Tag: war in ukraine

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.

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

‘Marching off to War’

‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching off to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before..‘ So begins the bizarrely militant 19th century hymn of the Salvation Army. And so it would appear that all of us good ‘Christians’ of the Western world are being asked to defend ourselves against the ‘soul-less’ Chinese and the Russian hordes of the steppes- simultaneously. Why should that be?

In Europe, the ongoing hype that the Russians are about to invade the Ukraine and massing troops on the border, is mounting, while the Russians report their concerns that the Ukraine Army is poised to attack the semi- autonomous Russian-speaking Ukrainian regions of the Donbass and Lugansk.

The Minsk agreement that was brokered by the Normandy Four Powers (Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France,) in 2015 which established Donbass as a Ukrainian semi-autonomous region, is in practice no longer supported by Ukraine, Germany and France. With the Ukrainian economy deteriorating ever more sharply, Ukrainian President Zelensky is desperate for some salvation. Provoking a ‘little war’ with Russia he supposedly anticipates, will be enough to keep him holding onto power and acquire that much needed support from NATO and the European Union.

https://youtu.be/K2kx4mlW3KU

What the truth on the ground really is- we may never know, but there is a high probability that the Russians would not want to invade Ukraine and acquire a completely dysfunctional and hostile entity, but would be prepared to militarily support their Ukrainian Russian-speaking cousins if the Ukrainian national army attacked the Donbass.

As has been noted elsewhere, a Russian attack across the Ukrainian border would be the gift to the United States that just keeps on giving- confirmation that Russia truly is that evil rapacious empire they have always been described as in mainstream Western media, and an opportunity to further isolate and sanction Russia and shut down Russian gas supplies to Europe.

The high risk of a wider war does not seem to be factored into Western media and politician’s view of the issues-naturally so for the Americans who can watch the destruction from a distance. However, given that the Russians have put their military on high alert and dispersed their Pacific submarine nuclear fleet from their bases in Siberia- that alone must be causing some concern in Washington.

And to the east, the Americans are continually hyping up the Chinese Communist threat. The ‘Chinese mainlanders are about to invade Taiwan’, they have trampled on human rights in Hong Kong and conducted genocide against Uighurs, let alone the sexual abuse of star tennis players!

China, having eradicated the threat to China/Hong Kong integration without loss of life , Western governments are now desperate to portray the Chinese government’s response to the terrorism by Uighur separatists as a ‘genocide’. Unfortunately for anti-communist religious cranks like Adrian Zenz, the latest ‘leaked reports’ indicate that far from there being ‘genocide’, some of the Chinese government’s concerns relate to Uighurs having a much more favourable policy to permit them to have more children that Han Chinese. The Uighur population has in fact increased at a far higher rate than the Han population over the past few years. The ‘genocide’ argument is a fiction. The need to non-violently suppress the Uighur terrorist violence in Xinjiang, is not.

Former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman, has an excellent summary of the United States’ duplicitous responses towards Taiwan over the years: for the first 20 odd years after the end of the Chinese Communist/Kuomintang war, unequivocally supporting Taiwan as the real Chinese mainland government, despite being a brutal dictatorship run by the Kuomintang, then pivoting to Communist mainland China to try and split China away from its informal alliance with the Soviet Union, and now recently, once again supporting Taiwan as an independent democratic country that must be defended against the communists. The fact that the Chinese government has repeatedly called for a peaceful reunification of Taiwan with the mainland has been completely ignored by most Western media.

It is however undoubtedly true that China; its economic and military power having expanded hugely over the past 30 years, has become more assertive and wishes to reassert its historical territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere, but there is no reason to believe that Mainland China intends to invade any country, let alone Taiwan, despite all the hype coming out of the United States and Australia.

And finally, the bizarre response to the posts from Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai about her apparent sexual abuse by a senior Chinese Communist Official. The English translation to her original post below indicates that her lover Zhang Gaoli (former Chinese government vice-president), is an unscrupulous and unpleasant man who exploits women, but that her love for him was the driving force of her distress, not a rape allegation. Given that Peng Shuai has been on Zoom video twice with the International Olympic Committee since her post, along with multiple pictures of her at social events , one wonders what it would really take for the Women’s Tennis Association to really really believe she was safe and ok. The impossibility of proving the absence of an allegation, has always been a key ploy of Western propaganda.

And now we have Washington saying they will diplomatically boycott the Chinese winter Olympics because of Uighur genocide etc. Given that the United States (along with the U.K.) is in fact guilty of the most horrendous genocide and human rights abuses of foreign populations over its 200 years of existence; including its more recent barbarities in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions killed , tortured and displaced, along with its support for some of the most brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel, it is surprising that a permanent ban and sanctions on all United States’ global activities, and extradition of those multiple U.S. war criminals to the Hague , has not been launched before now.

United States government officials presumably believe they can ratchet up Western opinion sufficiently to ensure Western public do not buy Chinese goods and thereby undermine its economy. As Noam Chomsky has most recently stated: “The ‘threat’ of China is China’s existence; it exists as a major power that the United States cannot push around, cannot intimidate, and does not follow U.S. orders. That is intolerable. Any mafia don can explain that” .

In addition the United States seeks to demonise the Russians sufficiently so that they can be viewed as a constant threat to democracy. The recent demolition of Russia-gate is just one example where, while the truth of the matter is finally out and no Russians did in fact attempt to undermine any U.S. elections, the smear continues to do its work with the public.

But the world is changing; Western powers no longer have that supreme authority to dictate ‘the truth’ to other countries- much of the world sees the economic benefits of China’s Belt and Road initiative (despite the enormous environmental destruction it causes), and the Russians are a trusted intermediary in many parts of Middle East and beyond.

Nevertheless the colonial ‘white powers”; the U.K. the U.S., Canada, Australia and to a smaller extent New Zealand, will continue to cling to a past where (even if historical reality tells a different story) they are the epitome of truth, democracy, justice and human rights.

Holding on to a past that never was, is a dangerous fiction…

______________________________________

Links

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/cornering-russia:-the-on-off-russo-ukrainian-war

Will the Chinese Civil War End with a Bang or with a Whimper?
Claims of Russian Interference in Ukraine Reek of Hypocrisy

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/the-missing-star-athlete-peng-shuai-is-not-missing-at-all.html

Full translation of Peng Shuai’s Weibo post, accusing Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault from tennis
The most remarkable aspect of Western attacks on China over Xinjiang is the unabashed hypocrisy

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar#:~:text=A%20report%20from%20the%20Costs,killed%20more%20than%20900%2C000%20people.

https://www.rt.com/russia/542236-european-security-balance-power/

The Usual Suspects Are Trying to Foment a Crisis With Russia
Olympolitik: Fake Peng Shuai Scandal Fuels US Effort to Boycott Beijing Olympics
“Unregulated Capitalism is a Suicide Pact”: Noam Chomsky Talks Climate, China, and More with Lowkey
https://richardfalk.org/2021/12/06/covering-up-failure-ignoring-the-record-of-regime-changing-interventions/
Robert Falk’s analysis of North- South relations