Ukrainian Downfall – What Comes Next – by John Helmer – 28 Feb 2024

SCORCHING THE EARTH WESTWARD — WHAT COMES NEXT AS THE UKRAINIAN ARMY COLLAPSES*

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The collapse of the Ukrainian army following the battle of Avdeyevka, and its disorganized retreat, have accelerated Russian military thinking of how far westward the NATO allies will decide that the Ukrainian statelet can be defended against the expected Russian advance – and how fast new NATO defences can be created without the protection of ground-to-air missile batteries like Patriot, long-range artillery like the M777, and mobile armour like the Abrams, Bradley, and Caesar: all of them  have already been defeated in the east.

In short, there is no longer a NATO-command line of fortification east of the Polish border which deters the Russian General Staff. Also, no bunker for the Zelensky government and its NATO advisors to feel secure.

Cutting and pasting from the Russian military bloggers and the Moscow analytical media, as a handful of US podcasters and substackers are doing as often as their subscribers require, is the Comfy-Armchair method for getting at the truth.   Reading the Russian sources directly, with the understanding that they are reporting what their military and intelligence sources are saying off the record, is still armchair generalship, but less comfy,  more credible.

Offence is now the order of the day up and down the contact line. The daily bulletin from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow calls this “improving the tactical situation” and “taking more advantageous positions”. In the past three days, Monday through Wednesday, the Defense Ministry also reported the daily casualty rate of the Ukrainian forces at 1,175, 1,065, and 695, respectively; three M777 howitzer hits; and the first Abrams tank to be destroyed.  Because this source is blocked in several of the NATO states, the Russian military bloggers, which reproduce the bulletins along with videoclips and maps, may be more accessible; also more swiftly than the US-based podcasters and substackers can keep up.

Moscow sources confirm the obvious:  the operational objective is to apply more and more pressure at more and more points along the line, in as many sectors or salients (“directions” is the Russian term) as possible simultaneously.  At the same time, air attack, plus missiles and drones, are striking all rear Ukrainian and NATO airfield, road, and rail nodes, ammunition storages, vehicle parks, drone manufactories, fuel dumps, and other supply infrastructure, so as make reinforcement and redeployment more difficult and perilous.

What cannot be seen are the Russian concentrations of forces aimed in the north, centre and south of the battlefield. Instead, there is what one source calls “an educated guess is that when the main blow comes, it will be North,  Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov, Poltava,  or Centre,  Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye,  or both simultaneously.” For timing, the source adds, “after the Russian election.”

That is now less than three weeks away, on March 17. President Vladimir Putin will then reform his new government within four to six weeks for announcement by early May. Ministerial appointments sensitive to the General Staff’s planning are the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is expected to remain in place; and the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who may retire.

Following the call of French President Emmanuel Macron for the “possibility” of French ground force deployment to the Ukraine battlefield, and the subsequent clarification by French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the Russian assessment has been derisory. “As for Emmanuel Macron’s statements about the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine,” replied Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova,  “I would like to remind you that just a month ago, the French Foreign Minister denied Paris’s involvement in recruiting mercenaries for the Kiev regime, and called direct evidence ‘crude Russian propaganda.’  There is a strong impression that the French President is, in principle, not aware of what his subordinates say, or what he says himself.  And now I want to remind Macron of the history of France. That is different. In April 1945, Berlin was defended by the French SS division known as Charlemagne, and a number of others. They also directly defended the Fuhrerbunker — Hitler’s bunker. They were among the last to be awarded the Nazi Order of the Knight’s Cross in the Third Reich. The French SS men from Charlemagne became the last defenders of the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Emmanuel, have you decided to organize the Charlemagne II division to defend Zelensky’s bunker?”

The view in Moscow is that there is now as much indecision, vacillation,  and chaos between  the Elysée and the Hexagon Balard  in Paris as there is in Washington between the White House and the Pentagon, over what last stand NATO can make in the Ukraine, and where to position it —  east of Kiev, or east of Lvov and the Polish border region.

The Moscow source again: “the NATO fortress and bunker plan for the Ukraine is proving a failure, and the Ukrainians are falling back on the old Wehrmacht tactic of ad hoc battlegroups with  increasing percentages of unit leftovers and low-quality conscripts acting as fire brigades to plug holes in the lines so as to delay the Russian advances. But what is the bunker fallback plan along what lines – is the plan to wait until the Americans, French, Germans or Poles show up? This is the stuff of Nazi dreams. It’s too late.”

A western military source comments: “I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability);  and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”

“The Russian ‘retreat’ conducted in Fall of 2022 was part of the plan and struck me as being inspired by the Mongol tactic of attacking, making a big show of running away, only to turn to pursue and then destroy the enemy. The Ukrainians and their NATO handlers fell for it hook, line and sinker. Now they don’t have the forces needed to maintain their fortress strategy, let alone conduct much in the way of counter-attacks. It was in this fashion that Gerasimov gained the upper hand in the two-front war – the one on the Ukrainian battlefield and the one on the Russian home front.”

“Deep battle is still the Russian doctrine. Its form and components may change, but the concept remains the same. The art is in figuring out where and when the holes drilled in the other side’s military, economic, and political structures will line up, and present the path to be exploited by Gerasimov. We can bet he’s known for quite some time.”

Two translations follow of current Russian military analyses. The first is by Boris Rozhin, whose Colonel Cassad Telegram platform is one of the leading military blogs in Moscow. The second is by Yevgeny Krutikov  who publishes long pieces in Vzglyad, the semi-official security analysis medium in Moscow, and short pieces in his Telegram account, Mudraya Ptitsa (“Wise Bird”).  

The translation is verbatim and unedited. Maps and illustrations have been added.

Source: https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin -- posted on February 27, 2024 – 20:25.  Part II has not been published yet.

February 27, 2024
The operational crisis of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine – Part 1
By Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”)

The successes of our troops strengthen faith in a collective victory. However, it is necessary to soberly assess the three factors that make up the operational situation at the front:

— our forces and materiel – the forces and materiel of the enemy;

— the ratio between them;

— the operational environment.

The situation in which the enemy is now on the defensive can be called an operational crisis. For four months, the Armed Forces of the Ukraine [VSU is the Russian acronym] command concentrated their reserves in Avdeyevka and Chas Yar, weakening other sectors of the front (in particular, Kupyansk and Zaporozhye). Having failed to ensure a crucial preponderance of forces, against the background of an increase in the media importance of Avdeyevka,  the enemy lost the operational initiative and is now forced to withdraw to reserve linesof defence. But they are not fully operational.

The transfer of reserves of the VSU is carried out under the increasing attacks of our aviation and high-precision attacks on key railway nodes (for example, Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka). Many VSU units need to be withdrawn for reformation, which is currently impossible. Therefore, they are equipped at the expense of mobilized citizens with low motivation and combat training.

LARGE MAP OF OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar. Click on original to enlarge view: https://t.me/s/rybar -- February 29 00:42.

By developing an offensive initiative west of Avdeyevka, our units have deprived the enemy of the opportunity to gain a foothold there. According to the Bakhmut scenario in the summer of 2023, when attacking near Kleshcheyevka and Berkhovka, the VSU  created a hotbed of tension, forcing us to hold large forces in position. Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have the opportunity to fully regroup, so they are withdrawing troops in key operational areas: Zaporozhye (Orekhov) and Slavyansk-Kramatorsk (taking into account our positions in the Avdeyevka and Bakhmut initial areas).

The new [VSU] commander-in-chief, [General Alexander] Syrsky, is confused about exactly where to concentrate his forces. In conditions of simultaneous movement of our formations along the entire front line: in the Zaporozhye,  Donetsk, Lugansk (the Svatovo-Kremennaya line) and Kupyansk operational directions, the concentration of forces and materiel in a particular area will inevitably create conditions for a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defence.

The advance of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the Maryinsk-Ugledar operational and tactical direction and in the area of Novomikhailovka creates conditions for squeezing the enemy west of the Marinka-Ugledar highway and in the direction of Kurakhovo, which in the foreseeable future will become a key node in the VSU defence  in this area. The situation is developing in a similar way in the Konstantinovsky direction, where our troops are having success at Chas Yar, advancing at the moment with coverage to Ivanovskoye, the largest defensive line in front of the Chas–Yar fortress area.

MAP OF THE CHAS YAR OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar.  Click on the original to enlarge view: https://t.me/rybar/57610

Steady pressure is recorded in the area of Yampolovka and Ternov, the Serebryansky forest, as well as on the left bank of the Seversky Donets, where an offensive is underway against Belogorovka in order to reach Seversk. Positional battles continue south of Seversk in the Razdolovka–Veseloe strip. Our units are moving along the railway line, although the tactical conditions of the terrain are not conducive to a rapid offensive there. The situation is more complicated in the Kupyansk direction. However, despite the difficulties of advancing and the altitude differences, we are managing to contain large enemy forces on both banks of the Oskol.

A likely scenario for the development of the situation is that during the coming month the VSU will continue the gradual withdrawal of troops to new lines along a rear echelon from 15 to 20 kilometres back,  while simultaneously trying to engage us in battles in areas where terrain conditions and defensive fortifications will allow us to hold positions: these are  Chas Yar–Konstantinovka, the southern approaches to Seversk (Rayaleksandrovsky fortress area), the Marinka– Kurakhovo–Ugledar line (Donetsk direction), and Rabodino–Orekhov (Zaporozhye).

At the moment of withdrawal from a particular area, the enemy will transfer his forces from site to site in order to inflict maximum damage to our advancing group. The VSU does not consider any other option, for example, to counterattack, since the concentration of troops required for that risks taking the shape of the Avdeyevka scenario, with the real prospect of falling into a котёл [trap].

 Left, Boris Rozhin; right, Yevgeny Krutikov. 

Source: https://vz.ru/

February 28, 2024How Russian troops are shifting Ukrainian defenses after  
Avdeyevka
By Yevgeny Krutikov

The advance of Russian troops to the West after the liberation of Avdeyevka has not been stopped at all. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have not been able to gain a foothold on any defensive line for many days, and moreover, this applies not only to the Avdeyevka direction. What is happening on the line of contact in the special operation zone and what will be the target of the Russian army in the coming weeks?

After the liberation of Avdeyevka the units of the Russian Armed Forces maintained a high rate of advance in this section of the line of contact. The enemy hastily tried to create new lines of defence to the west of the city along the Stepovoye–Berdych-Orlovka–Lastochkino–Tonenkoe–Severnoye line. But by Tuesday, February 27, Russian assault units had occupied the first line (Stepovoye, Lastochkino, Severnoye) and began operations to occupy the second line.

In some instances the enemy simply abandoned their positions, unable to withstand the blows of bombs and assault actions. The open spaces (fields, forests, and gullies) west of Avdeyevka came under the control of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation almost without a fight.

There is an explanation for this. First of all, the organization of defence on new frontlines is extremely costly and time–consuming; it requires a huge amount of equipment and specialists, and most importantly, time. It is precisely this time which the Russian troops are seizing to consolidate their positions, denying them to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and constantly putting pressure on them, primarily with long-range weapons.

The VSU, as it now turns out, were not prepared at all for the rapid abandonment of Avdeyevka. In addition, it seems that the enemy cannot withstand a direct clash with Russian troops outside of positions they have fortified in advance.  The VSU can cling to long-term fortified areas which have been prepared for a long time, but with the constant pace of the Russian offensive, they are forced to withdraw even from these positions.

Behind the new line of defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which has developed in the Avdeyevka area at the moment (provisionally around Orlovka), an empty space has opened up in which there are no natural obstacles capable of supporting new defensive fortifications. There is nothing like this up to the next major settlements of the Donbass, primarily Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsky). The enemy has not strengthened the small villages there in any way, thinking it wouldn’t be necessary.

MAP OF AVDEYEVKA AREA OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar. Click on original to enlarge view: https://t.me/rybar/57677 

The only limitation on the Russian forces for moving forward in this direction may be the old positions of the VSU on the flanks. For example, Kurakhovo is planned to be another “fortress”, which by the very fact of its existence creates a flank threat to the advance of the Avdeyevka grouping of the Russian forces.

The situation in another section of the contact line, west of Artemovsk, is indicative in this regard. The enemy’s positions in front of Chasov Yar in the villages of Krasnoe (Ivanovskoye) and Bogdanovka have looked to be very strong. But the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation began to move there not head-on, but from the north, pushing through and bypassing the fortified areas of the VSU.  As a result, by Tuesday, the assault groups had advanced almost to the centre of the village. At the same time, several heights were occupied, opening the way further to the west.

This manoeuvre is clearly visible on satellite images of the area where the lines of the enemy’s trenches south of Krasnoe are visible. Apparently, the VSU was afraid of the movement of Russian attack aircraft from this direction, from Kleshcheyevka. The ruins of Kleshcheyevka themselves are practically surrounded at the moment, but this direction has become secondary to movement on Chasov Yar.

The first districts of Chasov Yar – east of the canal, where the VSU units are located – are now being constantly shelled by Russian artillery and bombs [ФАБ],  which make it impossible for the enemy to manoeuvre their reserves and rotate.

The enemy transferred most of the reserves available at the beginning of February to Kupyansk. In Kiev this stabilization of the front near Kupyansk is considered a great achievement. The Kiev command is motivated to hang stubbornly on to the zone around Kupyansk by the realization that if they lose this node,  that would lead to the redeployment of parts of the Russian forces all the way up to Kharkov.

But the most important thing that the intelligence and leadership of the VSU are currently doing is trying to determine where the new main blow of the Russian offensive will occur after Avdeyevka.  The fact is that the Russian armed forces are now maintaining an operational pace along the entire line of contact. There is no section of the front line where successful assault operations would not be noted. This “multiple bites” [множества укусов] strategy currently being undertaken by the Russian forces has led to the disorganization of enemy behaviour and the dispersion of its resources.

For example, the first assault detachments of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on Tuesday night already entered the settlement of Terny in the Limansky direction and gained a foothold in it. The movement to Terny had not halted even for a day over several weeks, remaining in the shadow of the larger-scale events in the Avdeyevka direction and around Rabocino. But all of a sudden now it has turned out that in this area, units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have entered completely new positions, threatening to move further west to the Estuary and looming over the enemy’s Seversk grouping.

In Kiev, there is a well-founded fear that these new landmark breakthroughs by Russian units may generally lead to the collapse of Ukrainian defence and the transition of military operations to the more western regions of Ukraine.

Moreover, almost the entire line of contact, except for the Chasov Yar area, is now so fragmented that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have the opportunity to enter the operational space in several directions at once. Even the western press is now actively writing that the Russian forces are capable of providing assault operations simultaneously in two or three areas. No one knows which one of them will end up being the main one.

It is possible that there will be no “main” direction of impact, at least in the classical understanding of this concept. The new military reality also offered by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is a novel tactic: the movement of small assault groups with powerful support from artillery and heavy aerial bombs. Thus, the occupation of enemy strongholds is ensured, and only then are large open spaces cleared with the help of tanks.

In other words, relatively large settlements, turned into strongholds by the enemy, become something like a general direction, a vector of movement. For example, Pokrovskoye (Krasnoarmeysk) is located 40 kilometres west of Avdeyevka. This is clearly the next target for Russian troops. But the movement towards this goal need not be direct, but may be guided by the requirement to bypass and destroy the enemy’s defence lines.

At Chasov Yar, movement that was not in a straight line turned out to be effective for the Russian forces,  bypassing from the flanks the enemy’s fortified areas south of Krasny. Operations to hold down the enemy are conducted in Kupyansk in a straight line, while unexpected assault actions on the outskirts of this section of the front (the same Terny) lead to new threats of the encirclement of the defending units of the VSU.

Perhaps in the coming days we will see the next offensive operations of the Russian forces according to a linear scheme: the encirclement of Kurakhovo through the occupation of Krasnogorovka, access to the heights south of Chasov Yar, movement to Seversk, access to the supply lines of Ugledar, forcing the channel in Terny, breaking the enemy’s defences west of Avdeyevka, and much more.

None of these areas will be the “chief” or “main” one, but each of them will create the preconditions for the further liberation of the Donbass.

 [*] The lead picture is reproduced by Boris Rozhin to illustrate his battlefield report of February 28, at 19:17, indicating the disorganized retreat of Ukrainian forces west and south along the Berdych-Orlovka-Tonenkoe line in the central sector. “Today, the enemy has actually lost this line. Orlovka is in the process of coming under the control of Russian troops. In the next 24 hours, we should expect the appearance of videos with flags in Orlovka. Berdych is next.  An advantageous and prepared line of defence did not last long. The enemy will retreat to the west with subsequent attempts to use natural water barriers and terrain to compensate for the lack of prepared engineering structures.”   

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Source

Rocky Road to Dedollarization: Sergei Glazyev Interview – by Pepe Escobar – 29 Feb 2024

 • 2,300 WORDS • 

Very few people in Russia and across the Global South are as qualified as Sergei Glazyev, the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission (EEC), the policy arm of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), to speak about the drive, the challenges and the pitfalls in the road towards de-dollarization.

As the Global South issues widespread calls for real financial stability; India inside the BRICS 10 makes it clear that everyone needs to think seriously about the toxic effects of unilateral sanctions; and Professor Michael Hudson keeps reiterating current policies are not sustainable anymore, Glazyev graciously received me at his office at the EEC for an exclusive, extensive conversation, including fascinating off the record odds and ends.

These are the highlights – as Glazyev’s ideas are being re-examined, and there’s huge expectation for the green light from the Russian government for a new trade settlement model – which for the moment is in the final stages of fine-tuning.

Glazyev explained how his main idea was “elaborated a long time ago. The basic idea is that a new currency should be first of all introduced on the basis of international law, signed by the countries which are interested in the production of this new currency. Not via some kind of conference, like Bretton Woods, with no legitimacy. At the first stage, not all countries would be included. BRICS nations will be enough – plus the SCO. In Russia, we already have our own SWIFT – the SPFS. We have our currency exchange, we have correspondent relations between banks, consultation between Central Banks, here we are absolutely self-sufficient.”

All that leads to adopting a new international currency: “We don’t really need to go large scale. BRICS is enough. The idea of the currency is that there are two baskets: one basket is national currencies of all countries involved in the process, like the SDR, but with more clear, understandable criteria. The second basket are commodities. If you have two baskets, and we create the new currency as an index of commodities and national currencies, and we have a mechanism for reserves, according to the mathematical model that will be very stable. Stable and convenient.”

Then it’s up to feasibility: “To introduce this currency as an instrument for transactions would not be too difficult. With good infrastructure, and all Central Banks approving it, then it’s up to businesses to use this currency. It should be in digital form – which means it can be used without the banking system, so it will be at least ten times cheaper than present transactions through banks and currency exchanges.”

That Thorny Central Bank Question

“Have you presented this idea to the Chinese?”

“We presented it to Chinese experts, our partners at Renmin University. We had good feedback – but I did not have the opportunity to present it on a political level. Here in Russia we promote the discussion via papers, conferences, seminars, but there’s still no political decision on introducing this mechanism even on the BRICS agenda. The proposal by our team of experts is to include it in the agenda of the BRICS summit next October in Kazan. The problem is the Russian Central Bank is not enthusiastic. The BRICS have only decided on an operating plan to use national currencies – which is also a quite clear idea, as national currencies are already used in our trade. Russian ruble is the main currency in the EAEU, trade with China is conducted in rubles and renminbi, trade with India and Iran and Turkiye also switched to national currencies. Each country has the infrastructure for it. If Central Banks introduce digital national currencies and allow them to be used in international trade, it’s also a good model. In this case crypto exchanges can easily balance payments – and it’s a very cheap mechanism. What is needed is an agreement from Central Banks to allow a certain amount of national currencies in digital form to participate in international transactions.”

“Would that be feasible already in 2024, if there is political will?”

“There are some start-ups already. By the way, they are in the West, and the digitalization is conducted by private companies, not Central Banks. So the demand is there. Our Central Bank needs to elaborate a proposal for the summit in Kazan. But this is only one part of the story. The second part is price. For the moment price is determined by Western speculation. We produce these commodities, we consume them, but we do not have our own price mechanism, which will balance supply and demand. During the Covid panic, the price for oil fell to nearly zero. It’s impossible to make any strategic planning for economic development if you do not control prices of basic commodities. Price formation with this new currency should get rid of Western exchanges of commodities. My idea is based on a mechanism that existed in the Soviet Union, in the Comecon. In that period we had long-term agreements not only with socialist countries, but also with Austria, and other Western countries, to supply gas for 10 years, 20 years, the basis of this price formula was the price for oil, and the price for gas.”

So what stands out is the effectiveness of a long-term, long view policy: “We did create a long-term pattern. Here in the EEC we are looking at the idea of a common exchange market. We already prepared a draft, with some experiments. The first step is the creation of an information network, exchanges in different countries. It was rather successful. The second step will be to set up online communication between exchanges, and finally we move to a common mechanism of price formation, and open this mechanism for all other countries. The main problem is that the major producers of commodities, first of all the oil companies, they don’t like to trade through exchanges. They like to trade personally, so you need a political decision to make sure that at least half of production of commodities should go through exchanges. A mechanism where supply and demand balance each other. For the moment the price of oil in foreign markets is ‘secret’. It’s some type of colonial times thinking. ‘How to cheat’. We must create legislation to open all this information to the public.”

The NDB in Need of a Shake-up

Glazyev offered an extensive analysis of the BRICS universe, based on how the BRICS Business Council had its first meeting on financial services in early February. They agreed on a working plan; there was a first session of fintech experts; and during this week a breakthrough meeting may lead to a new formulation – for the moment not made public – to be put into the BRICS agenda for the October summit.

“What are the main challenges within the BRICS structure in this next stage of trying to bypass the US dollar?”

“BRICS in fact is a club which doesn’t have a secretariat. I can tell it, from a person that has some experience in integration. We discussed the idea of a customs union here, on the post-Soviet territory, immediately after the collapse. We had a lot of declarations, even some agreements signed by heads of state, over a common economic space. But only after the establishment of a commission the real work stated, in the year 2008. After 20 years of papers, conferences, nothing was done. You need someone who’s responsible. In BRICS there is such an organization – the NDB [New Development Bank]. If the heads of state decide to appoint the NDB as an institution which will elaborate the new model, the new currency, organize an international conference with the draft of an international treaty, this can work. The problem is that the NDB works according to the dollar charter. They have to reorganize this institution in order to make it workable. Now it works like an ordinary international development bank under the American framework. The second option would be to do it without this bank, but that would be much more difficult. This bank has enough expertise.”

“Could an internal shake-up of the NDB be proposed by the Russian presidency of BRICS this year?”

“We are doing our best. I’m not sure the Ministry of Finance understands how serious this is. The President understands. I personally promoted this idea to him. But the chairman of the Central Bank, and ministers are still thinking in the old IMF paradigm.”

‘Religious Sects Don’t Create Innovation’

Glazyev had a serious discussion on sanctions with the NDB:

“I discussed this issue with Mrs. Rousseff [the former Brazilian President, currently presiding the NDB) at the St. Petersburg Forum. I gave her a paper about it. She was rather enthusiastic and invited us to come to the NDB. But afterwards there was no follow-up. Last year everything was very difficult.”

On BRICS, “the financial services working group is discussing reinsurance, credit rating, new currencies in fintech. That’s what should be in the agenda of the NDB. The best possibility would be a meeting in Moscow in March or April, to discuss in depth the whole range of issues of BRICS settlement mechanism, from most sophisticated to least sophisticated. It would be great if the NDB sign up for it, but as it stands there is a de facto gulf between the BRICS and the NDB.”

The key point, insists Glazyev, is that “Dilma should find time to organize these discussions at a high level. A political decision is needed.”

“But wouldn’t that decision have to come from Putin himself?”

“It’s not so easy. We heard statements by at least three heads of the state: Russia, South Africa and Brazil. They publicly said ‘this is a good idea’. The problem, once again, is there is no task force yet. My idea, which we proposed before the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, is to create an international working group – to prepare in the next sessions the model, or the draft, of the treaty. How to switch to national currencies. That’s the official agenda now. And they have to report about that in Kazan [for the BRICS annual summit]. There are some consultations between the Central Banks and Ministers of Finance.”

Glazyev cut to the chase when it comes to the inertia of the system: “The main problem for bureaucrats and experts is ‘why they don’t have ideas?’ Because they assume the current status quo is the best one. If there are no sanctions, everything will be good. The international financial architecture that was created by the United States and Europe is convenient. Everyone knows how to work in the system. So it’s impossible to move from this system to another system. For businesses it will be very difficult. For banks it will be difficult. People have been educated in the paradigm of financial equilibrium, totally libertarian. They don’t care that prices are manipulated by speculators, they don’t care about volatility of national currencies, They think it’s natural (…) It’s a kind of religious sect. Religious sects don’t create innovation.”

Now Get on That Hypersonic Bicycle

We’re back to the crucial issue of national currencies: “Even five years ago, when I spoke about national currencies in trade, everybody said it was completely impossible. We have long-term contracts in dollars and euro. We have an established culture of transactions. When I was Minister of Foreign Trade, 30 years ago, at the time I tried to push all our trade in commodities into rubles. I argued with Yeltsin and others, ‘we have to trade in rubles, not in dollars’. That would automatically make the ruble a reserve currency. When Europe moved to the euro, I had a meeting with Mr. Prodi, and we agreed, ‘we will use euro as your currency, and you will use rubles’. Then Prodi came to me after consultations and said, ‘I talked to Mr. Kudrin [former Russian Finance Minister, 2000-2011], he didn’t ask me to make the ruble a reserve currency’. That was sabotage. It was stupidity.”

The problems actually run deep – and keep running: “The problem was our regulators, educated by the IMF, and the second problem was corruption. If you trade oil and gas in dollars, a large part of profits is stolen, there are a lot of intermediate companies which manipulate prices. Prices are only the first step. The price for natural gas in the first deal is about 10 times less than the final demand. There are institutional barriers. A majority of countries do not allow our companies to sell oil and gas to the final customer. Like you cannot sell gas to households. Nevertheless, even in the open market, quite competitive, we have intermediates between producer and consumer – at least half of the revenues are stolen from government control. They don’t pay taxes.”

Yet fast solutions do exist: “When we were sanctioned two years ago, transfer from US dollar and euro to national currencies took only a few months. It was very quick.”

On investments, Glazyev stressed success in localized trade, but capital flows are still not there: “The Central Banks are not doing their job. The ruble-renminbi exchange is working well. But the ruble-rupee exchange doesn’t work. The banks that keep these rupees, they have a lot of money, accrue interest rates on these rupees, and they can play with them. I don’t know who’s responsible for this, our Central Bank or the Indian Central Bank.”

The succinct, key takeaway of Glazyev’s serious warnings is that it would be up to the NDB – prodded by the leadership of BRICS – to organize a conference of global experts and open it for public discussion. Glazyev evoked the metaphor of a bicycle that keeps rolling along – so why invent a new bicycle? Well, the – multipolar – time has come for a new hypersonic bicycle.

……………………….

(Republished from Sputnik International )

Space Hero Of The Soviet Union – Time Traveling Cosmonaut Returns

CCCP Cosmonaut returns from time loop and finds Russia fighting German allied fascists in the Ukraine.

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On Rumble Video Hosting Site Космический Герой Советского Союза – Космонавт-путешественник во времени возвращается

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Moon Shot – Capitalist Private Craft Falls On Side Helplessly – 28 Feb 2024

Moon Shot – Capitalist Private Craft Falls On Side Helplessly – 28 Feb 2024 (9:18 min) Audio Mp3

Latest privately-owned Moon mission ends abruptly after botched landing

The first privately-owned mission to the surface of the Moon ended prematurely Tuesday as a result of a botched landing that has resulted on the spacecraft ending up lying on its side, unable to use its solar panels to recharge its batteries, and with several antennae pointing in the wrong direction. The lander, named Odysseus, continued collecting data until power failed.

(The Odysseus lunar lander can be seen Thursday in this image taken as it lands the south pole region of the Moon. The toppled lunar lander is still beaming back pictures of the moon, as its nears the final hours of its life.© Intuitive Machines via AP)

Much is being made in the corporate media about the fact that this is the first-ever Moon landing with a profit-making private corporation in control. The New York Times gushed that that the landing would “inaugurate a more revolutionary era” of more “economical” spaceflight. The Washington Post called it “a significant step toward NASA’s plan to eventually return astronauts” to the Moon. The Wall Street Journal asserted that the landing was a “milestone” for the space industry.

And NASA Administrator Bill Nelson set the tone for the nationalism and jingoism surrounding the event. “Today for the first time in the history of humanity, a commercial company—an American company—launched and led the voyage up there.”

(Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, describes how it is believed the company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon, during a news conference in Houston on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. [AP Photo/NASA])

In reality the landing was something of an exercise in reinventing the wheel. As the media and politicians themselves admit, there were landings that were far more technically challenging achieved more than half a century ago, both the famous landings of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, and the numerous Soviet Luna landers, which achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 1966 and the first robotic sample return in 1970.

Odysseus, in contrast, is quite limited. The spacecraft was built and launched by Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company co-founded by Stephen Altemus, Tim Crain and Iranian-American billionaire Kam Ghaffarian, and which focuses on lunar orbits and landings. It was a test bed for six experimental systems and was only slated to last nine or ten days on the lunar surface, according to Crain, which was based on how long the lander’s solar panels were to be exposed to the Sun. There was no backup power for the lander and its instruments to operate or survive the two-week-long lunar night.

Moreover, reports that have come out since the launch indicate that the probe may have been doomed from the start. Odysseus, the primary component of mission IM-1, was launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and descended to the Moon’s surface seven days later. The day after the launch, the company’s header of navigation, Mike Hansen, told Reuters that the lander’s laser-powered range finder wasn’t functional because Intuitive Machine’s engineers failed to unlock a safety switch during pre-flight checks. The range finder measures the time from when a light pulse is emitted from a laser to when the reflected light is detected, and is critical for measuring the craft’s distance from the Moon as it is landing. Range finders are a standard component of the vast majority of all modern landing systems.

The problem was only discovered while the spacecraft was en route to the Moon, and no software on board was able to unlock the switch remotely. As a result, the company was forced to use NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, one of the instruments launched as a technology demonstration, to measure the craft’s distance from the Moon as it was landing.

It’s currently unclear how much data was transmitted back to Earth from Odysseus. Intuitive Machines has been careful to say that “flight controllers intend to collect data” until the lander dies, but has so far provided essentially no information on the amount or quality of the data received. The most concrete bit of information revealed is that two of the lander’s antennae are pointed at the Moon, and the bandwidth between Odysseus and its controllers is much lower than expected.

The fact that the solution partially worked is a credit to the engineers and technicians who developed and operated NASA’s lidar system. Odysseus would have crash-landed otherwise. That the craft landed on its side is likely due to measurement errors caused by using the system in a way that it was never designed for. Intuitive Machines estimates that Odysseus touched down on the Moon at about twice the expected velocity, likely a major factor in why it ultimately tipped over.

The fact that a secondary system had to be relied on at all came from cost-cutting measures by Intuitive Machines. Hansen admitted in his interview with Reuters, “There were certainly things we could’ve done to test it and actually fire it. They would’ve been very time-consuming and very costly.” He continued: “So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk.”

Market pressures no doubt played a significant role. Stock of Intuitive Machines is traded on the NASDAQ and its value had been trending downwards since the company merged with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. and then went public in 2023. The company’s stock spiked after rumors emerged of some sort of collaboration with SpaceX, but almost immediately tanked. Stockholders were no doubt urging a successful launch as soon as possible in order to boost share values. In that regard, the mission was a success. The value of the company more than doubled in the lead-up to the launch and remains about 50 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the month, despite sharp falloffs after the company reported the poor landing.

That is not to say that the Apollo or Luna projects were themselves flawless. They suffered numerous setbacks, including the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a launch rehearsal. But they were genuinely new developments in humanity’s ability to develop technology and scientific methods to understand the world in which we live. The space race itself was started by the launch of Sputnik 1, a product of the progressive impulse provided the conquest of power by the working class in Russia in October 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, and Sputnik was achieved in spite of the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union.

Now, space flight is either subordinated wholly to militarism, private profit, or both. That so many companies are taking part is not a reflection of the strength of American capitalism, but of its terminal decline. Space travel is an inherently international endeavor, requiring infrastructure around the world to be successful. It cannot be done in any truly progressive manner on the basis of rival corporations, no matter how much money a figure like Elon Musk may have.

This was again proven by the explosion of the Astrobotic Technology lander in January shortly after its launch, the crash of the Japanese company ispace’s lunar lander in 2023, and the crash of Beresheet in 2019, a lunar lander developed privately by the Israeli company SpaceIL. And because the International Space Station is incapable of turning a profit, it is slated to be de-orbited and destroyed by 2030.

The drive by American capitalism to assert dominance in all aspects of geopolitics, which increasingly includes outer space, also plays a major role. Since the 1970s, Japan and India, professed allies of the US, and China, one of the main targets of imperialism, have all landed on the Moon. China launched its own space station, the Tiangong, in 2021, and several other countries have launched their own communications (and spy) satellites and sent missions to Mars. And if another country can send rockets to the Moon or Mars, so the thinking of think tanks and military minds goes, they can launch those same rockets at the US.

Real mastery of space travel will only be achieved when the resources of Earth are marshalled in a globally planned and scientifically coordinated manner. Capitalism has demonstrated time and time again it is incapable of doing this to deal with terrestrial problems—war, pandemics, climate change, social inequality—and it is no surprise that spaceflight is increasingly difficult. Like all the challenges facing modern humans, the issues are fundamentally political and will only be resolved when socialism finally buries capitalism.

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One Hour of Communist Music – The Moon (1:00:22 min) Audio Mp3

Bob Marley: One Love — The Complicated Life In A Movie – Review – 26 Feb 2024

Jamaican Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) was one of the most gifted and appealing musicians of the 1970s. This outstanding singer and songwriter did much to popularise and develop reggae, taking it in new directions for a global audience. Young people everywhere responded to his anti-establishment and rebellious music. He was a popular music star at a time when such figures still meant something substantial to masses of people.

Bob Marley’s continued popularity is reflected in the size of the audiences flocking to see Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic Bob Marley: One Love, despite almost universal criticism of its airbrushed superficiality.

At the end of Green’s film, we are told that Marley’s songs have become beacons for the oppressed everywhere. This deserves attention, but the necessary reflection on the contradictions in Marley’s life and work this involves is not forthcoming.

Bob Marley–One Love

Marley lived through a period of intense political turmoil. His musical career began as Jamaica was establishing its independence from British imperialism in 1962, and he achieved prominence and fame during a period of global revolutionary upsurge beginning in 1968 and into the mid-1970s.

Marley, like others of his generation, was shaped by this political environment in his response to the political and social oppression he stood against. Reggae voiced opposition to repression in a spiritual form that shackled and limited even its finest exponents, like Marley.

Green focuses on the period between 1976, when Marley left Jamaica following a politically motivated attempt on his life, and his return two years later, having recorded his masterpiece album Exodus in London. The songs from Exodus are at the core of the soundtrack, but Marley’s whole catalogue is significant.

This was a period of extreme political violence in Jamaica. The leading parliamentary parties—the People’s National Party (PNP) led by Michael Manley, in power since 1972, and the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), which had ruled after independence—were both bankrolling criminal gangs as muscle.

The PNP advanced a left-nationalist programme of reforms for what Manley called “our own model of socialism which must grow out of the application of basic principles to the special nature of Jamaican society.”

While orienting towards the Soviet Union and Cuba, Manley also appealed to US imperialism and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for economic support, at the expense of the island’s poor. His vague anti-imperialist rhetoric, however, won popular support against the right-wing JLP, which was more openly identified with US imperialism. Many Third World and non-aligned nations tried to play both sides off against each other in the Cold War to get some advantage for themselves.

Under Jamaica’s first Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante, the JLP fomented political violence against any protest. The JLP’s head in the 1970s, Edward Seaga, commonly dubbed “CIAga,” was prominent in Bustamante’s campaigns. In 1965, Seaga told a PNP crowd, “We can deal with you in any way at any time. It will be fire for fire and blood for blood.”

As Manley flirted with Castroism, the CIA armed the JLP and doubled its presence on the island. More than 100 people were killed in the run-up to the 1976 election.

In the absence of an articulated political response to this crisis, popular opposition to the brutality found its outlet in music and spirituality. In a distorted form, reggae music and Rastafari/Rastafarianism both spoke to popular discontent. There were no organized working class defense guards.

Rastafari is a religious and social movement that emerged in the 1930s, influenced by the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Rastafari idolised Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974, as the returned messiah and god incarnate. On a religious basis it espoused unity of people and rejected earthly governments (Babylon) as oppression. Notwithstanding this idealist, individualist form, Rastafari provided an outlet for anti-imperialist sentiment before independence and against government oppression afterwards.

In a pattern familiar across anti-colonial movements, such criticism became a threat to the newly independent national political class and capitalists, and Rastas were targeted and victimized after independence. In 1963, Bustamante told the police and army to “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive,” resulting in more than 150 detentions and an unknown number of deaths. Early in the film, we see traffic police pulling over Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a prominent Rasta. He is only released because of his high profile.

Rastafari contributed to the development of reggae as a fusion of older Jamaican music styles with soul. Bob Marley and the Wailers’ first album (1965) was a ska release that included “One Love,” incorporating Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” “One Love” was later reworked on Exodus in the now internationally famous reggae version.

Reggae became a popular expression of hopes for peace and an end to political violence. By 1976, both the PNP and JLP were trying to exploit this, which is where Green opens his film. Marley, already a star, was due to play “Smile Jamaica,” an ostensibly “non-political” peace concert in 1976 increasingly linked to Manley’s PNP.

Green shows Marley coming under pressure over it. His wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) wants him to cancel because of the violence. Some Rastafarians see it as a concession to “Babylon.” Others suggest it could be interpreted as support for Manley.

Kingsley Ben-Adir in Bob Marley–One Love

The violence here is described, even shown, but there is a disconnect between this and the musical response. Marley is presented as an otherworldly figure striving for peace. The film offers only a rather vapid presentation of his religious perspective for achieving this that does not bear scrutiny.

It sidesteps the real contradictions, offering a sanitised view of a world in conflict and responses to it. Rita tells Bob later, “You swim in pollution, you get polluted.” But a Rastafarian aloofness from Babylon gets us no closer to understanding anything.

Marley’s “Natural Mystic,” central here, sums this up. Apocalyptic about conditions, it anticipates even worse (“Many more will have to die”), but counters this with “a natural mystic blowing through the air / If you listen carefully now you will hear”), all while remaining compellingly listenable and danceable. 

The film’s weakest moments are all but a beginner’s guide to Rastafari. Rita introduces the young Bob to Rastas who discuss “the prophet Marcus Garvey.” A repeated dream image of a horseman rescuing the child Bob from a burning field is finally revealed as Selassie himself. The lyrics of arguably his finest track, “Redemption Song,” reflect its inspiration in the writings of the unprincipled opportunist Garvey.

Gunmen attacked Marley’s home ahead of Smile Jamaica. Rita only survived a shot to the head because her dreadlocks slowed the bullet’s impact. Marley’s manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) was so seriously injured he required airlifting to Miami. The wounded Marley played Smile Jamaica, then left Jamaica to recover from the trauma.

He decamped to London for two years in late 1976, where he began work on what would become his masterpiece, Exodus, which became a massive hit in the UK staying in the album charts for more than a year and spawning several hit singles. London was socially and politically volatile—riots in the street prompt the comment, “This reminds me of Trench Town neighborhood in the Kingston, Jamaica area”—but Green does not get beneath the surface of these conflicts.

Nor can he get any deeper into relations between this social crisis and musical responses to it. We see Marley at a Clash gig as they play “White Riot,” an appeal for a reaction against oppression. Hearing Marley’s new songwriting, Rita says: “You sound like you’re vexed.”

Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and his wife Beverley with US President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Marley began to develop his sound, taking on the guitarist Junior Marvin, who was raised as a child in Britain and played some of his career in the US. Marley encountered several different musical influences, as when Aston “Family Man” Barrett plays him the soundtrack to the 1960 film Exodus. Yet the primary driving force behind that soundtrack’s influence is the referencing of the biblical Exodus cited in a Hollywood movie depicting a Zionist account of the foundation of the Jewish State of Israel. Marley’s totally uncritical response to such issues is given voice in the song “Exodus,” with the line “Movement of Jah people.” 

Marvin and Barrett are played by their sons (David Marvin Kerr Jr and Aston Barrett Jr). Like the Marley family’s backing of this film, this is touching but signals that Marley’s depiction as an icon is assured.

It is no criticism of Ben-Adir to note that Marley was more complex than painted here. Green offers perfunctory indications of this complexity, confined within a framework of saintly justness. Only in the electrifying archive footage during the end credits do we get a better sense of Marley’s intensity and power as an artist.

Marley always wanted to tour Africa. This is presented as a clash between his pan-African idealism and cynical financial corruption. When Chris Blackwell (James Norton), owner of Island Records, tells him there is no infrastructure in Africa, Marley says, “Then we build it.” Marley physically attacks Taylor for instead lining his own pockets from African backhanders. When Marley finally did play in Africa, as the end credits note, it was for a 1980 gig celebrating the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe.

Marley considers a unity gig in Jamaica to end the political violence, saying, “I’m in it because of a cause.” The 1978 One Love Peace Concert came about because gang leaders Bucky Marshall (PNP) and Claudie Massop (JLP) hoped it might quell the violence.

Green reinforces the myth of the concert, with its iconic image of Marley between Manley and Seaga as they shook hands. Rita tells Marley his struggle is the source of his power and that sometimes the messenger has to become the message. By this point we already know about the rare skin cancer that would kill him at just the age of 36, so this is the consolidation of a mythic hero.

The real concert was more interesting and less conclusive. Former Wailer Peter Tosh spent half his set berating Manley and Seaga about conditions in Jamaica. Footage of the handshake (in the end credits) reveals the leaders’ cynical calculation. Far from achieving peace, the concert saw an escalation of violence. Massop and Marshall were both killed in 1979, while the next election year (1980) saw 889 murders. Jamaican parties continued to fund murderous gangs.

Marley’s music deserves a serious appreciation, but that requires an equally serious assessment of the world that created it.

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Germany: Mainstream Calls For Nuclear Weapons – 26 Feb 2024

Der Spiegel cover of the 17 February 2024 issue

Former President Trump’s joke that he would not stop a Russian invasion of a NATO country that refused to pay NATO level funding for ‘defense’ and weapons was a bombastic off the cuff remark. But, Germans who seek rearmament used the quip to beat the war drums. The supposed threat of a second Trump term is being used by some in Germany for an campaign in favour of its own nuclear weapons. Hardly a day goes by without a leading politician or a central media organization calling for a German or European nuclear bomb.

The current issue of Germany’s highest-circulation news magazine Der Spiegel shows a menacing-looking Trump on the cover. Trump is quoted saying, “I wouldn’t protect you!” followed by the question, “Does Germany need the bomb now?” The magazine’s unequivocal answer is yes.

Among other things, the authors are outraged that the “uproar was great” when the Social Democrats’ lead candidate for the European elections, Katarina Barley, “stated the obvious in the Berlin Tagesspiegel and called for consideration of a European nuclear weapon.” The necessary “discussion about building a European nuclear umbrella” should no longer be “dismissed as an ornament” by the chancellor and his advisers.

In fact, the government has long been working behind the scenes on alternatives to the US nuclear umbrella, in which Germany is involved through “nuclear sharing.” Even though Scholz prefers to avoid any public debate, “Trump scenarios are being played out in confidential meetings in the chancellery, the foreign ministry and the defence ministry,” Der Spiegel reports. Confidential talks are already taking place with the “nuclear powers Britain and France.” Also at the instigation of the Chancellery.”

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference, Scholz also spoke indirectly about the transformation of the EU into a nuclear power. “More than ever, we need to ensure that our deterrence fulfils modern requirements,” he said. In its first National Security Strategy, which was adopted last summer, Germany had therefore decided, among other things, to promote “the development and introduction of future capabilities such as stand-off precision weapons.” Discussions were currently underway with France and the UK. Obviously, the aim was to equip these “stand-off precision weapons” with nuclear warheads.

The aggressive media campaign serves to advance these plans and prepare the population for a much more comprehensive rearmament campaign, including the nuclear bomb.

In an editorial, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Berthold Kohler warned that Trump’s return to the White House “would also have consequences for Europe that we don’t want to imagine but must.” And he added provocatively, “Imagining alone is not enough, of course. Germany must finally prepare itself resolutely for the fact that the backbone of its security against military attacks and political blackmail could break away.”

Ramstein Air Base, Germany

One of the largest military bases in the world is the US military base at Ramstein, Germany. One might ask if that base with massive armaments is considered any kind of deterrence to a Russian invasion. Or doesn’t that fit the narrative of poor little unarmed Deutschland.

US Ramstein Air Base, Germany

“Prepare itself resolutely” means nuclear armaments. The Scholz government should “no longer bury its head in the sand and hope that the Trump nightmare will be over when it pulls it out again.” The Europeans must “massively rearm conventionally without any further delay,” but “also have nuclear forces that can restore the balance of terror in Europe, which is being disrupted by America in a way that Moscow had never dared to hope.”

Significantly, the former pacifists of the Green Party are among the most aggressive nuclear warmongers. Former Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who initiated the first German combat mission since the Second World War during his time in office, called for “our own nuclear deterrent” in Die Zeit back in December. Last week, the taz newspaper, which is close to the Greens, followed up with a commentary under the headline “Yes to the nuclear bomb.” In it, business editor Ulrike Herrmann cynically praises nuclear weapons as “paradoxical weapons” that are needed “to prevent a nuclear war.”

The Green Party’s in-house newspaper taz calls for nuclear weapons

This turns reality on its head. In fact, with the constant escalation of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which they themselves provoked, the leading NATO powers—including Germany—are not only accepting an all-destructive nuclear third world war but are actively preparing for it. The most senior Luftwaffe officer (Air Force) General Ingo Gerhartz threatened Russia with the use of nuclear weapons back in June 2022. “For a credible deterrent, we need both the means and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” he said.

General Ingo Gerhartz

A double interview recently conducted by the Süddeutsche Zeitung with the noted political scientists Carlo Masala and Herfried Münkler gives a particularly drastic impression of the idea of Germany fighting Russia. In it, the two pro-war professors out-do each other with calls for nuclear armament and possible nuclear strikes against Russia. “Nuclear weapons no longer prevent conventional war, they are a way of expanding it,” said Münkler. Germany needed to find “a different response to this than simply shying away from it.”

Masala calls for a return “to the principle of ‘massive retaliation’” and “to the old NATO maxim of responding to every attack with a major nuclear counter-attack.” The basic issue was “that we have to organize defense so quickly and hard that Russia cannot exploit its advantages,” he said. What was needed were “deep strike capabilities,” that is, “the ability to immediately attack strategically relevant targets in Russia with medium-range missiles or conventionally equipped intercontinental missiles.”

This is nothing less than a plea for a third nuclear world war. Russian military doctrine authorizes the use of nuclear weapons to defend Russia and Russian populations. Leading Russian politicians have repeatedly threatened to respond with nuclear strikes in the event of a full-scale NATO attack. Neither Münkler nor Masala and the other warmongers in official politics and the media have ever explained what their scenario is and how many millions of lives they are prepared to sacrifice. The fact is that a nuclear war with Russia would not only completely destroy Europe, but potentially turn the entire planet into a nuclear desert.

Despite this danger, the government continues to escalate the conflict with Russia. A motion passed in the Bundestag (federal parliament) on Thursday by the government coalition parties calls for a further massive expansion of military support for Ukraine with the declared aim of extending the war deep into the Russian heartland. Although the Taurus cruise missiles long demanded by Ukraine are not explicitly mentioned, there is no doubt that these are also on the agenda.

According to the motion, the “delivery of additional long-range weapons systems and ammunition is necessary to enable Ukraine to carry out targeted attacks on strategically relevant targets far to the rear of the Russian aggressor in accordance with international law and to further strengthen its land forces with the delivery of armoured combat systems and protected vehicles.” In this context, “an immediate replenishment should be initiated in the event of the Bundeswehr’s disposal of armoured vehicles.”

Some say that as in the 1930s, the ruling political class is reacting to the failure of the European Union to expand easily up to Russia’s border by effectively taking over Ukraine by preparing a massive invasion of Russia to break the country up and install a client government. The resulting multi-national invasion of the USSR by a large coalition of countries led by Germany failed miserably. The same confidence of simply getting over the border with troops would cause the vast continental country of Russia to collapse was expessed by Hitler who said, “Russia is a rotten shack, kick in the door and the whole thing will collapse.” That did not happen. The Russians beat Germany and the dozen other allied armies that invaded.

Some German’s tangible interests for military buildup and confrontation with Russia are being articulated ever more clearly. One of the leading foreign policy experts, Roderich Kiesewetter, (Christian Democrat, CDU) pointed out a few weeks ago in broadcaster ARD’s programme Report from Berlin that a military victory over Russia in Ukraine was “also an extremely economic question.”

“If Ukraine disintegrates, the follow-up costs will be much greater than if we go in much stronger now,” he declared. “And if Europe wants to realise the energy transition, it needs its own lithium deposits. The largest lithium deposits in Europe are in the Donetsk-Luhansk region.”

UPS Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS – by Eve Ottenberg – 23 Feb 2024

Last summer, 340,000 Teamsters were ready to strike UPS, but the union settled instead. One could argue it made a mistake. “We’ve changed the game,” the Teamsters announced at the time, because they got some of the life-and-death air-conditioning they demanded in UPS trucks, higher wages, more jobs, part-time rewards, equal pay and a MLK Day holiday among other supposedly “great” wins. But ah, what a difference six months makes. Because at the end of January, UPS announced it would eliminate 12,000 full and part-time managerial jobs to help get $1 billion in cost savings. Why? Because revenue shrank.

UPS hastened to assure the Teamsters that all was well: these luckless workers were not in the union. Though a part-time manager probably doesn’t earn big bucks, getting rid of 12,000 of them helps corporate savings add up. Indeed, given the long-time, anti-union ploy of classifying as many workers as possible as “management,” one wonders how many of these poor part-time managers really should have been in the union. And one also wonders on whom the next round of cuts will fall. Because clearly there will be one, maybe several.

This mass layoff was entirely predictable, bodes poorly for the future for unionized workers, and should have been vigorously addressed and negotiated with more than the sentence on separation of employment: “Upon discharge the Employer shall pay all money due to the employee during the first (1^st) payroll department working day,” or that “No bargaining unit employee currently performing work in the payroll department will be laid off or suffer a loss of their current payroll type position as a result of this section.” Another mention of circumstances that might involve a reduction of jobs is “If a technological change creates new work that replaces, enhances or modifies bargaining unit work, bargaining unit employees will perform that new or modified work.” Also “Driver-facing sensors will not be used for any purpose during any phase of a disciplinary process or be the sole basis for disqualifying a driver during the thirty (30) day period.” Regarding employees about to be fired, the contract says they should be kept on until their grievance procedure is finished. It also states that workers who won’t cross a picket line can’t be fired, specifies other instances in which they may not be fired, and those – a positive drug test – in which they may and lays out methods to increase hiring. These are the sorts of job termination and expansion issues that the contract addresses in legalese. They are standard boilerplate and indicate that the union did not specifically address mass job cuts. It probably should have.

But Teamster general president Sean O’Brien was strike-averse and eager to cut a deal. Even critical a/c in the trucks got short shrift, with only one third of UPS vehicles to have it installed over the five-year agreement. What do the drivers in the other two-thirds of the trucks do in sweltering summer heat? Hope they don’t collapse and die of heat prostration, I guess, the way Estaban Chavez, Jr. did in 2022, expiring in his truck from heat stroke. Meanwhile, part-timers continue living out of their cars as they work multiple jobs, because the two-tier wage structure was not ended.

So management got its cake and ate it too. First, with the contract it happily shelled out to snag more flexibility with work schedules. Then, half a year later, unhappy with having paid extra, it fires 12,000 “management” employees. All while UPS ceo Carol Tome pulled down $27 million in 2022. With hindsight, Teamster leadership looks a bit foolish, because rank and file workers were ready to strike and that, not stellar union negotiating skills, is what won employees some of their goals. As Truthout wrote July 26: “Any significant gains won by the Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company they were prepared to strike.”

But worker solidarity was, not to put too fine a point on it, betrayed. “Many of the younger radicals,” Joe Allen wrote in CounterPunch February 1, “that got jobs on some of the most socially isolating shifts at Big Brown, were left confused and in some cases very demoralized by their experience.” These were the activists from Democratic Socialists of America, who had flocked to UPS, getting hired there in expectation of a strike. To make matters worse, O’Brien very publicly hobnobbed with Donald “Tax Cuts for the Rich” Trump at Mar-A-Lago and met with other far-right politicos. Allen blames Teamsters for a Democratic Union for “cleaning up O’Brien’s previous image as a thug, with the broad left media, including Labor Notes, Jacobin and In These Times.”

UPS director of financial and strategy communications, Brian Hughes, was quoted in the Louisville Courier Journal February 2 that this round of layoffs amounts to “less than three percent of the UPS workforce and does not impact union-represented roles.” The ceo, meanwhile, has pointed out that full-time drivers earn $170,000 on average, thanks to the new contract. To repeat, though UPS has not announced which jobs specifically will vanish, company brass was at pains to emphasize that union workers are not affected. Translation: we’re tossing employees into the unemployment line, but we don’t want the union to notice.

And yet, the Courier Journal noted, “UPS reported nearly $2.5 billion in profit for the fourth quarter, according to USA Today. However, the fourth-quarter 2023 consolidated revenues of $24. 9 billion were a 7.8 decrease from fourth quarter revenue numbers in 2022.” Management can’t have that, oh no! Earnings must rise each year, relative to the last, or else UPS will cut jobs to make up the difference. “UPS is shooting for 2024 revenues in the range between approximately $92 and $94.5 billion. However, these numbers would still fall far short of the company’s historic 2022 earnings of $100.3 billion.” As Tome announced back then, “Our results in 2022 demonstrate our strategy is working.” So I guess one must conclude that if UPS doesn’t repeat its 2022 high this year, and it probably won’t, more layoffs will come next year. Fun times.

In fact, future lay-offs are a near certainly, as UPS struggles to match its 2022 revenue bonanza. One wonders about union negotiations with regard to job security, because that, as these latest firings show, is a big issue at UPS, a company that ditches thousands of workers because its revenue fell short of $100 billion. True, the contract won “the creation of 75,000 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions,” according to the Teamster’s press release on the contract, but nothing specifically appears to address protections against job cuts. This is always a dicey contract demand, because management doesn’t want to lose its grip on the absolute power to fire, but if these 12,000 lay-offs are an omen, maybe the Teamsters should have addressed it.

In these times, with companies more focused than ever on investor profits, stock buybacks, top brass compensation and stock dividends, it is wise for unions to be proactive about job security. Even if it means going out on strike. After all, strikes work. Why else did the railroad industry turn to president Joe “Phony Lunch Bucket” Biden to break a trainman strike, the focus of which for workers was job conditions? Precarity is a job condition, like overwork or being on call multiple days in a row. It is arguably the condition that enables all other on-the-job abuses. Remember, Biden was only too happy to sweep all workplace condition demands off the table for railroad employees. But he couldn’t do so for UPS, because there’s no federal involvement in the company. Turns out he didn’t need to, because the union decided not to press the issue.

Unions ignore precarity and working conditions at their peril. Teamsters head O’Brien’s laser focus on pay to the exclusion, say, of getting a/c in ALL the trucks speaks volumes about union leadership’s lack of touch with day-to-day labor. If O’Brien had to drive an un-air-conditioned vehicle for days on end in 100-plus degree weather, air-conditioning would have been a non-negotiable demand. If he lived in terror of losing his job, like some unfortunate part-time “manager,” you can bet precarity would have been an issue too. A genuinely good contract would have addressed these matters.

Meanwhile, over at the United Auto Workers, leader Shawn Fain led a successful strike and guess what? Contrary to management predictions, the sky didn’t fall in – even though one worker demand was the right to strike over plant closures and one key achievement was saving jobs at a factory in Belvedere, Illinois, previously slated for closure. This is a worthy union goal, and the UAW proved it attainable. Maybe next time, after who knows how many rounds of layoffs, the Teamsters will pursue it, too.

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Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.

Two Years After the Start of the SMO, the West Is Totally Paralyzed – by Pepe Escobar – 24 Feb 2024

• 1,300 WORDS • 

Exactly two years ago this Saturday, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced the launching – and described the objectives – of a Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. That was the inevitable follow-up to what happened three days before, on February 21 – exactly 8 years after Maidan 2014 in Kiev – when Putin officially recognized the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

During this – pregnant with meaning – short space of only three days, everyone expected that the Russian Armed Forces would intervene, militarily, to end the massive bombing and shelling that had been going on for three weeks across the frontline – which even forced the Kremlin to evacuate populations at risk to Russia. Russian intel had conclusive proof that the NATO-backed Kiev forces were ready to execute an ethnic cleansing of Russophone Donbass.

February 24, 2022 was the day that changed 21^st century geopolitics forever, in several complex ways. Above all, it marked the beginning of a vicious, all-out confrontation, “military-technical” as the Russians call it, between the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, its easily pliable NATOstan vassals, and Russia – with Ukraine as the battleground.

There is hardly any question Putin had calculated, before and during these three fateful days, that his decisions would unleash the unbounded fury of the collective West – complete with a tsunami of sanctions.

Ay, there’s the rub; it’s all about Sovereignty. And a true sovereign power simply cannot live under permanent threats. It’s even feasible that Putin had wanted (italics mine) Russia to get sanctioned to death. After all, Russia is so naturally wealthy that without a serious challenge from abroad, the temptation is enormous to live off its rents while importing what it could easily produce.

Exceptionalists always gloated that Russia is “a gas station with nuclear weapons”. That’s ridiculous. Oil and gas, in Russia, account for roughly 15% of GDP, 30% of the government budget, and 45% of exports. Oil and gas add power to the Russian economy – not a drag. Putin shaking Russia’s complacency generated a gas station producing everything it needs, complete with unrivalled nuclear and hypersonic weapons. Beat that.

Ukraine has “never been less than a nation”

Xavier Moreau is a French politico-strategic analyst based in Russia for 24 years now. Graduated from the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy and with a Sorbonne diploma, he hosts two shows on RT France.

His latest book, Ukraine: Pourquoi La Russie a Gagné (“Ukraine: Why Russia has Won”), just out, is an essential manual for European audiences on the realities of the war, not those childish fantasies concocted across the NATOstan sphere by instant “experts” with less than zero combined arms military experience.

Moreau makes it very clear what every impartial, realist analyst was aware of from the beginning: the devastating Russian military superiority, which would condition the endgame. The problem, still, is how this endgame – “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as established by Moscow – will be achieved.

What is already clear is that “demilitarization”, of Ukraine and NATO, is a howling success that no new wunderwaffen – like F-16s – will be able to change.

Moreau perfectly understands how Ukraine, nearly 10 years after Maidan, is not a nation; “and has never been less than a nation”. It’s a territory where populations that everything separates are jumbled up. Moreover, it has been a – “grotesque” – failed state ever since its independence. Moreau spends several highly entertaining pages going through the corruption grotesquerie in Ukraine, under a regime that “gets its ideological references simultaneously via admirers of Stepan Bandera and Lady Gaga.”

None of the above, of course, is reported by oligarch-controlled European mainstream media.

Watch out for Deng Xiao Putin

The book offers an extremely helpful analysis of those deranged Polish elites who bear “a heavy responsibility in the strategic catastrophe that awaits Washington and Brussels in Ukraine”. The Poles actually believed that Russia would crumble from the inside, complete with a color revolution against Putin. That barely qualifies as Brzezinski on crack.

Moreau shows how 2022 was the year when NATOstan, especially the Anglo-Saxons – historically racist Russophobes – were self-convinced thar Russia would fold because it is a “poor power”. Obviously, none of these luminaries understood how Putin strengthened the Russian economy very much like Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese economy. This “self-intoxication”, as Moreau qualifies it, did wonders for the Kremlin.

By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb, and blind that the destruction of the European economy has been a massive tactic, historic victory for the Hegemon – as much as the blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has been an abysmal failure.

All of the above brings us to the meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers this week in Rio. That was not exactly a breakthrough. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it very clear that the collective West at the G20 tried by all means to “Ukrainize” the agenda – with less than zero success. They were outnumbered and counterpunched by BRICS and Global South members.

At his press conference, Lavrov could not be more stark on the prospects of the war of the collective West against Russia. These are the highlights:

• Western countries categorically do not want serious dialogue on Ukraine.
• There were no serious proposals from the United States to begin contacts with the Russian Federation on strategic stability; trust cannot be restored now while Russia is declared an enemy.
• There were no contacts on the sidelines of the G20 with either Blinken or the British Foreign Secretary.
• The Russian Federation will respond to new Western sanctions with practical actions that relate to the self-sufficient development of the Russian economy.
• If Europe tries to restore ties with the Russian Federation, making it dependent on their whims, then such contacts are not needed.

In a nutshell – diplomatically: you are irrelevant, and we don’t care.

That was complementing Lavrov’s intervention during the summit, which defined once again a clear, auspicious path towards multipolarity. Here are the highlights:

• The forming of a fair multipolar world order without a definite center and periphery has become much more intensive in the past few years. Asian, African and Latin American countries are becoming important parts of the global economy. Not infrequently, they are setting the tone and the dynamics.
• Many Western economies, especially in Europe, are actually stagnating against this background. These statistics are from Western-supervised institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD.
• These institutions are becoming relics from the past. Western domination is already affecting their ability to meet the requirements of the times. Meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious today that the current problems of humanity can only be resolved through a concerted effort and with due consideration for the interests of the Global South and, generally, all global economic realities.
• Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and the EIB are prioritizing Kiev’s military and other needs. The West allocated over $250 billion to tide over its underling thus creating funding shortages in other parts of the world. Ukraine is taking up the bulk of the funds, relegating Africa and other regions of the Global South to rationing.
• Countries that have discredited themselves by using unlawful acts ranging from unilateral sanctions and the seizure of sovereign assets and private property to blockades, embargoes, and discrimination against economic operators based on nationality to settle scores with their geopolitical opponents cannot be considered guarantors of financial stability.
• Without a doubt, new institutions that focus on consensus and mutual benefit are needed to democratize the global economic governance system. Today, we are seeing positive dynamics for strengthening various alliances, including BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, LAS, CELAC, and the EAEU.
• This year, Russia chairs BRICS, which saw several new members join it. We will do our best to reinforce the potential of this association and its ties with the G20.
• Considering that 6 out of 15 UN Security Council members represent the Western bloc, we will support the expansion of this body solely through the accession of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Call it the real state of things, geopolitically, two years after the start of the SMO.

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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation )

US Wall Street AI Fueled Market Frenzy and Nvidia – Hype and Overinvestment? – 24 Feb 2024

The stock market surge, powered by the US chip designer Nvidia, which has sent Wall Street and other markets, including Tokyo, to new record highs, expresses some of the essential contradictions of the capitalist profit system.

A Nvidia office building in Santa Clara, Calif., May 31, 2023

There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI), for which Nvidia is the main supplier of computer chips with about 80 percent of the market, is a powerful development of the productive forces, laying the foundation for major economic advances.

But at the same time, the market frenzy it has set off underscores the central role which unproductive speculation and parasitism now plays as a driving force of profit and wealth accumulation. The tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars being raked in by hedge funds, speculators and corporate CEOs on the rise of its share price do not contain an atom of real value. They have only added another storey to the house of cards which is the global financial system.

Nvidia started in 1993 as a chipmaker for computer video games producing graphic producing units (GPUs) to run them. As the Financial Times reported: “Two years ago, Nvidia made most of its money selling graphics cards. It was a household name only to the most dedicated PC gamers.”

But it was discovered that its GPUs, which functioned somewhat differently from other chips, enabling more rapid multiple calculations, had applications which were necessary for the development of AI.

Its big break came at the end of 2022 when OpenAI made its ChatGPT tool publicly available, and it became clear the enormous potential which AI had across the board.

This led to a flood of investment in OpenAI because of the capacity of ChatGPT to generate human-like language and to provide answers to a range of questions.

The major high-tech companies moved into the development of AI and became big buyers of Nvidia’s chips while at the same time seeking to develop their own.

Last year saw a spectacular rise in the sales, profit and share price of Nvidia, capped off by the announcement of its results for the fourth quarter released last Wednesday.

It posted $22.1 billion in revenue, well above forecasts by analysts of $20.4 billion, with net profit coming in at $12.29 billion, compared to $1.49 billion a year earlier. It forecast sales of around $24 billion for the current quarter declaring the demand was not the issue but the ability of the company to meet it.

The profit and revenue results were released after the market had closed for the day, with Nvidia shares falling 2.9 percent in regular trading. But in after-hours trading the stock price surged by 10 percent to hit $741 withing 30 minutes of its results being released. This was a surge of $250 billion market value in less than a hour after the company’s shares had already tripled in price over the past 12 months.

There have even been projections that its shares could go to $1,300 which would transform Nvidia into a $3 trillion company. It is already surged past a market valuation of $2 trillion and is now the world’s third most valuable company after Apple and Microsoft.

In the wake of the Nvidia result, European markets rose with the Stoxx Europe 600 index reaching a record high. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index also hit a record eclipsing the level it reached 34 years ago before the share market and real estate bubble collapsed in the early 1990s.

The rise in Nvidia shares has been responsible for a quarter of the rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index in the year to date. So great has been its influence that some market analysts claimed that the release of its revenue and profit figures was a more important event than the release of inflation data.

In the event, Wall Street ignored the release of minutes from the meeting of the Federal Reserve which showed that members of its policymaking body were cautious on a round of interest rate cuts on which it has been banking.

As is always the case when what is regarded as the “next big thing” arrives there were plenty of boosters on hand with Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang occupying first place.

“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said.

In a call with investors, he said Nvidia had enabled “a whole new computing paradigm called generative AI.” Nvidia’s chips were “essentially AI-generation factories” of the new industrial revolution.

The trading desk at Goldman Sachs chimed in calling the company “the most important stock on planet earth.”

Last week Huang’s personal wealth jumped by $9.6 billion in a single day. As recently as last year Nvidia’s market value was $13.5 billion, Now it is over $2 trillion.

Soaring Nvidia shares have boosted the wealth of the 30 billionaires who appear on Bloomberg’s wealth list and attribute some of their wealth to AI by a combined total of $42.8 billion.

Two small companies connected to Nvidia, Nano-X Imaging and SoundHound AI also jumped after Nvidia detailed its connection with them. Nano-X shares doubled while those of SoundHound AI increased by 69 percent. Someone was either “in the know” or made an educated guess.

Large amounts of money were made following a massive increase in short-term call options on Nano-X that would only pay if there was a sharp rally. And there was, with the result that a contracted trade that sold for just $0.04 on Monday rose by almost 16,000 percent.

Hedge funds have been among the major beneficiaries. Arrow Street Capital, according to the FT, bought almost four million Nvidia shares in the fourth quarter of last year, lifting the value of its holdings to $2.1 billion and stood to make a profit of $1 billion so far this year.

The Bridgewater hedge fund stood to make $65 million so far this year after quadrupling its holdings of Nvidia stock and the gains on the stocks held by the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies are likely to come in at more than $375 million.

Amid the hype surrounding AI and Nvidia, recalling that of the dotcom bubble at the beginning of this century, some cautionary notes are being sounded.

FT columnist John Thornhill commented that it could well be the case that “investors are getting way ahead of themselves in their enthusiasm for AI-related hardware companies. … There is overcapacity in several segments of the notoriously cyclical semiconductor industry. There is geopolitical risk associated with China, one of the world’s biggest chip markets, which is being squeezed by US export restrictions. A salutary market correction is probably heading our way.”

Thornhill referred to an article by fellow FT journalist June Yoon in which she recalled the telecoms bust at the beginning of the 2000.

“The biggest risk of throwing too much cash, too fast, at AI chips is overcapacity,” she wrote. “That is already a problem for older-generation chips. With the current sector downturn lasting longer than expected, Samsung had to slash production last year to deal with a deepening chip glut.”

She concluded that broader adoption of AI may take time, “longer than today’s stock prices and funding expectations suggest” and that “hype and overinvestment are a dangerous combination.”

For all the billions being generated on the stock market, none of this represents real value. AI certainly contains the prospect of real advances. But it is being developed in the world of deepening recessionary trends where the only “growth” areas are financial speculation and military budgets.

Under these conditions, the marker frenzy is not a sign of health but is rather creating the conditions for a crisis. The contradiction between the possibilities of AI and the feverish speculation it has produced, recalls the analysis that an era of social revolution is ushered in by the conflict between the growth of the productive forces and the social relations in which they are encased.

Global Labor Union Action To Stop The Israeli War Machine – Block Arms Shipments – 24 Feb 2024

Last October 18, 2023, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) issued an urgent appeal notably “calling on trade unions in relevant industries: 1) To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. 2) To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 3) To pass motions in their trade union to this effect,” as well as to take action against companies complicit with the Israeli siege, to pressure governments to stop military trade with Israel “and, in the case of the U.S., stop funding it.”

In response, on October 30, five Belgian transport unions issued a joint statement saying they were refusing to load or unload arms shipments heading to the war zone. And on November 6, the Barcelona dock workers union announced it would “not permit activity in our port of ships containing war materiel,” while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

In Britain, Canada and elsewhere unions have passed motions and there have been protests outside Israeli companies, notably the “defense” contractor Elbit. In Italy, rank-and-file dock unions in Genoa and other ports actually stopped operations with Israeli ships and held a national one-day strike against the war on Gaza on November 17 that shut down hundreds of warehouses in logistics hubs. In Sydney, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) joined protests against Israeli ZIM Lines ships and has called for an immediate ceasefire. In January, the 20-million-member International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) issued a statement, “Global Unions Call for Unified Action Following IJC Ruling on Gaza Genocide Case.” Sounds good, but there is no call for labor action, just an appeal to the U.N. and “world leaders.”

In the United States, beginning in October the United Electrical Workers (UE) circulated a petition to other unions with demands for a ceasefire and restoration of food, fuel, water and electricity to Gaza, demands that were taken up by the United Auto Workers (UAW), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), National Nurses Union (NNU), Service Employees (SEIU), Painters (IUPAT), Flight Attendants (AFA) and even the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA). But these appeals were not opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza as such, and in the case of the UAW specifically were rendered moot by its endorsement of warmonger Democrat Biden, who has emphatically backed and enabled the Israeli slaughter, for president. The rest of the liberal union leaders will certainly follow suit.

As for the national AFL-CIO, after first quashing a ceasefire call by a local labor council in Washington State last October, on February 8, 2024, it issued a statement that begins by “condemn[ing] the attacks by Hamas,” does not oppose the Israeli assault on Gaza, and calls for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza but not for freeing the more than 8,000 Palestinians held hostage in Israeli prisons. In short, this is a pro-war statement – but what else can you expect from the outfit whose international “labor” operations in conjunction with U.S. intelligence agencies earned it the nickname “AFL-CIA” in much of the world?

The International Dockworkers Council (IDC), which in 2014 and 2021 issued sharp denunciations of Israeli massacres in Gaza, has said nothing about the genocide currently under way. The only recent “action” by the IDC, now headed by Dennis Daggett (son of ILA president Harold Daggett), was a statement in November against “any kind of war or confrontation” that didn’t even mention Gaza, and a January visit to Pope Francis in the Vatican, where likewise no mention of Gaza was reported.

(Dennis Daggett – International Dockworkers Council Head)

In contrast to the complicit silence of the ILA and ILWU leaders in the U.S., the Canadian section of the ILWU on December 20 issued a brief statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and expressing “solidarity with the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions.” It did not, however, call for any specific action, such as boycotting war materiel. Not coincidentally, the week before, the Canadian government voted for a ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. In January, Canadian ILA Locals 273 (St. John, New Brunswick) and 1953 (St. John’s, Newfoundland) took a stand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The reality is that almost all trade-union leaderships are part of a privileged labor bureaucracy that is ultimately beholden to the capitalist-imperialist rulers. Occasionally some may break ranks, particularly when they as well as the workers organizations they lead are under attack. But mostly that will reflect divisions in the ruling class, as with “antiwar” Democrats over Vietnam.

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https://archive.ph/PePDL

Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery – by Craig Murray – 21 Feb 2024

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Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.

We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.

The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of gray and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.

Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair, below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.

A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is in fact a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.

Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.

In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work, which led to a number of halts in proceedings.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases housing thousands of leather bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties, so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK Home Office representatives.

That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.

I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.

This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly. Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publications of photos or screenshots.

Twitter

The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.

I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court judge. But then what do I know of justice?

The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today. Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an £800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.

By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to replace his fellow ex-MI6 hiree Justice Swift and find for the FCDO in the Graham Phillips case!

And here these two were now to judge Julian!

What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.

Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by the comparatively bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.

Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all, and at times he merged into the wall behind him.

Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either. After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the defence to be allowed an appeal.

There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward Fitzgerald. Barrister’s wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.

Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue, in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Baraitser, that meant an appeal was viable and should be heard.

Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.

Baraitser and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention on Human Rights on Abuse of Process and Article X on Freedom of Speech.

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.

The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.

Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.

There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.

The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.

Finally, the Home Secretary had failed to take into account all these due factors in approving the extradition.

Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes extradition for political offences, at Article IV.

Fitzgerald said that espionage was the “quintessential” political offence, acknowledged as such in every textbook and precedent. The court did have jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process. He noticed that neither Swift nor Baraitser had made any judgment on whether or not the offences charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.

But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty. “You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.

This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of which they had felt the force.

Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament that people would not be extradited for political offences. Baraitser and Swift had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition for political offences. It was silent on the point.

Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts because of the ‘no political extradition’ clause. That must apply at both ends.

Of the UK’s 158 extradition treaties, 156 contained a ban on extradition for political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and many other countries in which no political extradition was firmly established jurisprudence. It could not suddenly be “not justiciable”.

It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.

All of the offences charged were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking” charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.

The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.

Julian Assange is a person in political conflict with the view of the United States, who seeks to affect the policies and operations of the US government.

Section 87 of the Extradition Act 2003 provides that a court must interpret it in the light of the defendant’s human rights as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights. This definitely brings in the jurisdiction of the court. It means all the issues raised must be viewed through the prism of the ECHR and from not other angle.

To depend on the treaty yet ignore its terms is abuse of process and contrary to the ECHR. The obligation in UK law to respect the terms of the extradition treaty with the USA while administering an extradition under it, was comparable to the obligation courts had found to follw the Modern Slavery Convention and Refugee Convention.

Mark Summers KC then arose to continue the case for Assange. A dark and pugnacious character, he could be well cast as Heathcliff. Summers is as blunt and direct as Fitzgerald is courteous. His points are not so much hammered home, as piledriven.

This persecution, Summers began, was “intended to prohibit and punish the exposure of state level crime”. The extradition hearing had heard unchallenged evidence of this from many witnesses. The speech in question was thus protected speech. This extradition was not only contrary to the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007, it was also plainly contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act of 2003.

This prosecution was motivated by a desire to punish and suppress political opinion, contrary to the Act. It could be shown plainly to be a political prosecution. It had not been brought until years after the proposed offence; the initiation of the charges had been motivated by the International Criminal Court stating that they were usking the Wikileaks publications as evidence of war crimes. That had been immedately followed by US government denunciation of Wikileaks and Assange, by the designation as a non-state hostile intelligence acency, and even by the official plot to kidnap, poison, rendition or assassinate Assange. That had all been sanctioned by President Trump.

This prosecution therefore plainly bore all of the hallmarks of political persecution.

The magistrates’ court had head unchallenged evidence that the Wikileaks material from Chelsea Manning contained evidence of assassination, rendition, torture, dark prisons and drone killings by the United States. The leaked material had in fact been relied on with success in legal actions in many foreign courts and in Strasbourg itself.

The disclsures were political because the avowed intention was to affect political change. Indeed they had caused political change, for example in the Rules of Engagement for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and in ending drone killings in Pakistan. Assange had been highly politically acclaimed at the time of the publications. He had been invtied to address both the EU and the UN.

The US government had made no response to any of the extensive evidence of United States state level criminality given in the hearing. Yet Judge Baraitser had totally ignored all of it in her ruling. She had not referred to United States criminality at all.

At this point Judge Sharp interrupted to ask where they would find references to these acts of criminality in the evidence, and Summers gave some very terse pointers, through clenched teeth.

Summers continued that in law it is axiomatic that the exposure of state level criminality is a political act. This was protected speech. There were an enormous number of cases across many jurisdictions which indicate this. The criminality presented in this appeal was tolerated and even approved by the very highest levels of the United States government. Publication of this evidence by mr Assange, absent any financial motive for him to do so, was the very definition of a political act. He was involved, beyond dispute, in opposition to the machinery of government of the United States.

This extradition had to be barred under Section 81 of the Extradition Act because its entire purpose was to silence those political opinions. Again, there were numerous cases on record of how courts should deal under the European Convention with states reacting to people who had revealed official criminality. in the judgment being appealed Judge Baraitser did not address the protected nature of soeech exposing state criminality at all. That was plainly an error in law.

Baraitser had also been in error of fact in stating that it was “Purely conjecture and speculation” that the revelation of US war crimes had led to the prosecution. This ignored almost all of the evidence before the court.

The court had been given evidence of United States interference with judicial procedure over US war crimes in Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy. The United States had insultated its own officials from ICC jurisdiction. It had actively threatened both the institutions and employees of the ICC and of boides of other states. All of this had been explained in detail in expert evidence and had been unchallenged. All of it had been ignored by Baraitser.

Following the publication of the Manning material, there had been six years of non-prosecution of Assange. WHy was there a prosecution after six years? What had changed?

Following the declaration by the International Criminal COurt that it would use Wikileaks material to investigate US government officials for war crimes, US officials described Assange as “a political actor”. This period saw the origin of the phrase “non state hostile intelligence agency”. Assange had been accused of “working with Russia” and “trying to take down the USA”.

Baraitser had acknowledged hostility from the CIA but stated that “the CIA does not speak on behalf of the US administration”.

It was important to note that it was after the Baraitser judgment that Yahoo News had published its investigation into the US government plot against Assange.

The court had heard of CIA action against Assange from Protected Witness No.2, but that had only gone to unlawful surveillance at the Ecuadorean Embassy and elsewhere. He did not know of the kidnap and kill plot. This was very real, and it was chilling. Indeed, the prosecution and extradition request was only initiated in order to provide a framework for the rendition attempt.

Political persecution was also apparent in the highly selective prosecution of the appellant. Numerous newspapers had also published the exact same information, as had other websites. Yet only Assange was being prosecuted.Baraitser had simply ignored numerous facts which were key to the case, and therefore her judgment was plainly wrong.

The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that, under Article 7 of the Convention, a prosecution must be forseeable, for the act committed to be criminal. This prosecution failed the forseeability test because no journalist had ever before been prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Baraitser was obliged to rule on this but instead had simply said it would be a matter for the US court.

Publication of leaks was routine. National security journalism is a thing. It was a well established aspect of the profession in the USA. Encouraging those in possession of classified material to reveal it is routine journalistic practice. Whistleblowers had been frequently published. But no publisher or journalist had ever been prosecuted for obtaining or publishing classified state material.

Baraitser had heard much unchallenged evidence on this point. A prosecution which has never happened before is not forseeable.

At this point, Judge Johnson intervened to ask whether the publication of so many unredacted names of informants had not also been unprecedented, and this may have been expected to trigger an unprecedented response?

Summers replied there had been other examples of publication of names. At this point, the court broke up for lunch.

It had been a strong start to the case by the defence. The judges had appeared to pay increasing attention as the case went on, and at times seemed surprised by some of the assertions made. The first substantive question, coming just on the lunch break, was however plainly intended to be hostile to Assange.

I am publishing this update at this stage. We are a quarter of the way in. I shall be continuing to write.

……………………

Source

UK: Julian Assange’s Final Appeal – by Chris Hedges – 18 Feb 2024

 • 2,600 WORDS •

Julian Assange will make his final appeal this week to the British courts to avoid extradition. If he is extradited it is the death of investigations into the inner workings of power by the press.

LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers can ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is far from certain that the British court will agree. It may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized. And that is the point, one understood by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País and The Guardian, who issued a joint letter calling on the U.S. to drop the charges against him.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other federal lawmakers voted on Thursday for the United States and Britain to end Julian’s incarceration, noting that it stemmed from him “doing his job as a journalist” to reveal “evidence of misconduct by the U.S.”

The legal case against Julian, which I have covered from the beginning and will cover again in London this week, has a bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland quality, where judges and lawyers speak in solemn tones about law and justice while making a mockery of the most basic tenants of civil liberties and jurisprudence.

How can hearings go forward when the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadorian Embassy, UC Global, where Julian sought refuge for seven years, provided videotaped surveillance of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege? This alone should have seen the case thrown out of court.

How can the Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno violate international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permit London Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian Embassy — sovereign territory of Ecuador — to carry Julian to a waiting police van?

Why did the courts accept the prosecution’s charge that Julian is not a legitimate journalist?

Why did the United States and Britain ignore Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses?

How is the case against Julian allowed to go ahead after the key witness for the United States, Sigurdur Thordarson – a convicted fraudster and pedophile – admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian?

How can Julian, an Australian citizen, be charged under the U.S. Espionage Act when he did not engage in espionage and wasn’t based in the U.S when he received the leaked documents?

Why are the British courts permitting Julian to be extradited to the U.S. when the CIA — in addition to putting Julian under 24-hour video and digital surveillance while in the Ecuadorian Embassy — considered kidnapping and assassinating him, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London with involvement by the Metropolitan Police?

How can Julian be condemned as a publisher when he did not, as Daniel Ellsberg did, obtain and leak the classified documents he published?

Why is the U.S. government not charging the publisher of The New York Times or The Guardian with espionage for publishing the same leaked material in partnership with WikiLeaks?

Why is Julian being held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial for nearly five years when his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy? Normally this would entail a fine.

Why was he denied bail after he was sent to HM Prison Belmarsh?

If Julian is extradited, his judicial lynching will get worse. His defense will be stymied by U.S. anti-terrorism laws, including the Espionage Act and Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). He will continue being blocked from speaking to the public — except on a rare occasion — and being released on bail. He will be tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government. That the jury pool is largely drawn from those who work for or have friends and relatives who work for the CIA, and other national security agencies that are headquartered not far from the court, no doubt contributes to this string of court decisions.

The British courts, from the inception, have made the case notoriously difficult to cover, severely limiting seats in the courtroom, providing video links that have been faulty, and in the case of the hearing this week, prohibiting anyone outside of England and Wales, including journalists who had previously covered the hearings, from accessing a link to what are supposed to be public proceedings.

As usual, we are not informed about schedules or timetables. Will the court render a decision at the end of the two-day hearing on Feb. 20 and Feb. 21? Or will it wait weeks, even months, to render a ruling as it has previously? Will it permit the ECtHR to hear the case or immediately railroad Julian to the U.S.? I have my doubts about the High Court passing the case to the ECtHR, given that the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe, which created the ECtHR, along with their Commissioner for Human Rights, oppose Julian’s “detention, extradition and prosecution” because it represents “a dangerous precedent for journalists.” Will the court honor Julian’s request to be present in the hearing, or will he be forced to remain in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh in Thamesmead, south east London, as has also happened before? No one is able to tell us.

Julian was saved from extradition in January 2021 when District Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. But this was a slim thread. The judge accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well.

The U.S. government claimed in the diplomatic note that its assurances “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to SAMs. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

It sounds reassuring. But it is part of the cynical judicial pantomime that characterizes Julian’s persecution.

No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. ADX Florence is also not the only supermax prison in the U.S. where Julian can be imprisoned. He could be placed in one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities in a Communications Management Unit (CMU). CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs. The “assurances” are not legally binding. All come with escape clauses.

Should Julian do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will, the court conceded, be subject to these harsher forms of control. If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling reads. And even if that were not the case, it would take Julian 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time to destroy him psychologically and physically. Amnesty International said the “assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”

Julian’s lawyers will attempt to convince two High Court judges to grant him permission to appeal a number of the arguments against extradition which Judge Baraitser dismissed in January 2021. His lawyers, if the appeal is granted, will argue that prosecuting Julian for his journalistic activity represents a “grave violation” of his right to free speech; that Julian is being prosecuted for his political opinions, something which the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty does not allow; that Julian is charged with “pure political offenses” and the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty prohibits extradition under such circumstances; that Julian should not be extradited to face prosecution where the Espionage Act “is being extended in an unprecedented and unforeseeable way”; that the charges could be amended resulting in Julian facing the death penalty; and that Julian will not receive a fair trial in the U.S. They are also asking for the right to introduce new evidence about CIA plans to kidnap and assassinate Julian.

If the High Court grants Julian permission to appeal, a further hearing will be scheduled during which time he will argue his appeal grounds. If the High Court refuses to grant Julian permission to appeal, the only option left is to appeal to the ECtHR. If he is unable to take his case to the ECtHR he will be extradiated to the U.S.

The decision to seek Julian’s extradition, contemplated by Barack Obama’s administration, was pursued by Donald Trump’s administration following WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the CIA’s cyberwarfare programs, including those designed to monitor and take control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers and the operating systems of most smart phones.

The Democratic Party leadership became as bloodthirsty as the Republicans following WikiLeaks’ publishing of tens of thousands of emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials, including those of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential election.

The Podesta emails exposed that Clinton and other members of Obama’s administration knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar — which had both donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation — were major funders of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. They revealed transcripts of three private talks Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs — for which she was paid $675,000 — a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. Clinton was seen in the emails telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign promises of financial reform. They exposed the Clinton campaign’s self-described “Pied Piper” strategy which used their press contacts to influence Republican primaries by “elevating” what they called “more extreme candidates,” to ensure Trump or Ted Cruz won their party’s nomination. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. The emails also exposed Clinton as one of the architects of the war and destruction of Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained secret. But if they do, they can’t call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, which attempted to blame Russia for its election loss to Trump — in what became known as Russiagate — charged that the Podesta emails and the DNC leaks were obtained by Russian government hackers, although an investigation headed by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, “did not develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of — or even was willfully blind to” any alleged hacking by the Russian state.

Julian is persecuted because he provided the public with the most important information about U.S. government crimes and mendacity since the release of the Pentagon Papers. Like all great journalists, he was nonpartisan. His target was power.

He made public the killing of nearly 700 civilians who had approached too closely to U.S. convoys and checkpoints, including pregnant women, the blind and deaf, and at least 30 children.

He made public the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 to 89, at Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

He showed us that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords.

He exposed that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime.

He revealed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians.

No other contemporary journalist has come close to matching his revelations.

Julian is the first. We are next.

………………………..

(Republished from Scheerpost)

“James P. Cannon and the Emergence of U.S. Trotskyism” (Bryan D. Palmer)(33:07 min) Video

Bryan D. Palmer on his new book, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism – by Chad Pearson – 21 Dec 2022

Chad Pearson recently interviewed Bryan Palmer about this new book,  James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2020; Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).

Why did you write this book?

There are many levels on which one could answer such a question. At the most basic, somewhat apolitical, level, it is a question of curiosity about an intriguing life. Cannon, who has not really been studied in depth for reasons we will likely get into in later questions, is a fascinating figure on the left. Born in the heartland of the United States, in an industrial suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, Jim Cannon was the son of Irish immigrants, the mother a devout Catholic, the father an Irish Republican with an attachment to the cause of labor reform and Debsian socialism. How did someone raised as an altar boy end up as a hobo agitator for the Industrial Workers of the World, a leading figure in the Communist Party, USA, and founder of American Trotskyism?

James Cannon. Credit: Socialist Workers Party, Pathfinder Press

Another level is historiographic: the writing on American communism has long been one of oppositional camps. Followers of Theodore Draper (with Harvey Klehr and John Haynes being his most prolific subsequent counterparts), known as traditionalists, have written studies of American communism that stress that it was a “foreign import,” imposed on the United States and its class struggles by the Comintern, which exercised an ironclad “Moscow domination.” A more New Left-inspirited school tilts against this interpretive orientation. These so-called revisionists stress instead that United States communists, while advocates of the Soviet Union and the Revolution of 1917, were also leading activists in the struggles against racism, unemployment, and exploitation, battling for industrial unions and civil rights. Of course, both sides tell us important things about the Communist Party in the United States. But in their oppositional stands they manage to each miss an important dimension of the communist experience.

Both sides wrestle with the issue of the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International, and its affiliated national parties. They do so, however, quite differently. Traditionalists insist that Stalinism was an outgrowth of Leninism and reflected merely the authoritarianism of Soviet communism. Revisionists tend to regard Stalinism as a tragic flaw in a Communist project that American revolutionaries aligned with the national section of the Comintern managed to bypass in their struggles against capitalism.

Diego Rivera Mural features Cannon with Trotsky in the Center and Cannon on lower right, just below Karl Marx. Credit: Prometheus Research Library

Cannon steps outside of these analytic schools, throwing a spanner into the interpretive works. If, as traditionalists argue, American communists were simply willing workers in Moscow’s Soviet cause, how could one of their leading figures, a native son, to boot, embrace wholeheartedly the Revolution of 1917, learn from architects of Bolshevism like Lenin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, and then reject the Stalinist leadership and turn away from the degeneration of revolutionary internationalism that was expressed in the Comintern with its Stalinization in the 1925-1929 years. And, if the history of American communism needs to be written, as revisionists so often suggest, as the chronicle of heroic struggles, often forged locally and outside of Communist Party obeisance to Moscow, how could someone as central to American communism as Jim Cannon manage to continue those struggles and the original commitments of 1917, but place so much stress on the necessity of winning United States communists and their Party back to their original purposes, going so far as to break from longstanding friendships and attachments to the International founded by Lenin but reconfigured by Stalin. Was it really possible for the secondary cadre of the Communist Party, USA, and its rank-and-file to express their allegiance to the Comintern, and to Stalin, and not take into their day-to-day activities some of what we know was a politics of a problematic nature?

So writing about Cannon offers an alternative to an historiographic impasse, one that in some ways reduces Communism in the United States to an either/or expression of foreign domination or progressive struggle. This bifurcation ultimately fails to deal with Stalinization and a dissident communist opposition to it.

Cannon, to me was “the red thread of continuity” that links the revolutionary workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism in the world’s most powerful nation.

Ultimately more is at stake than curiosity or historiography. The real reason to write this book, which of course encompasses the above issues as well, is that Cannon, to me was “the red thread of continuity” that links the revolutionary workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism in the world’s most powerful nation. Cannon’s political project, nothing less than the building of socialism in America, is what ultimately drew me to write this book. It explores Cannon’s role in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, which witnessed Trotskyism’s emergence in the United States, an under-studied and unheralded political achievement, in which the Left Opposition of the early 1930s became the largest and most successful international section of a Trotskyist movement struggling to resuscitate world revolution. This entailed opposing the Stalinizing fixation on freezing revolutionary struggle in the cul-de-sac of the program of ‘socialism in one country’. Cannon is thus a vital red thread of continuity in the international, and American, revolutionary tradition.

You write that Cannon has “hardly been embraced by the students of the American labor and revolutionary movements” (46). Why do you think this is the case?

There has always been an interest in Cannon, of course, with his writings published by the Trotskyist movement. And Draper considered Cannon an exemplary source on the early history of communism, relying on interviews with Cannon in his two-volume history of the origins of the American movement, insisting that for Cannon the cause of revolutionary communism remained alive into his later years in the 1950s, and this meant that he, above all of those Draper interviewed, was able to provide insights and tell the truth about the movement. Still, interest in Cannon in academic circles has been relatively muted, and up to the publication of my first volume in 2007 the best account of American Trotskyism and its leading figure remained that of a literary scholar of the New York intellectuals, Alan Wald’s 1987 book. Constance Ashton Myers’ The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 (1977) was weakly researched and, at its worst, condescendingly dismissive about Cannon, indeed about the anti-Stalinist left. There were important essays on Trotskyism, written by advocates such as Wald, Paul LeBlanc, and George Breitman, of which this trio’s 1996 edited volume, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, is undoubtedly the best example, but such writings were no substitute for an archivally-based, fully-researched treatment, one that put Cannon as the preeminent leader of the movement at its center.

Most labor historians were simply uninterested in Cannon, largely because the Trotskyist organizations he led, compared to the Communist Party, were always quite small. They did not register in the same way that the Communists did in terms of overall impact and involvement in major mobilizations. The CP, its membership, and large activist periphery, were especially visible in the union campaigns that gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and major anti-racist struggles, such as the protests against the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys. Trotskyists, for much of the 1930s, were fighting a rearguard battle to win the Communist Party back to its revolutionary principles, and few labor historians seemed interested in this, preferring to chronicle the epic struggles of organizing campaigns, strikes, and movements for social justice in which the larger CP was immersed.

“How ironic that New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in their 1960s practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and the left in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party that they in good part rejected politically.”

In addition, I cannot help but think that age-old bigotries, in which Trotskyists were caricatured as “splitters and wreckers,” influenced many New Left historians drawn to the study of labor; they simply did not think that the kind of history they wanted to write, and in which Communists clearly were both active participants and willing subsequent sources, had much of a place for Trotskyists, with whom they may have crossed contentious paths in the days of student radicalism and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. So Cannon and the movement he invested his life in building tended to languish. How ironic that New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in their 1960s practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and the left in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party that they in good part rejected politically. In their oral histories, for instance, they tended to venerate Communist Party members, and rarely, if ever, questioned their adherence to the Stalinized Comintern, its policy zig-zags from the Third Period to the Popular Front to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The ridiculousness of the allegations about Trotskyism being a Fifth Column for Hitler and aligned, conspiratorially, with capitalism, that were the stock in trade of the Moscow Trials, went largely unchallenged by many historians of labor and the left. Much more could be said. The point is that Cannon was indeed a marginal figure in the proliferating texts of histories of workers and revolutionaries that appeared in the late 20^th century and into the 21^st.

You offer a very critical analysis of the American Communist Party. After producing a rich introduction, you treat us to many examples of CP attacks on Trotskyists. Why should labor historians care about this factionalism?

I do indeed offer a critical analysis of the American Communist Party. I believe, deeply, that the Stalinization of the Communist International and its various national sections, including that of the United States, has much to atone for, souring socialism in the mouths of millions, as this process of political degeneration has done globally. From the 1920s abandonment of Chinese revolutionaries to the murderous outcomes of the Moscow Trials inside the Soviet Union and the deadly consequences of sectarian Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War to the disastrous policies that led to the evisceration of the powerful Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s, the record is a terrible one. This had its impact in the United States, and included the active role of the United States Communist Party in the imprisonment of Trotskyists like Cannon under the Smith Act in the war hysteria of the 1940s.

If I am insistent on this record being called out for what it was – which was a shameful repudiation of revolutionary solidarity – I do also recognize that in parties like the CP, USA militants could and did do wonderful work in organizing the unorganized, in fighting unemployment and racism, and in mobilizing workers to resist capital and the state. I make this clear in what I have written, not only in my studies of Cannon, but also in other publications.

The Militant, published by the Communist League of Ameirca, was edited by James P. Cannon and others. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

That said, yes, there were atrocities committed by both leaders and rank-and-file members of the Communist Party, directed against their Trotskyist counterparts. Trotskyists insisted on open debate, discussion among rival wings of the revolutionary movement. They wanted a dialogue on policies followed by the Comintern, and they demanded, as should all revolutionaries, that when policies led to failures and worse, then those policies should be critically examined. This was the basis on which Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern were originally expelled from the American Party in 1928, which sets the stage on which my book develops. As these dissident communists organized followers into a Communist League of America, Opposition (CLA) and published a newspaper, The Militant, that sought to make clear to revolutionaries in the United States how Trotsky’s critique of Comintern policies of the late 1920s, in which Stalin was orchestrating a shift away from advocacy of world revolution to the protection and entrenchment of Soviet power, to building “socialism in one country” rather than extending revolution internationally, the discussion Cannon and his allies wanted was shut down.

Trotskyists selling their newspaper were attacked, Trotskyists holding public forums were heckled and physically assaulted, necessitating the organization of labor defense guards (composed of Cannon’s former comrades in the IWW among others) to defend the right of free speech in the movement. Furriers knives and brass knuckles and lead pipes became weapons silencing Trotskyists. There was an ugliness to this gangsterism and thuggery that was entirely new to the revolutionary movement. In some ways it was the American equivalent to the Moscow Trials that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and culminated in the coerced confessions and murderous judicial execution of many old Bolsheviks. The difference was that in Moscow, Stalinists had a state and its power to effect their violence, while in the US Communists had only the capacity of their members to terrorize political opponents on the revolutionary left.

This violence brought into the revolutionary left was new. It had often infected trade unions, as revolutionaries were assailed by goons working on behalf of degenerate officialdoms, but it had never, before the attacks by Communists on Trotskyists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, been commonplace in gatherings of the revolutionary left, where heated debates, even acrimonious, sectarian, challenges were not uncommon, but where physical violence was virtually unheard of.

“My attention to the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist Party, a thuggery orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by secondary cadre and rank and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to challenge historians who have evaded this sordid history, even written articles suggesting the treatment of Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at what was done to revolutionary leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and strategic ways forward led to physical attacks on them as well as slanderous verbal denunciation.”

There are really two reasons labor historians should care about this, and they are different, but related. First, labor historians who inevitably address the left should care about the issue of factionalism, and many do, because it is an expression of ideas and programmatic orientations on the left and that are being implemented in the unions and social movements, because such ideas matter. They are the substance that animates activism, and an activism that is not driven forward by ideas, policies, and programs, is acutely compromised. So factionalism, often scorned as divisive, matters. Not all factional disputes are sectarian, and how one conducts a struggle to implement particular politics inside a revolutionary organization or, indeed, inside a union or social movement, is critical. This is where labor historians attentive to the violence that was perpetrated on the nascent Trotskyist movement by the Communist Party must draw a line, indicating that such resort to physical assault, premised on the view that ideas cannot be discussed, demands repudiation. My attention to the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist Party, a thuggery orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by secondary cadre and rank and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to challenge historians who have evaded this sordid history, even written articles suggesting the treatment of Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at what was done to revolutionary leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and strategic ways forward led to physical attacks on them as well as slanderous verbal denunciation. This needs to be recognized, for any communist party that descends into this kind of a response to engagement with its policies has clearly abandoned much that it needs to recover.

One of the most important labor victories in the 1930s involved Trotskyists. Here I’m talking about the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. How important were Trotskyists to the success of these strikes?

I argue that of the four major strikes in 1933-1934 – a series of textile strikes led by the CP in the South, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party, the longshore conflict in San Francisco in which Harry Bridges and the Communist Party were in the leadership, and the Minneapolis Truckers’ strikes organized by Trotskyists in the CLA – it was the Minneapolis strikes that were the most successful in securing for workers collective bargaining rights and advances in their wages/conditions. The three strikes of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters affiliated truckers in Minneapolis, occurring in February, May, and July-August 1934 ultimately, after much struggle, secured for the teamsters of the once proudly open shop city, union affiliation and improved conditions. These were bloody confrontations in which street battles led to the deaths of Citizen’s Alliance (an employers’ group) supporters who were special deputies, and striking workers. The strikes polarized the entire Minneapolis community, with tens of thousands of workers and their supporters massed in the streets. At the end of the bitter struggle, a union that was small and inhibited by its international leadership, who declared an interest in organizing only those workers who actually drove trucks, and, as a consequence could command an allegiance of less than 150 members, grew into a broad industrial union that boasted a membership of 7,000. John L. Lewis looked at the Minneapolis truckers and their willingness to battle reactionary bosses, Citizen’s Alliance ideologues and their special deputies, cops, local politicians, and a Farmer-Labor Party governor, Floyd Olson, and he realized it was time to make a move inside the American Federation of Labor to break with the so-called craft organization of workers and instead opt for a more inclusive industrial organization.

Battle of Deputies Run, Minneapolis 1934

“This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that would eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision…“

Women engaged in the Battle of Deputies Run, 1934, Minneapolis.

This was, from the beginning, the approach of the Trotskyists who envisioned organizing Minneapolis as a trucking hub, and who developed an extremely efficient set of preparations for an unprecedented class struggle. It was a nucleus of no more than a dozen members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America, Opposition, led by the Dunne brothers and Karl Skoglund, who worked, from 1928-1929 into 1933 to create the possibilities for the strikes. They had a long-term commitment and, once workers were eventually won over to the necessity of taking job action, they provided an exemplary blueprint for how to conduct a strike. This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that would eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision; a commissary and a Women’s Auxiliary was established, feeding striking workers and extending support for the confrontation with the bosses and their political supporters throughout Minneapolis; a workers hospital inside the strike headquarters, staffed by a doctor and nurses, was set up to care for the injured that the Trotskyists knew would likely emerge from street clashes and picket-line battles; a range of tactics were championed and developed, like the flying pickets that closed down thoroughfares and blocked incoming and outgoing trucks servicing a market center and 166 small trucking companies; and a daily newspaper, The Organizer, was set up to challenge the local daily press, which was a mouthpiece for the bosses. Trotskyists worked with already established, reform oriented local truckers’ leaders, winning them away from allegiance to the conservative hierarchy of the international union, led by one of the most reactionary trade union bureaucrats of the 1930s, Dan Tobin, who did everything he could to thwart the workers initiatives in 1934. These CLA leaders, long ensconced in the coal yards and trucking industry, worked patiently for more than a half a decade to bring the workers in this sector to the point they trusted their Trotskyist leaders AND were willing to take job action. Such job actions were always undertaken with the responsible commitment to achieving the ends of the workers’ strikes, which Cannon and the CLA understood were not about revolution, but about achieving collective bargaining rights. They adjusted to situations, and they kept their focus on what could be achieved and what was winnable in the particular, and changing, circumstances of 1934, which witnessed three separate working-class walkouts.

Dobbs in undated photo. Credit: Marxist Internet Archive.

The Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, supported by the national, New York-based leadership of the CLA, which staffed and created the workers’ newspaper and advised the strike leadership on how to approach the struggle and carry it to a successful end, became a power within the mainstream Trades and Labor Council, and eventually led the organization of the IBT in an eleven-state campaign of over the road truckers that at least doubled the national membership of Tobin’s IBT to almost 400,000 by 1940. Jimmy Hoffa later confessed that he learned everything he knew about organizing truckers from Farrell Dobbs, a Minneapolis teamster leader recruited to Trotskyism in the midst of the 1934 strikes. Minneapolis signaled that a few well-placed trade unionists, with a revolutionary organization behind them, could guide workers in struggle to previously unanticipated successes. In Minneapolis Trotskyists proved that their small numbers were not an impediment to them making great gains.

This established, also, that other ostensibly revolutionary groups, like A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party, should align with the Trotskyists to create a larger, more effective group. The Minneapolis strikes, led by Trotskyists with a protracted understanding of class struggle and a principled commitment to advancing the cause of collective bargaining, put the CLA on the map. It was global Trotskyism’s finest achievement in the trade unions, and would guide and influence Leon Trotsky in his preparation of the document that would serve as a founding statement of the Fourth International in 1938, a draft program known colloquially as the Transitional Program.

Echoing a few others, you point out the limitations of Roosevelt’s labor policies during the First New Deal, writing that “Roosevelt and Section 7A [of the National Industrial Recovery Act] actually provided little of material substance to workers battling to build unions, offering mostly rhetorical promise to those struggling to secure collective bargaining rights” (316). Can you talk a bit about how Canon and his colleagues viewed Roosevelt and the New Deal programs?

Cannon played a decisive role in shoring up the local Minneapolis Trotskyists to resist the temptation to succumb to the liberal rhetoric of massaging class struggle. This was, of course, the approach of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Governor, Floyd Olson, as well, who, like Roosevelt, was quite adept at proclaiming himself the friend of the workers. Yet both Olson and Roosevelt were more interested in containing workers’ upheavals than promoting them. When push came to shove, Olson was willing to call in the National Guard, raid the strike headquarters of the Drivers’ Union, and declare martial law to keep “order” and trucks moving in the midst of a protracted confrontation. The entire New Deal order, an administrative response to capitalist crisis that aimed to stave off the upturn in class struggle and workers resistance of 1933-1934, was ultimately more concerned with keeping the Democratic Party in power than in fundamentally advancing working class entitlements and genuine trade unionism. Its rhetoric may well have encouraged workers’ already committed to undertake militant actions, but it was those actions, not the New Deal agenda, that staked out new possibilities for labour’s advance. Cannon and the leadership of the CLA always understood this and, indeed, their militant strikes in 1934 were a central component of the working-class upheaval that dragged Roosevelt’s public utterances and policy offerings more to the left, rather than those appeals and legislative enactments pushing workers to struggle and build a more vibrant labour movement.

“The Minneapolis teamsters provided a textbook lesson of militant class struggle politics in their unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians pleas to compromise, and the pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators, and the like. The Trotskyist strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time and time again, what they insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking ruses.”

One dimension of this was the extent to which Roosevelt and his officialdom in Washington looked at the Minneapolis truckers’ militant actions and did their utmost to bring their struggles to a close. A number of local and national mediators tried to encourage workers to end their struggles before their victory would be secured, just as Governor Olson encouraged strikers to get back to work, promising them arbitration would work in their favor. Cannon was the most resolute of all of the Trotskyist leadership, either inside or outside of the local Drivers’ Union, in opposing these state initiatives to placate workers with the false promises of what could be delivered by mediators and arbitrators. He took this stand forcefully, for instance, even before the Minneapolis strikes, arguing decisively against the inclination of B.J. Field in the 1933-1934 New York Hotel strike to rely on Labor Board officials tied to Roosevelt to offer settlement terms to the striking workers. Those workers, it should be known, were marching in the street while Roosevelt celebrated his birthday in hotels where scab labor was providing the food and services to the President’s fête. That minor event symbolized the Democratic President’s relation to class struggle: a rhetorical proclamation that he stood with the workers; and actual actions that indicated he did not. The Minneapolis teamsters provided a textbook lesson of militant class struggle politics in their unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians pleas to compromise, and the pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators, and the like. The Trotskyist strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time and time again, what they insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking ruses. They used what mediators proposed that would advance the cause of the strikers to good effect, but when mediators demanded the ultimate quid pro quo of a return to work without guarantees of actual settlement terms, the Trotskyist-led teamsters sent these emissaries from Roosevelt’s administration packing. Reports in the Trotskyist press referred to mediators being “crucified by the rank-and-file” in mass meetings of rejection, and Cannon noted that as one mediator, a Catholic priest, left the union hall he was visibly shaken when a young worker ripped a crucifix off of his neck and hurled it at the priest. In their steadfast stand, Minneapolis’s unionists found that, in the end, the only way to get the attention of Federal mediators, was to refuse to give in. Then, they found, mediators were more likely to come around to seeing the value in taking a more forceful stand on behalf of the workers and their demands.

In short, Cannon and other Trotskyists followed a course in Minneapolis that promoted class struggle politics rather than reliance on New Deal legislation and the officialdom associated with the state’s bureaucracies, committed as it was to managing the Great Depression’s working-class discontent.

Briefly, what can you tell readers about the relationship between Trotsky and Cannon? How did Trotsky view Cannon? How would you characterize their relationship?

The point of departure is an elementary one. Cannon had considerable regard for Trotsky, even reverence. He was aware of his significant role in the Revolution of 1917, second only to Lenin. If, during the mid-1920s, when still a leading figure in the Communist Party, he voted on motions critical of Trotsky, he did so largely unaware of what was happening in the Communist International, and with little enthusiasm. Brought out of his disillusionments with the trajectory of the American Party in the late 1920s by reading Trotsky’s draft document at the 1928 Congress, Cannon appreciated that Trotsky was the founder of the Left Opposition with which he was aligned in his stand against the Comintern in 1928-1929. This led to his expulsion and the founding of the Communist League of America, Opposition. One of the essential tasks of the CLA was a publication program which struggled against all odds to place some of Trotsky’s key political writings outlining the missteps of the Comintern before an American readership.

Notwithstanding this high regard, Cannon also retained some suspicion of a figure like Trotsky, wondering to himself if this revolutionary Bolshevik pioneer would exhibit some of the same heavy-handed traits of a lesser counterpart such as Stalin. Would Trotsky insist on riding rough-shod over the national sections of the International Left Opposition?

Cannon also had no personal contact with Trotsky in the early days of the CLA, and one of the grounds for figures like Shachtman and Glotzer maintaining their personalized factional animosity to Cannon at the height of the dog days of the movement in 1932, was that Cannon was insufficiently theoretical and arguably too parochially embedded in the American movement to lead the Left Opposition in the US. Cannon, unlike Shachtman and Glotzer, did not travel to Turkey or Europe in the early days of the movement to meet with Trotsky, and was thus not assigned by him, in this period, to important tasks of building the International outside of the US, as, for instance, was Shachtman.

Cannon worried, in 1933-1934, if Trotsky, through meetings and, admittedly, likings for, elements gravitating to the US movement like B.J. Field and Albert Weisbord, might insist on the integration of such figures into the CLA. Both were incapable of being assimilated to the politics of the revolutionary Left Opposition,  each opting instead for a kind of freelancing foreign to the discipline of a Bolshevik organization. Trotsky, however, was not heavy handed, and he ended up agreeing with Cannon about people like Field and Weisbord.

Moreover, in his dealings with Shachtman internationally, at the same point that Shachtman was leading the personalized attack on Cannon inside the American movement, Trotsky came to appreciate that Shachtman simply could not be trusted to adhere to the revolutionary resolve demanded in certain situations. He was too prone to value journalistic felicity rather than programmatic clarity.  In a number of instances, Trotsky was convinced that Shachtman compromised revolutionary politics in his willingness to substitute chumminess with those following a wrong course rather than offering a forthright critique. Shachtman too often seemed unable to hold to the necessary political principles that differentiated the International Left Opposition from an array of radical and reformist positions. Cannon, more cautious, proved more steadfast.

Over time, then, Cannon became valued by Trotsky as the leading figure, not only in the US section of the Left Opposition, but within the broader international movement. Trotsky relied on Cannon, especially after the demonstrative example of the Trotskyist Minneapolis strikes, as a foundational proletarian figure in the potential vanguard. This was evident in 1937-1938, as Trotsky was drafting the document that would serve as the guiding statement of the new Fourth International, in which he relied on discussions with Cannon and others in Mexico, particularly with respect to trade union questions and the orientation of the new International to work in the labor movement. The Socialist Workers Party that Cannon founded in 1938 became the flagship national section in the New International, and while Shachtman, whose facility with languages was considerable, played a role in the meetings convened to establish this body, it was Cannon whom Trotsky trusted to try to bring together a deeply divided British Trotskyist movement and to convince wavering delegates from other European sections to join with Trotsky in the Fourth International. No figure in the American movement was more highly regarded by Trotsky than Cannon, and Trotsky was constantly urging Jim to participate in this or that development in the United States, even as he was geographically distant from places where such happenings were unfolding.

While you clearly admire Cannon, you are not guilty of hero-worship. You write, “Cannon’s foibles and shortcomings as a leader, of which he was well aware, were also on display in the mid-1930s.” Talk about some of his shortcomings.

The starting point is that Cannon himself recognized his shortcomings. He was not unduly modest, but his self-reflection, and capacity to look at himself critically, was decided different than others in the movement, among them Shachtman or C.L.R. James. The latter, for instance, while talented, cosmopolitan, and brilliant on the literary front, was given to egocentric postures of grandeur that would have been entirely foreign to Cannon. Cannon knew his limitations, and one of his favorite sayings was that, “He has the merits of his defects.” Which meant that the subject was aware of his shortcomings. Cannon, more than most revolutionary leaders was cognizant of those areas where he was lacking. He once said, for instance, that he wanted Sylvia Bleeker to give a eulogy at his funeral. “She will tell the truth,” he said. Bleeker, a needle trades worker in New York, and long time CLA/SWP member, was a friend of Rose Karsner’s, Cannon’s wife, and would, on occasion, be dispatched to some saloon or Lower East Side restaurant to get Cannon home after a night of drinking. She knew his shortcomings well.

Balanced against his accomplishments in the 1930s, Cannon’s personal failings were hardly overwhelming, but they did exist. He had a tendency to retreat into the bottle when the political movement that was so crucial in his life flagged, as it did in the early 1930s, and younger comrades whom he had mentored throughout the 1920s, like Shachtman, Abern, and Glotzer, turned against him. He neglected his duties and responsibilities in the movement for a time, as it flagged, although never to the extent suggested by his adversaries. They exaggerated and blew things out of proportion, and themselves were guilty of behaviors arguably as problematic.

Cannon also had to constantly shed his impatience with factional opponents, reaching back to tendencies engrained in the Stalinist school of bureaucratization that was the American CP in the mid-to-late 1920s. Trotsky would routinely admonish Cannon to let the differences between majorities and minorities in the dissident communist movement run their course, in debate and open discussion, rather than resolve them through the exercise of organizational power. Majorities and their leadership, Trotsky stressed, owed minorities more leeway than they were likely to give those exercising majority authority.

Cannon’s great strength in helping to found both the Workers (Communist) Party in the very early 1920s and the Communist League of America, Opposition, in the late 1920s, was that, as his one-time comrade in the CP, Alexander Bittelman, once said, he functioned like a mechanic, moving throughout a factory, maintaining, oiling, and reviving the apparatus of production. Cannon did this with the variegated personnel of the revolutionary movement, bringing together various human components of the left, situating them amongst the larger body in ways that led to enhancing their respective contributions. Cannon was an architect of movements, an organizer of organizers, a party builder, mentoring the young, and solidifying more senior cadre. This was a great strength, and Cannon continued to function in this way in various endeavors of the 1930s.

On occasion, however, he faltered. By the 1930s, after decades devoted to building the revolutionary movement, Cannon perhaps lost patience with some older comrades, in whom he placed great faith that they would function, as he did, in the best interests of the movement. But he was perhaps too insistent that once a comrade reached a certain level of experience in the movement, they should stand on their own, and come to the right conclusions. If they resisted coming to such conclusions, Cannon was perhaps less than able to offer them the comradely guidance they might well have benefitted from. There was a bit of this in Cannon’s response to personalized attacks on him in the early 1930s by Shachtman, Glotzer, Abern, and Maurice Spector. That said, this quartet gave as good as they got. The same could be said of the split of Hugo Oehler and Tom Stamm from Cannon later in the 1930s, over the question of entry into the Socialist Party. Again, this duo and those they attracted to them in their attack on what they considered the liquidationism of entry, violated discipline, behaved in a reckless and irresponsible manner, and conducted themselves in ways that certainly warranted expulsion from the body Cannon then headed, the Workers Party. That said, Oehler and Stamm were dedicated revolutionists, with a long history of functioning as Cannon’s trusted organizers, people whom he came to rely on in difficult situations and could be counted on to embrace left-wing stands. Might not Cannon have attempted to appease them somewhat as the decision to enter the SP was made, draw them back into the revolutionary fold? Cannon, however, at a certain point had had enough, and the split was irrevocable, as it had been between Cannon’s oldest friend in the CP, Bill Dunne, and himself in 1928. Cannon long harbored regrets that he had been unable to win Dunne to his positions at the end of the 1920s, and blamed himself for this failure. There was something of that, as well, in his reflections on his break from Oehler and Stamm in the mid-1930s, for he had great regard for both individuals.

“When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a right-winger who assumed the Presidency of the auto workers, battled the CP, Cannon operatives in the union like Bert Cochran, tended to be too uncritical of Martin. It was too easy, given the machinations of the CP and their fellow travelers inside the UAW, to want to strike blow after blow against the Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became, in some ways, too much the Trotskyists’ friend. But aligning with Martin to do this was inevitably going to end badly, as it did.”

A final shortcoming related to Stalinism. The revolutionary Left Opposition was always threading a political needle when it came to Stalinism. It had to drive its political message in a principled passage through the eye of a needle that separated undue hatred and dismissal of Stalinism (Stalinophobia) and the danger of taking an opportunistic path in reacting to Stalinist elements in the labor movement. What had to be avoided, in the trade unions, for instance, was pandering to the instinctual anti-communism of a mainstream officialdom, accepting or acquiescing to elements of their program in order to curry favor with them in legitimate struggles against the mistaken practice of the Communist Party. For the most part, Cannon pursued such a principled course. But on occasion, especially when confronted by slanderous attack and the worst (and exceedingly vile) behavior and positions put forward by the CP, its leaders, and even, sometimes its rank and file, Cannon faltered. He actually endorsed suing the CP in the bourgeois courts, for instance, when the CP alleged that the murder of a non-revolutionary trade unionist who worked with the Minneapolis Trotskyist teamster leaders in the late 1930s was a consequence of the Trotskyists facilitating the entry of gangsters into the Drivers’ Union. This was of course a vicious lie, and much evidence existed to repudiate it, but Cannon should not, along with all the rest of the SWP’s leadership, have opted for a libel case. He should have pursued an open discussion and debate of the issue, exposing Stalinist falsifications and the embittered irrationality that drove such misleading accusations. When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a right-winger who assumed the Presidency of the auto workers, battled the CP, Cannon operatives in the union like Bert Cochran, tended to be too uncritical of Martin. It was too easy, given the machinations of the CP and their fellow travelers inside the UAW, to want to strike blow after blow against the Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became, in some ways, too much the Trotskyists’ friend. But aligning with Martin to do this was inevitably going to end badly, as it did. Cannon might even drift into Stalinophobic statements that the Stalinists in the UAW were a greater danger to the auto workers than the bosses. This hyperbole was unfortunate, a political step backwards. Given the ugliness of Stalinist practices in the unions and elsewhere, which most labor historians slide over, whitewashing a lot of dirty behavior, Cannon’s unfortunate drift into Stalinophobia is understandable. We must not forget that this was a period as well that, in spite of the Popular Front’s class collaborationist unity with progressive bourgeois elements and all others on the social-democratic, reformist left, Trotskyists were still demonized by the CP. The Moscow Trials, at their height with the coming of the Popular Front, claimed Trotsky himself had collaborated with fascists and capitalists to sabotage the Soviet Union, and that Trotskyists were responsible for terroristic acts against the workers’ state. Stalinism was murdering left-wing dissidents in Europe, including in Spain, where the Trotskyist-inflected POUM and anarchist battalions fighting Franco were being sabotaged by Comintern agents. Cannon knew all this and had experienced Stalinist gangsterism, thuggery, and personalized, calumnious attack. Throughout all of this he often maintained a principled position on the place of the Communist Party, but he could, and did, occasionally slip.

You conclude this volume with these words “… James P. Cannon helped transform the development of the American left, leaving a militant, revolutionary footprint on the landscape of class relations in the world’s most powerful capitalist nation” (943). What key lessons can today’s activists draw from Cannon?

The starting point for any answer to this question is an assessment of where the left – a revolutionary left — is at right now, within the current conjuncture. Many see the left as vibrant, a forceful presence in the politics of our time. Much, however, depends on what we regard as left. I agree that in our time there is broader acceptance of a range of important diversity issues that are certainly necessarily included in any assessment of left-wing politics than there has been in the past. Certainly anti-racism is more forceful in our times than it has been in previous times. Basic commitments to women’s equality and feminism, advocacy for the disabled, and acceptance of and defense of the rights of various components of the LBGTQ2s+ communities are now very much in the public eye, and gaining support among the general population and within mainstream political culture in ways that were simply unimaginable in the 1930s or even the 1960s. This is all to the good.

It is questionable, however, as to how much the widespread politics of diversity, is aligned with a politics that seeks fundamental socio-economic transformation, the replacement of capitalist with socialism.  A revolutionary left that seeks a root-and-ranch repudiation of capitalism, and the establishment of socialism, in spite of the growth of bodies like the Democratic Socialists of America, seems to me weaker than at any point in United States history, reaching back at least 150 years. And the labor movement, while it is indeed showing signs of revival, and is the undeniable vehicle of defense of working-class interests, has suffered blow after blow in the last 50 years, losing much of the ground it secured through struggle in the course of the 1930s and 1940s. The weakening of the trade unions and the evisceration of the revolutionary left have been the decisive developments of the neoliberal era of the last half century.

Rebuilding the labor movement and the left is the necessary political task of our present, and that will not be done without an infusion of energy into movements and mobilizations that are unambiguously anti-capitalist. Capitalism, to my way of thinking, must be transcended if working-class exploitation is to be brought to an end and a host of varied oppressions, associated with colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the bigotry directed against so many components of modern society, are to be dismantled and defeated.

Even if Cannon did not speak in the idiom of our present (he was the product of a Victorian era, after all), his project was to bring capitalism to its knees and build a socialist society. His embrace of revolutionary socialism, from a young age, encompassed the ending of all oppressions, including, of course, the decisively important material marker of social hierarchy, class. Cannon’s anti-capitalist revolutionary politics must be revived if the left and its organized presence in the world of the 21^st century, including within the trade unions and an array of social movements, is to pose a meaningful challenge to entrenched authority and its varied sources of power.

We can appreciate that this kind of revolutionary left has been on a downward slide for decades. Organizations and movements of the left that emerged out of the 1960s and that occupied a significant place in the alternative political universe of the 1970s have largely been either repressed by the state – Black Panthers & American Indian Movement, for instance – or imploded, their internal fragmentation encouraged and accelerated by that same apparatus of coercive suppression. The times do not look good for the kind of revolutionary left Cannon dedicated his life to building, in part because the Stalinism that he lived through, broke from, and abhorred, has done so much to discredit the revolutionary socialist project within which it grew and which it came to undermine and eventually destroy within specific geographical boundaries.

If our times look inauspicious for the revival of the revolutionary left, imagine how they looked to Cannon in 1928. When he embarked on creating an alternative to a powerful Communist International that symbolized so much positive possibility to peoples of the world gravitating, amidst capitalist collapse, to the need to confront exploitation and oppression and establish societies whose guiding light was not the profit motive, the task before Cannon must have appeared especially daunting.

Yet with a small but committed group of like-minded men and women, Cannon built a political organization that intervened in the American class struggle in an amazingly effective way. That same group battled an entrenched Stalinist left-wing that outstripped it in size and historic significance at the same time as they aimed their sights at a political monolith, United States capitalism, that appeared to be marching to global hegemony. War and fascism threatened, racist segregation still governed much of the social relations of everyday life in the United States. Yet into this context, Cannon and the American Trotskyists jumped, exercising influence in trade unions, winning some (by no means all) progressive intellectuals to their banner, forcing the recognition that a society many on the left gravitated to instinctually had conducted show trails that were nothing less than a judicial obscenity, exposing their murderous outcomes as resting on nothing less than slander and falsehood. In the process a workers’ revolutionary party, the Socialist Workers Party, was formed, occupying the status as the flagship organization in a new revolutionary International. All of this took place amidst arguably the longest and most intense capitalist crisis in the history of modern political economy.

During the depths of this Great Depression, more and more people understood that capitalism was no longer a progressive force, pushing societies forward. As the crisis dragged on, some lost hope and became immobilized, but a militant minority came to understand that it must fight back. Today, those militant minorities tend to be hived off into their particularistic political silos. Moreover, capitalist crisis tends to be more mercurial and much more insidious in its continuities than was the Great Depression. We have witnessed, over the course of the last half century, a commonplace routinizing of capitalist crisis that manifests itself in an almost permanent state of crisis, so normalized that the crisis becomes identifiable only as fresh moments of intensification push people to the brink: currency breakdowns; financial meltdowns; pandemic panics. Capitalism, once a progressive force bringing a new mode of production and its class forces into being out of the ossified structures of an outmoded feudalistic, aristocratic order, is now clearly a destructive force. Its rapacious accumulative appetites have brought the planet closer and closer to an apocalyptic end; its destruction of biodiversity has unleashed inter-species, globally spread, viral pandemics. The reconfiguration of the transnational political economy threatens war and destabilizes material life throughout the world. Famine, drought, floods, pestilence, and destruction abound, cutting swaths of catastrophe across both the already impoverished global South, where the devastation is most acute, and the more developed and somewhat insulated economies of western capitalism. Never have we needed more the generalized perspective of the revolutionary anti-capitalist left, yet never has the voice of such a left been weaker.

The key lesson that Cannon’s history of the 1930s imparts to today’s revolutionaries is nothing less than the insistence that it can be done, that a revolutionary organization can be built, and that in building such a body, achievements can be realized. Capitalism is now an undeniably destructive brake on humanity’s advance, even survival. A revolutionary opposition is vitally necessary, now more so than ever. Cannon’s history is a reminder that this kind of fighting, anti-capitalist political organization can be established and nurtured, even in the worst of times, and that it can achieve tangible, immediate effect. More than ever the rallying cry of “Socialism or barbarism,” should be ringing in our ears. Cannon’s history provides us with a glimpse of how that ringing can translate into actions and accomplishments.

……………………..

Source

Chad Pearson teaches history at University of North Texas. He is the author of Capital’s Terrorists: Anti-Labor Violence in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022) Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). book isl

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left – by Bryan D. Palmer – Audiobook Part 1 (13:55:19 min) Audio Mp3

James P. Cannon – Audiobook Part 1 (13:55:19 min) Audio Mp3

Transcending Adveevka – by Pepe Escobar – 17 Feb 2024

• 900 WORDS • 

Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty-handed armies are going home

Bob Dylan, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Avdeevka. The name sounds like an incantation. Like Debaltsevo, or Bakhmut. The incantation summons the figure of a cauldron.

As it stands, and it’s all moving at lightning speed, it takes only 2 km for the cauldron to be closed. Virtually all roads and muddy trails are under massive Russian fire control. There may be up to 6,000 Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) soldiers left. They have nowhere to go. They are already in – or are going straight to – Hell.

“The Butcher” Syrsky, who has just been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the AFU amidst a nasty dog fight in Kiev, immediately got himself a fresh cauldron. Old habits die hard.

The morale and psychological state of AFU fighters is in tatters. Azov batallion neo-nazis are being decimated by massive artillery, FPVs and FABs.

Still, AFU generals are setting up the P.R. stage for another “victory” – a replay of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, even as the actual retreat, evacuation or “extraction” will proceed through the Corridors of Hell.

In fact, the only player who has successfully extracted himself from Hell, just in time, was Gen Zaluzhny. To quote Dylan: “Strike another match/ go start anew.”

The Axis of Resistance and its Slavic mirror

During my vertiginous journey across Donbass, only a few days ago, Avdeevka – the incantation – was omnipresent. At a meeting in a secret compound plunged in darkness in the western outskirts of Donetsk, two top commanders of Orthodox Christian batallions, while discussing tactics, noted that the fall of Adveevka would be a matter of days, maximum weeks

The symbology is quite transcendental. Kiev has been fortifying Adveevka non-stop for nearly 10 years – essentially to keep shelling civilians in Donetsk and other parts of Donbass with impunity, ad infinitum. Donetsk remains extremely vulnerable – and the shelling persists. The strength, resilience and faith of the residents of this historic mining town – and the surrounding countryside – are deeply moving.

In a very special conversation with Alexander Dugin, we both made it clear, directly and indirectly, that the working classes of Novorossiya are spiritual brothers of the oppressed in Palestine and Yemen. Yes, the Axis of Resistance in West Asia is mirrored by the Slavic Axis of Resistance in the black soil of the steppes.

As much as Russia may have been drawn to a civilizational war against the collective West, that is also a spiritual war. The proxy war by the Hegemon against Russia in Ukraine is as much a geopolitical gamble as a war of Western nihilism against Russian Orthodoxy.

I did mention the parallel between Orthodox Christianity and Shi’ism to a top commander; he may have been bemused, but he definitely got the message.

After all, he must have instinctively noticed it was the rejected, harassed and bombed in Orthodox Christianity and Islam who have re-awakened the Orthodox and Islamic civilizations for a transcendental war of survival – supported by faith.

Way beyond the Adveevka incantation – a sort of catalyst of all these times of trouble, as Mother Mary of God eventually comes offering solace – what struck me in this vertiginous journey in Donbass is Almighty People Power. Civilians are the true heroes of the full liberation of Novorossiya, as much as the people scattered across Greater Syria – encompassing Palestine, Syria and Lebanon – Iraq and Yemen.

These are the souls who have endured a Hell on Earth much more toxic and much longer than the Adveevka cauldron, since Zionism and its subsequent eschatological garrison-settler colonial offspring took over the Holy Land.

The people of Novorossiya, as much as Yemeni Houthis, have Faith imprinted in their DNA. Those deeply committed commanders and soldiers that I met in Novorossiya close to the front lines mirror the popular consensus.

Gamblers on the Highway of Hope

For a baby boomer Westerner, it’s inevitable to refer to Dylan when we’re back on the road: “The highway is for gamblers / better use your sense”. Somehow the ultimate gamblers across the black soil of Novorossiya are these volunteer, contract-signed soldiers who summon the power of unbreakable Faith to defend their land.

As for those pawns in the Western game who will perish or surrender when the cauldron is boiling to the max, it’s a case of “the sky too is falling under you”.

Shelley intuitively understood that we all rebel against oblivion – to which death condemns us. Yet this rebellion can follow two completely different road maps.

The man intoxicated with power wrecks everything before him, and is wrecked in turn (that’s the fate of the current Empire of Lies).

Then there’s the road followed by the poet, or spiritual warrior, whose soul is the Aeolian harp summoning vast, unseen, miraculous forces.

Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue.

There will be more P.R. terror attacks, the civilian plight may be prolonged for quite a while. But what’s already crystal clear is that any sub-par “rules-based order” chess player who dreams of defeating the Russian soul on thousand-year-old Russian lands is inexorably doomed.

…………………….

https://archive.ph/kkNP8

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

US Political Cartoonist ‘Mr. Fish’ Targeted By College Boss – 16 Feb 2024

University of Pennsylvania president denounces lecturer for anti-Israeli cartoons

In a statement released on Sunday, 4 February 2024, University of Pennsylvania’s interim president, Larry Jameson, denounced and smeared a lecturer at the university over supposed “antisemitic” political cartoons. 

Jameson’s statement, published on the University of Pennsylvania’s Instagram account, targets Dwayne Booth, known as “Mr. Fish” for his drawings and political cartoons. Booth’s illustrations, using the traditional satiric methods of the genre, have criticized Israel and the United States for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. 

In his statement, Jameson denounced the cartoons as “reprehensible, with antisemitic symbols, and incongruent with our efforts to fight hate.” Jameson proceeded to smear Booth’s cartoons by invoking the Holocaust. “They disrespect the feelings and experiences of many people in our community and around the world, particularly those only a generation removed from the Holocaust,” Jameson said. 

Jameson is seizing on allegations against Booth originally made in the Washington Free Beacon, which played a leading role in reporting on Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s plagiarized ‘scholarship.’

Booth teaches courses at Penn on political cartoons. His web page at Penn’s Annenberg School For Communication says his primary research area is political communication. Booth is also a freelance writer and has published work which is critical of American politics and has been particularly critical of Israel since it launched its war in Gaza. 

One cartoon that has been singled out by the media is called “The Anti-Semite.” This displays three men drinking from glasses of blood labeled “Gaza” in front of American and Israeli flags, with one of the men saying to the others, “Who invited that lousy anti-semite?” referring to a white dove in the distance meant to symbolize those calling for a ceasefire. Those attacking Booth claim he is invoking the “blood libel,” the infamous far-right lie that Jews drink the blood of Christians.

This misses the point entirely. Instead of being antisemitic, the cartoon sends up the manipulation of antisemitism to attack the opponents of genocide—precisely what Jameson is now doing.

Another cartoon singled out by Booth’s critics is entitled “Slaughterhouse.” It depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an apron covered in blood with a bloody knife in one hand and a Palestinian flag in the other hand. Another cartoon shows Netanyahu shoveling skulls into the engine of a train with an ironic text saying that Netanyahu is “magnanimous enough to bring every last Palestinian man, woman, and child in on the peace process.” 

Responding to the allegations against him made by the Washington Free Beacon, Booth stated, “Being accused of anti-Semitism by a reporter who presents no corroborating sources beyond her own misreading of my work is neither journalism nor responsible reporting.” In his remarks Booth also rejected the idea that the Zionist state of Israel is synonymous with Jews all around the world. Many people have a similar strange belief in a quasi-religion of ‘journalism’ with rules of honor and evidence that simply doesn’t exist in the real world. Why constantly invoke this fantasy? Journalists must seek the truth? Ha. Write what you want. Let the readers and market decide.

Penn President Jameson, it is clear, intends to use the episode to intimidate not only opponents of the war, but advocates of academic freedom and freedom of speech. His statement spelled this out in Orwellian fashion:

At Penn, we have a bedrock commitment to open expression and academic freedom… [but] we also have a responsibility to challenge what we find offensive, and to do so acknowledging the right and ability of members of our community to express their views, however loathsome we find them.

There is an obvious difference between students and campus workers challenging speech they “find offensive” and an attack on a faculty member by a university president—an office that at Ivy League institutions like Penn pays more than $1 million per year.

Summing up his conception of freedom of speech, Jameson concluded, “Not everything that can be said, should be said.”

The University of Pennsylvania has been at the center of the campaign targeting opposition to Israel’s genocide. 

Back in November 2023, a Jewish student group, Chavurah, screened the anti-Zionist film Israelism to an audience of Jewish and Muslim students. The leaders of the student group were threatened by the university with disciplinary action for showing the film. 

In spite of Penn’s efforts to quash opposition to Israel’s war drive, University President Liz Magill was summoned to testify before a Congressional committee, alongside Harvard President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth. During the testimony, the three were ruthlessly berated by Elise Stefanik, Republican congresswoman, for the presidents’ alleged “mishandling” of “antisemitic activity” on their campuses by allowing peaceful anti-Israeli protests that made some Jewish students feel ‘threatened.’

Under heavy pressure from the university’s billionaire backers and the Democratic and Republican parties, Magill was forced to resign her position as president. Gay was later forced out at Harvard over plagiarism revealed in absolutely shoddy academic ‘works.’

Jameson, who was brought on to replace Magill, was no doubt carefully vetted to be sure he could be relied on to move against political speech that opposes US imperialism and its Israeli proxy. In his bullying attack on Booth, Jameson has already delivered. 

The conflation of opposition to Israeli and American sponsored war on a civilian population with antisemitism has only one purpose. It is meant to confuse popular consciousness and silence opposition.

………………….

https://archive.is/lSQW3

Fascism – What It Is And How To Fight It – Trotsky (Rumble) Audiobook (1:28:54 min)

Fascism – What It Is And How To Fight It – Trotsky – Audiobook Mp3 (1:28:54 min)

https://rumble. com /v4dm8nq-fascism-what-it-is-and-how-to-fight-it-trotsky-1938.html

US Fatal Flaws Undermine America’s Defense Industrial Base – by Brian Berletic – 15 Feb 2024

The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.

The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.

In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.

For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:

Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.

In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.

Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.

If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.

US Defense Industrial Strategy Built on a Flawed Premise 

Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven prioritization.

The report claims:

The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive advantage to the United States over its adversaries.

The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.

China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such graduates is higher in China than in the US.

China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.

Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.

Not Just China, But Also Russia 

While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of global power.

Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.

While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society.

In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.

To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines, and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits, surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient. Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.

While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of profits.

The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.

The NDIS report would note:

Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations. This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility, and supply chain limitations.

Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs cannot be the primary consideration.

A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or security.

Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result, Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the past 2 years.

Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.

The New York Times in its September 2023 article, “Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand Missile Production, Officials Say,” admits Russian arms production of not only missiles, but also armored vehicles and artillery shells have exceeded prewar levels. The article estimates that Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined.

Despite this, Western analysts now claim Russian production will “plateau” as the limits of surge capacity are reached and new facilities and sources of raw materials are required.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a February 2024 article titled, “Russian Military Objectives and Capacity in Ukraine Through 2024,” regarding ammunition production would claim:

…the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in subsequent years, unless new factories are set up and raw material extraction is invested in with a lead time beyond five years.

But because Russia’s industrial base is purpose-driven rather than profit-driven, additional facilities are already being built despite the longer-term economic inefficiency of doing so.

US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a November 2023 article titled, “Satellite Images Suggest Russia Is Ramping Up Production Capacity For Its War Against Ukraine,” reported that Russia was not only expanding production at existing facilities but was also developing new factories producing warplanes, combat helicopters, military drones, and guided munitions.

US “Solutions” Fall Far Short

The 2023 NDIS cites the expansion of 155 mm artillery shell production as a demonstration of the US DIB’s ability to “scale rapidly.”

The report claims:

In response, the DoD has invested in expanding existing production facilities in Scranton, Pennsylvania and broke ground on a new production facility in Mesquite, Texas to respond to the higher demand signal. In addition to these investments made in December 2022, the U.S. Army awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion in September 2023* to meet its goal of delivering more than 80,000 projectiles per month by the end of FY2025.

However, this was only possible because the US Army owns the facilities producing artillery shells. Increased rates of shell production were made possible through existing surge capacity deliberately set up by the US Army years before the Russian SMO began. This foresight in planning, unfortunately for the United States, is a rare exception to the rule and cannot be applied across the rest of US and European arms production.

The West’s profit-driven policies have created problems for the US DIB well downstream of production lines for arms and ammunition. This includes America’s decades of off-shoring production to maximize profits by taking advantage of cheaper labor overseas. Many raw materials and components used across the US DIB today come from overseas including from “adversarial” nations.

The NDIS report lamented:

Over the last decade, the DoD has struggled to curtail adversarial sourcing and burnish the integrity of defense supply chains. Despite these efforts, dependence on adversarial sources of supply has grown. DoD continues to lack a comprehensive effort for mitigating supply chain risk. 

Profit-driven policies have also hurt the workforce. Decades of off-shoring US manufacturing saw America transition to a primarily service-based economy. This was reflected across education as well, where vocational skills were not only neglected, they were stigmatized.

The NDIS report would explain that:

The labor market lacks the required number of skilled workers to meet defense production demand while driving innovation at all levels. This shortfall is becoming exacerbated as baby boomers retire, and younger generations show less interest in manufacturing and engineering careers.

Beyond this problem, profit-driven policies have made education in the United States inaccessible. The desire to profit from providing education has usurped the actual purpose of providing education in the first place – the creation of human resources required to run a functioning, prosperous society. Degrees and training courses in the United States require loans that can take a lifetime to pay off.

A lack of interest in skilled labor and the inaccessibility of education in the United States has resulted in a skewed workforce relative to the rest of the world. The number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates in the US, for example, is comparable to Russia despite Russia having less than half the total population of the US. In 2016 there were 568,000 STEM graduates in the US for Russia’s 561,000, according to Forbes. China produced over 4.7 million graduates that same year.

US economic fundamentals altogether have created a skewed society and correspondingly skewed DIB that is struggling to match that of nations smaller in terms of population and GDP. But even if the US did address these fundamental problems, the fact remains that China alone, saying nothing of the BRIC alliance it is a part of, has both solid fundamentals and simply possesses a larger population, economy, and industrial base.

The premise upon which US foreign policy is based is unrealistic. The fundamentals of US economic power are fatally flawed.

The very notion of the US maintaining a competitive edge over the rest of the world is only realistic if the rest of the world is suffering from significant internal and/or regional instability.

This is precisely why the US has invested so heavily over the decades in political interference, political capture, and even regional conflict around the globe. However, the disparity between the US and the rest of the world in terms of economic power, industrial strength, and military might be diminishing faster than the US can impose its “international order” upon it.

A reemerging Russia alone has exceeded the US in terms of military industrial production. China is surpassing the United States across a much wider multitude of metrics. As long as the US pursues unsustainable policies based on an unrealistic premise, it will not only find itself surpassed by a growing number of nations, it will find itself isolated and unstable.

The difference between nations the US calls “adversaries” and the US itself, is the difference between a farmer who cultivates his land in a sustainable, purposeful way, and a predator who mindlessly consumes all in its path until there is nothing left to consume, thus jeopardizing its own self-preservation.

At a time between now and then, more rational circles of interest may displace those currently driving US economic and foreign policies, and transform the US into a nation pursuing power proportional to its means and invested in working together with the other nations of the world, rather than attempting to impose itself upon them.

…………………

Source

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Tags: China, Defense industry, International politics, Military defense, Russia, USA

The Jewish Lobby – List – by Jim Bracco – 16 January 2024

• Word count4,076

The Jewish Lobby

List of worldwide nongovernmental Jewish political organizations

The Jewish organizations listed here are political organizations devoted to Jewish political concerns, the leaders of which make up the Jewish Lobby, influencing the politics of their host countries. Such concerns include Israel, legal aspects to the definition of “antisemitism,” the public perception of the Judaism, how Judaism is treated in social interactions, and other parameters that determine the role of a Jewish minority in a larger, non-Jewish population. These leaders are the organized political arm of the Jewish community.

Not included here are other Jewish groups, such as religious and charitable groups that are not directly politically oriented, even though much of Jewish money that goes to Israel via such groups does technically contribute to the political power of Israel. The vast majority of these organizations are in the US and most the remainder are in England, France, Germany, and a few in Israel.

At the end of the list of Jewish groups are the relatively few non-Jewish groups that are known to promote Israeli political interests.

Additional comments on funding levels and political influence appear after the list.

Jewish Political Organizations

*Signifies US Political Action Committee (PAC)

#Signifies organizations in other countries

On this list, Current 2024: There are 354 total.

Number in the US: 274, of which 81 are PACS.

Number of foreign groups: 80.

Aish HaTorah

Academic Friends of Israel

Academic Study Group on Israel

Act.IL

Action PAC*

ActiveFence# (Israel)

Aleph Institute

Allies for Israel*

Am Yisrael Foundation

Ameinu

American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum

American Friends of Likud

American Friends of NGO Monitor

American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF)

American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

American Jewish Committee

American Jewish Congress

American Principles*

American Zionist Movement (comprised of 33 separate organizations)

American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE)

Americans for a Safe Israel

Americans for Good Government*

Americans for Tomorrow’s Future

Americans United in Support of Democracy*

Anchorage Charitable Fund

Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

American Principles*

Arizona Politically Interested Citizens*

Arutz Sheva

Asper Foundation

Atlantic Jewish Council

Avi Chai Foundation

Badger PAC*

B’nai B’rith International

B’nai B’rith Canada

Bard Center for the study of Hate

Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews

BAYPAC*

Because I Care PAC*

Betar

Bi-County PAC*

Birthright

Bnei Akiva

Board of Deputies of British Jews (affiliation with World Jewish Congress)#

Bodman Foundation

Breira (organization)

Bristol Jewish Society (J-Soc, UK)

Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (UK)#

California Legislative Jewish Caucus

California PAC*

Canada-Israel Committee#

Canadian Centre of Israel and Jewish Affairs#

Canadian Jewish Congress#

Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee#

Canadian Zionist Federation#

Canary Mission

Capital PAC*

CEJI – A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe#

Center for Jewish Community Studies (part of JCPA)

Center for Middle East Policy (within Brookings Institution)

Center for Security Policy

Central Conference of American Rabbis

Central Council of Jews#

Central Fund of Israel (CFI)

Central Massachusetts Chabad

Centralverein Deutscher Staatsburger Judischen Glaubens#

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA, Canada)

Chabad Lubavitch

Chabad of Westboro

Chai PAC*

Chicagoans for Better Congress*

Chili PAC*

Citizens Concerned for Natl Interest*

Citizens Organized PAC*

CityPAC*

Civil Society Forum

Cleveland Council of Soviet Anti-Semitism

Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV)

Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM)

Combat Antisemitism Movement CAM (Itself around 300 organizations)

Commentary

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA),

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)

Community Security Trust

Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond

Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater

Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula

Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany#

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (unites 51 orgs)

Congressional Action Cmte of Texas*

Congressional Israel Allies Caucus (CIAC)

Congressional Jewish Congress

Connecticut Good Government PAC*

Conseil Reppresentatif des Institutions Juives de France#

Conservative Friends of Israel (UK)

Coordinating Council of Jerusalem

David Project

David Horowitz Freedom Center

David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Delaware Valley PAC*

Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI)*

Democrats for Israel Committee*

Desert Caucus*

East Midwood PAC*

Emergency Committee for Israel

Emerson Family Foundation

Emgage

Eris & Larry Field Family Foundation

Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)

European Jewish Association#

European Jewish Congress#

European Jewish Parliament#

European Union of Jewish Students#

Five Towns PAC*

Florida Congressional Committee*

Florida Jewish Democrats

Foreign Policy Initiative (PNAC 2.0)

Foreign Policy Research Institute

For Integrity in Govt PAC*

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Freedom Center

Friends of Ir David

Friends of Israel*

Friends of Israel (UK)#

Friends of Israel Initiative

Friends of Israeli Defense Forces

Garden State PAC*

Genesis Prize

Georgia Citizens for Good Government*

Georgia Peach*

German Committee for Ffeeing of Russian Jews#

German organization Honestly Concerned#

Gold Coast PAC*

Grand Canyon State Caucus*

Greater Los Angeles PAC*

Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry

Habonim Dror

Hadassah

Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization of America

Hanoar Hatzioi (HH, Israel)#

Hasbara Fellowships

Heartland PAC*

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

Hellen Diller Family Foundation

Heritage Foundation

Hertog Foundation

Herzl Institute in Jerusalem#

Histadrut

Hochberg Family Foundation

Holocaust Memorial Council

Honest Reporting Canada#

Hudson Institute

Hudson Valley PAC*

Independent Australian Jewish Voices#

Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) #

Independent Jewish Voices (US)

Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism: four centers:

Yale University

Tel Aviv University#

Hebrew University of Jerusalem#

Technical University of Berlin#

Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis

Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy

Institute for Zionist Strategies (Israel)#

Interdisciplinary Center (IDC Herzliya)#

International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians#

International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (aka Stand for Israel)

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance#

International League Against Racism and Antisemitism#

International Legal Forum

Israel Allies Foundation

Israel Britain Alliance (UK)#

Israel Democracy Institute’s International Advisory Council#

Israel Hayom (biased newspaper in Israel, most widely distributed)#

Israel Land Fund (ILF)#

Israel on Campus Coalition#

Israel Policy Forum#

Israel Project

Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ)#

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs#

J Street

J Street PAC*

Jacobson Family Foundation

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs#

Jerusalem Post#

Jewish Agency for Israel#

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee#

Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco

Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles

Jewish Community Relations Council of New York

Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington

Jewish Council for Education & Research*

Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Jewish Daily Forward

Jewish Defense League

Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA)

Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA)

Jewish Federation of Cincinnati Hillel

Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia

Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)

Jewish Leadership Conference

Jewish Leadership Council (UK)#

Jewish Labor Movement (UK)#

Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF, Israel)#

Jewish National Fund – USA

Jewish National Fund – Canada#

Jewish News Syndicate

Jewish Party (Czechoslovakia)#

Jewish Party (Romania)#

Jewish Socialists’ Group#

Jewish Virtual Library

Jewish Voice for Labour#

JewishOnCampus

Jewishwebsite.com

Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace#

Jim Joseph Foundation

JNF Charitable Trust (Jewish National Fund – UK)#

Joint Action Cmte for Political Affairs*

Kentucky-Israel Caucus

Keren Keshet Foundation

Klarman Family Foundation

Kohelet Policy Forum

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law

Louisiana for American Security*

Magshimey Herut#

Maryland Assn For Concerned Citizens*

Massachusetts Congr Campaign Cmte*

Megamot Shalom

Mercaz-USA

Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus

Mida#

Middle East Forum

Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)

Middle East & Central Asia Research Center (MECARC, at Aria University)#

Mid-Manhattan PAC*

Milstein Family Foundation

Ministry of Diaspora Affairs (Israel government)#

Ministry of Strategic Affairs (Israel government)#

MinnPAC*

MOPAC*

Mosaic Magazine

Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies#

Moskowitz Foundation

Multi-Issue PAC*

Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council

National Action Committee*

National Bipartisan PAC*

National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry

National Jewish Democratic Council*

National PAC*

NC Jewish Caucus

Nefesh B’Nefesh

Never Again Action

New Fraternal Jewish Association

New Jersey Democratic State Committee Jewish Caucus

New Jersey-Israel Commission

Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust

New York State Young Democrats Jewish Caucus

Nextbook

NGO Monitor#

nocamels.com

NorPAC

North Jersey PAC/ NorPAC*

Northern Californians for Good Govt*

Northwest PAC*

Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (Official US Fed Gov Office!)

One Jerusalem

The Public Diplomacy Directorate (Israeli office)

PAC of Cherry Hill, NJ*

Pacific PAC*

Palestinian Media Watch

Partners for Progressive Israel

Pax PAC*

Pennsylvania Jewish Legislative Caucus

Pinsker Center (at King’s College London)#

KCL Israel Society (at King’s College London)#

City Israel Society (at King’s College London)#

Pro-Israel America PAC*

Qahal

Religious Zionists of America

Republican Jewish Coalition*

Reut Group (formerly the Reut Institute, Israel)#

Rita & Irwin Hochberg Family Foundation (aka, Defense of Democracies)

Roundtable PAC*

Sacramento Area Good Govt Assn*

Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research#

San Diego Community PAC*

San Franciscans for Good Government*

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)#

Scottish Council of Jewish Communities#

Seph PAC*

Shalem Center in Jerusalem#

Shiloh Policy Forum

Shurat HaDin (aka. Israel Law Center ILC)#

Silver State PAC*

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Snider Foundation

South Carolinians for Representative Govt*

South Florida Caucus*

Stand With Us (aka, Israel Emergency Alliance)

St Louis PAC*

St Louisians for Better Government*

Stat PAC*

StopAntisemitism

Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ)

SunPAC*

Swedish Zionist Federation#

Sussex Friends of Israel (UK)#

Tehran Jewish Committee#

Tennesseans For Better Government*

The Coexistence Trust#

Tikvah

To Protect Our Heritage PAC*

TX PAC*

United PAC*

U.N. Watch#

Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique#

Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) (aka, Union of Amrcn Hebrw Congrtns UAHC)

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (arm of UAHC)

Central Conference of American Rabbis (second arm of UAHC)

Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ)

Union of Jewish Students (UK)#

Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

United Americans In Israel*

United Democracy Project (from AIPAC)*

United Jewish Israel Appeal#

United with Israel#

U.S. House of Representatives Jewish Caucus

US Israel PAC*

Virginia Congressional Committee*

Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)

Washington PAC*

We Believe in Israel (UK)#

Westchester Allied PAC*

William Rosenwald Family Fund

Women’s Alliance for Israel / World Alliance for Israel*

Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO)#

Women’s Pro-Israel National PAC*

Women’s Zionist Organization of America

World Jewish Congress#

World Jewish Congress American Section (Fund raising arm)

World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ)# (Umbrella Organization)

World Union of Jewish Students#

World Zionist Organization#

Yehuda and Anne Neuberger Foundation

Yesha Council (in Israel)

Young Jewish Leadership PAC*

Zioness

Zionist Federation of Germany#

Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (Reps over 30 organizations)#

Zionist General Council#

Zionist Organization of America*

Non-Jewish Political Organizations

Christian Broadcasting Network

Christian Television Network

Christians United for Israel (John Hagee)

Stand for Israel

Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem

Funding Levels of Organizations

Jewish Political Action Committees (PAC) contributed to a total of $71,300,000 to US elections from 1990 to 2020, with an average of $3,400,000 per year, and in the years 2016 – 2020, the average was $8,300,000 per year: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pro-israel-pacs-campaign-contributions

The term “Israel Lobby” that most writers use for this Lobby fails to do justice to the extraordinary scope and composition of this special interest group, since the Lobby addresses all Jewish political concerns, not just Israel, the leaders of the US Jewish political organizations above are virtually all US Jewish citizens, and the number and impact of non-Jewish organizations that support Israel is minuscule compared to this huge block of Jewish organizations.

Shown below are funding levels of some of the above organizations, and contributions to most them are tax-deductible donations (according to Allison Weir). The above link to the Jewish Virtual Library provides funding levels for some of the individually named PACs in the list.

• The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): $100s million endowment; $100 million annual revenues.

• The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF): $26 million annual revenues.

• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP): $23.5 million net assets. $9.4 million annual revenues.

• Anti-Defamation League (ADL): $115 million net assets,[12] $60 million annual revenues.

• International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (aka Stand for Israel): $100 million annual revenues.

• The Israel Project: $11 million annual budget.

• Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF): $80 million net assets, $60 million annual revenues.

• Hadassah (Women’s Zionist Organization of America): $400 million net assets, $100 million annual revenues.

• The Jim Joseph Foundation: $837 million net assets.

• The Avi Chai Foundation: $615 million total assets.

• Jewish Federations: $3 billion annual revenues.

• Jewish Community Relations Councils, in cities all over U.S.: Boston annual revenues $2.5 million; Louisville annual revenues $7-10 million; Detroit $734,000, New York $4.5 million, etc.

• Hillel: Over $26 million.

• JINSA Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: $3 million annual revenues.

• Center for Security Policy: $4 million annual revenues.

• Foreign Policy Initiative (PNAC 2.0): $1.5 million annual revenues.

• MEMRI Middle East Media Research Institute: $5.2 million.

• Birthright: $55 million.

• David Project: $4.4 million.

• CAMERA Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America: $3.5 million.

Various Facts and Comments

1. Jewish Funding Levels of Politicians

As of January 2024, the top ten US politicians getting Jewish money since 1990 are:

#1 Joe Biden, $4,346,264

Biden is a key figure in securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state and helped block a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine. He stated that there are “no red lines” that Israel could cross that would result in a loss of American support, giving Israeli Jews a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws they want, resulting in Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes such as the bombing of schools, hospitals and places of worship, mass starvation, collective deadly punishment, including the use of white phosphorous munitions on civilians. Most all the arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the U.S. In November, 2023, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue, and enrolling themselves in likely war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

#2 Robert Menéndez, $2,483,205

He claims that Israel, based on Zionism, a form of fascism, and the United States are intrinsically linked and were founded on the same principles.

#3 Mitch McConnell, $1,953,160

He’s famous for his attempt to force through legislation criminalizing BDS, in direct violation of our first Amendments rights to free speech.

#4 Chuck Schumer, $1,725,324

This long-time senator, a pillar of the US Jewish Community, has taken the lead in steering the public conversation away from Israel’s crimes and towards a supposed rise in antisemitism across America. “To us, the Jewish people, the rise in antisemitism is a crisis. A five-alarm fire that must be extinguished,” the New York Senator said, adding that “Jewish-Americans are feeling singled out, targeted and isolated. In many ways, we feel alone.” Schumer is a skilled obfuscator and propagandist for the Jewish Tribe, enhancing the propaganda efforts that Israel funds with tens of millions of dollars annually for its “Hasbara” efforts. The idea that antisemitic hate is exploding across the United States comes largely from a report published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), headed by Jonathan Greenblatt, which claims that antisemitic incidents have risen by 337% since October 7. Buried in the small print, however, is the fact that 45% of these “antisemitic” incidents the ADL has tallied are pro-Palestine, pro-peace marches calling for ceasefires, including ones led by Jewish groups like If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace. He writes:

“Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.”

He labeled Dave Zirin, a Jewish journalist, as an antisemite for supporting Palestinians. Schumer has led the US Senate to push through military aid packages to Israel, even as it carries out actions many have labeled war crimes, writing that:

“One of the most important tasks we must finish is taking up and passing a funding bill to ensure we, as well as our friends and partners in Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region, have the necessary military capabilities to confront and deter our adversaries and competitors.”

#5 Steny Hoyer, $1,620,294

Hoyer demanded that “Congress must immediately and unconditionally fund Israel,” and give Netanyahu the green light to do whatever he pleases. And referring to Israel, which Jews established via settler colonization of Palestine, and in which Jews maintain illegal occupations, “..this is your place of security, this is your place of sovereignty, this is your place of safety.”

Hoyer also voted in favor of a bill stating that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic, thereby declaring all criticism of Israel to be invalid and racist.

#6 Ted Cruz, $1,299,194

On an interview with Breaking Point on YouTube, Cruz said, “I don’t condemn anything Israel does” just after the interviewer quoted an Israeli spokesman of advocating the use of a nuclear bomb on Gaza.

#7 Ron Wyden, $1,279,376

In 2017, he co-sponsored a bill that made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, for Americans to participate in or even encourage boycotts against Israel and illegal Israeli settlements. Such a bill would be in direct violation of the First Amendment.

#8 Dick Durbin, $1,126,020

He owes his political career to the Israel lobby. In 1982, the then-obscure college professor benefitted enormously from AIPAC money to defeat incumbent Paul Findley, a strong proponent of the Palestinian people. Recently, he called for immediate military aid to Israel and co-signed a senate resolution reaffirming Washington’s support for Israel’s “right to self-defense” in the wake of October 7.

#9 Josh Gottheimer, $1,109,370

He co-sponsored a bill equating opposition to Israeli government policy with antisemitism and introduced legislation to block and criminalize boycotting the state of Israel. He tried to pressure Rutgers University into calling off an event that protested for Palestinian rights. He wrote, “Last night, 15 of my Democratic colleagues voted AGAINST standing with our ally Israel and condemning Hamas terrorists who brutally murdered, raped, and kidnapped babies, children, men, women, and elderly, including Americans. They are despicable and do not speak for our party,”

#10 Shontel Brown, $1,028,686

She wrote, “Let’s be clear: Israel is not an apartheid state. Any mischaracterizations otherwise attempt to delegitimize Israel, a robust democracy, and will only serve to fuel rising antisemitism. I will always advocate for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship founded on our shared values.” She received more pro-Israel money than any other politician nationwide during the 2021-2022 election cycle, helping her overcome a double-digit polling deficit to defeat Nina Turner, a democratic socialist and former co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

2. The Center for Responsive Politics

The Center for Responsive Politics, publisher of OpenSecrets.org, tracks all lobbies and PACs, and describes the ‘background’ of those ‘Pro-Israel’ PACs as, “A nationwide network of local political action committees, generally named after the region their donors come from, supplies much of the pro-Israel money in US politics. Additional funds also come from individuals who bundle contributions to candidates favored by the PACs. The donors’ unified goal is to build stronger Israel-United States relations and to support Israel in its negotiations and armed conflicts with its Arab neighbors.”

The Center for Responsive Politics: 1990–2006 data shows that “pro-Israel interests have contributed $56.8 million in individual, group and soft money donations to federal candidates and party committees since 1990.” [$3.6 mpy] In contrast, Arab-Americans and Muslims PACs contributed slightly less than $800,000 during the same (1990–2006) period. In 2006, 60% of the Democratic Party’s fundraising and 25% of that for the Republican Party’s fundraising came from Jewish-funded PACs. According to a Washington Post estimate, Democratic presidential candidates depend on Jewish sources for as much as 60% of money raised from private sources.

AIPAC president Howard Friedman says “AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel’s predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a ‘position paper’ on their views of the US-Israel relationship – so it’s clear where they stand on the subject.”

According to Mitchell Bard, Israel lobbyists also educate politicians by:

taking them to Israel on study missions. Once officials have direct exposure to the country, its leaders, geography, and security dilemmas, they typically return more sympathetic to Israel. Politicians also sometimes travel to Israel specifically to demonstrate to the lobby their interest in Israel. Thus, for example, George W. Bush made his one and only trip to Israel before deciding to run for President in what was widely viewed as an effort to win pro-Israel voters’ support.[24]

Mearsheimer and Walt quote Morris Amitay, former AIPAC director as saying, “It’s almost politically suicidal … for a member of Congress who wants to seek reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti-policy of the conservative Israeli government.”[83] They also quote a Michael Massing article in which an unnamed staffer sympathetic to Israel said, “We can count on well over half the House – 250 to 300 members – to do reflexively whatever AIPAC wants.”[84] Similarly they cite former AIPAC official Steven Rosen illustrating AIPAC’s power for Jeffrey Goldberg by putting a napkin in front of him and saying, “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”[85]

American journalist Michael Massing argues that there is a lack of media coverage on the Israel lobby and posits this explanation: “Why the blackout? For one thing, reporting on these groups is not easy. AIPAC’s power makes potential sources reluctant to discuss the organization on the record, and employees who leave it usually sign pledges of silence. AIPAC officials themselves rarely give interviews, and the organization even resists divulging its board of directors.”[60] Massing writes that in addition to AIPAC’s efforts to maintain a low profile, “journalists, meanwhile, are often loath to write about the influence of organized Jewry. … In the end, though, the main obstacle to covering these groups is fear.”[60] Steven Rosen, a former director of foreign-policy issues for AIPAC, explained to Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that “a lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”[118]

Why so much political activity by Jews?

Here’s the Jewish Manifesto:

The Jewish Manifesto

“We had enough. No more will we be victims. The Holocaust was the last straw. Never again!

“We will fight for our existence, and too bad the Palestinians got in the way, but our survival as a Tribe is at stake, and we will make sure our refuge, the Jewish State, is restored to Eretz Yisrael and strong enough to forever ensure our Tribal survival in this world that mostly hates us.

“G-d reserved this land for us and we are claiming it for the second time now. The first time was from the Canaanites, and now it’s from the Palestinian Arabs. This is what our G-d has promised us because we are the only ones chosen by the Almighty.

“And we will lie and obfuscate and even resort to Biblical fairy tales as much as necessary to fool both ourselves and everyone else, convincing everyone that we have a valid moral argument to support our settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, Apartheid System, theft of land, ethnic cleansing, daily murders, dispossession, assassinations, and unjust imprisonment of our fellow Semites, the Palestinian Arab people. And now, finally, we have shown that we will resort to genocide of the Palestinians, once we feel confident enough that we can get away with it, at least in the minds of our favorite superpower, the USA.

“We will not admit to lying and obfuscating, and the most we will admit is that ‘We do what we have to do.’

“We do not take prisoners and we will assassinate you if we deem that you’re too much a threat to the Tribe, no matter who or where you are. We don’t recognize any possible constraint another sovereign nation might attempt with us, and we consider Israel above all other nations or human organizations. All other people are individuals, not members of anything that has equal status to the Jewish Tribe. Our morality is uniquely Jewish Morality and we acknowledge no higher authority, either secular or moral.

“And we will violate democratic principles by means of our vast wealth in order to ensure that the US superpower, along with the UK and key EU nations, will provide unconditional political and military support for Israel, enrolling the entire US citizenry into being accomplice and accessory to the actions Israeli Jews take against the Palestinian peoples.

“We are in a constant state of war with the Gentiles, mostly below the surface, because they can attempt our extermination anytime at the drop of a hat. The Tribe is more important than any of us, or any other person, because of the benefits our leaders derive from it, because of its proven success as their business model. Although Jew Power benefits most of all our leaders, all Jews should exercise it, because the Tribe must prevail forever and vanquish any resisting individual, whether Jew or non-Jew.”e sun.”[118]

I’m one of many curious beings who try to explain the problematic nature of tribalism, any kind of tribalism and hope that we humans learn to establish our common humanity – now proven by DNA to be a scientific fact – as the basis for all our institutions, groups, and dealings with one another.

………………………..

https://archive.ph/xXLkj

Article source: https://articlebiz.com

Life During Wartime – On the Road in Donbass – by Pepe Escobar – 13 Feb 2024

• 2,700 WORDS • 

Pepe Escobar embarked on a journey across Donbass to share his thoughts on the many first-hand encounters with the locals, who show unbreakable resilience.

You are given a name by the War:/it’s a call sign, not nickname – much more./Lack of fancy cars here and iPads,/But you have APC and MANPADS./Social media long left behind,/Children’s drawings with “Z” stick to mind./’Likes” and “thumbs up” are valued as dust,/But the prayers from people you trust./Hold On, Soldier, my brother, my friend,/The hostility comes to an end./War’s unable to stop its decease,/Grief and suffering will turn into peace./Life returns to the placid format,/With your callsign, inscribed in your heart./ From the war, as a small souvenir:/Far away, but eternally near.

Inna Kucherova, Call Sign, in A Letter to a Soldier, published December 2022

It’s a cold, rainy, damp morning in the deep Donbass countryside, at a secret location close to the Urozhaynoye direction; a nondescript country house, crucially under the fog, which prevents the work of enemy drones.

Father Igor, a military priest, is blessing a group of local contract-signed volunteers to the Archangel Gabriel battalion, ready to go to the front lines of the US vs. Russia proxy war. The man in charge of the battalion is one of the top-ranking officers of Orthodox Christian units in the DPR.

A small shrine is set up in the corner of a small, cramped room, decorated with icons. Candles are lit, and three soldiers hold the red flag with the icon of Jesus in the center. After prayers and a small homily, Father Igor blesses each soldier.

Paying my respects to the children victims of Ukrainian shelling at a DIY memorial off the ‘Road of Life’.

Quite an honor. This pic is now on the wall of the HQ of the Dmitry Donskoy Orthodox Christian battalion in Donbass.

With the kamikaze drone and DIY mine-landing rover specialists at an undisclosed location in Donetsk.

This is yet another stop in a sort of itinerant icon road show, started in Kherson, then Zaporozhye and all the way to the myriad DPR front lines, led by my gracious host Andrey Afanasiev, military correspondent for the Spas channel, and later joined in Donetsk by a decorated fighter for the Archangel Michael battalion, an extremely bright and engaging young man codename Pilot.

There are between 28 and 30 Orthodox Christian battalion fighting in Donbass. That’s the power of Orthodox Christianity. To see them at work is to understand the essentials: how the Russian soul is capable of any sacrifice to protect the core values of its civilization. Throughout Russian history, it’s individuals that sacrifice their lives to protect the community – and not vice-versa. Those who survived – or perished – in the siege of Leningrad are only one among countless examples.

So the Orthodox Christian battalion were my guardian angels as I returned to Novorossiya to revisit the rich black soil where the old “rules-based” world order came to die.

The Living Contradictions of the ‘Road of Life’

The first thing that hits you when you arrive in Donetsk nearly 10 years after Maidan in Kiev is the incessant loud booms. Incoming and mostly outgoing. After such a long, dreary time, interminable shelling of civilians (which are invisible to the collective West), and nearly 2 years after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO), this is still a city at war; still vulnerable along the three lines of defense behind the front.

The “Road of Life” has got to be one of the epic war misnomers in Donetsk. “Road” is a euphemism for a dark, muddy bog plied back and forth virtually non-stop by military vehicles. “Life” applies because the Donbass military actually donate food and humanitarian aid to the locals at the Gornyak neighborhood every single week.

The heart of the Road of Life is the Svyato Blagoveschensky temple, cared for by Father Viktor – who at the time of my visit was away on rehabilitation, as several parts of his body were hit by shrapnel. I am shepherded by Yelena, who shows me around the impeccably clean temple bearing sublime icons – including 13th century Prince Alexander Nevsky, who in 1259 became the supreme Russian ruler, Sovereign of Kiev, Vladimir and Novgorod. Gornyak is a deluge of black mud, under the incessant rain, with no running water and electricity. Residents are forced to walk at least two kilometers, every day, to buy groceries: there are no local buses.

Yelena, the caretaker of Father Michael’s temple at the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk.

Alexander Nevsky’s icon at Father Michael’s temple.

In one of the back rooms, Svetlana carefully arranges mini-packages of food essentials to be distributed every Sunday after liturgy. I meet Mother Pelageya, 86 years old, who comes to the temple every Sunday, and would not even dream of ever leaving her neighborhood.

Svetlana organizing food packages out of donations by the DPR military to civilians close to the front line.

Mother Pelageya, 86, at Father Michael’s temple in the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk.

Gornyak is in the third line of defense. The loud booms – as in everywhere in Donetsk – are nearly non-stop, incoming and outgoing. If we follow the road for another 500 meters or so and turn right, we are only 5 km away from Avdeyevka – which may be about to fall in days, or weeks at most.

At the entrance of Gornyak there’s the legendary DonbassActiv chemical factory – now inactive – which actually fabricated the red stars which shine over the Kremlin, using a special gas technology that was never reproduced. In a side street to the Road of Life, local residents built an improvised shrine to honor the child victims of Ukrainian shelling. One day this is going to end: the day when the DPR military completely controls Avdeyevka.

The Donbass Activ chemical plant at the entrance of the ‘Road of Life’ in Donetsk

‘Mariupol Is Russia’

The traveling priesthood exits the digs of the Archangel Gabriel battalion and heads to a meeting in a garage with the Dmitry Donskoy orthodox battalion, fighting in the Ugledar direction. That’s where I meet the remarkable Troya, the battalion’s medic, a young woman who had a comfy job as a deputy officer in a Russian district before she decided to volunteer.

Onwards to a cramped military dormitory where a cat and her kittens reign as mascots, choosing the best place in the room right by the iron stove. Time to bless the fighters of the Dimitri Zalunsky battalion, named after St. Dimitri of Thessaloniki, who are fighting in the Nikolskoye direction.

At each successive ceremony, you can’t help being stricken by the purity of the ritual, the beauty of the chants, the grave expressions in the faces of the volunteers, all ages, from teenagers to sexagenarians. Deeply touching. This in so many aspects is the Slavic counterpart of the Islamic Axis of Resistance fighting in West Asia. It is a form of asabiyya – “community spirit”, as I used it in a different context referring to the Yemeni Houthis supporting “our people” in Gaza.

Mariupol. Destroyed to the left, rebuilt to the right.

’Mariupol is Russia’. The port is to the left.

Mariupol building

So yes: deep down in the Donbass countryside, in communion with those living life during wartime, we feel the enormity of something inexplicable and vast, full of endless wonder, as if touching the Tao by silencing the recurrent loud booms. In Russian there is, of course, a word for it: “загадка“, roughly translated as “enigma” or “mystery”.

Tweet

I left the Donetsk countryside to go to Mariupol – and to be hit by the proverbial shock when one is reminded of the utter destruction perpetrated by the neo-nazi Azov battalion* in the spring of 2022, from the city center to the shoreline along the port then all the way to the massive Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.

The theatre – rather the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre – nearly destroyed by the Azov battalion is now being meticulously restored, and the next in line are scores of classical buildings downtown. In some neighborhoods the contrast is striking: on the left side of the road, a destroyed building; on the right side, a brand new one.

At the port, a red, white and blue stripe lays down the law: “Mariupol is Russia”. I make a point to go to the former entrance of Azovstal, where the remaining Azov battalion fighters, around 1,700, surrendered to Russian soldiers in May 2022. As much as Berdyansk may eventually become a sort of Monaco in the Sea of Azov, Mariupol may also have a bright future as a tourism, leisure and cultural center and last but not least, a key maritime entrepot of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union.

The Mystery of the Icon

Back from Mariupol I was confronted with one of the most extraordinary stories woven with the fabric of magic under war. In a nondescript parking lot, suddenly I’m face to the face with The Icon.

The icon – of Mary Mother of God – was gifted to the whole of Donbass by veterans of the Zsloha Spetsnaz, when they came in the summer of 2014. The legend goes that the icon started to spontaneously generate myrrh: as it felt the pain suffered by the local people, it started to cry. During the storming of Azovstal, the icon suddenly made an appearance, out of nowhere, brought in by a pious soul. Two hours later, the legend goes, the DPR, Russian and Chechen forces found their breakthrough.

The icon is always on the move along the SMO hot spots in Donbass. People in charge of the relay know one another, but they can never guess where the icon heads next; everything develops as a sort of magical mystery tour. It’s no wonder Kiev has offered a huge reward for anyone – especially fifth columnists – capable of capturing the icon, which then would be destroyed.

Father Igor reciting prayers.

The Orthodox icon “Mary Mother of God”, gifted to the people of Donbass.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor blesses the soldiers.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor blesses the soldiers.

At a night gathering in a compound in the western outskirts of Donetsk – lights completely out in every direction – I have the honor to join one of the top-ranking officers of the Orthodox units in the DPR, a tough as nails yet jovial fellow fond of Barcelona under Messi, as well as the commander of Archangel Michael battalion, codename Alphabet. We are in the first line of defense, only 2 km away from the front line. The incessant loud booms – especially outgoing – are really loud.

The conversation ranges from military tactics on the battlefield, especially in the siege of Avdeyevka, which will be totally encircled in a matter of days, now with the help of Special Forces, paratroopers and lots of armored vehicles, to impressions of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin (they heard nothing new). The commanders note the absurdity of Kiev not acknowledging their hit on the Il-76 carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs – totally dismissing the plight of their own PoWs. I ask them why Russia simply does not bomb Avdeyevka to oblivion: “Humanism”, they answer.

The DIY Rover From Hell

In a cold, foggy morning at a secret location in central Donetsk – once again, no drones overhead – I meet two kamikaze drone specialists, codename Hooligan and his observer, codename Letchik. They set up a kamikaze drone demo – of course unarmed – while a few meters away mechanical engineer specialist “The Advocate” sets up his own demo of a DIY mine-delivery rover.

That’s a certified lethal version of the Yandex food delivery rovers now quite popular around Moscow. “Advocate” shows off the maneuverability and ability of his little toy to face any terrain. The mission: each rover is equipped with two mines, to be placed right under an enemy tank. Success so far has been extraordinary – and the rover will be upgraded.

’The Advocate’ setting up his DIY mine-delivering rover test

There’s hardly a more daring character in Donetsk than Artyom Gavrilenko, who built a brand new school cum museum right in the middle of the first line of defense – once again only 2 km or so away from the frontline. He shows me around the museum, which performs the enviable task of outlining the continuity between the Great Patriotic War, the USSR adventure in Afghanistan against the US-financed and weaponized jihad, and the proxy war in Donbass.

At the school/museum in Donetsk only 2 km away from the front line

That’s a parallel, DIY version of the official Museum of War in central Donetsk, close to the Shaktar Donetsk football arena, which features stunning memorabilia from the Great Patriotic War as well as fabulous shots by Russian war photographers.

So Donetsk students – emphasis in math, history, geography, languages – will be growing up deeply enmeshed in the history of what for all practical purposes is a heroic mining town, extracting wealth from the black soil while its dreams are always inexorably clouded by war.

We went into the DPR using backroads to cross the border to the LPR not far from Lugansk. This is a slow, desolate border which reminds me of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, basically used by locals. In and out, I was politely questioned by a passport control officer from Dagestan and his seconds-in-command. They were fascinated by my travels in Donbass, Afghanistan and West Asia – and invited me to visit the Caucasus. As we left deep into the freezing night for the long trek ahead back to Moscow, the exchange was priceless:

“You are always welcome here.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Like Terminator!”

………………………………

https://archive.ph/9xDgA

*The Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

(Republished from Sputnik International )

Missile and Bomb Strike warfare: An American fetish and a global scourge – by James A. Russell (Responsible Statecraft) 24 Jan 2024

A common thread through recent history is that ‘hellfire from above’ doesn’t really work

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a “sustained bombing campaign” against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?

It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic purpose.

Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when and under what circumstances to use force?

For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it’s hard to remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on government and the popular imagination as some sort of “decisive” action that curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.

The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles — has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.

We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider continuing their attacks.

Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs will make them behave.

The history of America’s fetish

Open-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrance toward UN weapons inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the Iraqi dictator’s non-existent WMD programs.

My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.

We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative targeting against Saddam’s armies under the rubric of “shock and awe” and “effects-based operations.” Sure enough, Saddam’s armies indeed melted away from our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of the Middle East today.

We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that, they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving the Taliban in control of the country.

We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for political power and authority that continues to this day.

As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.

We’ve told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after “high value targets” all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win any of these wars?

Yet we remain addicted 

Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different. Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war. Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.

Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.

The Houthis have indicated they’ll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana’a on his next trip to the region for consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict’s wider fires to no strategic purpose.

Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back over half a century, you’d think that it was time for us to get into the rehab center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.

……………………………………

James A. Russell

James Russell is an associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The views expressed here are his own.

Genocide Meets French Devotion to Israel – by Diana Johnstone – 11 Feb 2024

Israel’s loyal supporters in the West combat rising world indignation over the suffering of the Palestinian people by changing the subject.

When Gazan families are buried under the rubble of their homes, it’s not about the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians; it’s about eternal Jewish victims; it’s about “Islamic terrorism;” or it’s about a threat to “Western values.”

That is the line taken by most of the French media and political class.

Or there is recourse to Biblical story-telling, featuring vengeance, ethnic slaughter and prophecy of doom. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares a struggle between good and evil:

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness and light shall triumph over darkness . Now my role is to lead all Israelis to an overpowering victory… We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah…”

In the United States of America, the crazed prophecies of the Israeli leader find support from an American variant of Judeo-Christianity, more Judeo than Christian, whose followers are taught to believe that gentle Jesus will zoom back to earth as a murderous Avenger while his faithful float up to heaven.

France & the Shoah

Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in recent history.

France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably de-christianized over the past two hundred years.

To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually called here.

It all began in 1954 when 27-year-old Jewish journalist named Eliezer Wiesel met the 70-year-old Catholic novelist François Mauriac in Paris.

Mauriac was deeply moved by Wiesel’s “resurrection” from his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, seeing him as a Christ figure. For Mauriac, the sacrifice of the Jews recalled the Crucifixion of Jesus.

With help from the prominent French writer, Wiesel transformed his copious Yiddish notes into a French memoir, La Nuit (Night), the testimony that transformed him into a major spiritual figure of the post-World War II era.

It was Mauriac, the devout Christian, who saw in Wiesel and his people the parallels with Christianity, which as the Shoah was destined to take on the attributes of a state religion in France as memories of the Nazi occupation were transformed into sacred myth.

An Alliance Against Arab Nationalism

When the Nazis invaded France, there were approximately 320,000 Jewish people living in France, including a large number of foreign nationals who had fled from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

Those unfortunate exiles made up the bulk of the 74,000 Jews who were brutally rounded up and deported under German occupation. These deportations are the principal factual basis for what developed into a sense of national responsibility for the Shoah comparable to that of Germany itself.

However, of all Nazi-occupied countries, France is the country where the largest percentage of Jews escaped Nazi deportations. An estimated 75 percent of Jews survived the occupation without being deported, including around 90 percent of Jews with French citizenship.

The reasons for this are controversial, but one result is that France has the largest Jewish population in Europe today — around half a million, the third largest Jewish population in the world, although far behind Israel or the United States (with around 7 million each).

In recent years, many Jews have moved to Germany from Russia and from Israel itself (118,000 altogether), making France and Germany the home to more Jews than any other member state of the European Union. They are also the countries where institutionalized repentance for the Shoah is most developed.

A difference is that a number of prominent Jews in Germany are sharply critical of Israel (which may get them in trouble with the law), whereas the French Jewish community is more solidly Zionist. The politically influential Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), a sort of French AIPAC, fiercely defends Israeli interests.

A significant peculiarity of France is that Europe’s largest Jewish population is cohabitating with continental Europe’s largest population of Muslim origin, mostly Arab. Although France officially avoids ethnic or racial counting, this population is estimated at around 15 million.

While politically disorganized, this community is assumed — especially by Jewish community leaders — to be hostile to Israel. The potential for conflict between these two communities — one very small and very influential, the other very large and disparate — has for years haunted French political leaders.

France & Arab Nationalism

Guy Mollet, by then former prime minister of France, with his wife, on right, and the Israeli politician Golda Meir, on left, during Israel’s Independence Day Parade in Tel Aviv, May 13, 1959. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

When the Jewish State was just a dream, it was seen by some as a sort of socialist project, based on the kibbutz. Building on long standing friendly relations between French Socialists and Zionism, France was the closest Western ally of the new State of Israel.

In 1954, the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet agreed to sell Israel whatever military equipment it wanted. France even helped Israel develop nuclear weapons.

At that time, Tel Aviv and Paris were allied against Arab nationalism, inasmuch as secular, left-leaning Arab States (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) sympathized with both the Palestinians and the rising national liberation movement in French Algeria.

But this changed under Charles De Gaulle, who conceded Algerian independence in 1962, put an arms embargo on the region in 1967 and sought to build balanced relations with Arab States as part of an effort to develop friendly, post-colonial relations with the Global South.

In June 1967, Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Days War was celebrated in the streets of Paris by joyous horn honking. But President De Gaulle had opposed the Israeli expansion and called for a sustainable peace based on evacuation of territories conquered by Israel and mutual recognition by the belligerent states.

In a remarkable press conference on Nov. 27, 1967 in Paris, De Gaulle expressed ongoing support for the existence of Israel as a fait accompli while expressing strong misgivings about the future of Jewish rule over Palestinian territories.

After recalling the shared admiration for the Jewish people and sympathy for their suffering, De Gaulle observed, in respect to the creation of a Jewish state, that:

“Some even dreaded that the Jews, up to then dispersed, but who remained what they had always been, that is an elite people, self-confident and domineering, when once reunited on the site of their ancient greatness, might come to transform the highly moving wishes expressed for nineteen centuries into an ardent and conquering ambition.”

Charles de Gaulle in London delivering a BBC radio broadcast in 1941. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

De Gaulle recalled that he had promised that France would defend Israel from any Arab attack, but implored Israel not to use its advantage to attack its Arab neighbors.

“We know that France’s voice was not heard. Israel having attacked, in six days of combat seized the objectives it wished to attain. Now, on the captured territories, it is organizing an occupation which cannot go on without oppression, repression, expulsions, and a resistance to all that which it will call terrorism.”

In response to these statements, prominent Jewish intellectuals and community leaders ceased to revere De Gaulle as the leader of the Resistance. Around this time, the Resistance itself as national patriotic myth was rapidly discredited as the public imagination of Nazi Occupation came to center on the Holocaust.

Cinema played a role. In 1967, the documentary film by Marcel Ophuls, “The Sorrow and the Pity”, convinced audiences that collaboration rather than Resistance had overwhelmingly dominated occupied France. The film had a strong impact on public opinion, not least on young leftists who the following year carried out a libertarian revolt targeting the two political heirs to the Resistance: the French Communist Party and President Charles De Gaulle.

In the revisionist mood of the time, national pride stemming from the Resistance gave way to national shame over the deportation of Jews. This guilt became a sort of public ritual for audiences who watched Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour long documentary “Shoah,” released in 1985. In 1990, France adopted a measure called the Gayssot law which can lead to heavy fines and even imprisonment for any questioning of the official version of the Holocaust.

As I wrote in my book Circle in the Darkness, heresy defines religion. A French citizen can deny the existence of Napoleon, or any other historic event, but any questioning of the official version of the Shoah is blasphemy. Thus by sacralizing a unique historic event, the Gayssot law in effect established the Shoah as a state religion.

The Shoah is celebrated officially and unofficially, not only in the annual Shoah commemoration but almost constantly in school rooms, trips to Auschwitz, radio and television programs, books and films. It has de facto replaced Christianity, which had succumbed to laïcité (secularism) over a century ago, as the State religion. It has its martyrs and saints, its holy scripture, its rituals, its pilgrimages, everything that Christianity had except redemption.

Expanding Role of Political Islam

Meanwhile, France’s post-war industrial buildup drew thousands of workers from Algeria.

It wasn’t until new laws in the 1970s allowed “family reunion” that regrouping of foreign workers with wives and children began to create large immigrant neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs of Paris and other large cities, with their own ethnically distinct religious practices, food and dress, especially veiled women, clashing visibly with French customs.

The growth of these communities had a strong impact on the political environment. The National Front, a coalition of far right groups led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, called for stopping immigration, and the new left issued from the May ’68 movement became their champions.

In the early 1980s, in order to accommodate European unification, Socialist President François Mitterrand abandoned the program of nationalizations and social measures for which he had been elected in coalition with the French Communist Party (PCF).

The PCF left the coalition and subsequently lost its influential role both in assimilating foreign workers and in opposing unlimited immigration. The Socialists thereupon adopted human rights and antiracism as their defining issues, condemning opposition to immigration as racist. Accused of anti-Semitism, the National Front was condemned as a pariah with no fit place in the Republic. This condemnation was ensured by Le Pen’s conviction under the Gayssot law for having stated, in an interview, that gas chambers were “a detail of World War II.”

While the left has increasingly adopted an “open border” acceptance of immigration, it has increasingly advocated measures to ban Muslim customs seen to violate the official French doctrine of laïcité.

French laïcité was institutionalized by the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, which finally deprived the Catholic Church of its traditional role in education. In response to an apparent growth of religious practice among younger Muslims, laïcité was revitalized by banning religious identity signaling in public schools, notably by prohibiting school girls from wearing Muslim headscarves to cover their hair. This focus on female dress later produced a ban on wearing the burka in public. While intended to promote cultural assimilation, such measures can also feed Muslim resentment at being a discriminated minority.

Western Schizophrenia Toward Islam

Palestinian protestors confront Israeli troops in Gaza City in 1987, during the First Intifada. (Efi Sharir / Israel Press and Photo Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

In 1979, Western attitudes toward Islam entered their drastically schizophrenic period, decrying the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a political and human rights disaster, while giving full support to Islamic Mujahidin in neighboring Afghanistan.

French political exhibitionist Bernard Henri Lévy was a most zealous supporter of Afghan Muslims opposing the Russian incursion which failed to save modernizing progressive forces in Kabul.

It was President Jimmy Carter’s chief strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw the potential of militant Islam to defeat Soviet influence in Central Asia. In the 1990s, the United States secretly backed illegal arming of Mujahideen to fight on the Islamic side in Bosnia, against Serbia, considered in Washington a miniature Russia. For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.

Israel’s initial enemies were linked to secular Arab nationalism: the Popular Liberation Forces (PLF), Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In Gaza, the local branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, banned in Egypt and hostile to secular groups, looked harmless, especially since its leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, was a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair and half blind.

Yassin built an Islamic center, called the Mujamma, which gained popularity by a variety of social and charitable activities. The Israeli overlords favored this development as it rivaled the secular resistance groups. Israel officially recognized the Mujamma in 1979 and the number of mosques in Gaza doubled under Israeli administration.

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“For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.”

It was only during the Palestinian uprising of December 1987, known as the First Intifada, that Sheikh Yassin created Hamas, dedicated to Islamist resistance. Close to the people through its cultural and sports activities, the Islamic organization had a popular base that eventually led to electoral success in Gaza against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 2006.

The complicated U.S. instrumentalization of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Islamist revolution in Iran, U.S. support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran before waging war against Saddam Hussein, led in mysterious ways to the dramatic Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, whose one clear political effect was to cement the U.S.-NATO-Israeli alliance against “Islamic terrorism.”

This term has involved confounding different, often mutually hostile, groups with each other as well as falsely associating peaceful Muslims with armed groups. Israeli leaders had always denounced Palestine resisters as terrorists, including those who were Christian. But Islamist terrorism was a threat that made it easier to identify Israel as the front line in defense of Western Judeo-Christian civilization.

Oct. 8, 2023: Ruins left by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the southern of Gaza strip. (Mahmoud Fareed, Wafa for APAimages)

From then on, the United States and its NATO followers have ravaged the Middle East, using Islamist extremism as official enemy or factual ally, to destroy the three most secular and pro-Palestinian States in the region, Iraq, Libya and Syria — executing Saddam Hussein, murdering Moammer Gaddafi and persisting in illegal occupation and sanctions against Syria aimed at overthrowing Bashir al Assad.

Terrorist Attacks in France

Following the Gaullist tradition, President Jacques Chirac kept France out of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. But subsequent governments aligned with the United States, and Bernard-Henri Lévy ostentatiously goaded France into assaulting Libya. France has paid a heavy price in blowback for its ambiguous encounters with Islam. In the last 12 years, the country has experienced an extraordinary number of authentic, Islamist, terrorist attacks against civilians by fanatics shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

[Related: How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries]

• In March 2012, a man named Mohammed Merah shot dead seven people, including a French rabbi and three young Jewish children in southern France. His stated motives included Palestine and the French ban on the burka.
• On Jan. 7, 2015, two coordinated attacks occurred, causing a major shock to the public. Gunmen entered the offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and murdered eight well-known cartoonists and two guards, in revenge for having published insulting cartoons of the Prophet. Meanwhile an accomplice killed several people in the course of taking hostages in a kosher grocery.
• The deadliest attack took place in the evening of Nov. 13 the same year, killing 131 people and wounding 413 more when Islamist fanatics from Belgium blew themselves up outside a major sports event, sprayed gunfire and grenades into the theater during a rock concert and across café terraces in Paris. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) called the attacks retaliation for French bombing of Syria.

Civil service on Nov. 15, 2015, at the Place de la République in remembrance of the victims of the attacks that took place two days earlier. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

• On Bastille day 2016, a Tunisian drove a 19-ton cargo truck into a holiday crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring 434 before being shot dead by police.
• Twelve days later, an 86-year-old priest was stabbed to death while saying mass in a church in Normandy. ISIS claimed responsibility.
• On Oct. 6, 2020, in the course of a class on freedom of expression, middle-school teacher Samuel Paty showed his class Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet, after permitting Muslim students to leave if they chose. Ten days later, in retribution, the teacher was stabbed and beheaded in the street by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, an Islamic Chechen refugee accorded political asylum from Russia. This caused an enormous shock in France, not least among the teaching profession.
• On Oct. 13, 2023, a 20-year-old Chechen political refugee shouting Allahu Akbar attacked a school in the northern French city of Arras, stabbing to death French literature teacher Dominique Bernard.

In this context, people in France are particularly sensitive to the term “Islamic terrorism,” [as if the entire religion of Islam was responsible, rather than calling it Islamist terrorism, which refers to political Islam.]

When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as “Islamic terrorism,” implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.

Contrary to those attacks, the well organized Hamas fighters carried out a successful military operation, breaching the Israeli wall that imprisons Gaza and overrunning Israeli military bases. This operation had clear objectives, in particular, the taking of hostages to exchange for some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The hostage-taking was a clear invitation to negotiations, but the Israeli regime loathes any negotiations that could “legitimize” a Palestinian movement.

“When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as ‘Islamic terrorism,’ implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.”

The government initially banned demonstrations protesting against Israel’s massive attacks on the people of Gaza. Peaceful demonstrators were brutalized and fined by police. However, bans have been dropped and pro-Palestinian demonstrations have continued. Opposition to Israel’s genocidal retaliation against the people of Gaza is surely strong throughout the French population, especially among the youth, but it has very little political voice and so far, no pollsters are measuring it.

French media echoed wildly exaggerated Israeli reports of Hamas atrocities and the “rise of anti-Semitism.”

Newspapers featured growing Jewish fears of being attacked here in France. The Israeli government has deliberately exploited fear of anti-Semitism to encourage French Jews to move to Israel, but the success of the Hamas incursions risks shaking confidence in Israel as Jews’ one safe refuge — cramming half the world’s Jewish population into a small space surrounded by enemies.

Left & Right Switch Positions

Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2019. (The Left, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In the days following Oct. 7, mainstream media interviewers tested every politician with the demand to condemn Hamas as an “Islamist terrorist organization.” Almost all enthusiastically complied, emphasizing their support for “Israel’s right to exist” (whatever that might entail).

From Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel to Eric Zemmour, founder of a nationalist party to the right of Marine Le Pen’s, French politicians were unanimous in condemning Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack” – with one exception. The notable exception was the country’s leading leftwing politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Mélenchon refused to denounce Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” Hamas killings of civilians were “war crimes,” like any killing of civilians, he said. The attacks, he tweeted, “prove only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and our compassion go to all the distressed populations, victims of it all. A ceasefire should be imposed .”

Many parliamentary members of Mélenchon’s party “La France Insoumise” (LFI, France Unbowed) followed suit, contrary to other sections of the fragmented left. Danièle Obono, an African-born LFI Paris MP was rudely goaded by a hostile TV interviewer into saying that Hamas “is a resistance movement, that’s what it calls itself…its objective is the liberation of Palestine… it resists occupation.” Within a couple of hours, Interior Minister Gérard Darmanin announced that he was having her charged with “apology for terrorism.”

Danièle Obono in March 2022. (DIE LINKE, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

A verbal lynch mob rose up against Mélenchon, a chorus vigorously joined not only by his enemies on the right but also by rivals in smaller parties belonging to the disintegrating leftist electoral coalition NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire, Ecologique et Social) which he founded. Mélenchon and the LFI are denounced as “Islamo-leftists,” flattering terrorists to win over the Muslim vote.

Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, angrily denounced Mélenchon as “an enemy of the Republic.” Mélenchon, he raged, “chose not to express solidarity with Israel but to legitimize terrorism by an equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”

Meanwhile Serge Klarsfeld, famous as a lifelong Nazi hunter and president of the association Sons and Daughters of Deported Jews of France, rejoiced that Marine Le Pen had completely changed the ideology of her party, the Rassemblement National, from that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen led her party in a Nov. 12, 2023 Paris demonstration against anti-Semitism while emphasizing her support for Israel. As a result, she has “become respectable”, he concluded. Such approval will make it hard to demonize her in future elections as in the past.

Referring to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Klarsfeld expressed regret that “the far left has abandoned its line of action against anti-Semitism,” while noting that “the extreme left has always had an antisemite tradition.”

And thus a long brewing political reversal is being completed, not only in France but across Europe and even America. Israel, whose early supporters were on the left, from the Soviet Union to the French Socialists, is most vigorously championed by the right, whereas more and more people (but rarely politicians) on the left are joining the non-Western world’s shock and horror at the genocidal actions of Israel against the Palestinian people.

The War of Civilizations

The most extreme champions of Israel, including numerous commentators and Eric Zemmour, a journalist who founded a nationalist, anti-Muslim party called Reconquest to the right of Marine Le Pen, merge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a worldwide war of civilizations. For them, Hamas is just part of an international Islamic war on Western civilization. In this view of things, Israel is the vanguard of Western civilization whose main enemy is anti-Semitism.

In the midst of this turmoil, President Emmanuel Macron follows the European trends, but with notes of ambiguity confirming his position as a perfect centrist. He hesitated before suspending funding to UNRWA, then did so claiming his intention was to obtain a cease-fire. Such uncertainty can only displease both sides of the embittered national division over Gaza.

He stayed away from the politically overcharged Nov. 12 demonstrations against anti-Semitism, but compensated by leading a Feb. 7 commemoration in Paris of the 42 French and Franco-Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attacks. The French government chartered a plane to fly in relatives of the victims from Israel. Participants booed and shouted “fascist!” and “terrorists!” at parliamentarians from Mélenchon’s party who showed up to pay their respects.

In a cold rain, Macron read out the first names of the 42 victims whose lives, he said, were “shattered by terrorist fury.”

“On October 7, at dawn,” he said, “the unspeakable resurfaced from the depths of history,” producing “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.” So in France, it seems, that what Oct. 7 was really about was not Gaza, nor Israel, and certainly not about the Palestinians, but fundamentally about a resurgence of the impunity wrought by the ever-present Shoah.

………………………

https://archive.is/OrmXD

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

(Republished from Consortium News)

The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US – by JAMES BAMFORD (The Nation) 31 January 2024

At about $60 a square foot, the 44-story skyscraper at 605 Third Avenue is one of the priciest office buildings in Manhattan. And standing at the plate-glass window of his 73,000-square-foot headquarters Jonathan Greenblatt knows the value of projecting an image of wealth and power. On the street far below the director of the Anti-Defamation League are his targets: Americans who need to be educated and informed as to the growing dangers of antisemitism throughout the country, whether in schools, at work, or in the community.

And for Greenblatt, the best way to get that message out is by working closely with the friendly mainstream press, who typically accept the ADL’s data and press releases at face value. After all, the ADL—founded in 1913 in the wake of the controversial murder conviction of Leo Frank, who was later lynched by a Georgia mob in 1915—has been around a long time, and has always had very close relations with Congress, the White House, and the rest of the Washington establishment.

On January 9, for example, a few weeks after a large pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York City, Greenblatt released a report listing over 3,000 antisemitic incidents committed in the three months since the war in Gaza began. “U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel,” warned the ADL press release. “The American Jewish community is facing a threat level that’s now unprecedented in modern history,” said Greenblatt. “It’s shocking.” As expected, the ADL report drew media coverage around the country. “Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. surged after October 7 Hamas attack, advocacy group says,” ran an NBC News headline. Similar titles headed stories by The Hill, Axios, CNN, and many other sources.

But much of the report was hype. Rather than attacks against Jews due to their religious or ethnic identity, many of the cited “incidents” were actions directed against Israel to protest the conduct of its war in Gaza—incidents the ADL would later admit made up nearly half of the total. “Overall, a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization [ADL] had focused on in previous years,” noted Arno Rosenfeld in The Forward. Many of the incidents were simply protests by civil rights organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

Earlier this month, a number of former ADL staffers confided to Jewish Currents “that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.” Another was quoted saying that Greenblatt is “waging war on pro-Palestinian activists,” while a third asserted that “there are a lot of people of all political stripes at ADL who believe what Jonathan is doing is reprehensible.” According to the magazine, Greenblatt has even battled against the ADL’s own civil rights office over legislation targeting criticism of Israel, “choosing repeatedly to privilege Israel advocacy over the protection of civil liberties.”

Even before the war in Gaza, there had been concern by many progressive organizations about the legitimacy of the ADL’s alarmist claims regarding antisemitism. In 2020, more than 100 such groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Movement for Black Lives, signed a “#DropTheADL” open letter requesting that members of the progressive community not partner with the ADL. The organization, it said, “has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.”

The problem is that The New York Times, PBS, and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges. At the same time, they regularly fail to inform their readers, viewers, and listeners either about the organization’s current shift towards silencing Israel’s critics or its long history of deception, lying, and corruption—including covert operations and illegal spying on innocent Americans. A greater awareness of this history—and of the ADL’s ongoing attempts to silence critics of the war in Gaza via slanderous and often untrue charges—might suggest that, instead of simply repeating those charges, a less-credulous media might want to examine the group’s long-standing (but carefully hidden) links to the Israeli government. And whether the ADL’s spying and covert operations are really all in the past.

For much of its history, the ADL has operated in the United States as if it were a hostile intelligence organization—which, in essence, it was. The organization’s spymaster was Irwin Suall, who from the 1960s to 1997 ran his nationwide network of agents and informants from the ADL’s New York City headquarters. As millions of dollars in donations flowed into the “civil rights” organization, tens of thousands of dollars flowed out to Suall’s clandestine operatives in the field, actively engaged in violating the civil rights of thousands of Americans. Among his agents was Roy Bullock, a beefy San Franciscan with the codename “Cal” who posed as a small-time art dealer in the Castro District and spied undercover in the US for the ADL. To hide the ADL’s involvement, Bullock’s payments were laundered through a Beverly Hills attorney who, Bullock would later tell authorities, never missed a payment in more than three decades. Bullock said he would submit his reports to the ADL’s executive director in San Francisco, Richard Hirschhaut, now the regional director of the American Jewish Committee for Los Angeles.

A July 1992 internal ADL memo from Suall praised Bullock as “our number one investigator.” It would eventually be discovered his network of spies secretly collected information on more than 12,000 individuals and more than 950 American religious, labor, peace, and human rights groups. His targets included the NAACP, the Rainbow Coalition, ACLU, ACT UP, the American Indian Movement, Greenpeace, the Northern California Ecumenical Council, the United Farm Workers, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and KQED public television, and at least eight Jewish peace groups, as well as an assortment of pro-Palestinian organizations. A key target was the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Working clandestinely with Bullock was Thomas Gerard, a detective with the San Francisco Police Department’s Intelligence Unit, and a three-year veteran of the CIA. Gerard would illegally supply Bullock with confidential data from police and FBI computer files about Americans, many of them pro-Palestinian activists, that were targets of the ADL. Eventually, investigators would discover that Gerard kept files on 7,011 people.

Bullock and Gerard also targeted Americans on behalf of the apartheid government of South Africa—an extremely close ally of Israel at the time. Bullock and Gerard would meet clandestinely with agents from the brutal and notorious Bureau of State Security (BOSS), including one using the name “Humphries,” in the Travelodge motel in San Francisco’s Fisherman Wharf area. “Humphries said he was interested in acquiring information on anti-apartheid activities in the United States,” Bullock later confessed to the FBI agents, as well as “any sexual impropriety” they could dig up on the well-known anti-apartheid activist Bishop Desmond Tutu. Even details about members of Congress—including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ron Dellums, a powerful critic of the South African government—were passed on by the ADL agents to BOSS.

The ADL’s spying operations began to unravel in October 1992, when Detective Gerard was brought into the FBI’s San Francisco office for questioning. Shortly thereafter, to avoid arrest, he fled to Palawan, a remote jungle island in the Philippines that had no extradition treaty with the United States. At the time, I was the Washington investigative producer for ABC News, and after discovering where Gerard was hiding, I flew to Palawan along with a colleague, James Walker. When we arrived, Gerard agreed to an interview, in which he admitted knowing Bullock but denied giving him the confidential police files, even though Bullock had already confessed to the FBI and many of the documents were recovered.

We also interviewed David Gurvits, the ADL’s former operative in Los Angeles, who told us that he informed authorities that his job was to collect information—some of it illegal—and to maintain files on thousands and thousands of people. “Other codenames for other investigators included Flipper, Chi-1, Chi-3, Chi-2,” he told us. “Flipper,” it turns out, was the codename for an ADL operative who worked out of the organization’s Atlanta office. Chi-1, 2, and 3 worked out of the ADL’s Chicago office. Gurvits told investigators with the San Francisco Police Department that the ADL kept records on any Arab-American who had “anti-Israel leanings” or wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing such feelings. Just as today, criticism of Israel—not antisemitism—was the ADL’s true concern.

The investigation also clearly showed how closely the ADL and its spying operation collaborated with the Israeli government and its intelligence organizations. According to court documents, “Bullock and/or Hirschhault admitted that ADL or its agents gave information to the Government of Israel.” Also, Suall “had met with the Israeli intelligence officials in Israel.” And in an interview with the FBI, a former employee of the Los Angeles ADL office “provided confirmation of direct, regular contacts between employees of the ADL and Israeli officials.” Bullock, according to the reports, “also testified to the FBI that the ADL paid for Gerard to fly to Israel,” likely to also meet with senior Israeli intelligence, military and political officials. Palestinians and Arab-Americans in the United States were the main targets of the spying.

And it turns out the ADL had been spying in the US and passing the data to the Israeli government for a very long time. “[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda,” said a 1961 internal ADL document. “Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli Government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source.” It would seem, therefore, that ADL’s intelligence gathering activities against American citizens have long been well known to Washington.

Exposing this secret and long-standing collaboration between the ADL and Israel, with the US fully on board, would have been deeply embarrassing to both countries. Israel, therefore, may have attempted to quickly shut it down. According to a secret March 29, 1993, FBI memorandum, “SFPD [The San Francisco Police Department] has received information from a reliable source that two persons, described as ‘Israeli generals,’ are in, or are about to travel to, Washington, D.C., in regard to captioned matters [i.e., the ADL case]. The purpose of their travel is to try to visit the attorney general, to press for an end to the FBI’s investigations concerning [redacted] and [redacted] [likely Bullock and Gerard]. According to the SDPD, the FBI’s investigation of these matters are causing a great deal of interference in the U.S. activities of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), and so Israel is seeking to intercede on the ADL’s behalf.”

The FBI quickly dropped the case and washed its hands of it—as it does with virtually all cases involving Israel. That left prosecution to the San Francisco district attorney’s office which, armed with a search warrant, carried out a surprise raid on the ADL’s San Francisco office on April 8, 1993. Local television stations aired video of investigators lugging out evidence boxes full of files. But in the end, the DA’s office also wanted to drop the political hot potato. Thus, the DA agreed to forgo prosecution of the ADL and Bullock in exchange for a pledge not to engage in improper information gathering activities—i.e., spying—in California. And a payment of up to $75,000 to fight hate crimes, which is what they were supposed to have been doing all along. Because the FBI refused to provided documents in his case, Gerard was allowed to plead no contest to the lesser charge of illegal access to a police computer system. He was sentenced to three-years of probation, 45 days on the sheriff’s work crew, and a $2,500 fine.

With barely a slap on the wrist, and a wink from Washington, the ADL continued as if nothing had happened, even continuing to employ its star spy Bullock. At the time the spying was exposed, the head of the organization was Greenblatt’s immediate predecessor, Abraham Foxman—known in the community as the “Jewish pope” because of his power, having served as president for 28 years until his retirement in 2015. The ADL board did not dump Foxman after the embarrassing spy scandal; instead, the organization greatly rewarded him: in addition to being kept on for another decade, he received a $1.5 million retirement package above and beyond his salary. And at his retirement party, then–Vice President Joe Biden—who received more pro-Israel cash than any other member of Congress—sang “Happy Birthday” to Foxman. All of which sent a clear message to Greenblatt that no matter what his organization does, Washington will happily close its eyes. The ADL’s priority today remains—as it has for decades—going after Americans who are simply opposed to Israel’s endless occupation and oppression of Palestinians. The group’s preferred targets are students, professors, activists, and demonstrators—rather than antisemites, especially those on the far right. But the group’s reckless bullying ought to also act as a wake-up call to the media to take a closer look at the ADL’s long history of corruption, spying, and covert links to Israel before blindly publishing the next breathless handout.

………………

Source

One Hour of Hebrew Communist Music (1:01:05 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Yiddish Communist Music (1:00:35 min) Audio Mp3

The Birth of the Zionist State – A Marxist Analysis (Workers Vanguard)

https://archive.ph/rEq21

Hemingway – Le papillon et le char – Guerre civile espagnole – 1937

Je voulais lire un court article d’Hemingway pour avoir une histoire pour accompagner une vidéo de cheminée. Je n’ai jamais vu beaucoup de politique dans les histoires qu’Hemingway a écrites sur la guerre civile espagnole des années 1930. Il était proche en tant que correspondant de guerre et avait une sympathie ouverte pour les gauchistes luttant pour une certaine version du contrôle ouvrier et populaire de la société par le biais de la démocratie directe et de la coopération. Mais je n’ai pas vu grand-chose sur les idées de gauche dans certains de ses articles dans « La Cinquième Colonne » et dans d’autres récits sur la guerre civile espagnole. J’ai lu le plus court. “Le papillon et le char” semblait être une pièce jetable à laquelle Hemingway avait téléphoné pour respecter un délai. Je pensais qu’il ne s’était pas passé grand-chose dans la brève histoire. Mais après l’avoir enregistré et mis sur une vidéo avec une cheminée, puis mis sur Dailymotion, Youtube et Vimeo, j’ai entendu l’histoire encore et encore. J’ai pensé au nombre de fois où j’étais allé dans des bars pour avoir des conversations politiques. Tout comme dans l’histoire. Certains hommes brutaux réagissent de manière excessive à un geste insensé dans l’histoire. En écoutant, j’ai réalisé qui ils étaient. Stalinistes. Je ne suis pas sûr qu’Hemingway réalise qui il décrit comme étant les tireurs du bar, mais ils correspondent à la description et travaillent à l’aéroport lorsque les staliniens dirigeaient la Russie. La Russie était le seul pays à « aider » l’Espagne de gauche avec des « experts » et des agents de la police secrète.

Les histoires sont nées de l’expérience d’Hemingway pendant la guerre civile espagnole en tant que correspondant de l’Alliance des journaux nord-américains et en tant que participant au tournage d’une œuvre pro-loyaliste/de gauche « La Terre espagnole ». Cette histoire et d’autres sont nées d’aventures dans et autour de Madrid assiégée, en particulier à l’hôtel Florida et dans un bar appelé Chicote’s. Le livre se distingue par la présence dominante de l’auteur, que l’on retrouve vivant à chaque page. Cette présence oriente l’attention, c’est Hemingway immédiat et indubitable.

L’expérience derrière les histoires était quasiment réelle. La question se pose de savoir en quoi la fiction autobiographique diffère du journalisme autobiographique – c’est-à-dire la meilleure des dépêches que le correspondant a envoyées d’Espagne et qui ont été réimprimées il y a quelques années dans « By-Line : Ernest Hemingway ». La réponse est que la différence réside davantage dans la qualité que dans la nature. Aussi bonne que soit une partie de cette correspondance, ces quatre histoires sont meilleures que n’importe laquelle d’entre elles.

Hemingway était un si bon journaliste qu’il pouvait révéler la vérité sur les raisons de la défaite de la gauche espagnole – même s’il travaillait avec le Parti communiste stalinien. Il a été assez honnête pour écrire simplement sur ce qu’il a vu. Certains l’ont exhorté à ne pas signaler un meurtre dans un bar dans un quartier de gauche parce que « les mauvaises nouvelles nuisent à la lutte ». Il m’a donné une leçon qu’il n’a peut-être pas apprise lui-même. Quel genre de gauchiste quitte le Cuba révolutionnaire et se rend dans l’Idaho pour se cacher du FBI ? Celui qui s’est échappé au bout d’un fusil de chasse. Demande en rythme et en amore.

Eine Pflicht gegenüber den Unterdrückten – Hemingway

In Hemingways Roman „Für wen die Stunde schlägt“ aus dem Jahr 1940 spricht der linke Charakter Robert Jordan von seiner Hingabe an die linke Sache der Spanischen Republik und der Unterdrückten auf der ganzen Welt. Die Figur spricht über die Stimmung in den anarchistischen und sowjetisch-stalinistischen Hoteltreffpunkten, in denen sich Aktivisten, Parteimitglieder und Kämpfer versammelten.

An jedem dieser Orte hatte man das Gefühl, an einem Kreuzzug teilzunehmen. Das war das einzige Wort dafür, obwohl es ein Wort war, das so abgenutzt und missbraucht worden war, dass es nicht mehr seine wahre Bedeutung hatte. Sie verspürten trotz aller Bürokratie, Ineffizienz und Parteistreitigkeiten etwas, das dem Gefühl ähnelte, das Sie erwartet hatten, aber nicht hatten, als Sie Ihre Erstkommunion feierten. Es war ein Gefühl der Hingabe an eine Pflicht gegenüber allen Unterdrückten der Welt, über die man genauso schwer und peinlich sprechen konnte wie über religiöse Erfahrungen, und doch war es authentisch wie das Gefühl, das man hatte, wenn man Bach hörte oder in der Kathedrale von Chartres stand oder die Kathedrale von León und sah das Licht durch die großen Fenster fallen; oder als Sie Mantegna und Greco und Brueghel im Prado sahen. Es gab einem einen Anteil an etwas, an das man ganz und gar glauben konnte und in dem man eine absolute Brüderlichkeit mit den anderen verspürte, die daran beteiligt waren. Es war etwas, das Sie noch nie zuvor gewusst hatten, das Sie aber jetzt erlebt hatten, und Sie legten so viel Wert darauf und auf die Gründe dafür, dass Ihr eigener Tod völlig unwichtig erschien; Sie sollten nur etwas vermeiden, weil es die Erfüllung Ihrer Pflicht beeinträchtigen würde. Aber das Beste war, dass man gegen dieses Gefühl und auch gegen diese Notwendigkeit etwas tun konnte. Du könntest kämpfen.

对受压迫者的责任 – 海明威

​在海明威 1940 年的小说《丧钟为谁而鸣》中，左派人物罗伯特·乔丹谈到了对西班牙共和国左翼事业的奉献，并在世界各地受到压迫。 这个角色讲述了在无政府主义和苏联斯大林主义酒店会议中心的感受，活动人士、党员和战士都在那里组织活动。

………………

在任何一个地方，你都会感觉自己正在参加一场十字军东征。 这是唯一的词来形容它，尽管这个词已经被磨损和滥用，不再给出它的真正含义。 尽管存在官僚作风、效率低下和党派斗争，但你的感觉就像你在第一次圣餐时所期望的那样，却没有。 这是一种对世界上所有受压迫者的责任的奉献感，这种感觉就像宗教体验一样困难和尴尬，但它却是真实的，就像你听到巴赫或站在沙特尔大教堂时的感觉一样 或者莱昂大教堂，看到光线从大窗户透进来； 或者当你在普拉多看到曼特尼亚、格列柯和勃鲁盖尔时。 它让你参与到你可以完全相信的事情中，并且让你感受到与其他参与其中的人绝对的兄弟情谊。 这是你以前从未了解过的事情，但你现在已经经历过，并且你如此重视它及其原因，以至于你自己的死亡似乎完全不重要; 只是要避免的事情，因为它会干扰你履行职责。 但最好的事情是，你也可以为这种感觉和这种必要性做点什么。 你可以战斗。

Israel Tells Gaza – Eat Dirt – by Chris Hedges – 8 Feb 2024

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1 , they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.

In the abandoned town of Maya Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattering strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

……………………………

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor , and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report .

(Republished from Scheerpost)

Why Medvedev Is Free to Go Full ‘Born to be Wild’ – by Pepe Escobar – 8 Feb 2024

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space

Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild, 1967

The world has got to be thankful to the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dimitri Medvedev. Paraphrasing that iconic Cold War era string of ads about a beer that refreshes the parts other beers cannot each, Medvedev refreshes those – sensitive – parts the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for diplomatic reasons, cannot reach.

As astonishing tectonic shifts keep turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down, and the Angel of History looks East while the United States, corroded from the inside, desperately clings to scraps of its dwindling Full Spectrum Dominance, Medvedev makes no bones about how much he enjoys “smoke and lighting”, not to mention “heavy metal thunder”.

Exhibit One is something for the ages. It deserves a full quote – complete with colorful English translation:

“Western politicians who have shat their pants and their mediocre generals in NATO have once again decided to scare us. They launched the largest military exercises since the Cold War.

These involve 90,000 soldiers from 31 countries of the Alliance and ‘almost block’ Sweden, about 50 warships, 80 aircraft, 1,100 ground combat vehicles, including 133 tanks.

Some stages are expected to take place in the most blatantly Russophobic and most disgusting countries to us, such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that is, in close proximity to Russia’s borders.

The NATO blabbers were afraid to directly say who these exercises are aimed against, and limited themselves to empty chatter about ‘practicing defense plans and deterring potential aggression from the nearest opponents’.

But it is quite obvious that this convulsion of flabby Western muscles is a warning to our country. It’s like they’re saying, shouldn’t we properly threaten Russia and show the Russian hedgehog a fat transgender European ass.

It turned out not scary, but very significant.

After all, if the Alliance itself decided to conduct exercises of this level, it means they are really afraid of something.

And even more so, they do not believe not only in victory but in any military successes of the rotten neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. Plus, of course, they are working out the anti-Russian agenda for domestic political purposes, consolidating their dissatisfied electorate.

Overall this is a very dangerous play with fire.

Significant forces have been assembled. And exercises of this scale have not been conducted since the last century. So they are a well-forgotten old thing.

We are not going to attack any country in this bloc. All reasonable people in the West understand this. But if they play too hard and encroach on the integrity of our country, they will instantly receive an adequate response.

This will mean only one thing – a big war, from which NATO will no longer turn away.

The same thing will happen if any NATO country begins to provide its airfields to Bandera’s supporters or quarters its troops with neo-Nazis. They will certainly become a legitimate target for our Armed Forces and will be mercilessly destroyed as enemies.

All those wearing helmets with NATO symbols, who today swaggeringly rattle their weapons not far from our borders should remember this”.

Humiliating defeat or Totalen Krieg

Heavy metal thunder Medvedev is complemented by a superb analysis by Rostislav Ishchenko, who I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow years ago.

These are two key takeaways:

1. “Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time ‘of the 90s’”.
2. Ishchenko neatly draws the West’s choice, “between recognition of a shameful defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for, for they are going to engage in China.”

The inevitable conclusion: the whole U.S. architecture of “Russian containment” is “crumbling”.

Ishchenko correctly notes that “the West is not able to wage a proxy war against Russia beyond 2024” (Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, already said last year that the SMO will end in 2025).

Ishchenko adds, “Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near, and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.”

Well, they are trying. Hard. For instance by regimenting a bunch of hyenas for the Three Seas scam. And by giving the CIA’s darling Budanov in Kiev free reign to stage serial terror attacks inside the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, a confidential memo designed at the London School of Economics suggests close cooperation between the German government, USAID and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation to build a sort of “new Singapore in Kiev”: that is, a “reconstruction” profiting corporate Germany out of a low-wage hellhole.

Well, no one knows what sort of “Kiev” will survive, and in what form. So there won’t be any remixed “Singapore”.

There will be no compromise

German analyst Patrik Baab has offered a meticulous breakdown of the key facts underlying Medvedev’s outburst.

Of course he needs to quote NATO’s Stoltenberg, who has already elliptically confirmed, on the record, that this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression – NATO in fact provoked it; moreover it’s a proxy war, essentially about NATO’s eastward expansion.

Baab also correctly acknowledges that after the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March/April 2022, imploded by U.S. and UK, there is zero trust in the Kremlin – and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – of collective West politicos.

Baab also refers to one of Sy Hersh’s Deep State sources:

“The war is over. Russia has won.”

Still, the key point – which does not escape Medvedev’s attention – is that “no concessions are to be expected in Washington. The military confrontation continues. The war has become a battle of attrition.” That ties in with Medvedev already making it explicit that Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Mykolaev and Kiev are “Russian cities.”

Hence, “a compromise is therefore de facto ruled out.”

Russia’s Security Council clearly understands how the strategic concept adopted by NATO at the 2022 summit in Madrid totally militarizes Europe. Baab: “It proposes multi domain warfighting against a nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘NATO enlargement has been a historic success.’”

That’s the rhetoric parroted non-stop by Stoltenberg straight out of NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Feeling the pulse in Moscow, in a series of in-depth exchanges, it becomes clear that the Kremlin is prepared for a nasty war of attrition that could last years – beyond the current Raging Twenties. As it stands, the song remains the same in Ukraine: a crossover of snail technique and the ineluctable meat grinder.

The endgame, as Baab clearly understands, is that “Putin is seeking a fundamental security agreement with the West.” Even as we all know it’s not gonna happen with Straussian neocons dictating policies in the Beltway, the facts on the – geoeconomic – ground are unmistakable: sanctioned-to-death Russia already surpassed Germany and the UK and is now the strongest economy in Europe.

It’s refreshing to see a German analyst quoting historian Emmanuel Todd (“WW III has already begun”) and crack Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, who explained how there has been “a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet times”, including economic and political considerations.

Baab also refers to the inimitable Security Council’s Scientific Council stalwart Sergei Karaganov in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Russia has completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance – the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political, and cultural dominance was built – has been stripped away from them (…) The European Union is moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They need an external enemy.”

When in doubt, read Shelley

It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics: the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization” scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of BackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce.

Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis that “sets the tone.”

And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.”

So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not before the November elections in the U.S..

Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not “the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations collapsed across Eurasia since the 4^th century. What is blatantly clear is that the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the dustbin of History.

And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”

This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.

Oh yes, this a heavy metal thunder sonnet that outlasts Empires – including the “colossal wreck” vanishing in front of our eyes.

……………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Путешествие к центру Солнца – Винтаж Верн

«Путешествие к центру Солнца» — научно-фантастический роман Жюля Верна 1868 года. Он последовал успеху своего более раннего приключенческого романа «Путешествие к центру Земли» и использовал тех же главных героев. В этой истории снова участвует немецкий профессор Отто Лиденброк, который считает, что к центру Солнца идут плазменные трубки. Профессор предположил, что в недрах Солнца баланс гравитации и антигравитации создаст пространство, по сути напоминающее Землю, с умеренным климатом и воздухом, пригодным для дыхания. Он, его племянник Аксель и их гид Ганс используют паровую ракету американской конструкции, предназначенную для самой большой в мире пушки, и запускаются к планете Меркурий, чтобы приблизиться к Солнцу.

Команда сталкивается со множеством приключений, в том числе с нелепыми животными и потусторонними опасностями, прежде чем в конечном итоге возвращается на Землю, где они совершают аварийную посадку на Луне и строят воздушный шар, который позволяет им протянуть стальной трос от Земли к Луне. Последний кусочек антиматерии, который есть у профессора в табакерке, обеспечивает полет на 250 000 миль. В космическом вакууме искатели приключений просто затаили дыхание в ожидании скорого путешествия. Мужчины едут домой в соломенной корзине-гондоле, доедая последние кусочки французского хлеба и допивая последнюю бутылку вина. Гондолы причаливают на юге Италии, у вулкана Стромболи, где они оказались в последней книге.

Жанр космической фантастики существовал уже задолго до Верна. Однако «Путешествие» значительно увеличило популярность этого жанра и повлияло на последующие подобные произведения. Например, Эдгар Райс Берроуз открыто признал влияние Верна на свою собственную серию «Пеллюсидар».

Military Draft? – No, We Don’t Need Conscript Armies – by Nathan Akehurst (Jacobin) 5 Feb 2024

Early in January, Britain’s Telegraph revealed that the once-mighty Royal Navy was running out of sailors and would have to decommission two recently refurbished frigates to staff its new ships.

Reporting on a naval “recruitment crisis” exploded. The alleged posting on LinkedIn of a senior submarine job was widely ridiculed. Right-wing reporters blamed shortages on a “woke generation” not wanting to join — yet somehow also blamed the Navy’s inclusion staff for appealing to diverse recruits.

This was mostly a media circus — until another branch of the armed forces escalated it. General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, warned that Britons would need to prepare to “place society on a war footing,” even hinting at the possibility of a return to conscription in the event of war with Russia.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak swiftly ruled out a draft, but the general’s speech already had media and politicians at fever pitch. “Gen Z has had it too easy for too long,” thundered one Independent column.

Several Tory MPs lined up to welcome a draft, with Boris Johnson laughably claiming he’d happily report for frontline service. Outrage met a poll claiming that over a third of under-forties would refuse to serve in a hypothetical world war.

The culture wars had begun colliding with real wars. Yet what the controversy really showed was Western elites’ increasing obsession with using jingoistic rhetoric to cover for structural decline.

Unwilling Soldiers

Western militaries are suffering from personnel shortages well beyond Britain, and many commentators see some form of draft as a solution. It’s not just a confected media row; since the Ukraine war, states across Europe are considering hardening their draft laws.

Draft armies today are unpopular outside extreme situations. But even setting aside the ethics of coercing teenagers to fight, it’s simply bad policy. General Sanders aside, most mainstream military opinion does not view conscript armies as effective in most circumstances — perhaps helping to explain why so few NATO countries have them. Unwilling soldiers rarely make good ones.

Israel’s war in Gaza offers a grim contemporary example. The Israel Defense Forces’ devastating firepower has been highly effective at razing homes and infrastructure — with a death toll sufficient for the International Court of Justice to hear a “plausible” case of genocide. But its ground forces, reliant on small elite units bulked out by conscripts for mass, have struggled to achieve their objectives.

Israel’s reliance on conscription is usually framed as a response to operational needs, but in fact reflects the outsized centrality of the armed forces in public life, with immense power over land, business, politics, and society. It is “an army with a state rather than a state with an army,” as Israeli scholar and former air force pilot Haim Bresheeth-Zabner and others have persuasively argued.

This demonstrates a further point: that military doctrine is produced by social and political conditions. While militaries retain significant cultural power and popularity, notably in the United States, the relative unpopularity of service itself reflects deeper political realities.Issues like stagnating pay, substandard living conditions, and veteran homelessness are further increasing the unattractiveness of service careers.

From what we know, soldiers do not sign up solely for either cultural or material reasons. But the personnel shortage issue does have material roots as much as cultural ones.

Enlisted service ranks still recruit disproportionately from working-class backgrounds, and still face charges of exploitative practices in doing so, while US forces exploit the student debt crisis to boost their numbers. But issues like stagnating pay, substandard living conditions, and veteran homelessness are both common and commonly reported, further increasing the unattractiveness of service careers.

But above all the decline of the mass army has limited its role as a means of working-class income maximization. Despite post 9/11 rearmament, there are still a million fewer US service personnel than in the 1980s.

In 2015, the German army was a quarter of the size of West Germany’s 1990 numbers alone, with Italian forces shrinking by 67 percent in the same period and British ones by half. This tracks the deindustrialization of the late twentieth century as much as it does a post–Cold War “peace dividend.”

Even these shrunken armies, though, still struggled to recruit. The US military, for example, has been at pains to shake off a reputation gained in the 1990s and 2000s for lowering standards in order to encourage people through the door.

This is where a truth may lurk in the right-wing carping about “woke millennials not wanting to fight” (even if neoliberalism has probably done more than the antiwar left to erode the sense of communal obligation that states use to compel service).

Service has limited appeal to a generation that is not only generally less nationalistic but has grown up with wars that were self-evidently stupid, vicious, counterproductive, and undertaken largely without public consent. Afghanistan and Iraq hardly made good advertisements for service.

The demand for conscription in this context is reminiscent of pandemic-era moral panics about people quitting jobs and demanding better pay, responding to the reality of shrinking desire with coercion. This also contextualizes the other mooted solution to recruitment shortages, where US forces are mulling offering citizenship for service to migrants.

The glaring ethical issues of militarizing a group with limited rights, in an army where racial minorities already disproportionately bear the consequences of war, do not need too much expounding. In any case, its likely political unpopularity and inefficiency makes such a plan difficult to implement at a large scale.Military service has limited appeal to a generation that is not only generally less nationalistic but has grown up with wars that were self-evidently stupid, vicious, and counterproductive.

Conversations about conscription do not persist as realistic discussions of national strategy. They are a salve applied by warmonger columnists who do not wish to admit that we are simply not capable of wielding the force we once did. Interrogating the reasons why is far less attractive to highly online war hawks than rooting for a quick fix that satisfies their desire to make young people suffer more.

Shrunken Power

US military spending surged throughout the Global Financial Crisis, while British forces were shrunk but insulated from the worst of austerity; there is always more money for hypothetical foreign threats than for education, health, or welfare. This did not, however, make armies completely immune from the cancerous effects of a neoliberal model that has seen public services auctioned off and short-termist profit chasing infect government and business alike, with disastrous results.

Another factor in the British Army’s recruitment shortage is probably that outsourcing giant Capita, renowned for its public sector screwups, took over recruitment just before it dramatically fell. Both UK and US forces have faced scandals from price inflation to the provision of dangerously substandard equipment under a regime of outsourcing and corporate incursion.

As Western societies have become less labor-intensive and more service-based, military doctrine and procurement have followed reform in other public services. States have sought to project global power with less manpower, more tech, and lower budgets. This involves retaining deployments around the world, but with smaller ground forces reliant on a high-tech network of surveillance, airpower, and smart munitions that act as force multipliers.

Small-unit operations save on political as well as financial costs. The smallest ones don’t need to be accountable at all — hence Western states’ increasing reliance on special forces acting under a blanket of national security secrecy. The UK’s 2021 Defence Review called for more forces stationed around the world, in a show of neoimperial bravura, but the size of the deployments made many little more than Potemkin units — there for show.As Western societies have become less labor-intensive and more service-based, military doctrine and procurement have followed reform in other public services.

Even larger wars like Afghanistan and Iraq had a much less intense footprint than their antecedents, allowing for American and British imperial commitments while minimizing public outcry over casualties. This was not entirely successful, and Donald Trump’s (cynical) antiwar stance played an often-underrated role in his success.

The “budget imperialism” model came apart for Russia in Ukraine in the early months of its 2022 invasion. Operating under systems constructed for sweeping defense cuts earlier in Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Russian formations quickly became degraded. They survived only by reorganizing in ways analogous to older Soviet structures, mobilizing reservists, and increasing arms production.

This probably also helped reenergize the conscription discourse in the West, as defense apparatchiks looked to counter Russia’s recovery. But even assuming that public consent could be acquired for assembling the personnel required to sustain brutal attritional warfare like that in Ukraine, that would also require the industry to back it.

The US military-industrial complex is huge, and those of the UK and European Union are also competitive. They supply the world’s most expensive armies (although as discussed, neoliberal capitalism plays a role in vastly inflating those costs relative to output) as well as exporting them around the world, sometimes to both sides of the same conflicts.

It has, however, become clear that they cannot sustain war production to the degree that manufacturing-intensive economies like Russia and China do. Attempting to supply Israel and Ukraine with ammunition simultaneously short-circuited US abilities. Huge rearmament programs are underway across the West to compensate. But such work takes a long time, tacks against the prevailing winds of modern economies, and saps resources from other investment-starved areas.

And with new technologies exerting complex effects on the nature of war, it is not entirely clear what battlefield we are supposedly preparing for.

Damaged Prestige

This wider malaise provides a backdrop to Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led attempt to prevent Yemen’s de facto government from seizing Israel-bound shipping in the Red Sea.

The operation was launched in January to great fanfare, and promptly came apart as US allies refused to send ships under American command. Two British warships colliding in port, and the reported deaths of two US Navy SEALs by falling from a ladder while seizing a boat, did not help perceptions that the operation was floundering.

The United States and UK escalated with dozens of air strikes on positions across Yemen. Asked if they were working, Joe Biden replied “No,” but then added, “Are they going to continue? Yes.”

The United States and Europe spent a decade arming and backing a Saudi-led war in Yemen that brought an already desperately poor and troubled country to its knees, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. For forces operating from such a country to deal such blows to US prestige is remarkable.

Days later, Islamic Resistance in Iraq militia took credit for a drone attack at a US base near the Jordan-Iraq border that killed three US soldiers. The White House blamed Iran and vowed a “very consequential response.” Senator Lindsey Graham was among those calling to “hit Iran hard, now.”Germany’s Social Democratic defense minister recently called for the German armed forces to become war ready.

Reporters once again leaped on and fueled rumors that the Biden administration planned to reinstate a draft, even though it had signaled no such thing. Again, calls for conscription and rearmament serve as a quick fix to avoid serious questions.

This is not the only motivation, though. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, arms CEOs were celebrating a world in chaos. These firms in turn pour funding into the circuit of security and defense think tanks that fan the flames of war in the media.

War Drums

Seemingly everywhere, the war drums are beating. Germany’s Social Democratic defense minister recently called for the German armed forces to become war ready, amid a €100 billion rearmament program. France last year began rehearsing its first high-intensity war drills. The European Union recently held its first live military exercise, and is now cutting climate spending and foreign aid to finance war and border control.

A return to the era of mass mobilization is not yet here and not entirely viable. Britain, for instance, recently dispatched an aircraft carrier with no aircraft to signal its much-vaunted “pivot to the Asia-Pacific,” yet the ghosts of past glory are no substitute for serious engagement with the challenges of the present.

But a deliberate attempt to mobilize public opinion behind military adventurism is underway, and in some places may even be working. It is also inextricable from attempts by the United States and allies to tear apart the very international order they set up to defend their own interests and security.

The “rules-based international order” of the United Nations (UN) system, international law, and multilateral institutions is often weak or lenient on great powers, but it remains a significant guarantor of an (in relative terms) long peace that has endured since 1945.

The United States and its allies are busy tearing such bulwarks apart. Whether it is defunding UN agencies, arming allies as they carpet bomb civilians, maintaining the right to unlimited extrajudicial drone strikes or special operations, or dismantling the Refugee Convention, a new strain of militarism across the Western mainstream political spectrum is scorning the international order in full view of the world.

This is an international corollary of a domestic politics that demands the return of draft armies, unlimited funding for weaponry in a period of soaring inequality and collapsing social safety nets, the gearing of economies towards war production, the creeping militarization of civilian functions like policing and borders, and the placing of a cordon sanitaire around dissenters to such an approach.

We are not yet at war. But hawks around the world are trying very hard to push us closer. And as they do, the real threats to our security — climate change, gaping inequality, and resource depletion, all of which also help drive conflict — go neglected.

As Biden’s comments on the Yemen air strikes encapsulated, the “security” circuit is unyielding in its claim to be acting in the “national interest” — regardless of whether their military initiatives work.

……………….

https://archive.ph/j64fq

Source

What’s Left? – by Ted Rall – 2 Feb 2024

• 1,000 WORDS • 

We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the right of the Western European representative democracies from which our political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is a gaping chasm between the policy orientation of the two major parties that receive mainstream-media coverage and the leanings of the American people they purport to represent.

Gallup’s decade-plus poll of basic opinions consistently finds that 4 in 10 Americans have a positive view of socialism. (Half of these are also favorably predisposed toward capitalism.) When given a chance to demonstrate that, they do. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” received 43% of the Democratic primary popular vote in 2016 and 26% in 2020. Four members of the Democratic Socialists of America are currently serving in Congress. Despite a century of reactionary Cold War suppression and McCarthyite propaganda, U.S. voters have moved more left since the heyday of the old Socialist Party, whose four-time presidential standard-bearer Eugene Debs peaked at 6% in 1912.

History is punctuated by periodic spasms of protest that reveal Americans’ yearning for a world with greater economic equality, a merciful justice system, increased individual rights and the prioritization of human needs over corporate profits: the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots of 2020, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 1999 Battle of Seattle, etc., all the way back to the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements at the dawn of the republic. These leftist movements were ruthlessly crushed by state violence and marginalization by the media before, in some instances, ultimately achieving their goals. Like streetcar tracks that keep having to be repaved over as asphalt erodes, however, fundamental human cravings for fairness and equality always reemerge despite the U.S. political system’s suppression.

I write this at one of those times between uprisings, when the presence of the Left in Americans’ lives feels irrelevant. (We’re talking here about the actual, socialist/communist-influenced Left of the sort we find in Europe, not the corporate “liberal” Democratic Party.) The Green Party, the nation’s biggest Left party, received 0.2% of the vote in the last presidential election; it will probably not appear on the ballot in many states, including New York, this year. There are no sustained street protests about any issue, including the Supreme Court’s radical repeal of abortion rights. Israel’s war against Gaza inspired one major (over 100,000 attendees) anti-war demonstration, in Washington, and it was matched in size by an opposing march in favor of Israel. Sanders and his fellow socialists have been absorbed into the Democratic Borg.

What’s Left?

There is no organized Left in the U.S. We are pre-organized. We are bereft of leaders. We have no presence in the media. We have no realistic prospect of having our positions aired, much less seriously considered and debates or enacted into law.

The Left may not exist as a political force. Yet we exist. Polls show that there are tens of millions of individual leftists here in the United States. Sanders’ massive campaign rallies, with tens of thousands of attendees in numerous cities, proved that we’re able and willing to mobilize when we feel hope. Our record of taking to the streets to fight racist cops and warmongers and strikebreakers and gay bashers, despite formidable risks, point to our revolutionary spirit.

Four out of 10 Americans view socialism favorably. How many more would feel the same way if they were exposed to leftist ideas? What if there was a socialist party that might possibly win?

Some readers criticized my 2011 book “The Anti-American Manifesto” because it called for revolution, or more accurately for opening rhetorical space for revolution as a viable political option, without laying out a step-by-step path for organizing a revolutionary organization. My omission was intentional. Allowing ourselves psychological access to the R-word must precede organization, revolution must be led by the masses rather than an individual, and in any case, I am not blessed with the gifts of an organizer and wouldn’t know where to begin to build a grassroots movement. Still, no doubt about it, we have a lot to do. We must agitate and confront and organize and work inside electoral politics and out in the streets.

But for what?

What do we want?

What should we fight for?

Karl Marx and his socialist contemporaries would call this a programme — a list of demands and desires, like a political party platform in the not-so-distant past, which confronts the biggest problems facing us and lays out specific ways to solve them if and when we win power at the ballot box or seize power at the point of a gun as the culmination of a revolutionary movement.

The Communist Manifesto – 1848 – Audiobook (1:22:03 min) Audio Mp3

We need a coherent vision for the country. We must build credibility by demonstrating that we know what has people worried, terrified and merely annoyed; successfully identifying people’s concerns shows that we get it, that we get them. We need solutions to their problems. We need to walk people through our ideas, listen to their thoughts and adjust our programme in response to their feedback.

What is the Left?

The Left is the idea that everyone is entitled to the good things in life by virtue of existing, that we should all have equal rights and opportunities and that the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, health care, education and transportation should be guaranteed by the government.

In this richest nation that has ever existed anywhere, albeit the one with the biggest wealth gap, we can get there. But we will never accomplish anything within the constructs of the electoral politics trap. Never has the dysfunction and uselessness of the duopoly been clearer than in this election cycle, when most voters say they wish neither of the two major-party candidates were running.

Let’s figure out how.

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What the First Week of War With Iran Could Look Like – by Matthew Hoh – 1 Feb 2024

When Logic and Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead – by Matthew Hoh 

Posted on 1 February 2024

I was asked for my thoughts on what most concerned me about the expected US attacks on Iran following the death of three American soldiers over the weekend in Jordan. Some of those thoughts made it into Newsweek. 

Below, I’ve provided an extended set of thoughts on what we could expect from US attacks against Iran. It’s divided into best and worst-case scenarios. Not surprisingly, the worst-case scenario is longer:

Most concerning would be an attack on Iran itself that would put the same types of domestic political pressure on Iran to respond that President Biden is facing. It’s hard to see the Iranians, or any nation, being overtly attacked by a foreign country and not responding in some equivalent manner. I think limited attacks on targets in Iran would see commensurate Iranian reprisals. So attacks on Iranian Republican Guard facilities or air and naval bases would see return attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria.

BEST CASE:

The Iranian response to the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani by the US in January 2020 is a good example. Hopefully, that is where it would end. However, there is the danger of it not ending and an escalating tit-for-tat cycle taking hold – insisted upon by internal US and Iranian political pressures. There is also the danger that a US attack on Iran would see groups allied with Iran increase their attacks on US targets in response, including against targets such as the US Embassies in Baghdad and Beirut. Further, anti-Iran groups such as the Islamic State and Kurdish and Baluchi separatist groups could see an opportunity to attack Iranian targets, including civilian targets, as happened earlier this month in Iran. That’s what I see as the dangers of a “best case” from a US attack against Iranian territory; again, hopefully, it’s a replay of January 2020.

WORST CASE:

The worst case is the US decides to launch significant attacks on Iranian targets in Iran, including Iranian political and military leadership, and indicates that the attacks will be wide-ranging and lasting, i.e., a military campaign that seeks to destroy Iranian military capacity and presages regime change (whether or not that is the actual intent doesn’t matter, what matters is what the Iranians perceive). Such intensive attacks give the Iranians a political motivation and a practical reason to launch full-scale attacks in return.

Iran, with a “use it or lose it” mentality, could launch large-scale attacks on US bases, especially air and naval bases and command headquarters in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain, damaging or destroying the US ability to conduct operations with US Air Force ground-based aircraft. Iranian attacks on US naval ships, focusing primarily on the US aircraft carrier in the region, the USS Eisenhower, using anti-ship missiles, drones and diesel submarines, could not just cause losses and casualties but could, along with the loss of airfields in the Gulf monarchies, prevent US airpower from defending US troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria. US forces in Iraq and Syria, with limited American air support (US ground-based air support would still come from Turkey, as well as long-range bombers from Europe, Diego Garcia and the US), might then be overrun by large numbers of Iranian-allied Iraqi and Syrian units (the same experienced and very competent troops that defeated the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria). I don’t believe we would see long-range Iranian missile strikes on Israeli targets out of fear of an Israeli nuclear response, but that would not stop Hezbollah from launching tens of thousands of missiles against Israeli bases, ports, airfields, infrastructure and cities.

Cyberattacks are probable, as cyberattacks have already been conducted over the last two decades. So, despite the 7,000-mile distance to the Persian Gulf from the US East Coast, the US public would feel the war in some hard and costly ways if cyberattacks are not limited to government and military targets (if they can even be confined to specific targets).

It must be said that the Iranians are assumably well prepared for this war. Forty-five years of US regime change efforts, including the 1980s war, sanctions, assassinations, bullying, and threats, have left no doubt in most Iranian minds that they must be prepared for war with the US. No nation is immune from incompetence and corruption in its leadership, military, and industry, and the Iranians may be as bad off as the Americans are in that regard. Regardless, the expectation should be that the Iranians have taken the threat from the US seriously and are ready for it.

Questions then abound as to how other nations would respond. Likely, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah would enter the war. Syria and Russia would seemingly be eager to quietly help, or at least not get in the way of the destruction of US forces in Syria. What would the Kurds, in both Iraq and Syria, do watching US forces attacked and destroyed and the Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria now dramatically affected? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain would have difficult decisions to make as their populations would possibly see the attacks not against them but against the Americans (the Iranian attacks, though significant, would presumably be confined to the US bases). The entire region, minus Israel, along with much of the world, would see the Iranian actions, as they do the Yemenis and Iraqis, as being done in defense of the Palestinians.

At a minimum, within the week, we would then witness a prolonged US air, drone and missile campaign against Iran; a Hezbollah-Israel war that might spill into Syria; US prisoners in Syria and Iraq; and a plunging world economy. Turkey, China and Russia would see a great opportunity in an eventual reduced presence of the US in the Middle East, essentially the US in an isolated alliance with a Fortress Israel. Turkey, Russia and China would present themselves in juxtaposition as calm and reliable partners. Ukraine would need to sue for peace.

The political pressure on the US to “win” in the Middle East would be enormous, the ghost of John McCain would haunt the 2024 elections, and while I don’t think we would see American ground troops in large numbers like in the Iraq and Afghan wars, the idea of a US invasion and occupation of Iran is terrifyingly absurd, the resulting war would make those previous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem like provincial affairs.

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Reprinted from Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace.

Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a former Marine Corps captain, Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled Iraq War veteran and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International Policy. He writes at Substack.

One Hour of Iranian Communist Music (1:00:13 min) Audio Mp3

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