Category: War and Peace

New Zealand Aligns itself with Genocide

23/01/23

New Zealand’s new Coalition government has, as of 23rd January 2023, formally agreed to support Israel’s genocide in Palestine by agreeing (at US request) to provide a small military force to support the American ‘coalition” to bombard Yemen.

The New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon, has committed outrageous lies to say there is no connection between the Gaza terror and the actions of Ansarallah (Houthi). Ansarallah has made it abundantly clear that the reason it has been attacking shipping heading to Israel is to try and force Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mr Luxon is self-evidently lying through his teeth in saying there is no connection between the Red Sea attacks by Ansarallah and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, our ‘great’ New Zealand journalists at the news conference where Luxon was interviewed on the Yemen announcement, blindly accepted these lies without a question.

The UK and US in their bombing campaign in Yemen are simply continuing the genocide that their previous Saudi proxy had waged in Yemen for 9 years from 2014, using American and UK weapons, American and UK military instructors and guidance systems, and in all likelihood, “retired” British and American pilots to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world.

New Zealand’s conservative National Party which Chris Luxon leads, has a long history of sucking up to every US war of atrocity- from Korea, (shelling North Korean fishing villages from our warships) Vietnam (sustained mortar fire into Vietnamese villages), Iraq( hiding in their military camp in Basra) , Afghanistan (supporting the US and Australians to murder and torture Afghans) to its proxy war in Ukraine ( providing logistics to Ukrainian neonazis to shell Donetsk City civilians with cluster munitions) ; but all tiny amounts of military support  intended to bolster the U.S.’s ‘legitimacy’ in fighting these wars on the world stage.

However, the United States no longer has the credibility or respect of the Global South or indeed much of the world; particularly because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal savagery in Gaza.

As Caitlin Johnstone notes:

We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.

Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.

The National Party, along with its right wing allies; New Zealand First and ACT, are stuck in a time warp where the “civilised’ white man rules the world, and might is right.

New Zealand’s credibility globally has just sunk to a new low.

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Links

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/01/hoping-that-china-will-help-with-yemen-is-delusional-bullshit.html#more

The Psychopathic West

As of 19th November 2023, the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF) continues to bomb, fire missiles, bulldoze and steadily destroy the Gaza Strip, the 177 square kilometre concentration camp set up by Israel in 1975 to contain Palestinians already enduring a blockade limiting food water electricity and other resources.

As the “occupying entity’ Israel under international law, has an obligation to protect that population. Israel ignores all such UN requirements, and has consistently brutalised the Gaza and West Bank Palestinian populations, as it has done since the Nakba (the Catastrophe) of 1948, when Israeli soldiers killed thousands and forcibly ejected millions from Palestine into refugee camps across the Middle East.

Israel was only able to achieve that ethnic cleansing and subsquent genocide of the Palestinian people with the unconditional military support of billions of dollars and pounds from the United States and the United Kingdom. These two entities have thus made a 75 year commitment to genocide of the Palestinian people to ensure that European Zionists can live their apartheid dream of a Jews only state in Palestine -thus condemning all non-Jews in Palestine; many of whom can trace their families back thousands of years in Palestine, to lives as non-citizens, or, in the words of many Zionists- sub-humans.

Thus while the IDF continues its barbaric bombing of women, children hospitals universities,essential infrastructure and residential areas in Gaza under the pretence of fighting Hamas; the US and UK “authorities” secretly celebrate the final solution to the Palestinian problem-sending more missiles and bombs to Israel so that the Gazan population can be finally eradicated or forced into Egypt.

A cease-fire therefore is not an option; that would just prolong the Palestinian problem and might lead, (“God”-forbid) to a negotiated settlement – a 2 or 1 state solution.

British and US “authorities” are therefore dismayed at the enormous groundswell of public revulsion in the West to Israel’s barbaric response to Hamas’s terror attack on October 7th, which lead to the deaths of over a thousand Israelis and about 250 hostages. Increasing evidence shows that many of those deaths were caused by Israeli helicopter gunships shooting at anything that moved.

https://goingunderground.castos.com/episodes/bombshell-max-blumenthal-exposes-israels-bidens-lies-deceit-over-gaza-bloodbath-october-7th

It is ironic that it is only now that Western publics are beginning to appreciate what Israel stands for- a quasi-religious fanatic apartheid state prepared to undertake any barbarity to fulfil its messianiac goal of a Jews-only state in Palestine.

These acts of barbarity and dehumanisation of Palestinians are not a one-off; they are part of a systematic process of extermination of Palestinians that has been steadily evolving and constantly refined by the Israeli state since the Nakba of 1948.

Those who criticise the Israeli entities actions are deemed to be ‘anti-semitic’; strangely ignoring the overtly deeply racist and murderous anti-Palestinian actions of the Israeli state and its settler thugs, and ignoring the explicit racism of a state that only recognises one section of its people as legitimate citizens.

For 75 years Israel has been milking the myth of it being the victim against Arab terrorism, a myth that Western mainstream media has enthusiastically endorsed, despite the evidence. e.g. Even today the New Zealand state television channel, TVNZ1 conveniently refuses (despite requests) to acknowledge the existence of the Nakba when outlining their history of the ‘Israeli/Arab’ conflict.

Purely coincidentally of course, we note that New Zealand’s ‘Five Eyes’ ally Australia is providing targetting data of Palestinians to be murdered by Israel, through its Pine Gap intelligence monitoring facility. Almost certainly, New Zealand is providing similar data to Israel via its signal intelligence facility at Waihopai.

So why does the US and UK and most of the West “unconditionally” support these 75 years of brutal savagery by Israel?

Because its suits them. Israel is supposedly a rational “Western” (read “white”) state entity in the Middle East amidst a torrent of ‘unpredictable Arabs’ -who also dont have the “right” religion! Israel is a predictable conduit for Western arms into the region. Israel can act as a proxy for Western ambitions in the Middle East, can spy for them, and can undertake savagery in the region with terrorists that would be hard to justify at home; including ongoing assassinations of Iranian scientists and providing support to ISIS jihadists in Syria.

US and UK authorities continue to deny what is self-evident-that Israel is committing massive war crimes against the Palestinian people. Using the illegitimate excuse of ‘revenge’, Israel is indisputably committing the war crime of collective punishment. UK’s Labour leader (and bizarrely a human rights lawyer) Keir Starmer, has enthused about the right of Israel to commit collective punishment, knowing full well he is lying, and is thus complicit himself in genocide

The UK, France, and other Western nations have even attempted to make support for Palestine illegal (a gross human rights abuse in itself). Such is the desperation of the Western establishment to support apartheid Israel, no matter the cost. The effort to keep lying that Israel is a shining democracy with the right to ”self-defence’ by people like Germany’s Olaf Sholtz is astounding. Im not aware of too many democracies in the world that keep half their population in concentration camps, depriving them of basic necessities of life and human rights!- but such are the cruel fantasies that people like Sholtz have to make up to defend their complicity in genocide.

And all the while, Palestinian people of all ages are being massacred by the Israel state for the crime of not being Jewish.

Mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, young children and babies; blown to pieces by Western bombs and missiles used by a racist psychopath state.

But none of this should be any surprise -the West has been actively engaged in the murders of millions in the South over the centuries, where a profit can be made- why stop that little scam now?

The difference this time is that the role of the West in this ongoing savagery by Israel is visible for everyone to see- despite the fabrications and prevariciations of mainstream Western media.

The lies, duplicity, brutality, greed and racism of those who cling to power in the West are exposed for all to see.

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Links

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/19/when-it-comes-to-the-israeli-led-war-on-terror-follow-the-money

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-hospitals


The Immorality of Western Politicians

On 7th October , the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Hamas, a militant group in Gaza , the home to three quarters of a million Palestinians imprisoned behind concrete and wire fences by Israel since 1967, launched a surprise attack against Israelis.

Moon of Alabama talks about this new Hamas raid (doomed to failure against overwhelming military odds) as a retaliation against Israel’s recent military support for Israeli settler thug’s invasion of the Muslim Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

In reality, this is one more desperate attempt by Palestinians to reassert their legitimate rights as free Palestinians, rather than prisoners of the Israeli apartheid regime – which many have described as slow motion genocide, since the 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe) when Israeli soldiers, with the full support of the US, UK and many other Western countries, killed thousands of Palestinians and brutally forced many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

247 villages in Southern Palestine were ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. The refugees from those villages were then forced into a concentration camp that came to be known as the Gaza strip.

And while any responsible government should deplore any violence by any party in another part of the world; the response from Western governments, including my own New Zealand government, has been to condemn Hamas’ violence, without in any way acknowledging that the causes for this violence are the direct result of the barbaric actions of multiple Israeli governments since 1948. A long-standing pattern of ‘legalised’ (by Israeli courts) sustained violence against Palestinians for their crime of owning land that Israeli settlers wanted to acquire at no cost.

Let us not pretend that Western politicians are not aware of these barbaric crimes by the Israeli state- crimes which continue to this day, and every day, and yet somehow, year on year, we do not hear condemnation of these crimes by the Israeli state and the settler thugs they support. Instead we hear that Israel is a key partner of the US, the UK and the EU in helping conducting the West’s business of extortion of Arab and Iranian assets in the Middle East.

And for many years the United States purported to act as an ‘honest broker” between the Israeli state and Palestinians; pretending that a Palestinian state was still a viable option, while all the while providing unlimited military and other resources to the Israeli regime to continue it expansionist agenda in Lebanon and Syria, and almost nothing to the West Bank and Gaza enclaves.

This is one moment in this decades’ long war against Palestinians where Western countries could really do the honourable thing, and strongly pressure Israel to ensure it complies with international law by tearing down the walls containing Palestinians in their tiny prison encampments, grants them full rights as Israeli citizens, allows the right of return for all Palestinians since 1948 and fully compensates Palestinians for the theft of their lands.

Do we in fact have any Western politicians with any honour?

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Postscript

As Jonathan Cook so lucidly outlines ,the West’s enthusiastic swooning over Israel’s ‘retaliation’ is sick-making; and who gives a flying f*** that Israel’s much vaunted ‘intelligence” (read ‘Terrorist’) services didn’t have advanced warning of Hamas’s attack? How about some long term justice for the Palestinian people (after 75 years of Western enthusiastic support for Israeli injustice). As Jonathan says; ‘This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals’.

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Links

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/10/palestine-strikes-back.html#more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

Remembering the Nakba

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-west-hypocrisy-jailbreak-stomach-turning

https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/gazans-break-out-of-worlds-biggest?publication_id=314817&post_id=137770975&isFreemail=true&r=5hf4x

– IMEMC News International Middle East Media Center

https://richardfalk.org/

PCHR: “Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Weekly Update | September 14-20, 2023)” | – IMEMC News

Mansour: Israel’s ‘License to Kill’
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak Israel’s Language

Media in an Unstable World

The world for humans continues to become more uncertain and more unstable; although you would largely not know that from our mainstream media. Climate Change is a little problem but we are working on it ,they say. Lets just ignore that we nowhere near achieving any of our much vaunted global targets of containing, let alone reducing, Co2 emissions- we are therefore definitely heading for global climate disasters in less than a decade.

Catastrophes like the recent flood devastation in Dera in Libya are third world issues, not our problem (and absolutely nothing to do with the avaricious Western world’s destruction of Gadaffi’s prosperous Libya (and his brutal death with a bayonet up his anus by Western supported jihadists, which US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton subsequently delightedly cackled about).

We are witness to an existential war in Ukraine, where, we are told, Ukraine will inevitable triumph against Putin and the evil Russians, but where in fact the West continues to coerce the Ukrainian military into sending thousands and thousands of its troops into slaughter against overwhelming superiority of Russian arms (Russian total air superiority, vast mine fields and overwhelming artillery capacity) .

And once independent academic analysts like Robert Patman in New Zealand along with the rest of the West, now regurgitate the nonsense of China being a threat to the West (and to New Zealand) and thus the appropriateness and necessity of the West continuing its brutal and sadistic “rule based international order” to confront both Russia and China.

Strangely too we hear very little mention in Western mainstream media of the drumbeat of a new multi-polar world. A world where the West can no longer dictate the economic terms through violence, war and blackmail of the South. Perhaps the images of African Sahel countries finally booting out their French colonial occupation forces raises some eyebrows in countries other than France, but there appears little recognition that this anti -Western movement is gaining steam across the South.

And strangely we how somehow not informed by mainstream media that the $6 billion that the US government has now so generously released to suppliers of essential goods to the Iranian population for the release of five Americans held by Iran for spying, was in fact Iranian state money stolen by the United States with their unilateral illegal sanctions against Iran, because of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons development.

Or perhaps you missed the very quiet admission by the US’s General Milley recently that the much hyped Chinese ‘spy’ balloons that drifted over the United States in February 2023 actually didn’t have any spy gear installed on them at all.

But hey, who needs facts when you need to inflame good white folks against the evil Russians,Chinese and Iranians ( let alone the North Koreans that the US committed 3 years of brutal genocide against in the Korean War).

And let’s just forget about climate change, what is more important than ensuring our global economy and consumerism keeps expanding?- right to the very end…

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Links

Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
New Zealand’s priority is helping defeat Russia in Ukraine
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods

How Americans released in swap deal engaged in espionage activities in Iran (presstv.ir)

World War Three

With the decision of the West to provide F16 fighters to the Kiev government we are heading rapidly closer to a world war.

It is not that the F16s are likely to be a ‘game-changer’ -as the Western media have called all of the previous Western wonder-weapons provided to Ukraine. It is the fact that the decision to provide these weapons is one more example of the West crossing the red-lines they promised they would not cross about the provision of more military support to Kiev.

Once it becomes evident that F16s are not going to provide the military advantage to Kiev that has been promised (Kiev cannot provide the necessary air support infrastructure to create a safe environment for the new fighters), nor can they match the newer generations of Russian fighters and its surface and air to air missiles), the next Western red-line will have to be crossed.

The West, after saying that training Kiev’s pilots on F16s would take at least 18 months, now says the training will take 4 months. This very likely indicates that the pilots flying the F16s will not be Ukrainian – they will be Western military ‘retirees’ or ‘volunteers’ and/or be operated out of Polish airbases..

Sow the seeds - US war poster

Kiev and the West is determined to ‘defeat’ the Russians in Ukraine- to ‘return’ Crimea and the Donbass to Ukraine (and then to carve up Russia in the way the neocons attempted to in the Yelstin years) . Given that President Putin gave the key rationale for the Ukraine invasion as protecting Russian speakers in the Donbass against neonazi Kievan troops, and given that Crimea has been a part of Russia since Catherine the Great annexed Crimea in 1783, a ‘return’ of Crimea and the Donbass to Ukrainian control would be an existential threat to the whole Russian Federation (not just Putin) and the Russian population would never accept that loss.

This is particularly so since Kiev has made it clear that it regards Donbass’ Russian speaking citizens as second class citizens who either have to be forced to speak Ukrainian or be exiled to Russia. Similarly Ukraine has made it clear that anyone in Crimea who has supported Russia (95% of the population at last count) will be deported to Russia once they ‘reassert’ control of the Crimean peninsula.

Western ‘intelligence’ and their military leaders are presumably aware of the existential nature of this war to Russia; although a knowledge of history and facts is not a prerequisite for decision-making in the US).

While NATO and the West insist they are not at war with Russia, the facts speak otherwise. Kiev’s military would have collapsed more than 6 months ago without NATO weapons; without NATO’s satellite and drone surveillance of Russian troops, without its ‘advisors’ on the ground in Ukraine, without the training of Kiev’s troops to use NATO weapons, and without the ‘retired’ NATO military ‘volunteers’ on the front line. NATO thus continues to pretend that its only providing ‘assistance’ to Kiev- the reality is very different – this is a NATO war.

It is now a very small step for NATO soldiers with NATO uniforms to be on the ground in Ukraine and supporting Kiev from NATO airbases and missile sites in Europe. Once that final line is crossed-possibly in the next few months, China will have no choice but to enter the war on Russia’s side. China has certainly provided economic support but likely no overt military support to Russia since the war began, and is fully aware that once Russia is disposed of and carved up, (as NATO strategists have made clear is the goal) they will be next.

The extension of the military ring around mainland China and the recent development of a second AUKUS/NATO military containment ring in the Pacific with New Guinea and other Pacific nations, plus the West’s universal abrogation of the ‘One China’ principle regarding Taiwan that the West had previously signed up to, are clear signals to Beijing that war with China is coming, and coming soon. Russia must survive for China to survive.

China continues to play a constructive and peace-making role in Ukraine as Patrick Lancaster notes, although to date, without success, unlike its outstanding recent success in brokering peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran to the great consternation of the U.S., U.K. and Israel, who had hoped that an Iran/Saudi confrontation would be the catalyst for regime change in Iran and access to its oil once again as in the ‘good old days’ of the brutal American controlled Shah.

The United States is desperate to ensure that it maintains total control of the economic strands of the global economy; it rightly sees the expansion of non-US dollar transactions as a major threat to it’s control, and its consequent capacity to threaten and cajole and extract the wealth of other nations who do not obey their wishes. And there are many in the West who are quite deranged enough for the world to endure World War 3 so that the West’s avaricousness can be maintained.

If the dollar collapses, the United States already in huge debt, will collapse rapidly. Its capacity to maintain its 600 plus military bases around the world will cease – and like the decline of the Roman Empire on fast forward, its military men will return home to vent their frustrations on the Empire.

Thus neither side in this war can afford to lose. Those of us on the periphery of this battle of the giants, need to maintain our safety as best we can!

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Links

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/28/the-moment-has-arrived-biden-must-give-ukraine-all-it-needs-to-win

A Letter to New Zealand’s Defence Minister

Kia ora  Mr Henare

I note with interest your and the Labour Party’s unequivocal support for the current government in Kiev on your recent visit to Ukraine.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/20/defence-minister-peeni-henare-visits-ukraine-meets-counterpart/
Concurrently and interconnectedly  I note New Zealand’s decision to vote against  the annual  UN resolution   ‘COMBATING GLORIFICATION OF NAZISM”.

https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

FROM https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

These two  interconnected decisions make clear New Zealand’s position to  support the Kiev government, a regime which  is  unequivocally militarily and politically supported by neonazi groups like the Azov and Aidar battalions  and political  groups like the Right Sector, and which  for 8  years has been  shelling and  killing  more than 10,000  innocent Ukrainian people in  the Donbas simply because they  want to  speak  their native language, Russian (note that these figures are  confirmed by the Organisation for Security in  Europe (OSCE)

New Zealand equipment and targeting information is undoubtedly also being used by the Kiev military to  continue to fire missiles at Donetsk City and its civilian  infrastructure.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to be unequivocally condemned, a path to peace must be negotiated which dispassionately  examines the reasons for this war  and Western  governments’ refusal  to  honour the Minsk  agreements signed by  Kiev, which would have  meant the Russian  invasion would never have happened.

While previous Labour administrations like David Lange’s and Norman Kirk’s had the moral  courage to  push back  against  the NATO white mans’ club, which continue to drone murder,  torture and initiate wars against those who do not wish  to ‘compulsorily share’ their resources with the Western  world, this Ardern government has cemented its relationship  as a NATO ‘ally’  and a key member of the Five Eyes group and continues to  enthusiastically  facilitate those illegal and immoral  activities. 

One would have that thought that those who have been victims of white man’s colonialism would have  taken some courage and   initiative to  distance New Zealand from  these activities of the white man’s club. New Zealand  is, and will increasingly become a pariah  state in the South  and East while it maintains it enthusiastic support for  NATO and the current ‘international  rule based order’,  which  every  non  Western  state recognises as code for the right for the US and its allies to do  whatever it wishes , including sanctions, targetted killings and  extreme violence against  whole populations. 
Does not the current Labour government have the courage to  push back  against  this ever expanding and dangerous war  that  NATO is fuelling at  the expense of likely  hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, and demand that  each  side sit down to negotiate firstly a cease-fire and then a peace agreement which  is endorsed at the UN?

I sincerely  hope that  this Labour Government does belatedly recognise that New Zealand’s international and defense policies and actions  are currently not on  the moral side of rectitude.

Postscript 6th November 2022

The Telegram channel Rybar made the following post on 5th November.

#Ukrainian #Nazi group, within Azov Movement, Karpatska Sich, translated to Ukrainian the New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo White Supremacist shooter.

The Ukrainian-language translation of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, flanked by a sticker for Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Karpatska Sich.

The New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo shooter is a “must read” for all #NeoNazis and White Supremacists worldwide.
Here a group of #Ukrainian #Nazis from Karpatska Sich holding copies of the book translated to Ukrainian by the Nazi elitist group inside #Azov movement.

Neo Nazi Polish/Ukrainian group Karpatska Sich made a hateful video regarding the Pride marches in the EU the year.

(Note also the ‘sieg heil’ Nazi salutes)

Follow:
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

In other words, the New Zealand government’s military is funding, training and likely imbedded with neonazis in Ukraine who are directly implicated in the New Zealand mosque shooting in Christchurch in 2019, which the same NZ government has roundly condemned as a terrorist act.

New Zealand is supporting terrorism.

Western media and the Quest for War

The bizarre orchestrated western media response to Hu’s exit from the PRC’s national Congress meeting in Beijing is noteworthy. Apparently a frail 79 year old man being gently escorted out the CCP Congress shows-the-utter-ruthlessness-of-xi-jinpings-quest-for-absolute-power!

Exactly how that is the case is not made clear, and why he would be so publicly supposedly removed from office is unexplained, but apparently any opportunity to demean and deride the Chinese Communist party by the West is a good opportunity. But why should that be so?

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong based and not China state media) reported that ‘The episode was not reported in Chinese state media but in its evening newscast on Saturday night state broadcaster CCTV included a shot of the former president voting at the closing ceremony before his exit’. Clearly Mr Hu Jintao had not been sent off to the concentration camps or eaten by sharks at the behest of President Xi Jinping, like other more fanciful stories concocted by South Korean ‘intelligence’ officials about North Koreans who buck the Party line –but mysteriously reappear larger than life later after suffering a hideous death!

We are told that Xi Jinping is ‘ruthlessly’ consolidating his power by appointing more of his supporters to his decision-making circle, (something of course that Western politicians never ever do!) after the Chinese Communist Party Congress (representing its 96.71 million members) were somehow intimidated into once again electing the dictator Xi Jingping for a third consecutive term!

And we are told by Western media that China has a ‘very aggressive’ foreign policy. Strangely this view is not reflected by most of the nations of the South, many of whom have benefitted enormously from China’s technical expertise and support for their infrastructure development – in sharp contrast to the predatory practices of the United States and its IMF and World Bank proxies, of dismantling economically vulnerable states for the benefit of American corporations.

The Chinese ‘threat’ therefore is that the long-standing predatory actions of the United States and its Western white allies (what the West likes to call the ‘rule-based order) are under threat.

Even in little old New Zealand China’s economic overtures to small Pacific Island nations are seen as a heinous threat to New Zealand agricultural businesses’ accessing cheap (often under minimum wage) Pacific Island farm labour. The crime of China providing the infrastructure drinkable water to villages in the Cook Islands (whose population are technically New Zealand citizens!!) was recently outlined in detail on New Zealand’s state television and radio

Attempts by the United States to try and ensure Chinese businesses are unable to access state of the art semi-conductors for their electronic equipment is just one more example of ‘rule-based order’ Western nations trying to ensure their continued capacity to loot the countries of the South .

The pretence is that these actions by the US are designed to impede China’s military aggressive actions. They are in fact designed to ensure China stays a subservient power to the US, economically and militarily. Charles Freeman (ex US diplomat) states it bluntly: ‘This is the equivalent of smoking pot in a hot tub and fantasizing about tripping up competitors in track events, while they are out training and trying out new equipment. It’s conceivable that China will stumble and fall, enabling us effortlessly to “win the future,” but it is imbecilic to count on this. Delusional complacency and reliance on dumb luck or divine intervention will not enable us to outperform China or any other rising power.

And as Counterpunch notes: ‘Biden and the Post are talking about a country [China] that has not used military force outside its borders for more than 40 years, and has only one military facility [Djibouti] outside its zone of influence.’. Contrast that with the West’s brutal wars in the last 40 years in Iraq, Syria, and Libya- let alone its unwavering support for Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian people or the U.S.’s 750 plus military bases across the world.

Pelosi’s bizarre flight to Taiwan recently to stir up the Republic of China or ROC (colloquially known as ‘Taiwan’) into buying lots more American military equipment they didn’t know they needed, is just one more of many examples of attempts by the US to provoke mainland China so it can be further labelled in the Western (white) media as an aggressive dictatorship and thus not to be trusted. It is after all only the Western white media (and now Zelensky’s PR team) who speak “the truth”!!!

A not dissimilar strategy has been successfully used by the US and its white allies against the Russians by arming Ukraine to the teeth with NATO weapons and supporting Kiev in shelling and killing 10,000 Ukrainian Russian speaking civilians in the Donbass since 2014. The killings, the US supported Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, the savagery of the neonazi battalions in the Donbass and Kiev’s secret service, the SBU, simply no longer exist!- they are supposedly wiped clean from our memories.

It would seem that those of us in the West are, not so slowly, being brainwashed by a Western media in lock-step with Western corporate ‘interests’ and their politicians, to believe that China and Russia are the evil ones against whom we must fight to the bitter end to maintain our ‘right’ to plunder the rest of the non-white world as we see fit.

And all the while, Gaia will have the last laugh on those petty human squabbles.

The South China Morning Post ( Hong Kong based and not state media ) reported that ‘The episode was not reported in Chinese state media but in its evening newscast on Saturday night state broadcaster CCTV included a shot of the former president voting at the closing ceremony before his exit’.

Postscript

An erudite and sane perspective on the Ukraine war and international relations by Robert Falk (below)

[Prefatory Note: This is the third iteration of an essay on the evolution of the Ukraine War, the earlier two versions published online in Transcend Media Service (TMS) and CounterPunch. The essential argument remains: war-mongering geopolitics in the nuclear age imperils species survival and suppresses the necessity for emergency action to restore sustainable forms of ecological habitability to planet earth.]

And Chris Hedges’ beautiful but savage indictment of all war

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/my-war-never-ends?

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/us-chip-war-version-2-decoupling-from-china-or-declaring-war/

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Links

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/300719559/the-photo-that-shows-the-utter-ruthlessness-of-xi-jinpings-quest-for-absolute-power?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3196899/former-chinese-president-hu-jintaos-congress-exit-break-communist-party-script

US breaks ice, Russia thaws
Outcompeting China to “Win the Future”

The Cult of ‘Personality’

The cult of ‘personality’ is not however limited to kings and queens; we see it everywhere in the world; the adulation of rock and movie stars whose lives are constantly shattered by trauma and misadventure and a role model for no-one, the president of an Eastern European country with an addiction to cocaine and ill-gotten gains who sacrifices the lives of thousands of men for his glory, or another Eastern European president whose addiction to patriotism and ‘duty’ has resulted in the ruthless death and destruction of so much

Kings and Queens are human beings too, and the grief and loss they leave behind should be respected and not trivialised..

However, it does astound me how not only people in the U.K. but around the world are now eulogising the late Queen of England for her glorious ‘service’ to the country and (British) Commonwealth. Exactly what that ‘service’ was I am yet to discover.

Was it perhaps those queenly waves from her limousine, or maybe the way she delivered her annual speeches from the Crown which had been written for her by the government of the day, or perhaps the way she shook hands with even the lowliest of commoners and smiled so graciously?.

In compensation for that annual ‘service’ we are told she and her retinue are paid $78million (USD) per annum by the British taxpayer, while the Windsor family’s assets currently stand at $28 billion (USD). The contrast between the royal family’s obscene wealth and the poverty of many in the U.K. could not be more extreme.

And let us not elaborate on the assets that the Crown has’ acquired” from British colonies over the centuries at the point of a gun, or the Crown’s enthusiastic embrace of the tyranny and abuse of those colonies, or the British Crown’s continued support of genocide in Yemen, to name just one war..

And yet, the downtrodden poor of Britain and many across the world have wept real tears of grief and loss at her passing- creating an account of a person whose apparent only wish was to ‘serve’ her people. (it is in passing, extraordinary how the entire Western media have all enthusiastically leapt onto the bandwagon of the Queen’s ‘service’ terminology , as one )

There are of course many in the world who do not share those views of a noble and glorious British monarchy- but most Western media are careful to avoid such inglorious inputations.

But let us leave those who wish to mourn, to do so in peace. Their grief is no doubt in most cases genuine- their loss is real..

And all the while, the voices of those who are calm and rational; who call for a safer, sustainable, kinder and compassionate world, are silenced by demagoguery and the power of the corporate media who attach themselves so comfortably to that demagoguery- there is, after all- money to be made with the latest craze…

The cult of ‘personality’ is not however limited to kings and queens; we see it everywhere in the world; the adulation of rock and movie stars whose lives are constantly shattered by trauma and misadventure and a role model for no-one, the president of an Eastern European country with an addiction to cocaine and ill-gotten gains, who sacrifices the lives of thousands of men for his glory, or another Eastern European president whose addiction to patriotism and ‘duty’ has resulted in the ruthless death and destruction of so much. And then, for many Americans, the eulogising of the latest president-whoever he is , to our ‘democracy’ and our ‘exceptional nation’, and the consequent demonisation of those who disagree with us.

What is it in the human psyche that permits many of us to succumb to this irrational and dangerous fervour?- to march in lock step with our current hero to oblivion? For our ‘hero’ will soon become our next ‘monster’ when the current vogue for them has dissipated.

We desperately need to let go of those ‘heroes’, we need to focus instead on what we all need to do right now to save as much as we can of what is left of this planet- both for ourselves and the other living things we have imperiously assumed dominion over.

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Links

“https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/09/cruelties-of-the-queens-reign/”
Queen Elizabeth II Wasn’t A Servant. She Was A Parasite
Imposed Insanity – Royalty, Propaganda And The Coming Catastrophe
That’s Enough Monarchy Now

A Descent into Fantasyland

All wars are, without doubt, pointless, tragic and foolish affairs that also play a significant part in destroying the remainder of our natural environment and a future for our children.

Western media are continuously playing a looped recording that Ukraine and its president Zelensky are defending the ‘free world’ – democratic ‘white” nations- against the evil Russian hordes. What is most interesting is that the language used in this messaging is consistent right across the Western media, regardless of the country you live in .

The downright lies and half truths about Ukraine that I read and hear about from New Zealand media are the identical lies and half-truths that are being published in the U.K. the U.S. or anywhere in Western Europe.

We are for instance told :

  • That the Russian and its allied armies are, any day now, going to run out of ammunition, equipment or manpower.
  • That the Ukrainian army will (very soon) start pushing the Russians back to the Russian border, and perhaps beyond..
  • That the Kiev government is a free and democratic state, fighting a desperate war against unprovoked aggression.
  • The Russians are bombing themselves in a nuclear power plant that they took from Ukraine in March 2022.

And we are for instance not told :

In the last few days we have also heard about the killing of the daughter of the ‘ultra-nationalist” Alexander Dugin. Dugin is, in my opinion, an obnoxious idealogue who has for many years promoted a Russia first meme. However nobody deserves to die because of their beliefs, (let alone their children) – be they Russian, Ukrainian or any other nationality.

What is however scary, is the identical use of language by Western media in describing Dugin as an ‘ultra-nationalist” – what exactly an ‘ultra-nationalist’ is, as opposed to simply being a ‘nationalist’, is somewhat unclear- but one is left with the clear understanding that only Russians can be ‘ultranationalists’ (or for that matter ‘oligarchs’) and never of course those Americans who have the ludicrous belief in the United States as the ‘exceptional nation’ who wanders the world doing good deeds for the benefit of those of us who are less enlightened.

Patriotism is one of the scourges of humanity; an absurd belief in the superiority of the culture and land to which you were accidentally born into. A scourge that blights and distorts the mind into believing that any action ; however intrinsically evil it is, is good as long as it benefits the country you were born in.

We see that evil in the blue and gold banners that enswathes everything in Ukraine, the United State’s ‘Stars and Stripes’, and the blue white and red flag of Russia, to name but three.

So now, as Westerners, we are told to hate all Russians, all Chinese, because they are a threat to our expensive lifestyles….And as true patriots, we should consume more, build more and destroy more , because we are the epitome of ‘civilisation’.

And all the while, we move ever faster into a new world where the climate is already more unpredictable and dangerous, where global warming and sea-levels continue to rise and rise for the next hundred, maybe thousand years, and where we ever more rapidly, destroy what is left of our living world.

Western media may pay occasional lip-service to the climate ’emergency’ (as though it will conveniently go away in the next few years if we just try harder), but refuse to say out loud the only solution we have to this global catastrophe- to drastically reduce consumption.

And why?- because their media profit margins and their sponsors depend on more economic ‘growth’.

So it becomes clear that the only path to ‘de-growth’, and retaining some semblance of a live-able world for humans and other species, is one where Gaia herself creates that economic destruction.

When hurricanes, huge storms, enormous amounts of rainfall, oppressive high temperatures and sea level rise ( among many other ‘natural’ impacts), result in it being impossible to buy insurance for industry to sell your products or to have a market where people can no longer afford to buy your useless junk; only then will we start to see a return to a sustainable (but hotter) world where all species can live in harmony, and even some contentment!

Media have indoctrinated us all to believe that we need to consume more, do more, travel more – that we cannot live lives of contentment without all those things we need to buy and consume..

Its a lie.

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Links

https://en.interaffairs.ru/article/did-cia-train-ukrainian-torturers/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/head-spinning-disorientation?

Ukraine’s Massive Money Laundering Scam
https://www.thepostil.com/the-hidden-truth-about-the-war-in-ukraine/
American Hegemony and the Politics of Provocation
https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/26/chris-hedges-the-dawn-of-the-apocalypse/
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/07/30/zelensky-militants-convicted-child-rape-torture-military/

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-08-23/meaning-darya-dugina-assassination

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-draft-law-5371-workers-rights-war-russia/

https://rumble.com/v1dqx82-bidens-shame-the-8-minute-expose-of-ukraines-biggest-lies.html

NATO: The White Supremacists’ Club

On June 26th Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s current prime minister, admitted in a TV interview, that New Zealand had been a NATO ‘partner’ -not member (as Ukraine also is) for the past 10 years. The interview was undertaken while Ardern was travelling to make a brief presentation to a NATO meeting in Spain, currently discussing how they can mitigate the Western disaster in Ukraine where Russian and Ukrainian ‘separatists’ are bulldozing through the remnants of Kiev’s army in the Donbass .

As Murray Horton notes ‘The message from Washington is clear – be in our “club” and we’ll make it worth your while’.

New Zealand has thus made it clear that it, along with NATO members, is de facto at war with Russia, along with the rest of the Western world. Apart from the U.S. occupied colonies of Japan (50,000 U.S. troops) and South Korea (23,000 U.S. troops), no other non Western countries have subscribed to trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine through the use of arms shipments to Kiev’s troops, or tactical guidance on the ground and satellite and in-air drone and manned aircraft surveillance of Russian forces. However New Zealand has also admitted to providing Kiev with artillery training and actively monitoring radio and other ‘chatter’ from Russian and their allies’ troops.

https://youtu.be/qciVozNtCDM

Given the admission from Ardern that New Zealand has been a NATO partner for the past 10 years, and has also been part of the Five Eyes alliance since 1956, we are thus a co-conspirator to the Minsk 1 and 2 subterfuges of 2014 and 2015 by Western nations in their pretense to the Donbass residents that a Ukrainian semi-autonomous region for the Russian speakers there was going to happen, and Kiev would stop bombarding Donetsk and Lugansk. New Zealand is also party to the provision of military equipment to the Kiev ‘regime’ (certainly not a ‘democracy’ now that almost all political parties other than Zelensky’s have been banned) which have been used to deliberately target civilian populations in Donetsk city in the past few months.

However if one were to believe Western and New Zealand media, Russia is shelling its own allies in the Donbass!- or as some Kiev residents have liked to call it over the years- the ‘Bombass’.

But let us not over-estimate the intelligence of our (Western) world leaders either!…

For New Zealand to pretend it is not at war with Russia is absurd. New Zealand is aiding its Western ‘allies’ to ensure that as many Ukrainians die for nothing in a war that could easily have been avoided if the West had insisted that Kiev abide by the Minsk agreements it signed in 2014 and not re-armed Kiev and its neonazi groups.

And let us not forget the colossal destruction this war is wreaking on the environment and the staggering amount of human resources wasted building weapons that could have been used to plant trees, and build a sustainable world….Or forget the increasing probability of a ‘hot’ war between Western white countries and China and Russia, which would likely then lead us all to nuclear armageddon.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1540853710720475137

Once, Ardern’s Labour Party had the courage to ban nuclear armed warships from New Zealand’s shores, to confront France in its contamination of numerous Pacific Island’s with nuclear bomb tests, and to press for a nuclear free South Pacific. But no longer. Ardern and her party (despite the spin from local policy New Zealand people that New Zealand has its own foreign policy) have completely sold out to the U.S., the U.K. and their white supremacist NATO minions, to the great enthusiasm of all of Australia’s main political parties. And we hear no word from the NZ government or the media about the U.S. latest military base in the south pacific, because of course U.S. bases are not a threat to anyone!

Recently the U.S. orchestrated yet another Pacific military alliance between the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK., strangely titled ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ whose purpose is to operate, the U.S. says “according to principles of Pacific regionalism, sovereignty, transparency, accountability, and most of all, [will be] led and guided by the Pacific islands.”. (Strangely those Pacific Island nations are not actually party to this agreement! )

This comes on top of the other new Indo-Pacific military ‘white folks’ agreement signed between Australia the United States and the U.K.; entitled AUKUS, which is intended to break the Pacific nuclear free agreement signed by most Pacific Island nations.

China has recently had the temerity to sign economic and security deals (not military bases) with a number of pacific island countries. If you believed NZ and Australian media and government lurid pronouncements, the ‘red peril’ is once again on the march to take away our democracy and freedom!

Presumably it’s the freedom to colonise vulnerable south pacific countries, to threaten and blackmail governments in the region, and to exploit Pacific Island communities using their cheap labour – dastardly Chinese stuff to try and limit us “good white folks'” exploitative opportunities in the Pacific !

Denis Argall notes from an Australian perspective that ‘the United States is entering into a period of instability at home and overreach abroad. The US’s declared intent to use the Ukraine war to diminish Russia is neither healthy nor attainable. The US provocation of war with China is contrary to our interests as well as common sense’.

And as Murray Horton succinctly notes from a New Zealand perspective; ‘NZ is in the white Western world’s self-proclaimed elite intelligence club, namely Five Eyes. Which proved to be absolutely useless in seeing what was going on in Afghanistan, a country which had been an adventure playground for Western spies for 20 years. So, why is New Zealand in Five Eyes, what use is it to us (or anyone else, for that matter)? Time for NZ to get out, time for Five Eyes to become four eyes.’

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Links

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-global-power-shift-isnt-west-to.html

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/06/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-s-europe-trip-to-include-attending-nato-summit-meeting-with-boris-johnson-pushing-for-trade-deal-with-eu.html

NZ BECOMES FURTHER ENMESHED IN US EMPIRE The Politics & Economics Of Five Eyes By Murray Horton (Page 5)

Understanding the NY Times Article on the CIA in Ukraine
New clear ways for the Pacific- Address historic nuclear injustices in the Pacific
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/07/australias-newly-elected-labor-prime-minister-anthony-albanese-rushed-to-meet-with-joe-biden-in-tokyo-after-his-election-victory-to-fortify/
The United States- the Pacific bully
Opposition political parties banned in Ukraine and ‘unified information policy’ imposed