor, and sick to have a truth-based relationship with what’s being done in their name around the world, and if they do make some space in their life to become politically engaged they are herded into a kayfabe two-party system where both factions support war, militarism, imperialism, plutocracy and ecocidal capitalism but put immense amounts of energy into empty culture warring over issues that nobody with any real power cares about.

Trying to talk about this to people who are still plugged into the mainstream imperial worldview is like if Amazon had a children’s cartoon show called Andy Amazon & Friends, and the public believed the cartoon show was Amazon — they didn’t know anything about the sprawling trillionaire megacorporation that’s devouring the global economy. You’d try to talk about the gargantuan e-commerce company and they’d think you were talking about the cartoon, and object that what you’re saying doesn’t line up with what they know about the show and its characters.

Once you see the corporation behind the cartoon, once you see the empire behind the performative puppet show of official politics, you see it everywhere. You see it in the movements of the imperial war machine. You see it in the news headlines. You see it in the phony justifications and narratives that are being spouted by the western political-media class. You see it in our education system. You see it throughout our vapid mainstream western culture of interminable diversion and capitalist indoctrination.

And you stop caring about the puppet show. You stop caring about presidential elections, about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, about the culture war wedge issue of the day and the latest hot topic that everyone’s saying you need to take a position on. It becomes as interesting to you as some Youtube video your kid has on in the background when you’re busy dealing with a home emergency.

And the behavior of the empire absolutely is an emergency. The escalations against Russia and China that these freaks are pushing have the world on a trajectory that’s going to get us all killed, and the horrors they are inflicting in Gaza and elsewhere are creating a nightmare on earth right here and now. The empire is only getting crazier and more violent as its planetary domination becomes more challenged, and until people can see it for what it really is, it’s going to be very hard to build up the necessary public opposition against it to use the power of our numbers to force them to stop.

June 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | culture and arts, politics, USA | Leave a comment

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nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope