Tag: antiwar

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)

https://richardfalk.org/2022/10/25/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/

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.

_____________________________________________

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

Where to from here?

As two of the world’s ‘superpowers’ fight it out in Ukraine for the spoils of war, the world descends into a dystopian whirlpool of economic stagflation and environmental catastrophe.

While the Western propaganda war of obvious lies to its populations about the war in Ukraine is deeply disturbing, what is far far worse is the psychotic behaviour of all the world’s political classes in talking about the need to address climate change while doing the exact opposite- promoting ‘growth’, trying to revitalise tourist air travel, more production of goods, more industry..

The evidence is unequivocal; only a reduction and stabilization of human ‘growth’ will allow species on this planet to barely cope with the ongoing and now inevitable climate and ecocide we are experiencing. Promoting more growth is simply going to push us all faster off the cliff to a far deeper environmental catastrophe.

Sadly the Ukraine war has given us ample evidence of the concerted activity of Western media to consistently lie to its populations. The refusal to acknowledge the war of terror by the Kiev government on its Donbas population for 8 years since 2014 ( with 14,000 deaths), the refusal to acknowledge the existence of the well documented neo-nazi military groups working to eliminate Ukrainian Russian speakers (even while promoting videos made by them), or even the refusal to acknowledge that much of the fighting against Western Ukrainians is being carried out by Russian speaking Ukrainians from the Donbas against Western Ukrainians and the neonazis, are all examples of the subterfuge Western governments are required to commit to ensure a compliant population supports their war against Russia, while ignoring the horrors of Palestine’s slow genocide by Israel or the rapid genocide in Yemen by the Saudis, both enthusiastically supported by the U.S. and U.K.

My ‘favourite’ so far from New Zealand state tv , TVNZ, is their recent video clip of an interview with an elderly man in Donetsk (a Donbass city held by Russian speaking Ukrainians and constantly bombarded by Kiev’s troops since 2014) after shelling of his apartment building by the Western Ukrainians, while the commentator pretends the damage has been caused by Russian shelling.

The level of ineptness and stupidity of politicians across the globe is staggering: countries with artificially determined boundaries lurch towards war with each other and potential nuclear armageddon, for no apparent reason other than the engorgement of weapons contracts and politicians and bureaucrats’ egos. This craziness is fuelled by corrupt and inept journalists who parrot the ‘official’ line of their country’s equally inept politicians.

When media have no compunction to consistently lie to get their ‘message’ across, one knows we have no hope of the media presenting an honest case about the desperate need for genuine action about climate change. We are instead presented with occasional short media articles about climate change, followed by a psychotic switch to the main propaganda barrage of ‘produce more, work more, buy more, sell more, fly more’. Greenwashing is now the ‘in thing’. Half-truths and pure lies infest our mainstream media.

Perhaps the one saving grace of our incompetent leaders is that they are, through their own incompetence, leading the world into a severe economic depression, which, together with the impacts of climate change, will inevitably reduce consumption and consequently allow some restoration of our natural world.

Sadly however that economic depression will lead to much suffering and many deaths. A planned and systematic approach to de-growth would have been a far more humane response.

Unfortunately , politicians’ and bureaucrats’ responses to the various crises enveloping the world is either to make war, or ‘grow’ economies more.

Because that’s ‘progress”?- isn’t it?

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Links

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-planet-mind.html

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-defactualization-of-america?s=r

https://www.rt.com/russia/556334-ukrainian-camp-nationalistic-narrative/

Jacques Baud: “The goal is not to help Ukraine, but to fight Putin”

New Zealand and the War in Ukraine

In response to the New Zealand government’s decision to send troops to Europe to support NATO, I drafted the following letter to the editor of my local paper

Dear Sir

I would appreciate if you could publish the following letter

‘Supporting’ Ukraine

While any invasion of another country is deplorable and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to be condemned, one needs to remember that prior to this invasion, more than 10,000 Russian speaking Ukrainians have been killed by the Kiev government in the Donbass since 2014; predominantly by neo-nazi groups like the Azov Battalion- the very same neonazi group that Brenton Tarrant , the Christchurch mosque shooter, was an ardent adherent of.

We should all be aware that truth is the first casualty of war, but the level of war hysteria and blatantly distorted propaganda we are seeing across the Western world about this tragedy in Ukraine, is extremely alarming- our media now howls for World War Three.

Our prime minister talks about how New Zealand supports the “rule based international order”; the U.S. imposed version of how they believe the world should be; not United Nation’s rules.

It is time to step back from the brink of a massive, potentially nuclear, war which would involve China Russia and its allies, and the Western camp.

Saner heads need to prevail; we need peace and an effective response to the imminent climate catastrophe unfolding, not this foolish provocation by New Zealand.

_________________________

Links

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/04/russia-invasion-new-zealand-dispatches-50-troops-to-europe-to-assist-with-logistics-of-moving-weapons-into-ukraine.html

Tragicomedy

If it weren’t for the fact that people are dying in Ukraine and livelihoods and other living things destroyed, and potentially many more may die in other countries , this would be a comedy

Tyler Durden and CJ Hopkins at Zerohedge outline just some of the absurdities in their beautifully satirical and comprehensive analysis of the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In my ‘neck of the woods’ in New Zealand I am entertained each evening by the propaganda from TVNZ1 -one of our government funded TV channels. In their extensive coverage of the tragedy in Ukraine they somehow fail to mention:

  • That any neo-Nazis actually exist in Ukraine ( despite showing several propaganda videos of Ukrainian military with Nazi insignia). Ironically Brenton Tarrant , the New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooter, had close links to the Ukrainian neo-nazi Azov Battalion, an organisation the New Zealand government in supporting the fascist salute of ‘Slava Ukraini!’ or ‘Glory to Ukraine’, would like us to forget.
  • That the Kiev government has been fighting a war with Eastern Ukrainians that they call ‘terrorists’ (or if you’re a neo-nazi, ‘cockroaches’) for 8 years with over 13,000 deaths with active support from NATO; and that Ukrainian shelling of civilian infrastructure in the Donbass is ongoing.
  • That British, American and German military ‘advisors’ have been training and providing ‘defensive’ weapons to these rabidly anti-Russian groups for those 8 years (and more) (note that there is militarily no such thing as a defensive weapon-anything that makes you safer in war also makes you more capable of fighting offensively)
  • That civilian casualty figures for the 12 days of war so far are astoundingly low ( 407 in 12 days), in comparison with say America’s ‘shock and awe’ terror campaign in Iraq ( 6,700 deaths in the first 3 weeks)– but noting that every death is a tragedy.
  • That all the while this hellish Ukraine war is going on, the Americans and the British are actively supporting a decidedly more hellish genocide in Yemen by the Saudis and other gulf states.
  • That the Russian Army and separatists from the Donbass have now encircled in a ‘cauldron’ the majority of the Ukrainian army in the East.
  • That the Russians claim to have found evidence of a number of American sponsored Ukrainian biolabs producing germ warfare agents, which the Americans both confess to and deny!
  • That the Russians claim to have found documental evidence of the Ukrainian Army’s intent to destroy the Donbass separatists in an offensive starting 25h February.
  • That the maternity hospital in Mariupal had been publicly identified by the Russians as having been turned into a Ukrainian military base 3 days before the shelling by the Russians of the building.
  • That the Western media’s constant pressure on the Americans and their European allies to implement Zelinsky’s plan for a NATO ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine would result in shooting war that could easily end in nuclear war. (It would be like America having dog-fights and missile strikes over Canada or Mexico)

I guess TVNZ and the rest of the Western media are just trying to protect me from Russian propaganda- so I really feel quite relieved that I don’t need to know about any of this! Let’s keep it simple after all….

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Links

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hopkins-revenge-putin-nazis

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/facebook-allows-calls-violence-against-russians-over-ukraine-invasion

https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-the-transnational-network-that-nobody-is-talking-about/

https://www.academia.edu/12951527/The_Fascist_Kernel_of_Ukrainian_Genocidal_Nationalism

https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/10/nato-arming-training-nazis-ukraine-azov/

The Russia/West Propaganda War

‘The first casualty when war comes is truth’. Hiram W Johnson (1917)

As this horrendous war in Ukraine unfolds, we see the Western media carefully following their politicians’ lines. ‘There is no Nazi problem in Ukraine’, ‘NATO is not a threat to Russia’, “Putin is a madman dictator’ etc etc…

Curiously, as I have noted in a previous blog, these memes were becoming increasingly strident even before Russia recognised the 2 Donbass republics, even in my little country of New Zealand (part of ‘Five Eyes’) we are apparently an enthusiastic supporter of the (neo)- nazi Azov Battalion in the Ukraine and their propaganda videos, should you want to believe our government funded TVNZ ‘news’.

But perhaps the most obscene media article I have seen is this recent Guardian article by a Mr Jason Stanley who states ‘no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States’, in downplaying the risks of Nazis in Ukraine. What Mr Stanley deliberately omits to say is that Ukraine is the only country in the world where Nazi battalions are an integral part of their army, and whose battalions have been actively involved in killing as many Eastern Ukrainian Russian speakers in the Donbass as possible (13,000 at the last count) – with the full support of the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Let us also not forget the post-Maidan coup Kiev government’s enthusiastic sanctifying of Stepan Bandera, the white (Ukrainian Slav) supremacist and killer of ‘Asiatic’ Russian Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, the LGBTIQ community, Communists and Jews, both during and after the second world war (with support for his OUN-B group and its successors from the Americans).

Mr Stanley’s customary caricature of Putin as the ‘global leader of the far right’ is, to be polite, somewhat strange. Putin is certainly a nationalist, an anti-communist, a Russian Orthodox believer and a fervent conservative (none of those Putin attributes particularly endear him to me; as do most politicians’ ‘values’ in the West or East!), but ‘far right’? -no.

The decision by European countries to constrain Russian economic interest in Europe and beyond is an entirely valid response to Russia’s aggression, but the decision to suppress access to Russian government media like RT and Sputnik in the West indicates a strong wish to ensure the views of only one side of the war are circulated to Western populations; a series of views that are indisputably half-truths in many cases and often lies (e.g. the 4 years of ‘Russia-gate’ fabrications), as noted above. Such repressive actions lead the public to believe right is completely on our side and no compromise is possible with the evil aggressor. A recipe for a third world war, or worse.

However, as Chris Hedges so aptly says, ‘to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.’

And that is not to say that the Russian government and its media are the epitome of truth. The Russian government and its media unequivocally stated that no Ukrainian invasion was planned, while they were preparing for just such an invasion.

Reports from websites that are Russian supporters are as likely to provide a slanted or untrue version of events on the ground in Ukraine as the Western media. Part of that false view can be attributed to the ‘fog of war’ – journalists rely on narratives from people in the war-zone with their own agendas, or from people who are simply making things up to suit their audience. And then there are the journalists in the West, and no doubt in the East as well, who are paid by their various ‘intelligence’ agencies to provide that ‘special’ messaging for a gullible public.

Emotive videos of Ukrainian women filling bottles with petrol to make Molotov cocktails, of a man supposedly holding back a Russian tank, or of an armoured personnel carrier (Russian or more likely Ukrainian) deliberately running over a car, the Snake Island defenders who died but are now resurrected etc etc are all designed to dull our intellectual acuity and make us react with anger and fear rather than a calm consideration of the facts, and make mediation between the warring factions impossible.

The current fad to sanction Russian cats, deprive Russian paralympians of competing, remove access to Russian authors or composers or remove Russian media from the Western world is bizarre. Perhaps a glimpse into this madness can be seen in a recent CNN article by one Oliver Darcy where the Russian website RT is blasted for actually giving a Russian point of view to the Russian invasion! How dastardly is that! We of course should know that there is only one viewpoint to be had on this deadly event, and that is the American official line! Knowledge of any other viewpoint is therefor treasonable an un-American!

We should also note the ‘extraordinary’ levels of white racism that pervade Western media- they imply how shocking that this war could have happened to European, well-dressed educated white people who look just like us!, not those people of darker skins in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Be warned! The populations of Arab, African, South American and Asian countries who have endured so much pointless war by the U.S. and its allies over the past 50 years are taking due note of the total hypocrisy and racism of Western media.

As Moon of Alabama notes: Historian Anne Morelli has summarized Arthur Ponsonby’s classic book Falsehood in War-Time as this:

  1. We do not want war.
  2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
  3. The enemy is inherently evil and resembles the devil.
  4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interests.
  5. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary.
  6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
  7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
  8. Recognized artists and intellectuals back our cause.
  9. Our cause is sacred.
  10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

On the Russian side we hear of the Ukrainian government military using illegal phosphorous shells near Kyev, or prisoners released from jails given automatic weapons, of Azov battalion units using Eastern Ukrainians as human shields in the Donbass – fact or fiction? We may never know.

The increasing practice in both West and East to use legislation to designate foreign media companies as ‘foreign agents’ also exacerbates the considerable risk for governments and their publics to misinterpret, deliberately or otherwise, the intent of a ‘foreign’ government, and thereby increase the risk of war.

After talking to a very frightened and distraught friend in Ukraine over the weekend, I know that the internet is up and running there, that water and electricity are (at least so far) not being destroyed, unlike the terror attacks by the Americans in Korea, Vietnam, Libya and Iraq (to name just a few) that deliberately destroyed all infrastructure (a ‘shock and awe’ war-crime).

This terror and destruction needs to stop -now. Russia needs to negotiate in good faith with the Kiev government; withdraw its troops and compensate for lives lost and destruction caused. In turn, Kiev and NATO need to recognise the very real fears by Russia about the likely destruction of Russia by NATO. A neutral Ukraine (as Austria was during the cold war) is the only solution. A neutral Ukraine will not only be of benefit to Russia, but also Ukraine, its neighbours, and the wider world.

We instead need to mobilise globally now to ‘fight’ catastrophic climate change and species loss . The intensely environmentally destructiveness of armies and wars of aggression need to be replaced with deliberate processes to safely reduce global consumption of commodities, to plant billions of hectares of trees that can grow in perpetuity and restore natural eco-systems – to create a sustainable planet.

The Western Propaganda War Against Russia

I live in New Zealand . Every day now, on our government funded Television New Zealand news channel TVNZ 1, I watch reports about how Russia is about to invade Ukraine. It is somehow never mentioned that western media and governments have been predicting imminent Russian invasions of Ukraine since 2015, when the Eastern Ukraine Donbass broke away from Western Ukraine after the U.S. supported coup against the marginally Russian supporting Ukrainian president of the time.

We have had videos of desperate Ukrainian military at the front lines vowing to re-take ‘occupied Ukraine’ – we are not told that those ‘occupiers’ of Eastern Ukraine are in fact Russian speaking Ukrainians who have lived in the Donbass for hundred of years, but who have been threatened and systematically militarily attacked by ultra-nationalists (i.e neo nazis) from West Ukraine since the Maidan coup in 2014.

We are not told that the Kiev government has refused to implement the Minsk agreements they signed up to , and were approved by the U.N. , that would have granted some level of autonomy and safety to Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and ended the ongoing war in the Donbass and any need for Russia to continue to provide support against what it calls genocide in Eastern Ukraine.

We are not told that the 79 year old woman being trained to fire a rifle against the Russian invaders in the Television New Zealand news clip, is in fact being trained by a neonazi of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, who wears his Nazi insignia. That Nazi insignia – called the Wolfsangel-is the same insignia worn by the Nazi SS Reich Division Das Reich. When that is pointed out to TVNZ, there is no apology or retraction of the nazi propaganda.

We are shown videos of a serious Anthony Blinken, U.S. secretary of state, ‘imploring’ the Russian to say they will not invade Ukraine. When the TVNZ anchorperson directly asked their reporter on the ground in Ukraine what Russia was saying about Ukraine, the reporter neglected to somehow mention that Russia has repeatedly said it would not invade.

Bizarrely in a recent Youtube interview, the former head of Britain’s MI6, Sir John Sawers, has admitted that their ‘imminent Russian invasion’ information comes out of their own delusional Russophobic heads, rather than from any facts on the ground.

‘What has been released, the idea that Putin might want to dislodge [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and replace him with a puppet government, or that he’s going to contrive a pretext for Russian intervention in the east of Ukraine, these are based on a growing understanding, an analysis of Putin, rather than deep, secret intelligence reports‘.(my emphasis)

And if the analysis of the situation of Russian troops ‘about to invade” by the BBC is anything to go by- Western media and the intelligence community are just making it up as they go along.

As Scott Ritter has recently stated on Twitter, ‘On Feb 4 the Russians and Chinese signed a strategic agreement predicated on the mutual embrace of the rule of law predicated on the UN Charter. It’s hard to see how Putin would undermine this foundational doctrine by invading Ukraine in a manner that violates international law.’

We all know that Western governments and their compliant media have lied repeatedly about their rationale for starting yet another war. We know that the stated reasons for their wars in Libya, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, let alone Korea or Vietnam, were all based on lies, and lies that were easily disputed and verified as falsehoods, if we had had true fearless investigative journalism.

One can therefore only conclude sadly, that the New Zealand government and its government funded media outlet, Television New Zealand , are fully in lock step with the Americans and the British in stoking a war with Russia, and that New Zealand still remains merely a colony of the British Empire that we all thought had sunk at Singapore when the Japanese invaded in 1941.

Postscript

As of 18th February the Donbass authorities in Eastern Ukraine have asked all civilians , particularly women and children, to evacuate to Russia across the border. Western media is portraying this as some kind of strange false flag incident, although it is hard to rationalise that one. Certainly both the Donbass separatists and the Ukrainian military have upped their shelling across the line of contact considerably in the past 2 days . It would appear that the Donbass separatists are calculating that should the Ukrainian forces invade across the contact line, Donbass military will be able to once again eliminate the Ukrainian ground troops in ‘caldrons’ , as they did in 2014 and 2015, knowing that they effectively now have a free-fire zone with no Donbass civilians at risk.

Or it could be seen as victory for the extremists in Kiev. As President Zelensky himself has said:

“I think that if you live today in the territory of Donbass, temporarily occupied, and you think that: “Our cause is right, we are Russians, we are going to Russia, it’s a big mistake to stay in Donbass…” For the future of their children and grandchildren… it is already necessary to go and look for a place in Russia. It is right. Because there will be no civilization on this territory without Ukraine. Ukraine will grow upwards, Donbass in the occupied form will not grow anywhere. There will be no happiness for these people.”. In another words, Zelensky (although himself Jewish) is supporting the neo-nazi drive to eliminate all Russian speaking Ukrainians from Ukraine- a process that is internationally defined as genocide

The Donbass civilian evacuation is a calculated risk, given that Ukrainian forces have considerably upgraded their weaponry with American and British offensive weapons since 2015, but a sound one. It is unlikely that the Ukrainian military will risk such another debacle, much to the chagrin of their U.S. and U.K military advisors who have now safely left the country!

_______________________________________________Links

MintPress Study: NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine
Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Dogs of War
John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda
We Are Not Useful Idiots!
A comprehensive outline of the complex history of Ukraine

Russia Begins Preparing for Refugees From Donbass

Rather than produce fake evidence to the U.N. Security Council, as Colin Powell had, Antony Blinken just produced nothing at all, though the U.S. has intelligence it can show, writes Scott Ritter.

Ukraine: Where to Find the Truth in Enormous Detail
https://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/reports/?filters=+ds_date:(%5B2022-02-01T00:00:00Z%20TO%202022-02-21T00:00:00Z%5D)&solrsort=score%20desc&rows=10
Daily reports from the Ukraine Line of Contact from the  Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe– (OSCE)

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-calls-sides-spare-critical-civilian-infrastructure-eastern-ukraine

A War in Ukraine?- Again?

Kiev officials continue to describe the Donbass separatists as “terrorists’ even while the Kiev administration has signed up to negotiating with separatists as part of the Normandy and Minsk agreements – but has never actioned that agreement . Defining the separatists as ‘terrorists’ makes it virtually impossible for Kiev to negotiate anything with them. Kiev is supported in this position (at least officially) by Poland, the U.K and U.S.)

The new government in Berlin however appears to be currently more reticent in supporting Kiev in its aggressive stance and has declined Kiev’s request for more weapons. There are real risks to Ukraine’s neighbours of neo-nazi military brigades like the Azov battalion and other extremist groups supported by the Right Sector, that those groups would not only continue to fight against the Donbass separatists , kill Russian speaking Ukrainians in other parts of Ukraine, and, as in the past, Poles and Jews as well as Russian speakers elsewhere, but also foment trouble in disaffected youth in their own countries…

The U.K. and the U.S. continue to support these extremist groups with arms and training , as they have done since the end of the Second World War (using the extremist OUN-B group led by Stepan Bandera ( now an official hero of the Kiev government ), in an effort to destabilize first the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation and the Donbass.

Despite the 9/11 blowback that occurred with the U.S. and U.K support of Saudi and Turkish backed wahhabist extremists in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the strategy of using local extremists continues to be a key item in the U.S. destabilisation playbook. Extensive Ukraine government and Right Sector media has portrayed Western Ukrainian as ‘true slavs’, unlike the Russians in the north and east who are deemed to be lesser beings with eastern mongol genes; a strategy that gives permission for extremist groups like the Azov battalions to exterminate Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians with impunity.

Berlin’s current reticence to fully support the NATO and U.K./U.S. agenda in Ukraine appears to come from a sudden realization that they are hugely reliant on Russian gas. The Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russian to Germany was initiated at the insistence of Germany with the understanding that Russian gas would not only be much cheaper than U.S. gas shipped across the Atlantic to Germany, but was also both more reliable and able to be delivered in greater volumes than the Americans could ever provide. Germany’s economy therefore relies on cheap Russian gas, particularly now that its coal fired electricity producers have been largely shut down in response to climate change concerns . The German government therefore walks a tightrope between supporting its NATO allies, and getting the energy it needs for its economy .

The Russians have insisted that the expansion of NATO up to its borders be reversed ( an outcome of the negotiations that led to East Germany and the other Easter European countries becoming independent from Russia in the 1990s, on the verbal understanding that NATO would not expand beyond its 1990s borders). U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and NATO’s Stoltenberg have insisted that that agreement never existed ( despite multiple citings of evidence of its existence) and that NATO will continue to expand its membership and site weapons wherever it wishes to, regardless of the resultant explicit threat to Russia’s existence..

Exactly what NATOs current purpose is now that communist Soviet Russia has gone, is never explicitly stated, but it is clear that its purpose is to stop Russian ‘aggression’ and intimidate Russia through ongoing military threats. U.S. think tanks have also intimated their wish that Russia be balkanised, so that the carve-up of Russia’s economy can continue from the Yeltsin years, and so that Russia does not have the capacity to militarily oppose any Western military plans (as it has done in Syria).

While Western media and the U.S. continue to hype up the threat of a Russian land invasion of the Ukraine ( with extensive videos of Russian tanks conducting military exercises in Russia), the reality is that it would simply not be worth-while for Russia to invade Ukraine with tanks and troops.

It is possible however, that if the Kiev government or its extremist wings were to launch a large scale attack on the Russian speaking Donbass ( emboldened by Western weapons supplies and bombacity) that Russia would feel obliged to protect its Russian speaking neighbours and respond militarily. Sending columns of Russian tanks into Eastern Ukraine, let alone across the Dnieper River into Western Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalism is most fierce, would however be a suicidal endeavour; not least because the Ukrainian economy is devastated after years of corruption and mismanagement, and Russia would have to take responsibility for economically supporting 37 million Ukrainians, whilst countering an Eastern Ukrainian insurgency (supported and trained by the U.S. and U.K)

Russian not only wants a NATO pullback, but also the Kiev government to officially adhere to and implement the Minsk agreements they signed up to-i.e. negotiate with the Donbass separatists and agree to their self-government within a Ukrainian federal structure. However the level of Kiev propaganda against the ‘terrorists’ in the East and against Russian speaking people generally, seems to indicate that such a compromise is currently not possible; particularly while the extremist right wing groups hold such sway in Kiev. Those groups would also be fearful that a re-integration of the Donbass population into a federal Ukrainian democratic framework, would tip the balance towards a national government that once again would be more favorable to Russia, and likely result in many of the underhand deals that have occurred since 2014 between the Kiev government and Ukrainian oligarchs, being re-aligned once more towards Russian interests.

Ukraine is in crisis; its young people drifting in the multitudes to more favourable economic conditions in Western Europe, and an accelerating drift towards a centralized autocracy in Kiev driven largely by extremist groups like the Right Sector, with corruption widespread throughout the economy. The loss of revenues from Russia from the Russian gas pipeline which passes through Ukraine to Europe (and the siphoning of some of that gas for Ukraine’s use) with the inevitable advent of the opening of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline to Germany and beyond, via the Baltic Sea , will only exacerbate this crisis. The Ukrainian ex-comedian President Zelensky’s position is extremely fragile- torn between the demands of the ever-increasing power of the right wing extremists in Kiev and Western Ukraine, and the demands of the U.S and U.K., while his popularity with the majority of Ukrainians plummets. Zelensky has tried to eliminate some of his key political rivals like Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk, with legal challenges of ‘treason’, but the opposition forces are gathering against him.

What options does someone like Zelensky now have in the face of such challenges ? War can so often improve a leader’s political chances..

_________________________________________

Links

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/16/common-sense-and-self-preservation-go-mainstream-in-washington-d-c-capitulation-to-russian-demands-becomes-discussable/

CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine since 1953