Monthly Archives: June 2024
#News – CrossTalk (26:00 min) 21 June 2024
#News – Alexander Mercouris (1:04:03 min) 20 June 2024
#News – Alex Christoforou (36:43 min) 20 June 2024
Israel vs. International Law: Who Will Win? – by LAURENT GUYÉNOT • 19 JUNE 2024
• 1,700 WORDS •
French language distinguishes “le Droit” and “la Loi”. In English, “droit” sometimes translates as “right”, as in “human rights”. “Right” carries the notion of rational and universal principles. “Laws” (“les lois”), on the other hand, are arbitrary conventions, which must not necessarily be rational or universal, let alone just. But unfortunately, “le Droit” translates in English as “Law”; when the French say “le Droit International”, Americans say “International Law”, which blurs a crucial distinction.
In its loftiest sense, Law (le Droit) is man’s effort to establish a rational, scientific basis for justice and social order. The first such Western attempt is attributed to the Roman jurist Gaius, author around 161 AD of the Institutes. What he called ius gentium is “the law common to all humankind, and it is established between all men by natural reason and is observed in a similar way among all peoples.” Hugo Grotius’s On the Laws of War and Peace (1625), considered the first modern treatise of International Law, was based on Roman law. René Robaye writes in Le Droit Romain:
Roman law is part of European cultural heritage. … For two millennia, jurists have studied it, generation after generation. Most universities continue to make it an object of scientific research, because the genius of Rome is first and foremost that of its law, and the influence of Roman institutions remains considerable.[1]
Roman Law was rooted in the Greek conviction that man can access universal truths through reason. Reason, philosophers taught, is God’s (or Nature’s) gift to all men, regardless of their national idiosyncrasies. By reason men can discover universal laws (schoolboys throughout the world still learn the theorems of Pythagoras and Thales). Greeks did reflect upon the most rational laws for the city, but it fell to the Romans to develop that practical branch of knowledge. The Romans were born jurists. Latin was perfectly suited for that, and Rome’s most eloquent speaker, Cicero, was a lawyer.
The characteristic of Roman Law is its secular character. It is a human creation, inspired by divine reason, not by divine revelation. It can therefore always be improved; it is a work in progress. “These qualities explain why Roman law survived the society which created it, to become, several centuries later, the foundation of the most important family of modern legal systems.”[2]
Because Rome thought of Law in terms of universal principles, Roman emperors distributed Roman citizenship generously, and in the third century gave it to all free men living in the Empire. Rome is everywhere. Roman citizenship meant being subject to Roman laws and no other.
Jerusalem is the exact opposite of Rome. It is founded on a Law (Torah) that was not built by human reason, but fell from heaven as a divine revelation. It is explicitly given for the benefit of one single people, who decreed that their Temple is God’s only dwelling place. Jerusalem is nowhere else than in Jerusalem, even when Jews are everywhere. And there are no other Jews than Jews. Jerusalem in an extreme form of chauvinism, so perversely extreme that it postures as a universalism. Israel’s Law gives Israel a divine right, even a divine duty, to steal the land of another people or to commit genocide against Amalek, and ultimately to rule the world. Isaiah 2:3-4: “The Law will come from Zion” and “Yahweh will judge over Nations.”
There cannot be a starker contrast than between Rome’s and Jerusalem’s legal traditions. Rome’s law is man-made and rational, while Jerusalem’s law is God-made and irrational. The opposition goes beyond Rome versus Jerusalem. It had never occurred to the Egyptians that the gods could dictate their laws to men, according to German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who thinks it was a Hebrew innovation.[3] However, like the yin within the yang, Egyptian law did contain a degree of divine intervention: laws were made by kings, but kings were divine. Only in the Greco-Roman tradition, I think, was Law fully appropriated by human reason. And only in Israel is Law entirely God’s prerogative. Which makes Rome and Jerusalem the purest forms of two radically opposed visions of world order.
Because Roman Law has conquered the world, in the form of International Law, Israel’s Law is a global anachronism. This is why it rarely exhibits itself naked. But whoever has made some serious effort to understand Israel will know that Israel is still living in the paradigm of Divine Law (or Divine Right), the paradigm of chosenness. Chosen by who and for what are questions on which Israelis may differ (“chosen for universal hatred,” said Leo Pinsker),[4] but they are of secondary importance. “Chosen” means: above International Law. In truth, Israelis do not mind International Law, as long as it does not apply to them. International Law may be good for others, but Israel is exceptional—the unique exception to the rule.
No one has said it more clearly than terrorist and future Prime minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1943 : “We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: ‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man’.”[5]
International Law does not recognize exceptions, only outlaws. Therefore if it is to survive, International Law must judge, restrain and punish Israel. Granted, that’s no easy task. In 1948 Shamir’s Stern Gang murdered Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, because he had called for the “return of the Arab refugees rooted in this land for centuries.”[6] Israel will kill International Law if it tries to infringe on their Divine Law.
Israel has actually been planning to kill the UN from 1948 (after having used it in 1947). In 1962, David Ben-Gurion stated that within 25 years, the current UN will be abolished, while “a truly United Nations” will be seated in Jerusalem, “to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[7]
We are now witnessing the final showdown. On one side is International Law, which we may call Rome, for the reasons explained above; it is committed to truth and justice. On the other side is Jerusalem and its Divine Law, the Empire of the Lie.
Obviously, the United-States are now part of Israel. They used to stand for Rome, but have been conquered by Jerusalem, in three major steps: the buying of Truman in 1947, the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, and the 9/11 PSYOP.
Never before the complete incompatibility between International Law and Israel has been more blatant. This is cause for hope, actually, because in front of such evidence, world leaders are joining in the realization that one of the two must go. Israel and International Law cannot coexist on this planet. And the prospect of a nuclear world without International Law is terrifying.
Israel’s genocide of Gaza (the new Amalek) under American protection accelerates this global awareness. International Law, respect for treaties, the search for justice in conflict resolution, diplomacy based on good faith and trust, are things that Israel deeply despises. International Law is the quest for justice and truth; Israel (including the US) is the power of lies, hypocrisy, cheating, corruption, intimidation, blackmail, false flag terrorism, and so on.
For example, one of the most important historical missions of International Law is that which John Kennedy entrusted to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 1961: global nuclear disarmament. Israel assassinated Kennedy, and is now the only country with hundreds of atomic bombs that has never signed any Non-Proliferation Treaty, and refuses to admit the existence of its nuclear arsenal, while openly threatening the world with its Samson Option. The whole world is now realizing the consequence of having allowed Israel to become the only nuclear power in the Middle East (it is a major factor in Israel’s defiance of International Law today).
Israel getting away with their massacre in Gaza would mean the death of International Law—or its zombification. I hope that world leaders are beginning to understand that they have no choice: sooner or later, the international community will have to disarm Israel.
There is, however, another possibility that cannot be ignored: a new world war.
Only a world war can bring about the death of the United Nations and the fulfillment of Isaiah’s and Ben-Gurion’s prophecy. This is why neoconservative crypto-Zionists are calling for military escalation against Russia. They have been calling for a new world war since the aftermath of 9/11, but Putin frustrated them in 2013 with his military and diplomatic support for Bashar al-Assad. So they turned against Putin.
French Jewish “political adviser” Jacques Attali declared in 2020 that a world government would come “either after the war or instead of the war.”[8] And he thought, like Ben-Gurion, that this new world government would be headquartered in Jerusalem.[9] Now “in place of war” is no longer possible for this prophetic dream to become reality. Israel therefore needs a world conflagration.
In this scenario, Israel would not be one of the belligerents, of course, but it would prolong the conflict, pick the winner at the end, and come out strong enough to rule the Middle East. World wars have always made Israel stronger. The UN would be dissolved, and its resolutions with it. This is the real Great Reset that Israel needs.
Notes
[1] René Robaye, Le Droit Romain, Academia, 2023, p. 7-10.
[2] René Robaye, Le Droit Romain, Academia, 2023, p. 7-10.
[3] Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, Stanford University Press, 2009.
[4] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, 1882 .
[5] “Document: Shamir on Terrorism (1943),” Middle East Report 152 (May/June 1988), merip.org/1988/05/shamir-on-terrorism-1943/
[6] . Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 90.
[7] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Ducovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
[8] https://www.arretsurimages.net/emissions/arret-sur-images/il-faudra-un-gouvernement-mondial-apres-ou-a-la-place-de-la-guerre
#News – Alex Christoforou (32:52 min) 19 June 2024
#News – Alexander Mercouris (1:23:27 min) 19 June 2024
Hegemon Orders Europe: Bet on War and Steal Russia’s Money – by Pepe Escobar – 18 June 2024
• 1,500 WORDS •
The Swiss “peace” kabuki came and went – and the winner was Vladimir Putin. He didn’t even have to show up.
None of the Big Players did. Or in case they sent their emissaries, there was significant refusal to sign the vacuous final declaration – as in BRICS members Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE and South Africa.
Without BRICS, there’s absolutely nothing the collective West – as in The Hegemon and assorted vassals – can do to alter the proxy war chessboard in Ukraine.
In his carefully calibrated speech to diplomats and the leadership of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Putin delineated an incredibly restrained and strategic approach to solve the Ukraine problem. In the context of the Hegemon’s escalatory green light – actually in practice for several months now – for Kiev to attack deeper into the Russian Federation, Putin’s offer was extremely generous.
That is a direct offer to the Hegemon and the collective West – as the sweaty T-shirt actor in Kiev, apart from illegitimate, is beyond irrelevant.
Predictably, NATO – via that epileptic slab of Norwegian wood – already proclaimed its refusal to negotiate, even as some relatively awake members of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) started discussing the offer, according to Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin.
Moscow sees the Verkhovna Rada as the only legitimate entity in Ukraine – and the only one with which would be possible to reach an agreement.
Russian UN representative Vasily Nebenzya cut to the chase – diplomatically: if the generous proposal is refused, next time conditions for starting negotiations will be “different”. And “far more unfavorable”, according to Duma Defense Committee head Andrei Kartapolov.
As Nebenzya stressed that in case of a refusal the collective West will bear full responsibility for further bloodshed, Kartapolov elaborated on the Big Picture: Russia’s real target is to create a whole new security system for the Eurasian space.
And that, of course, is anathema to the Hegemon’s elites.
Putin’s security vision for Eurasia harks back to this legendary speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Now, with the steady advance of an irreversible multi-nodal (italics mine) and multi-centric new system of international relations, the Kremlin is pressing for an urgent solution – considering the extremely dangerous escalation of these past few months.
Putin once again had to remind the deaf, dumb and blind of the obvious:
“Calls to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, which has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, demonstrate the extreme adventurism of Western politicians. They either do not understand the scale of the threat they themselves create, or they are simply obsessed with the belief in their own immunity and their own exclusivity. Both can turn into a tragedy”.
They remain deaf, dumb and blind.
A proposal that does not solve anything?
A fiery debate is raging in informed circles in Russia about Putin’s proposal. Critics blast it as a capitulation – forced by selected oligarchs and influential business circles, adverse to an “almost war” (the preferred motto) that keeps postponing the inevitable decapitation strike.
Critics argue that the military strategy is totally subordinated to a political strategy. And that would explain the serious problems in the Black Sea and in Transnistria: the political center of power refuses to conquer the number one economic/military target, which is Odessa.
Additionally, Ukraine’s weapon supply chains are not being properly interrupted.
The key critical point is “this is taking too long”. One just needs to look at the example of Mariupol.
In 2014, Mariupol was left in the control of nazi-banderista gangs as part of a financial deal with Rinat Akhmetov, the owner of the Azovstal works. That’s a classic case of oligarchs and financiers prevailing over military objectives.
Putin’s generosity, visible in this latest peace offer, also elicits a parallel with what happened in Dara’a in Syria: Russia also negotiated what looked at first like a peace deal. Yet Dara’a remains a mess, extremely violent, with Syrian and Russian soldiers at risk.
It gets really tricky when the current proposal only asks NATO not to be encroached in Kiev; but at the same time Kiev will be allowed to have an army, based on the (aborted) April 2022 negotiations in Istanbul.
Critics also argue that Putin seems to believe that this proposal will solve the war. Not really. A real de-nazification campaign is an affair of decades – involving everything from full demilitarization to eradicating focuses of extremist ideology. A real cultural revolution.
The current escalation already is in tune with the orders given by the rarefied plutocracy who really runs the show to messengers – and operatives: nazi-banderista gangs will unleash a War of Terror inside Russia for years. From Ukraine territory. Just like Idlib in Syria remains a terror-friendly environment.
The Odessa file
Putin’s strategy may be on to something that escapes his critics. His wish for a return of peace and the re-establishment of sound relations with Kiev and the West has got to be a ruse – as he’s the first to know that’s not gonna happen.
It’s clear that Kiev will not willingly cede territory: these will have to be conquered in the battlefield. Moreover NATO simply cannot sign its cosmic humiliation on the dotted line, accepting that Russia will get what it is demanding since February 2022.
Putin’s first – diplomatic – objective though has already been met. He has clearly demonstrated to the Global Majority he’s open to solve the dilemma in a serene atmosphere, while discombobulated NATO keeps shrieking “War!” every other minute.
The Hegemon wants war? So war it will be – to the last Ukrainian.
And that brings us to the Odessa file.
Putin, crucially, did not say anything about Odessa. This is Kiev’s last chance saloon to keep Odessa. If the peace proposal is rejected for good, Odessa will feature in the next list of non-negotiables.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, once again, nailed it: “Putin is patient. Those with ears will hear, those with brains will understand”.
No one should expect working brains popping up across the West. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has confirmed how NATO is planning massive installations in Poland, Romania and Slovakia to “coordinate transfer of weapons to Ukraine”.
Add to it the epileptic slab of Norwegian wood stating that NATO is “discussing” bringing their nuclear weapons to a state of combat readiness “in the face of the growing threat from Russia and China”.
Once again Old Stolty gives away the game: note this is all about the Hegemon’s paranoia with the top two “existential threats”, the
Russia-China strategic partnership. That is, the leaders of BRICS coordinating the drive towards a multipolar, multi-nodal (italics mine), “harmonic” (Putin’s terminology) world.
Stealing Russian money is legal
Then there’s the blatant theft of Russian financial assets.
At their sorry spectacle in Puglia, in southern Italy, the G7 – in the presence of the illegitimate sweaty T-shirt actor – agreed to shove an extra $50 billion in loans to Ukraine, funded by the interest on Russia’s frozen and for all practical purposes stolen assets.
With impeccably twisted logic, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – whose hairdressing and wardrobe revamp conclusively did not apply to her brains – said that the G7 “will not confiscate frozen assets of the Russian Federation”; “we are talking about the interest that they accumulate over time.”
As financial scams go, this one is a thing of beauty.
Essentially, the main customer (the Hegemon) and its instrument (the EU) are trying to mask the actual theft of those “frozen” Russian sovereign assets as if this was a legal transaction.
The EU will transfer the “frozen” assets – something around $260 billion – to the status of collateral for the American loan. That’s the whole thing – because only the income deriving from the assets would not be enough as collateral to secure the loan.
It gets even dicier. These funds will not leave Washington for Kiev; they will remain in town to the benefit of the industrial-military complex churning out more weapons.
So the EU steals the assets, under a flimsy legalese pretext (Janet Yellen already said it’s OK) and transfers them to the U.S. Washington is immune if everything goes wrong – as it will.
Only a fool would believe that the Americans would give a sizable loan to a de facto country 404 with a sovereign debt rating in the abyss. The dirty job is assigned to the Europeans: it’s up to the EU to change the status of Russia’s stolen/”frozen” assets to collateral.
And wait for the ultimate dicey gambit. The whole scheme concerns Euroclear, in Belgium – where the largest amount of Russian funds is parked. Yet the decision on this money-laundering scam was not taken by Belgium, and not even by the EUrocrats.
This was a Hegemon-imposed G7 decision. Belgium is not even part of the G7. Yet in the end, it will be the EU’s “credibility” as a whole that will go down the drain across the whole Global Majority.
And the deaf, dumb and blind, predictably, are not even aware of it.
…………………..
(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)
#News – Alexander Mercouris (1:26:49 min) 18 June 2024
#News – Alex Christoforou (41:19 min) 18 June 2024
#News – Alexander Mercouris (1:28:35 min) 17 June 2024
#News – Alex Christoforou (41:04 min) 17 June 2024
Xenagogue Vicene – A Non-Political Graphic Artist According To AI
Xenagogue Vicene is an artist and hobbyist based in the United States. They describe themselves as being “raised by wolves near the forest” and a “humble woodcutter who herds sheep.” Their interests span from rock music to Rachmaninoff, and they appreciate the Great Books of the Western Tradition1. Additionally, Xenagogue Vicene has shared thoughts on topics such as Thomas Kinkade’s paintings and even speculated about whether Ernest Hemingway was a vampire1. If you’d like to explore more of their work, you can find it on their DeviantArt profile
Xenagogue Vicene is an artist known for their eclectic and imaginative creations. Their work spans various styles and themes, from intricate digital illustrations to whimsical character designs. They often infuse their art with a touch of fantasy, capturing the essence of magical worlds and mythical creatures. If you’re curious, I recommend exploring their DeviantArt profile to see the full range of their artistic expression!
Supporting Xenagogue Vicene’s work is a wonderful way to appreciate their creativity! Here are a few ways you can show your support:
- Follow on Social Media: Connect with them on platforms like DeviantArt, where they share their art. Liking, commenting, and sharing their work can boost their visibility.
- Purchase Art: If they offer prints, originals, or merchandise, consider buying something that resonates with you. It directly supports their artistic endeavors.
- Commission Art: If you have a specific idea or character you’d like them to create, consider commissioning a piece. It’s a personalized way to support their talent.
- Spread the Word: Share their art with friends, family, and fellow art enthusiasts. Word of mouth can make a big difference!
Remember, artists thrive on encouragement and recognition. Your support can make a meaningful impact!
What political ideas does Xenagogue Vicene express?
Copilot
Xenagogue Vicene primarily focuses on artistic expression rather than explicit political ideas. Their work tends to explore fantasy, whimsy, and intricate details, rather than conveying specific political messages. If you’re interested in their art, I recommend checking out their DeviantArt profile for a deeper look into their creative world!
…………..
Basically gleaned from Deviant Art, which I have lost the password for and not added to for many, many years. I noticed the AI Co-Pilot was not allowed to access the content on this XenagogueVicene blog. That cuts out most of my main daily content.
But, still fun to read.
#News – Alexander Mercouris (1:23:19 min) 16 June 2024
#News – Alex Christoforou (41:27 min) 16 June 2024
The Day the West Defined ‘Success’ as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians – by Jonathan Cook – 12 June 2024
• 2,100 WORDS •
Israelis dance in the streets, the White House hails a ‘daring’ operation, Rishi Sunak expresses relief. How carnage in Gaza has become the new normal
Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish organisations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel – celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
Videos even show Israelis dancing in the street.
According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defence establishment”.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.
State terrorism
Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 37,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.
The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.
But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on Unrwa, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
Nefarious motive
In the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage – or what he termed a “daring operation”.
He admitted in an interview on Sunday that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during the Second World War.
A Biden official disclosed to the Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
‘Successful’ massacre
As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times, meanwhile, breezily erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterising the operation as a “surgical strike”.
Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process – need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The programme stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.
Leveraging murder
Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on Sunday.
Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking – rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political and media class – as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.
The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverising Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same US “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
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How Hamas Defeated Israel – by Ted Rall – 14 June 2024
When residents of the Middle East woke up on the morning of Oct. 7, the Palestinian cause was in a sorry state.
Seven hundred thousand radical Israeli settler-colonists and sealed-off “military zones” occupied 60% of the occupied West Bank, which was blockaded by a Berlin-style border wall, so much that the United Nations human rights chief no longer believed Palestinian sovereignty was even theoretically possible. The occupied Gaza Strip was subject to an Israeli blockade that destroyed the economy and drove the unemployment rate to 80%. Former President Donald Trump had moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem — a strong signal to Palestinians that the world would never allow them their own state — and President Joe Biden had let it stay there. Muslim nations that had previously supported the Palestinian struggle (Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan) normalized diplomatic relations with the hard-right government of Israel; Oman, Indonesia, Somalia and Saudi Arabia were expected to follow.
The world, including numerous Arab governments, had forgotten the Palestinians.
By the end of the day, everyone remembered them.
It had been necessary, Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership, told The New York Times two weeks after the attack, to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash. We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
Whether you call it terrorism, asymmetric warfare, guerrilla warfare or resistance, an action like the Oct. 7 raid on an Israeli music festival and nearby kibbutzim is a disadvantaged, under-armed and poorly situated group’s attempt to flip the game table, catch an adversary by surprise and scramble the positions of the players in order to create a different situation.
It’s also a test of their adversary. More about that below.
Hamas has accomplished its objectives. Israel’s saturation bombing and starvation campaign launched after Oct. 7, which military analysts call the most brutal and systemic assault against a civilian population since World War II, shocked Muslims (and many other people) around the world. Under pressure from their subjects, the Saudis now say they will only consider a normalization deal that explicitly guarantees Palestinian statehood — something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to consider. Biden, a self-declared Zionist and faithful supporter of the Jewish state throughout his career, now says he wants a two-state solution. He has also threatened to withhold arms, though using weasel words to justify redefining his “red line.” Sixty-one percent of voters in the United States (by far Israel’s closest military ally and the country to which Israel owes its creation) now say the U.S. should stop supplying all weapons to Israel.
The long-ignored Palestinian issue is so “back on the table” that Democrats worry they might lose the battleground state of Michigan and the presidency due to the state’s substantial Arab population.
Many Israelis and their supporters fail to grasp the reality of the current situation. “How can Hamas be winning?” they ask. Israelis support the war effort, and the Israel Defense Forces have only lost a few hundred troops, nearly a fifth of them to friendly fire and accidents. Gaza, on the other hand, has been flattened. The IDF has killed at least 37,000 Palestinians, though Ralph Nader is surely closer to the truth when he estimates the total number, including the bodies buried under tens of millions of tons of rubble, at 200,000. Israel’s obvious objective, the expulsion of the surviving population and annexation of Gaza into Israel, appears tantalizingly close.
Yet Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar was right when he told his close associates recently, “We have the Israelis right where we want them.”
The Israelis have committed the cardinal error of warfare: underestimating the intelligence of your enemy. Of course Hamas’ leaders knew exactly what Israel would do in response to Oct. 7. They have studied Israel’s behavior repeatedly over decades: when attacked, Israel always responds with overpowering force, much of it directed at civilians. And they don’t care how it looks. “Hamas knew Israel would strike back hard. That was the point,” Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group told The Washington Post. “To Hamas, Palestinian suffering is a critical component in bringing about the instability and global outrage it seeks to exploit.”
The IDF always tortures civilians and demolishes homes and other infrastructure at an extravagant scale. So, like a chess player, Hamas goaded its aggressive adversary into a fierce attack because it was willing to make sacrifices — Hamas fighters, Palestinian civilians, Gazan infrastructure — to obtain something even more valuable.
As we’ve seen recently in northern Gaza, Hamas remains a potent military force able to engage the IDF in street combat. But survival isn’t Hamas’ primary objective. Making Israel look evil is — and Israel has fallen into Hamas’ trap.
The test Israel faced on Oct. 7 was: Can we exercise restraint? Like the U.S., which faced a similar test on 9/11, Israel failed miserably. Israel’s over-the-top craziness has fulfilled Hamas’ main goal, which was to expose the Israeli government as bloodthirsty, oppressive monsters unworthy of the support of the world upon which it depends.
As a result, most of the world now recognizes Palestinian sovereignty. The International Criminal Court has ordered Israel to stop its military actions in southern Gaza. The International Court of Justice is preparing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. And the UN expressly states that Israel is morally and ethically the same as Hamas, a terrorist organization guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Never mind the two-state solution — it’s dead, and not only because of Netanyahu. The globe is moving toward a new consensus: an end to the Israeli ethnostate from a bygone colonial era, replaced by a “one person, one vote,” post-apartheid democracy.
Looking back to October, the only way Israel could have won at war with Hamas was to learn the lesson of the classic 1980s movie “War Games”: don’t play. Imagine, if you can, how Hamas’ leadership would have felt had Israel refused to take the bait on Oct. 7, responding only with pinpoint raids to try to rescue hostages, or negotiating for them, while playing the weeping victim for the cameras. It would have been a devastating moral and political defeat and the beginning of the end for the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Israel wanted Gaza. They may not even keep Israel.
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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
Israel Agrees to a Ceasefire… as Long as It Can Keep Fighting – by Mike Whitney – 14 June 2024
Good news! Israel has agreed to accept Biden’s ceasefire deal as long as it can keep fighting. This is from CNN:
Israeli statement on Tuesday indicated it was poised to formally sign up to the current ceasefire plan for Gaza, while at the same time maintaining the freedom to keep fighting. CNN
Can you see how absurd this is? It’s like the fat man who agrees to go on a diet as long as he can still eat as much as he wants. It’s nonsense.
A ceasefire is a ceasefire. It is the termination of hostilities and an end to the fighting. Period. Israeli’s lawyerly wordplay does not change the meaning of the word or twist it to fit Israel’s strategic agenda. It is semantical gymnastics intended to hoodwink the public.
We shouldn’t have to point this out, but the media appears to be pressing the issue by carefully rephrasing Israel’s deliberate misunderstanding of what “ceasefire” means. Now –in the last 24 hours– they have slightly modified their approach again to better conceal their trickery. Now, instead of saying that a ceasefire allows them “the freedom to keep fighting”, they’re saying that “the ceasefire plan enables its war goals.”
There’s a subtle difference, but the meaning is the same. Israel wants to continue slaughtering civilians while saying they are in compliance with the ceasefire. It boggles the mind to think they’d put so much effort into finding a benign phrase for ‘continuing the killing’.
So, what’s really going on behind this misleading language?
That’s easy. Israel wants it to look like they’re cooperating with the Biden-backed ceasefire deal while continuing their military operation in Gaza. That’s it in a nutshell. Take a look at this Tuesday article at Newsweek:
Amid conflicting narratives over U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest push for a ceasefire… an Israeli official has told Newsweek that the U.S. proposal aligns with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of inflicting a lasting, decisive defeat against the Palestinian movement.
“Israel will not end the war before achieving all its war objectives: destroying Hamas’ military and governing capabilities, freeing all the hostages and ensuring Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel in the future,” the Israeli official told Newsweek on background.
“The proposal presented enables Israel to achieve these goals and Israel will indeed do so,” the Israeli official said. Israel Official Says Biden Ceasefire Plan Allows IDF to Destroy Hamas, Newsweek
Obviously, the ceasefire proposal does NOT align with Netanyahu’s plan to keep fighting or it wouldn’t be a ceasefire. Right?
But the foofaraw over the meaning of “ceasefire” is just one of many cringe-worthy particulars linked to Biden’s ham-fisted Gaza policy. There’s also the administration’s wacko messaging problem. For example, on Tuesday:
Joe Biden announced that the ceasefire resolution (approved by the Security Council on Monday) was “Israel’s proposal.”
Also, on Tuesday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the ceasefire resolution was “Israel’s proposal.”
U.S. National Security Spokesperson John Kirby repeated the same claim that “This was an Israeli proposal.
And just to round it off, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the same thing in an interview with Wolf Blitzer adding that “Israel has already accepted this deal.”
Naturally, their claims were uncritically reiterated in all the media: This was an Israeli proposal.
But none of it was true. It was all lies.
And, just hours after Blinken made his case to the media, Netanyahu’s office issued the following statement:
“The claim that Israel agreed to end the war before achieving all its goals is a total lie,” …
As you can see, Netanyahu had no interest in pulling his punches. He basically read Blinken the ‘riot act’ in what-amounts-to a humiliating slapdown.
Now, you’d assume that if you had just been exposed to the world as a liar, you might show a bit of shame or remorse. But not Blinken. Without missing a beat, the mercurial Secretary tweaked his talking-points from “This is Israel’s deal” to ‘it’s all Hamas’ fault’, which is the blame-shifting narrative he is prattling today. Here he is on Twitter:
My message to governments and people throughout the region is this: If you want to alleviate the terrible suffering in Gaza, to get all the hostages home, to put Israelis and Palestinians on the path to durable peace — then press Hamas to say yes to the ceasefire. Anthony Blinken @SecBlinken
Yeah, because Hamas is the obstacle to peace. Got that?
What Blinken fails to mention in his tweet is that Netanyahu never had any intention of accepting a ceasefire, in fact, he has said repeatedly that there will be no permanent ceasefire until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are freed. There’s no wiggle-room in the Israeli position at all. Netanyahu and his lieutenants are more determined than ever to achieve their maximalist strategic objectives. And Blinken supports those objectives which is why he shifted his attention from Netanyahu (the real problem) to Hamas.
But you got to hand it to him, Blinken’s performance has been a remarkable display of diplomatic choreography. Think about it: He was sent to Israel to persuade the two warring parties to find common ground and end the hostilities. But after just one day of promoting Biden’s deal, he switched into full Zionist-mode by covering-up Netanyahu’s intransigence while scapegoating Hamas for virtually everything.
Whatever happened to the “honest broker” concept? Here’s Blinken again:
Hamas asked for changes in the hostage deal proposal – some are workable and some are unworkable. Hamas could have replied with one word – yes. Instead they presented more changes – some of them go further than their previous positions”@Megatron_ron
What changes?
Hamas has welcomed the Biden-backed ceasefire from the beginning as was reported by CNN, Reuters and many other news agencies. In the words of one Hamas official:
“We want a ceasefire,” (but) the “burden is on the Israeli side to implement this resolution.”
But now that Netanyahu has rejected the ceasefire, the media has to make it look like Hamas is the ‘bad guy’. This is from Axios:
Secretary of State Tony Blinken said Wednesday that Hamas has not accepted the U.S.-backed proposal for a hostage and ceasefire deal and presented “numerous changes” that go beyond its previous positions….
Israeli officials said on Tuesday that Hamas effectively rejected the proposal, which President Biden presented in a speech 12 days ago…. Speaking from Doha after meeting with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Blinken said: “Hamas proposed numerous changes to the proposal that was on the table. Some of the changes are workable and some are not.” Blinken says Hamas didn’t accept ceasefire deal, Axios
This isn’t even remotely true. It’s just more blame-shifting. Of course, Hamas wants a ceasefire. Does anyone seriously think they want to see another 30,000 Palestinians slaughtered by Israel. Of course, not. And their demands are modest and reasonable.
What does Hamas want? This is from NPR:
Hamas wants a guaranteed end to the war, removal of Israeli troops from the Egypt-Gaza border and a say in which Palestinian prisoners get released…. But Israel says it won’t agree to end the war until it ensures Hamas will no longer govern Gaza. NPR
These are not just reasonable demands; they are explicitly required under the Biden ceasefire proposal. And this is what the vast majority of Americans want too. (See chart below) They want an end to the fighting, an end to the killing, and an end to the genocide.
Only Israel opposes these measures. Only Israel sees some advantage to continuing the slaughter and mayhem. Only Israel wants more civilians to suffer and die. And, judging by his performance, Blinken’s sympathies align more with Israel’s than they do with the national security interests of the United States.
What’s clear is that Secretary Blinken is considerably more interested in shielding the intractable Netanyahu from blame and advancing the strategic interests of the Jewish state than he is with ending the butchery of innocent civilians or salvaging what’s left of America’s tattered reputation. Perhaps, he’s playing on the wrong team?
Israel’s Control Over America Grows Ever Stronger – by Philip Giraldi – 14 June 2024
US foreign policy is based on appeasing the Jewish state
Back in September 2017 I wrote an article for the Unz Review site entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” with the subtitle “Shouldn’t they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?” The article focused on the fact that most of the individuals and groups in the US that were agitating for war with Iran in particular were Jewish and most did not hide their loyalty to Israel, headed then as now by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I argued that it was a mistake to have Jews managing America’s relationships in the Middle East in particular as some of them certainly would experience a conflict of interest that would inevitably not be beneficial to the United States. And, one might add, that in spite of that tie that binds with a foreign government, no pro-Israel group has ever been compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 which would provide some transparency on finances and concerning direct contacts with the Israeli government or its Embassy in Washington. The end result of all that is to make it extremely easy to use money, which the Zionist billionaires have in abundance, to corrupt the US government process on behalf of an apartheid state that is no ally in reality and does not have values that fit well with what was once American democracy.
If measured by comments received on it on the Unz site, the article on the ethnic advocacy promoting America’s Wars turned out to be the most popular that I have ever written and it was picked up widely online and in various publications both in the US and abroad. Inevitably, however, it produced a backlash from Israel’s many friends and within 24 hours there was added an update to the original online posting. It read “On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that ‘America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars’ was unacceptable. The TAC management and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled “Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi.”
The TAC malignancy who did the actual firing was particularly miffed by my assertion in the article that prominent Jews, like Bill Kristol, who appear regularly on television to advocate hardlines against Iran and others while articulating a “threat to America” when they are actually acting on behalf of Israel should appear above a label that reads something like “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” I added that it would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”
Indeed, it is the wealthy and influential beyond belief Jewish diaspora and its non-stop lying and corruption that sustains the fictitious narrative of Israel as a “land without people for a people without a land.” Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone observes that “Everything about Israel is fake. It’s a completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots. That’s why it cannot exist without being artificially propped up by nonstop propaganda, lobbying, online influence operations, and mass military violence.”
My point in revisiting the past is that seven years ago one would never have imagined the control that the Jewish Lobby has since obtained over the US foreign policy as well as over many domestic policies largely thanks to the alarmingly pro-Israel measures that have been advanced by an ignorant and reckless Donald Trump followed by the totally mindless and heedless Joe Biden. Biden has a majority of Jews occupying senior positions in his administration and it is fair to say that Jews are at the controls for Middle Eastern policy as well as what is playing out in Ukraine. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is little more than a spokesman and advocate for Israel as he made clear when he arrived in Israel after the Hamas attack and announced that “I come before you as a Jew…” and followed that up with his family holocaust history, though he failed to mention that his stepfather worked for Robert Maxwell, a leading Israeli spy. And let’s not forget about Congress, where pro-Israel fanatics have taken complete control (with the sole exception of Tom Massie) of the Republican Party. This control is exercised through over the top political donations and favorable media coverage dependent on one’s supportive view of Israel. A story is currently circulating indicating that Miriam Adelson, Israel-born heiress to the Sheldon Adelson multi-billion dollar casino fortune, has offered Trump $100 million as a political campaign contribution if he will promise to enable Israeli annexation of all of historic Palestine after he wins the November election.
Some congressmen have revealed that when they first surfaced as political candidates a representative of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) would casually drop by and determine their viewpoint on the Middle East. In some cases, would-be legislators would be asked to sign a statement pledging full and uncritical support of Israel no matter what it does. And we have recently learned that Israel runs major secret intelligence operations using fake personas on social media spreading pro-Israeli stories to influence decision making and maintain control of the US government. Beyond that, according to Massie, who told Tucker Carlson, every Republican in Congress besides himself “has an AIPAC person” assigned to them with whom they are in constant communication, whom he describes as functioning “like your babysitter” to make sure that no one hesitates when it comes to policies impacting on Israel. One assumes that this consists of AIPAC or Anti-Defamation League (ADL) provided interns who spy on the officials lest they deviate from their pledged loyalty to the Jewish state. I would call such activity foreign espionage connected to incitement to commit treason that should be exposed like the rat poison metaphor cited above. These monsters promoting a foreign country’s interests are not really our friends and are not out to do anything beneficial for the American people.
Support for Israel in the media is also contrived and essentially phony, going beyond slanting stories and ignoring the Palestinians. It is generally and imposed from the top down. Since October outlets like The New York Times, CNN and CBC have been denounced through staff leaks regarding demands from their top executives, who are often Jewish, that they slant their Gaza coverage to support the narratives favored by Israel. There have been resignations in government over the Israeli genocide being supported by Biden and Briahna Joy Gray has just been fired by The Hill for mildly criticizing Israel while co-hosting the show “Rising”, a fate that every media employees must understand lest they share Gray’s fate if they are insufficiently supportive of the Zionist entity. Israel’s support from Hollywood and other celebrities is similarly forced. A Hollywood marketing firm has had to explain a newly leaked email that instructed the firm’s employees to “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.”
Other new developments on the Israel front that have emerged in the past seven years include the attacks on freedom of speech and association, the development of pro-Israel legislation at state and local levels which deny government benefits and jobs to citizens who support peaceful boycotts of Israel, and the ultimate abomination the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which is seeking to criminalize any criticism of the Jewish state. The Act is just one aspect of how the power of organized Jewish groups over the government and media is shaping the kind of society that Americans will be living in in the near future. It will be a society devoid of several fundamental constitutional rights, like free speech, due to deference to the preferences of one tiny demographic.
Upcoming elections have also been targeted by the “Lobby,” with Jewish groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out attacks on candidates considered to be anti-Israeli. The Zionist inspired heavy hand of government and of America’s educational institutions has also been observed recently in the arrests and other punishments to include blocking of employment opportunities and canceling degrees to students protesting against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Jewish counter-protesters, sometimes violent as in the recent case of UCLA, are as a rule not punished and their student groups are untouched while pro-Palestinians groups are banned from campus.
Sometimes the leaning over backwards to please the Israelis is completely ridiculous. Congress is currently seeking to pass a bill that would punish the Maldives for blocking travel to the islands for Israeli passport holders while the war in Gaza continues. US Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey is leading efforts to pressure the government of the Indian Ocean tourist hotspot. Gottheimer, known to be one of Congress’s most aggressive Israel firsters, is seeking bipartisan support in developing the legislation which will be called the Protecting Allied Travel Here (PATH) Act. The legislation could block any US aid or assistance to the Maldives until Israelis again have permission to visit the country. Gottheimer argued that “taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be sent to a foreign nation that has banned all Israeli citizens – one of our greatest democratic allies.” He also added predictably that the Maldivean move was “antisemitic”.
So, in my humble opinion we have been increasingly getting screwed relentlessly by Israel in spite of much of the punishment taking place out in the open, but the hapless wretches in Congress are too weak and terrified by the Jewish lobby to do anything about it. And now we have war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu showing up at the end of July for another round of pandering and groveling plus cheering and bowing by the Joint Session of that very same Congress that has done so much to give Bibi and tools and money enabling him to kill 35,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and counting. It is a disgrace and when the world sits back and reckons what has happened and determines who is to blame the chickens will inevitably come home to roost. America the Pariah. It almost rhymes.
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Two European Thorns in the Empire’s Side – by Eve Ottenberg – 14 June 2024
Two European Thorns in the Empire’s Side: Rightist Orban and Leftist Fico (and Look What Happened to Him)
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban may be a far-right politician, but he also opposes the west’s proxy war in Ukraine and that, much more than his extreme conservatism, is what infuriates imperial henchmen. The European Union is in a constant snit over Orban, because every time that organization turns around, he blocks funds or weapons to Kiev. Another war opponent is leftwing Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico – and we all know what happened to him. On May 15, he was shot five times. The attempted assassination failed, but he’s still recovering; and his fate was used by an EU official, Oliver Varhelyi, who warned the Georgian prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, that if Georgia approved a foreign agents’ bill, something Washington and Brussels vehemently oppose – since it interferes with a Georgian color revolution and opening a second front against Russia – he should bear in mind what happened to Fico. Varhelyi claims his remark was taken out of context. Ho, ho!
This alleged attempted intimidation of the Georgian prime minister comes at a time of great tensions between the EU and Georgia. So no surprise that Kobakhidze would charge that what Politico May 23 predictably tarred as “his increasingly authoritarian government,” was basically receiving EU threats and faces “abusive blackmail” from the west. Indeed, the U.S. has already imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials. “In my conversation,” Kobakhidze wrote on Facebook, “the European Commissioner listed a number of measures Western politicians can take after [Georgia passes] the transparency law and…[the Commissioner] said ‘look what happened to Fico, you should be very careful.’” If that doesn’t sound like a threat to you, you need to doublecheck your grip on reality.
In this context of western war-on-Moscow insanity, Washington regards countries like Georgia, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova as chess pieces it must either eliminate or bring to its side via color revolutions, lawfare, sanctions, other financial extortion, electoral chicanery or outright meddling in those nations’ internal affairs. Perhaps not chess pieces, because Washington doesn’t play a strategic game like chess. Let’s just say, the imperial view is that these countries are weaklings to be bullied.
Such bullying comes in a bleak landscape of ever more dangerous escalation between two superpowers, the U.S. and Russia, escalation that could lead to nuclear war. Perceiving this mad peril, the third superpower, Beijing, recently weighed in, announcing that it would support Moscow militarily. So much for the Beltway hallucination about driving a wedge between China and Russia, in order first to defeat the latter then the former, a delusion the hubristically over-confident United States never bothered to conceal but instead shouted from the rooftops early on in the Ukraine War. You’d think this Sino-Russian publicly proclaimed defense pact would convince Washington’s rulers that their hyper-aggressive belligerent approach has failed, so it’s time for diplomacy. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.
The 40- and 50-somethings ruling the roost at the state department and who form a despotic cadre of neocon government advisors have little experience of the terrors of the cold war and evidently less realistic grasp of what a hot one would mean – 90 million dead Americans in the first few minutes and tens of millions more shortly thereafter. These so-called leaders are a lethal, planetary menace. And don’t look to Donald “Fire and Fury” Trump for salvation: He recently proclaimed he’d bomb Beijing and Moscow. If one of these two presidential candidates, Trump or Biden, doesn’t come to his senses fast, humanity’s ranks could soon be thinned to those who had the foresight and money to build bomb shelters.
The Biden gang’s insane journey toward Atomic Armageddon is all the loonier, because these hacks seem to forget that in a nuclear war there are no winners. Even if the fanatics at, say, the neocon Institute for the Study of War convince the white house to attempt to destroy all Russian nuclear command and control centers, it is pointless, as Moscow knows. That’s because Russia has a “dead hand” nuclear launch system. In the very unlikely event that the west decapitates the Kremlin, the nukes launch automatically at Europe and the United States, even if Russian leadership is all dead.
That the psychopaths in supposed institutes and think tanks in Washington might advocate such a move is simply an argument to end their influence. But Biden has assembled a globally lethal bunch of neocons to run foreign policy, no surprise from the president who greenlit the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline. However, they now play a terrifying game, pushing as close as possible to Moscow’s red lines. A no-fly zone in western Ukraine? F-16s for Kiev? Western boots on the ground in Ukraine? Any of these would be an end-times disaster. Yet feckless, reckless Biden has shown repeatedly that what he swears never to do one month, he implements a few months later. In short, given the war-mongers he packed the white house with, he’s not to be trusted with humanity’s fate.
Leaders like Fico and Orban come right out and say the west is crazy for war. But such honesty is not allowed. Nor is it permitted to utter the truth that Moscow was massively, deliberately provoked into invading Ukraine, a provocation that the west cultivated for nearly a decade, starting with a 2014 CIA-backed neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev. And Biden was one of the most gung-ho Ukraine-in-NATO boosters. Now, as Kiev (with American satellite surveillance and targeting) damages the Russian early warning nuclear defense umbrella, what will Washington say if this leads – as enough such damage could – to an atomic holocaust? That Moscow’s launch was unprovoked? If so, Beltway survivors, if there are any, will be shouting into the wind: because hundreds of millions of humans will already be dead and five billion others will soon follow them into the grave, via nuclear winter.
Meanwhile, the west’s provocations never cease, be they immense or small. The latest less gigantic one involves Serbia, a country bullied by NATO for its perceived pro-Russian stance. This latest insult was the Germany- and Rwanda-backed UN designation of Serbia as having committed a genocide, when in fact many others (Croats, for instance) committed mass atrocities during the 1990s Balkans fighting. But the most egregious bullying of Serbia dates back to 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia – a country that, in its previous communist incarnation, was much hated by covert fascists in the west.
Why? Because Yugoslavia was long led by former WWII partisan Josip Tito, a wily and seriously far-left ruler; and not only did western crypto-fascists despise leftists, they also detested their own erstwhile allies – the anti-Nazi partisans. How else to explain Allen Dulles’ first post-war act as OSS head, namely hunting down partisans in the forests of Europe, partisans who had fought alongside the west against Hitler? Those communist or Jewish or anti-fascist partisans were simply too unbowed to be trusted. Instead, the U.S. preferred to deal with and protect former Nazis, like the 1500 Nazi scientists that it imported to NASA in the U.S. in Operation Paperclip.
Back in the present, here and there glimmer faint signs of rationality from Washington, namely Biden’s recent remark that Ukraine won’t join NATO or his comments to ABC News June 6 that American weapons must not be used against the Kremlin. The former has been obvious to the realists who heard Moscow’s furious retort to the 2008 western vow to put Kiev in NATO – nyet means nyet. But the U.S. Empire is not led by realists. It’s led by a very unfortunate combo of neo-con fanatics and wishful thinkers, whose grip on the nation’s steering wheel must be shaken, because they ignore those faint common sense road signs and thus speed us all toward a crash.
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Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.
Israel and the Misjudgement of Reality – by Alastair Crooke – 10 June 2024
• 1,300 WORDS •
The hard truth is that the Resistance has understood the reality of the situation better than their western counterparts.
On all fronts, the Israeli internal paradigm is fracturing; and externally, the West is itself fissuring, and becoming a pariah on the global stage. The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of ‘Orientalism’ and colonialism onto the skyline. And is gyring the West towards being ‘the world’s untouchable’ (along with Israel).
Overall, Israel’s government objective looks to be to converge and then channel – multiple tensions into a wide military escalation disgorgement (a big war) – that somehow would bring a restoration of deterrence. Such a course concomitantly implies that Israel would thus turn its back to western pleas that it somehow act ‘reasonably’. The West mostly defines this ‘reasonableness’ as Israel accepting the chimaera of a passage to ‘normality’ arriving through the Saudi Crown Prince bestowing it, in return for a contrite Israel undoing seven decades of Jewish supremacism (i.e. accepting a Palestinian State).
The core tension within the Western-Israeli calculus is that the U.S. and the EU are moving in one direction – back to the failed Oslo approach – whilst polling underscores Jewish electors firmly marching in the other direction.
A recent survey conducted by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs shows that since 7 October, 79% of all Jewish respondents oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State on 1967 lines (68% were opposed prior to 7 Oct); 74% are opposed even in exchange for normalisation with Saudi Arabia. And reflective of the internal Israeli divide, “only 24% of left-wing voters support a [Palestinian] State without conditions”.
In short, as the western institutional leadership clings to the shrinking Israeli secular liberal Left, Israelis as whole (including the young) are moving hard Right. A recent Pew poll shows that 73% of the Israeli public support the military response in Gaza – albeit a third of Israelis complained it had not gone far enough. A plurality of Israelis think Israel should govern the Gaza Strip. And Netanyahu, in the aftermath of the ICC arrest threat, is overtaking Gantz (leader of the National Union) in approval ratings.
It seems that the ‘western consensus’ prefers not to notice these uncomfortable dynamics.
Additionally, a separate Israeli divide concerns the purpose of the war: Is it about restoring to Jewish citizens the sense of personal, physical security, which was lost in the wake of 7 Oct?
That is to say: Is it the sense of Israel as a redoubt, safe space in a hostile world that is being restored? Or alternatively, is the present struggle one of establishing a fully Judaicised Israel on the ‘Land of Israel’ (i.e. all the land between the river and the sea) the prime objective?
This constitutes a key divide. Those who see Israel primarily as the safe redoubt to which Jews could flee in the wake of European holocaust, naturally are more circumspect at the risking of a wider war (i.e. with Hizbullah) – a war that could see the civilian ‘rear’ directly attacked by Hizbullah’s vast missile arsenal. For this constituency, safety is a premium.
On the other hand, a majority of Israelis sees the risk of wider war as inevitable – indeed to be welcomed by many, if the Zionist project is to be fully established on the Land of Israel.
This reality may be difficult for secular westerners to grasp, but the 7 October has re-energised the Biblical vision in Israel, rather than excite a surfeit of caution about war, or a desire for rapprochement with Arab States.
The point here is that a ‘New War of Independence’ can be held aloft before the Israeli public as the metaphysical ‘vision’ of the way ahead, whilst the Israeli government attempts to pursue the more mundane path of playing the long game, leading to the full military matrix control over the land between the river and the sea, and the removal of populations that will not submit to the Smotrich dispensation of ‘acquiesce or leave’.
The schism between Israel as a secular, post-holocaust ‘safe-space’ and the contrasting Biblical, Zionist vision sets a border between the two zeitgeists that is both porous, and at times overlaps. Nonetheless, this Israeli divide has bled across into U.S. politics and, in a more scattered way, has entered into European polity.
For the Jewish diaspora living in the West, keeping Israel as a safe-space is vitally important as, insofar as Israel becomes insecure, Jews feel their own personal insecurity worsens, pari passu. In one sense, the Israeli projection of strong deterrence in the Middle East is an ‘umbrella’ that extends to cover the diaspora, as well. They want quiet in the region. The Biblical ‘vision’ has an edge to it which is frankly too polarising.
Yet, those very power structures straining to sustain the Israeli strongman paradigm in the western consciousness now find their efforts are tending to shred those western political structures, on which they depend, thus alienating key constituencies, particularly the young. A recent poll amongst 18-24 year-olds in Britain found that a majority (54%) agreed that “that the State of Israel should not exist”. Just 21% disagreed with this statement.
The wielding of Lobby power to compel Western united support for Israel and its deterrent objectives – coupled with a lack of human empathy for Palestinians – is inflicting heavy losses on institutional leadership structures as underlying mainstream parties fracture in different directions.
The damage is exacerbated by the western peace camp’s ‘reality blindspot’. We hear it all the time: the only solution is that of two-states living peacefully side by side on the lines of 1967 (as enshrined in UNSC resolutions 242 and 338). Apart from in the West, the same mantra is also rehearsed (as the peace camp reminds us) by the Arab League.
It seems so simple.
It is indeed ‘simple’ – but only through ignoring the reality that such a Palestinian state can only come into sovereign ‘being’ through force – through military force.
The reality is that there are 750,000 settlers occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and a further 25,000 settlers living in Syria’s Golan Heights). Who will remove them? Israel won’t. They will fight to the last settler; many of whom are zealots. They were invited and placed there in the years since the 1973 war (largely by successive Labour governments), precisely to obstruct any possible Palestinian state coming into existence.
The question that those who say ‘the solution is simple’ – two states living side by side in peace – do not answer: Has the West the will or the political resolve to instantiate a Palestinian State by force of arms, against the current will of a plurality of Israelis?
The answer, inevitably, is ‘no’. The West does not have the ‘will’ – and the suspicion then arises that in their hearts they know this. (There is perhaps a yearning for a solution, and disquiet that absent ‘calm in Gaza’, tensions will spike in the diaspora, too).
The hard truth is that the Resistance has understood the reality of the situation better than their western counterparts: A putative Palestinian State has only receded in prospect since the 1993 Oslo process, rather than having advanced a jot. Why did the West not take corrective action over three decades, and only then recall the dilemma when it became a crisis?
The Resistance has better appreciated the inherent untenable contradiction of one people appropriating to themselves special rights and privileges over another, sharing the same land, and that such a scenario could not long persist, without breaking the region apart (witness the wars and devastation to which maintaining the existing paradigm already has led).
The region stands at the edge; and ‘Events’ at any moment can push it over that edge, despite the efforts of regional actors to control incremental movement up the escalatory ladder. This is likely to be a long war. And a solution likely will only emerge through Israel, by one means or another, facing up to the inner paradigm contradiction within Zionism – and to begin seeing the future differently.
And of that, there is, as yet, no sign.
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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation )
Lenin and Putin – AI Generated Text – 14 June 2024
#Lenin Versus #Putin – AI Generated Comparison –
Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Putin are two significant figures in Russian history, with Lenin being the founder of the Soviet Union and Putin being the current President of Russia. While both have had considerable influence on Russia, their approaches and ideologies differ significantly. Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary who led the Bolshevik Party and established the Soviet Union in 1917. He implemented policies such as nationalization of industries, land redistribution, and centralized economic planning. On the other hand, Putin, who came to power in 1999, has focused on strengthening Russia’s economy, military, and global influence. He has also been accused of suppressing political opposition and promoting nationalism. — (Leaves out Putin being a member of the Communist Party of Russia until he was past forty years old. Putin worked for the Soviet Union until the implosion and dissolution of the USSR. Putin never publicly criticized Stalinism or the system openly. )
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Machine Translate
#Ленин против #Путина – Сравнение ИИ –
Владимир Ленин и Владимир Путин — две важные фигуры в российской истории: Ленин — основатель Советского Союза, а Путин — нынешний президент России. Хотя оба они оказали значительное влияние на Россию, их подходы и идеологии существенно различаются. Ленин был революционером-марксистом, который возглавил большевистскую партию и основал Советский Союз в 1917 году. Он проводил такую политику, как национализация промышленности, перераспределение земли и централизованное экономическое планирование. С другой стороны, Путин, пришедший к власти в 1999 году, сосредоточил усилия на укреплении экономики, военного и глобального влияния России. Его также обвиняли в подавлении политической оппозиции и пропаганде национализма. — (Не учитывается, что Путин был членом Коммунистической партии России до тех пор, пока ему не исполнилось сорок лет. Путин работал на Советский Союз до распада и распада СССР. Путин никогда публично не критиковал сталинизм или систему публично.)
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Biden’s Ceasefire Fiasco – by Mike Whitney – 11 June 2024
• 1,800 WORDS •
Biden: Israel is offering a ceasefire.
Israel: We’re not.
Biden: I negotiated this ceasefire
Israel: There’s no ceasefire agreement.
Biden: The ceasefire will begin soon.
Israel: It won’t.
Rinse and repeat. @Pimso B
The Biden administration’s ceasefire resolution is a cynical fraud aimed at airbrushing Israel’s tattered image while laying the groundwork for the final expulsion of the Palestinian people. In truth, there won’t be a ceasefire because Netanyahu and his entire cabinet are adamantly opposed to ending the hostilities. There’s not even any gray area here. After the US-drafted resolution was passed on Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office delivered a terse statement saying the following:
“The claim that Israel agreed to end the war before achieving all its goals is a total lie,” says the PMO….
The full document, argues Netanyahu’s office, would show that “Israel will not end the war until all its conditions are met — that is, fighting until Hamas is eliminated, returning all of our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again represents a threat to Israel.” (Times of Israel)
Repeat: “Israel will not end the war until all its conditions are met — (and) until Hamas is eliminated.”
So, what was the point of pushing through a ceasefire resolution when it had zero chance of being implemented? Was it just a publicity stunt?
And, why is Secretary of State Anthony Blinken –not only saying that Israel supports the proposal– but that Israel actually had a hand in crafting its language. Here’s Blinken on Monday:
“First, let me be very clear, Israel has accepted the proposal, in fact, they were critical in putting it forward. It is the official position of the Israeli government, the prime minister. So, the only party that has not said ‘Yes’ is Hamas. That’s who everyone is waiting on. That’s who the Palestinians are waiting on, it’s who the Israelis are waiting on, and it’s who the hostages and the hostage families are waiting on. It’s who the entire region and the entire world are waiting on. So, we’ll see, does Hamas want to end this war that it started or not? We’ll find out. But it’s clear that virtually the entire world has come together in support of the proposal. So, the only question is will Hamas say ‘Yes’? @AssalRad
This is a total fabrication and Blinken knows it:
Israel has NOT accepted the proposal
Israel was NOT “critical in putting the ceasefire resolution forward”
The ceasefire resolution is NOT “the official position of the Israeli government (and) the prime minister.”
These are baldfaced lies, and very stupid lies at that, because they can be easily checked and disproved. Take a look:
Repeat: “In a preemptive response to the UN Security Council’s decision, Netanyahu says, “We will not agree to any deal that leads to ending the war.”
Netanyahu’s position is crystal clear and has been for a long time: The rampage will continue for the foreseeable future. So, why is Blinken deliberately misleading the public? What is the objective here? This is from CNN just hours after the resolution was approved by the UNSC:
Israel has vowed to persist with its military operation in Gaza, saying it won’t engage in “meaningless” negotiations with Hamas, shortly after the United Nations Security Council overwhelmingly approved a US-backed ceasefire plan intended to bring an end to the eight-month war…
(Israel’s) senior diplomat (Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly) said the war would not end until all hostages were returned and Hamas’ capabilities were “dismantled,” accusing the Palestinian militant group of using “endless negotiations… as a means to stall for time.”
Her comments came after 14 of the 15 UNSC council members voted in favor of Monday’s US-drafted resolution, with only Russia abstaining – the first time the council has endorsed such a plan to end the war…..
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is on a diplomatic trip to the Middle East, said Tuesday that in a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the Israeli leader “reaffirmed his commitment” to the current proposal to secure a ceasefire and hostage release, which is still awaiting an answer from Hamas. Blinken said that he got an explicit assurance from Netanyahu that he continues to support the deal, and will accept it if Hamas agrees to what is on the table. …
But an Israeli statement on Tuesday indicated it was poised to formally sign up to the current ceasefire plan for Gaza, while at the same time maintaining the freedom to keep fighting… Israel vows to press on in Gaza after UN Security Council approves ceasefire proposal, CNN
Can you see how ridiculous and Orwellian this is? Israel will agree to a ceasefire as long as it has “the freedom to keep fighting”. Huh? In case you’re wondering, the definition of “ceasefire” is “a suspension of fighting.” Therefore, we must assume that if the fighting continues, there is no ceasefire.
By the way, Hamas has already agreed to the terms of the ceasefire which is another blow to Blinken’s crazy plan to try to make Israel look like the peacemaker. Here’ more from CNN:
Hamas welcomed the adoption of the UNSC resolution, saying in a statement it was ready to engage with mediators to implement measures such as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, prisoner exchange, returning residents to their homes and the “rejection of any demographic change or reduction in the area of the Gaza Strip.” …
The Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour said the Palestinian Authority – which governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank – welcomed the deal as a “step in the right direction.”…
“We want a ceasefire,” (but) the “burden is on the Israeli side to implement this resolution.”
“The proof is in the pudding. We will see who are the ones who are interested to see this resolution to become a reality and those who are obstructing it and want to continue the war of genocide against our people,” he added. CNN
It’s worth noting, that just a few days ago, Israeli diplomats met with US envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield to express their opposition to the Biden ceasefire resolution. The Israelis even objected to it being called a “ceasefire”. They preferred the less permanent-sounding phrase a “cessation of hostilities.”
Israel also objected to “the updated draft’s call for both sides to fully implement the latest hostage deal proposal. The earlier version only called on Hamas to accept the proposal.” (Times of Israel)
Israel also objected to a clause in the resolution that “rejects any attempt at demographic or territorial change in the Gaza Strip”. (which suggests that the native population could face ethnic cleansing.) The Israeli envoy also wanted to omit any mention of America’s “unwavering commitment to achieving the vision of a negotiated two-state solution… consistent with international law and relevant UN resolutions, and in this regard stresses the importance of unifying the Gaza Strip with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
According to the Times of Israel:
The two-state framework is rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has also worked to weaken the PA, likening the governing body to Hamas.
So, if Israel had expressed its opposition to a ceasefire so forcefully just days earlier, then why did the members of the Security Council believe that they (Israel) had suddenly changed their mind?
It makes no sense.
The only country that wasn’t duped by the ceasefire hoax was Russia who abstained from the vote on a US-proposed resolution. In explaining why Russia chose to abstain, Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia said the following:
We have a number of questions about the American draft resolution, in which the Council welcomes a certain “deal” whose final contours are still unknown to anyone save the mediators themselves. The information circulating in open sources is quite contradictory. The sponsors have not informed the Security Council of the details of the agreements. We are essentially being offered to buy “a pig in a poke”.
There was no negotiations process as such on the draft resolution. The sponsors offered variations of the final text, in effect demanding that Security Council members sign up to them under time pressure.
Hamas has been called to accept the so-called “deal”. But there is still no clarity as to whether Israel has formally agreed, as stipulated in the resolution, to the “deal” proposed by President Biden, given numerous statements by Israel on continuing the war until Hamas is completely defeated. What exactly did Israel agree to? Perhaps we are going to hear the answer to that question today from the Israeli representative?
We are convinced that the Security Council should not subscribe to agreements with vague parameters, without guarantees of their implementation on the ground, and also without any clear understanding of how the parties feel about them. In essence, the Council is giving carte blanche and endorsing a plan whose details it does not know. The parameters listed in the three paragraphs are not the details. Since the escalation in Gaza began, the Council has already adopted three resolutions whose implementation remains only on paper. This one may become the fourth. Explanation of vote by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia after UNSC vote on a US-proposed draft resolution on Gaza, ru
In short, the Russian envoy to the UN saw through Blinken’s absurd scam and refused to play-along. Now we can see he did the right thing. Now we can see that the administration was trying to rig the Security Council vote by suggesting that Israel supported measures that Israel did not support. That may have helped to pass the resolution, but it didn’t help to put pressure on Netanyahu or force him to end the hostilities in Gaza. Instead, the whole matter has rebounded on the administration and made it look like they will engage in all manner of counterproductive skulduggery in order to get their way.
And what is it that the administration wants?
Well, apparently, they want a ceasefire. Apparently, the deepening isolation and reputational damage has gotten so bad that western elites are ready to throw in the towel. As President Biden said “it’s time for this war to end.”
But if the Biden administration is serious about a ceasefire, then they should have the courage to stand up and say so, instead of manipulating outcomes at the Security Council.
They need to suspend the weapons shipments and cut off the funding pronto. That is the only language Netanyahu and his cadres understand.
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The Summer of Living Dangerously – by Pepe Escobar – 12 June 2024
• 1,300 WORDS •
The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses.
So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy.
That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy.
The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris.
Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants.
After all what he really craves is to become a “War President” – together with the Cadaver in the White House, Starmer in the UK, Rutte in the Netherlands, the Toxic Medusa von der Lugen in Brussels, Tusk in Poland, without having to answer to the French people.
It’s nearly certain that Le Petit Roi will be facing the real prospect of becoming a lame duck President who needs to obey a right-wing parliament; Elysée Palace chatter already joined the circus, conveying the impression he might resign (that was later denied). Still, if Le Petit Roi runs off to war on Russia no French citizen will follow him, least of all the – pitiful – French army.
Bigger things though are in play. Following the – auspicious – game-changing messages to the Global Majority coming out of the St. Petersburg forum last week, anchored on openness and inclusiveness, the BRICS 10 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Nizhny Novgorod carried the baton early this week.
Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed three key points:
- “The countries of the Global South no longer want to be dependent on the double standards of the West and its whims.”
- “Everyone knows that the BRICS countries already serve as the locomotive of the world economy.”
- “We [at the BRICS FMs meeting] stressed the need for consistent efforts to create a new world order, where the equality of independent states will be the key.”
Now compare it with the shrinking G7 meeting later this week in Puglia in southern Italy: the same old song, from a “tough new warning” to Chinese banks (“Don’t do business with Russia or else!”) to vociferous threats against the China-Russia strategic partnership.
And last but not least, extra plotting to skim interest from the massive, frozen/stolen Russian assets with the intent of sending them to country 404; the Toxic Medusa itself announced that country 404 will receive €1.5 billion of the income from stolen Russian assets from the EU in July, 90% of it to buy weapons.
As for U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell – the man who invented the defunct “pivot to Asia” during Harpy Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the early 2010s – he had already advanced that Washington will sanction Chinese companies and banks over Beijing’s relations with Russia’s military-industrial complex.
False flags and perfect symmetry
By several metrics, Europe is about to implode/explode not with a bang but an agonizing whimper anytime within the next few months. It’s crucial to remember that the snap elections in France and Britain will also coincide with the NATO summit on July 11 – where Russophobia-fueled warmongering will reach paroxysm.
Among possible scenarios, some kind of false flag to be squarely blamed on Russia should be expected. It could be a Franz Ferdinand moment; a Gulf of Tonkin moment; or even a USS Maine before the American-Spanish war moment.
The fact remains that the only way these “leaders” across NATOstan plus their lowly MI6 agent in a green sweaty T-shirt in Kiev will survive is by manufacturing a casus belli.
If indeed that happens, a date can be advanced: between the second week of July and the end of August; and certainly no later than the second week of September.
October will be too late: too close to the U.S. elections.
So be prepared for the Summer of Living Dangerously.
Meanwhile, The Bear is not exactly hibernating. President Putin, before and during the St. Petersburg forum, elaborated on how “symmetric” Moscow’s response will be to attacks by Kiev using NATOstan missiles – already ongoing.
There are three NATOstan members which are supplying missiles with a range of 350 km and more: U.S., UK and France.
So a “symmetric” response would imply Russia providing Global South nations with advanced weaponry – capable of causing serious damage to nodes of the Empire of Bases.
And here are the top candidates to receive these weapons – as extensively debated not only on Russian TV channels but also in the St. Petersburg forum corridors.
West Asia: Iran (which already has them); Syria (badly needs them); Yemen; Iraq (would be very helpful to Hashd al-Shaabi) and Libya.
Central, Northeast, Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Myanmar (these two were present in St. Petersburg) and North Korea.
Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua (just look at the current Russian foray in the Caribbean).
Africa: Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Southern Sudan and Zimbabwe (just look at Lavrov’s recent African tour).
Mr. Zircon says hello
And that brings us the jolly matter of a Russian naval force hangin’ out in the Caribbean, headed by the hypersonic missile-armed frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the Kazan nuclear submarine.
The indispensable Andrei Martyanov has noted how the Gorshkov “carries 32 Onyx, Zircon, Kalibrs and Otvet. These are the most advanced and deadly cruise missiles in history, with a serious combat pedigree. Kazan, which is Yasen-class SSGN carries also 32 VLS and, in addition, has 10 torpedo tubes which can shoot not just torpedoes.”
Well, this naval force is obviously not there to launch WWIII. Martyanov explains that “while both can strike all of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada, they are there not for that reason. God forbid if it comes to real WWIII there are plenty of Bulavas, Avangards, Sarmats and Yarses to deal with this horrifying business. No, both Gorshkov and Kazan are there to show that they can reach any combat ship or strategic sea lift vessel carrying any military combat set from North America to Europe in case of some nutjob deciding to try to survive a conventional war with Russia in 404.”
What’s even more intriguing is that after spending time in Havana, the naval force will remain in the Caribbean for a series of exercises – and will be joined by other Russian Navy vessels. They will remain in these waters until the end of The Summer of Living Dangerously. Just in case some nutjob has fancy ideas.
Meanwhile, the possible escalation towards Hot War in Europe proceeds unabated, with NATO via its epileptic slab of Norwegian wood radically changing the established rules of proxy wars with one nonsense outburst after another.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are already capable, via NATO, to destroy both military and civilian Russian assets – oil storage, airports, energy facilities, railway junctions, even concentration of troops.
Everyone and his neighbor will be waiting for the “symmetric” responses.
For all practical purposes the crucial decision has been made by the rarified plutocracy which really runs the show: force Europe into war on Russia. That’s the rationale behind all the rhetorical kabuki about a “military Schengen” and a New Iron Curtain from the Arctic through the Baltic chihuahuas all the way to rabid Poland.
The plutocracy actually believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in radioactive European carcasses.
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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)
The Three Key Messages from St. Petersburg to the Global Majority – by Pepe Escobar – 10 June 2024
• 1,300 WORDS •
In the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) had to deliver something special.
And deliver it did: over 21,000 people representing no less than 139 nations – a true microcosm of the Global Majority, discussing every facet of the drive towards a multipolar, multinodal (italics mine), polycentric world.
St. Petersburg, beyond all the networking and the frantic deal-making – $78 billion-worth clinched in only three days – crafted three intertwined key messages already resonating all across the Global Majority.
Message Number One:
President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session.
The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world’s 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP).
Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres.
Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia’s regions.
What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover.
Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure.
And that leads us to…
Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat.
Message Number Two:
That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West.
Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%).
The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September.
This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+.
Now to…
Message Number Three:
It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system.
And it’s not only about BRICS.
It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – “harmonic multipolar world”.
The Top Sessions for Further Reference
All of the above could be followed, live, during the frantic two and a half days of forum’s sessions. This is a sample of what were arguably the most engaging. The broadcasts should be very helpful as references going forward – all the way to the BRICS summit in October, and beyond.
On the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Arctic expansion. Best motto of the session: “We need icebreakers!” The essential discussion to understand how the current global trade supply chains are not reliable anymore and how the NSR is faster, cheaper and reliable.
On the BRICS business expansion.
On the BRICS goals for a true new world order.
On the 10 years of the EAEU.
On the closer integration between EAEU and ASEAN.
The BRICS+ roundtable on the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
This session was particularly crucial. The key actors of the INSTC are Russia, Iran and India – all BRICS members. Actors on the margins which will profit from the INSTC – from the Caucasus to Central and South Asia – are already interested to be part of BRICS+. Igor Levitin, a top Putin advisor, was a key figure in this session.
The Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP).
This was an essential discussion on what is eminently a civilizational project – in contrast with the collective West’s exclusionary approach. The discussion shows how GEP interlinks with SCO, EAEU and ASEAN and stresses the inevitable complementarity of transport, logistics, energy and payment structure all across Eurasia. Glazyev, Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk and former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl – always ultra-sharp – are key participants. Extra – astonishing – bonus: Adul Umari, acting Minister of Labor in Taliban Afghanistan, interacting with his Eurasia partners.
On the philosophy of multipolarity.
Conceptually, this session interacts with the GEP session. It offers the perspective of a concise inter-civilizational dialogue under the framework of BRICs+. Alexander Dugin, the irrepressible Maria Zakharova and Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University are among the participants.
On Polycentricity. That involves all Global Majority institutions: BRICS, SCO, EAEU, CIS, CSTO, CICA, African Union, the renewed Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Glazyev, Maria Zakharova, Senator Pushkov and Alexey Maslov – director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University – discuss how to build a polycentric system of international relations.
As Project Ukraine Faces Doom…
Finally, it’s inevitable to contrast the – hopeful, auspicious – mood at SPIEF with the collective West’s hysterics as Project Ukraine faces doom. Putin made it quite clear: Russia will prevail, no matter what. The collective West may rekindle “the Istanbul solution”, as Putin noted, but modified “based upon the new reality” in the battlefield.
Putin also deftly defused all the pre-fabricated, nonsensical nuclear paranoia infesting Atlanticist circles.
Still, that won’t be enough. On the packed corridors at SPIEF, and in informal meetings, there was total awareness about the Hegemon’s desperation-fueled warmongering masked as “defense.” There were no illusions that the current dementia posing as “foreign policy” is betting on a genocide not only for the sake of the “aircraft carrier” in West Asia but mostly to cow the Global Majority into submission.
That would raise the serious possibility that the Global Majority needs to build a military alliance to deter this – planned – Global War.
Russia-China, of course, plus Iran and credible Arab deterrence – with Yemen showing the way: all of that may become a must. A Global Majority military alliance will have to show up one way or another: either before the – incoming, planned – disaster, to mitigate it; or after it has totally engulfed West Asia into a monstrous, vicious war.
Ominously, we may be nearly there. But at least St. Petersburg offered glimmers of hope. Putin: “Russia will be the heart of the multipolar harmonic world.” Now that’s how you clinch a one-hour speech.
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(Republished from Sputnik )
On The Road – Kerouac – Abridged Audiobook (2:35:25 min) Mp3
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac. It’s based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. The novel is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The story is a roman à clef, featuring key figures of the Beat movement, including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, represented by characters in the book. Kerouac himself serves as the narrator, known as Sal Paradise. The novel was published by Viking Press and has been recognized as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century
Free Speech Video Platform Odysee Finds New Life with Arweave Integration
Forward Research has announced its acquisition of Odysee, a crypto-based censorship-resistant video platform. With this strategic acquisition, Forward Research aims to weave Odysee’s seven million-strong user base into the fabric of the Arweave network, a decentralized data storage solution heralded as the “permaweb.”
Arweave is a decentralized storage network that leverages blockchain technology to create a permanent and immutable data storage solution. Designed to store data permanently, it enables users and developers to pay a one-time fee for perpetual data storage, making it a revolutionary alternative to traditional cloud storage services that require ongoing payments. This innovative approach is aimed at preserving valuable information indefinitely, fostering a sustainable and censorship-resistant web infrastructure.
Sam Williams, the visionary behind the Arweave blockchain and the driving force at Forward Research, illuminated the urgency of their intervention. “We stepped in to save it from going offline,” Williams emphasized, underscoring the precarious state Odysee found itself in, teetering on the brink of extinction due to regulatory pressures that had claimed its predecessor, LBRY.
The demise of LBRY, under the weight of overbearing US regulatory scrutiny, once cast a long shadow over Odysee. Yet, Williams sees this challenge not just as a rescue mission but as a long-term investment in the digital future.
LBC support will soon be dropped, according to Odysee CEO Julian Chandra.
“It’s official, we are building Odysee on a technical stack called Arweave. For laymen, what this means is we now have the tool to safely and successfully provide users with a system that ensures total censorship resistance,” Chandra posted on X.
A Strategic Acquisition
While the financial specifics of the acquisition remain under wraps, Williams was keen to highlight Odysee’s impressive scale. This acquisition is not just about numbers; it’s a strategic play to disrupt the existing monopolies in social media, with aspirations of positioning Odysee as a viable contender against giants.
“The goal is to topple the monopolies that currently exist in social media. We haven’t won until it replaces Twitter,” Williams said.
Odysee’s allure lies not in its crypto foundation but in its staunch commitment to free speech and user rights—a commitment that dovetails seamlessly with Arweave’s mission. Arweave, renowned for its capacity to store data entirely on-chain, presents a stark contrast to Ethereum, which can only manage metadata or links to large files. Williams described Arweave’s capabilities as the “permaweb,” a permanent, immutable web that aligns perfectly with Odysee’s ethos.
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Scott Ritter Silenced by Liberal Authoritarians – by Patrick Lawrence – 8 June 2024
• 1,700 WORDS •
Scott Ritter speaks at SUNY New Paltz (Wikimedia Commons)
It is not difficult to be astonished these days, given how many things going on around us warrant astonishment. To pull something out of a hat at random, the Democratic apparatus has openly, brazenly politicized the judicial system—weaponized it, if you prefer—in its determination to destroy Donald Trump and now has the temerity to warn in the gravest terms that a second Trump term would mean… the politicization of American justice.
Again at random, in The Washington Post’s June 7 editions George Will tells us President Biden “has provided the most progressive governance in U.S. history.” Yes, he wrote that. Give in to your astonishment.
It is interesting in this case to note that, during the reign of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago, our George thought big government was bad, bad, bad. Now it is a fine thing that Biden is “minimizing the market’s role by maximizing the government’s role in allocating society’s resources and opportunities.” Apart from turning his own argument hourglass upside-down, this assessment of our swiftly declining president is preposterously, right-before-your-eyes false.
You cannot tell the AC’s from the DC’s these days. But this is not the half of it in the way of astonishing events, things done, things said and such like.
Last week, as many readers will have noticed, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector and now a widely followed commentator, was about to board a plane bound for Turkey when armed police officers stopped him, confiscated his passport and escorted him out of Kennedy International Airport. Ritter was booked to transit through Istanbul for St. Petersburg, where he planned to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual gathering.
Here is Ritter recounting this incident in an interview with RT International:
I was boarding the flight. Three officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said, “Orders of the State Department.” They had no further information for me. They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.
No passport, no freedom to travel, no explanation. I have it on good authority that Ritter subsequently advised other Americans who were to attend the St. Petersburg events not to risk it.
I have had countless conversations over many years in which the question considered has been “Is this as bad as the 1950s?” The matter has been especially vital since the Russiagate fiasco began during the Clinton–Trump campaign season in 2016. It was in the ensuing years that the authoritarianism implicit in American liberalism from the first burst upon us like some weird grotesque out of a Dr. Seuss book.
I always urge caution when invoking comparisons between our corruptions and ideological extremes and those of the McCarthy era. Hyperbole and exaggeration never serve one’s understanding or one’s argument. But the confiscation of Scott Ritter’s passport on the instructions of Antony Blinken’s State Department seems to me a radical step too far. The liberal authoritarians now in command of the nation’s major institutions, the House of Representatives among the only exceptions, have just signaled they are quite prepared to act at least as undemocratically as the House Un–American Activities crowd, the FBI and the rest of the national-security state did during the 1950s to preserve their political hegemony.
When I think of confiscated passports I think of Paul Robeson, the gifted singer, the courageous political dissenter, the civil rights advocate—here he is singing his famous Water Boy—whose documents were seized in 1950 because he refused to indulge in the Cold War paranoia that was already prevalent. His performing career collapsed and he nearly went broke before a Supreme Court decision restored them in 1958. Or I think of all the screenwriters, novelists, poets, painters and activists whose papers were canceled while they were in Mexico—or in France or in Sweden or in England—to avoid HUAC and expatriation turned into exile.
And when I am finished thinking of these people, about whom there is a rich, inspiring literature, I think of how far America descended into a derangement we tend to look back upon in some combination of wonder, derision and contempt.
We can no longer look back in this fashion. The revocation of Scott Ritter’s passport, along with the destruction of the judicial system, the myth-spinning about our purported leaders and all the rest pushes this in our faces. Let us give this a moment’s thought to see if we can determine what is likely to be in store.
Why Scott Ritter, I have wondered these past few days. Of all the dissident commentators of too many stripes to count, why Scott? I reply to myself, “Because Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, a former U.N. arms monitor in Iraq and he enjoys big-time credibility as a patriotic American.” His voice, in short, is the sort that can carry weight in sectors of the voting public that may well prove key in determining the outcome in the Trump–Biden election this Nov. 5.
Viewed in this context, I take the full-frontal suppression of Ritter’s rights last week as very likely tied to the liberals’ political prospects, other than brilliant as they are at this point. Censorship, suppression of various kinds taking various forms, “canceling”—these are nothing new, of course. But I sense things may get a great deal worse from here on out.
This is a year of global elections, as has often been remarked. The Associated Press counted 25 major national elections in a piece published at the start of the year. Taiwan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Russia, Slovakia, India, Mexico: These are among the big ones that have already taken place. The European Union is holding parliamentary elections June 6–9, cited in liberal quarters as the most important in decades. When Americans vote Nov. 5, it will be in this context.
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In many of these elections—not all but many—the core issues are variants on a theme. The liberal order, such as we have it, is cast as defending itself against the onslaughts of—take your pick—populists, authoritarians, here and there a dictator. This is certainly how liberal media encourage American voters to view the Biden–Trump contest. And it is for this reason I think we must all brace ourselves for what may turn out to be a very major disaster for what remains of American democracy—and by extension the West’s.
Cast your mind back to 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, an incipient triumphalism was taking hold in the U.S. and Francis Fukuyama published his famous (or infamous) The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press). Fukuyama, then a middling bureaucrat at the State Department, made the case that liberal democracy had won out and would stand as the ultimate, unchallenged achievement of humankind. A sort of happy political monoculture was destined to prevail eternally across the planet.
However sophomoric you may find this thesis, and I find it almost juvenile in its silliness, it came to define the expectations of all righteous American liberals. There was the Bush II administration, a major setback for the liberal narrative, although at the horizon this was merely a variation on the liberal theme. Then came the Obama years. And the Obama years set up the Democrats for a kind of fateful consummation in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy that November was incontrovertibly the surest of outcomes because it was… what is my phrase?… a matter of historical destiny.
This is why Clinton’s defeat landed so hard among the mainstream Democrats. It was more, much more, than a loss at the polls. Trump’s victory contradicted what had become a prevalent consciousness among American liberals. Biden’s win in 2020 was a kind of salvage job: It put the liberal narrative back on track. But something had happened in the years after Clinton’s November 2016 loss. Liberals had assumed an uncompromising ideological righteousness such that we can now legitimately call them authoritarians—soft despots in de Tocqueville’s terminology, apple-pie authoritarians in mine. The cause is upside-down to the Cold War cause, but these people are at least as dangerous as the McCarthyites, and, as I have suggested, maybe more so.
We learned something important during those years. Deprived of what they considered their right as conferred by the force of history, liberals demonstrated that they would stop at nothing in the cause of retrieving it. Even those institutions that must stand above the political pit if a democracy is to have any chance of working, notably but not only the judiciary, were intruded upon in the liberal authoritarian project. Nothing was off limits.
Here we are again. We are headed into another confrontation of the kind that set liberals on the path of destruction they began to walk in 2016. We are already seeing a new wave of preposterous, utterly unsubstantiated charges of Russian or Chinese interference. Trump will turn America into a dictatorship. Trump will go on a rampage of retribution. Trump—we hear this already, as noted—will corrupt the courts, our courts, the courts we have kept pristine.
The Scott Ritter affair astonishes me yet more than any of the other astonishing developments of late. I read it as a warning of how extreme things may get, what irreparable damage to the American polity may be done, if liberal authoritarian cliques determine that a broad campaign to suppress dissent will be necessary if Biden is to have a chance of winning a second term and they are to fulfill their end-of-history destiny.
Let me put it this way. Liberal media now routinely bait Trump to say whether he will automatically accept the outcome this Nov. 5. One would have to be naïve in the extreme to make any such commitment as things now stand.
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(Republished from Scheerpost)
US Supporting Genocide to Halt Multipolarity – by Pepe Escobar – 5 June 2024
• 1,300 WORDS •
The Hegemon is calculating for a World War to halt multipolarity. It supports Israel’s Gaza genocide as a necessary evil to win hard in West Asia, figuring who’s going to care once the war goes global?
The St Petersburg Economic Forum (SPIEF) takes place this week. It’s one of the go-to annual meetings across Eurasia. The overall theme in 2024 is “multipolarity,” quite fitting considering this is the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS. The BRICS summit next October in Kazan will be crucial in drawing the contours of the road map towards multipolarity going forward.
Ay, there’s the rub. Taking us to arguably the key question facing the Global Majority: How can we afford to dream about multipolarity when we are plunged into The Unthinkable, reduced to the role of mere spectators, watching a genocide broadcast 24/7 on every smartphone on the planet?
The – avowedly imperfect – International Court of Justice (ICJ) at least ordered the biblical genocidals to stop bombing Rafah. Israel’s response? They bombed Rafah. Worse, they burned children alive in refugee tents. With American missiles.
And the genocide will continue at least until the end of this multipolar year, as boasted by Israeli intel. The Global Majority at least clearly sees how the “rules-based international order” works. Yet that’s not much of a comfort.
The ICJ order to stop the carnage in Rafah, plus the ICC drive to seek warrants for the arrest of top Israeli leaders for serial war crimes in Gaza, predictably sent the Israel–US joined at-the-hip combo into a hysterical frenzy.
The heart of the matter concerns the real masters and managers of the Empire of Chaos and Plunder – much more than their lowly emissaries. The masters cannot allow any institution to loosen their grip on the official narrative.
The official narrative is “there’s no genocide in Gaza” and no “red lines” have been trespassed. This is the official diktat of the collective west. No breaches are allowed. They will go to unconstitutional extremes to enforce total narrative control, with an ironclad public relations operation to envelop the whole planet in layer after layer of propaganda stupor.
Slightly contradicting Mao Zedong, real power does not come from the barrel of a gun (or from a hypersonic nuclear missile); it comes from narrative control, or what we used to call “soft power.” The difference now is that the Hegemon does not control soft power anymore. The Global Majority is perfecting, in real-time, its own soft power counterpunches.
A systemically sociopathic society
The narrative controllers may still be able to obliterate key facts from western public opinion, for instance, on ethnic cleansing. Christian Arabs have been systematically ethnic-cleansed in Palestine. In the early 1950s, Bethlehem was 86 percent Christian, a figure that has since plummeted to a dismal 12 percent today. The biblical psychopaths built a wall around Bethlehem, annexed land for the benefit of armed Jewish settlers, and ethnically cleansed Christians.
Serious studies on hyper-ethnocentrism or the systemically sociopathic character of Israeli society do not offer much solace when it comes to stopping a genocide.
Because the wound is much deeper. Alastair Crooke, a former diplomat with vast on-the-ground experience, is peerless among westerners when it comes to understanding the intricacies of West Asia.
In his columns and podcasts, he touches on the major wound laid bare by the war/genocide in Gaza: the schism, at the heart of the west, between an “illiberal social engineering project” posing as liberalism and a project to “recover the ‘eternal’ values (however imperfect) that once lay behind European civilization.”
Adding to the problem, the US–Israel power structures are joined at the hip. And they work under a sort of complementary logic. While Israel’s version of plunder is embodied in settler colonialism, the Hegemon – as brilliantly explained by Michael Hudson – has been on an orgy of rent-seeking financialized colonialism since the end of WWII.
And what Michael Hudson qualifies as the FIRE (finance–insurance–real estate) racket has calcified, as Alastair notes, into “a permanent framework to the Western political and geopolitical system.”
Thus, it’s no wonder that the Global Majority instinctively sees the Israel–US combo – bearing different forms of exploitation/plunder all the way to genocide – as the epitome of colonialism, now “softened” by a narrative control op into a meaningless “rules-based international order.”
It’s also no wonder that the Gaza genocide has sparked a renewed Global Majority-wide, anti-colonial wave.
Still, that’s not enough. No one is actually stopping the genocide. That would only be practically possible by inflicting a devastating military defeat on Israel – with the victors dictating the terms of capitulation. That’s not feasible – at least not yet – and contributes to the biblical psychopaths believing they can get away with anything.
‘A new horizon of human sacrifice’
Andrea Zhok is a professor of Ethical Philosophy at the University of Milan and one of the foremost independent Italian intellectuals. Zhok takes us further into the – appropriately tragic – dead-end now contemplated by the collective west.
The west under the Hegemon, he says, only ever had a Plan A. There was no Plan B. That implies the west will continue to apply all forms of Divide and Rule against the major Eurasian powers – Russia, China, and Iran. Zhok notes, correctly, that India is substantially under control.
That’s the crossroads scenario we’re in right now. Looking ahead, it’s either an Open Hot War or an array of Hybrid Wars between major powers and their vassals – essentially, the Third World War.
Zhok shows how the west under the Hegemon is now obsessed with creating “systemic wounds” capable of cyclical destruction. To open these “wounds,” there are two main procedures: war and pandemics.
He argues that only “a new horizon of human sacrifice” is capable of allowing the west’s “Ultimate Truth” to continue standing on its clay feet.
In fact, it is this “new horizon of human sacrifice” that is conditioning the west’s non-response – or worse, legitimization – of the Gaza genocide. And that is inexorably corroding the European psyche from the inside. What used to be called European civilization – now completely vassalized by the Hegemon – may not ever be cured of the cancer.
If these trials and tribulations were not enough, irrational messengers – under orders – are busy bringing us closer day after day to a nuclear war.
And some lowly functionaries even admit it, point blank.
It’s all here, in a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and analysts Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, during which the former refers to an email he received from a military/intel source. This is what the source told him:
Today, I listened to an extensive interview with an IDF ex-intelligence officer. His position was clear: ‘We are,’ he said, ‘aiming towards a world war’ (italics mine). Israel, therefore, shouldn’t stop itself from implementing some of the most radical measures because its actions will be measured retroactively in the context of the brutal world conflict to come.
This should be seen as the ultimate explanation for the Hegemon/Vassals’ nonstop frantic escalation in the intertwined Forever Wars front – from Gaza to Novorossiya.
That includes genocide – and genocide spin-offs, such as the $320 million ‘aid’ pier scam now turned into junk on the Gaza shore, bringing it all back to genocide all over again as the breadcrumb ploy of expelling/shipping Palestinians abroad has miserably failed.
“Aiming towards a world war” makes it all so clear who’s really running the show. And the whole multipolar world is still being held hostage.
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(Republished from The Cradle)
US: A Professor on ‘Authorities’ Who Order Police to Crush Student Protests – by Richard D. Wolff – 3 June 2024
The Washington Post’s journalists recently exposed what many already suspected or knew. Donors from society’s richest 1 percent pressured university administrators and political leaders to use police and other means to crush peaceful student protests. The students wanted a change in United States and Israeli policy and action to secure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Growing numbers of faculty are joining the students’ protests. They too have been unjustly persecuted by the same “authorities.”
Of course, the lawful role U.S. police are supposed to play is quite different. As “peacekeepers” police should act to make it safe for any and all sides of disputes over U.S. foreign (or domestic) policies to engage in free speech. When university leaders collaborate with police to shut down free speech, both abuse their power. Students around the world have confronted those abuses as have U.S. students in the past. Our students now confront them yet again.
As a professor myself, I am embarrassed when university administrators justify calling in the police to “remove” students from university “private property” (such as lawns). They argue as if real estate concerns outweighed the education and public importance entailed by peaceful student protests on urgent, life-and-death public issues of the day. Real estate justifications also reveal university administrators’ ignorance. Huge tax exemptions subsidize private universities in the United States with public money. They get expensive public services delivered to them gratis. The rest of the U.S. public pays the taxes that fund those public services. Likewise, massive government grants support general university purposes (added on to grants for specific academic research projects) for both “private” and public institutions. To significant degrees, all colleges and universities are publicly funded institutions. They are thus perfectly appropriate locations for public expressions of opinion about important public issues. University administrators try to hide slavish pandering to rich donors when they try fake “private property” excuses for calling the police on students. Punishing students seeking peace in Gaza brings deep and lasting shame on the universities who do that.
The same applies to all those authorities who use the old “violence” ploy to cover their pandering. They pose as driven to prevent or end mostly unreal campus violence. Meanwhile, these same authorities mostly support real, infinitely worse violence in Ukraine and Gaza. In contrast, student protestors for peace in Gaza have every reason to avoid campus violence precisely because it risks dissuading some other students from joining them. Enemies of the protest try to associate it with violence precisely to constrain the protests’ growth. Years ago, university administrators, police, and politicians likewise wildly exaggerated the minimal violence they blamed on anti-Vietnam war protesters. Unlike those authorities, those protesters actually helped end that war and its horrific violence.
Protests disrupt “business as usual” to open time and space for public discussion and action around an urgent public issue. That is why workers strike, marchers crowd streets for the rights of minorities and women, and vigils for peace gather at traffic intersections. In recent years, millions of French people wearing yellow vests shut down France to ask for social changes. In the spring of 2024, general strikers similarly shut down Argentina. Protesters explain why they want change. Their protests ask others to engage with the question of change.
Protests also attest to a society’s social health: its ability to overcome the resignation, reticence, and fear that too often prevent or delay social problems from getting public attention. The absence of protest often drives urgent social problems underground. There they fester and eventually burst forth more disruptively than earlier protests would have been. Let protesters make their points. If counter-protesters wish, let them do likewise with their points. That is what “free speech” means. When the “authorities” in power fear the criticism, questions, and demands of the people they control, almost any public protests quickly become intolerably frightening to them. Their control is challenged and they react in ways that undercut their empty claims to be “democratic.” We all have a right and duty to affirm genuine free speech.
The larger world is changing. The horrors in Gaza, the forming of a new, powerful student movement critical of U.S. foreign policy, and undemocratic efforts to stop free speech all flow from global changes. Our world is now fast becoming very different from what it was for most of our parents’ lives. Just as the British empire rose, peaked, and then fell, the American empire that followed it rose, peaked, and is now declining. Americans are only beginning to grasp that reality as denying it remains the majority’s position. Each of us confronts the changes in the world based on our own histories. Therefore, before drawing conclusions about Gaza and the student protests, I need to explain where I am coming from, my family’s history, and how it contextualizes my engagement with a changed and changing world.
My mother and her sister were both incarcerated in concentration camps in the late 1930s (my aunt in a German camp, my mother in a French camp). Their parents (my grandparents) were killed in a different German concentration camp. My mother was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, and attended the University of Berlin until she fled Germany in 1936. My father, born in Metz (a disputed French/German city on the border), attended several German and Swiss universities, became a lawyer and eventually a judge in Germany before leaving for France in 1933. His sister was picked up by the Gestapo in Paris in the late 1930s and later killed in Auschwitz. Many other family members died in ways linked to fascism and/or World War II. All those who “survived” suffered severe traumas, often aggravations of other traumas they had suffered earlier in their lives.
My parents, beyond surviving, additionally underwent the refugee experience in the United States. The English language and U.S. customs were largely unknown to them. They had no money. Their European professional credentials were not honored in the United States. When I was born, my father was a steel worker in a Youngstown, Ohio, factory, and my mother was a “homemaker” in that period’s words. As the first child of refugee “survivors” of multiple traumas, I was heavily pressured to “succeed” in the new country. My unspoken task was somehow to compensate for all the losses and injuries my parents always carried with them everywhere. I also listened closely to the snippets of information about fascism, Europe, World War II, and contemporary history that emerged from countless conversations in and around my family. This is the background for how I “relate” to the events in Israel, Gaza, and the United States over recent decades, especially since last October. “Relate” here includes confronting today’s student protests, their attempted repression, and writing this article.
The uniform premise of discussions of fascism, war, and related subjects within my family was that they all represented the most recent of a long list of human tragedies across history. They could have happened anywhere and probably did. And they could happen and probably would happen again anywhere. Perhaps the best that we could reasonably hope for was that some sort of political action we might undertake now could reduce the probability, frequency, or horrors of future tragedies.
For me, that meant I should seek to understand how societies work, act to change them, and thereby contribute to achieving the best that could reasonably be hoped for. Notions that any nation or region was uniquely prone to or immune from becoming Nazis were not taken seriously. Germany was in no way uniquely prone to nazification. Likewise, “denazification laws,” “civil liberty traditions,” or slogans like “never again” gave no nation immunity from becoming partly or wholly nazified. That included Israel.
My father fought fascism as a student in Germany, then as a journalist across Europe, as a labor lawyer in Germany, and later as a naturalized U.S. citizen combatting the racism directed against African Americans and against Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. He was respectful of Marxism as an intellectual tradition and a political movement but personally kept his distance from it. He was always a European left social democrat: comfortable in the United States of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) from his arrival in 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945. He became progressively more uncomfortable after 1945. He neither missed nor denied the rightward shifts of politics in the United States and Western Europe after 1945. He sensed the maturation of conditions that could again enable new nazisms to emerge. He explicitly wondered about such possibilities, especially for a fascism to emerge and take power in the United States but also in other places including Israel.
As my mother grew older, she mused often that “the Jews learned nothing from the Holocaust” and “the Jewish Zionists learned nothing from the Holocaust beyond ‘Better to perpetrate one than to suffer it again’.” My mother, 9 years younger than my father, had to leave the University of Berlin in 1936 after police identified her as a courier for the anti-Hitler underground. A frequently heard comment from one or the other of my parents: Jews have very often been the enemies and victims of nationalisms, often after long periods of living and intermarrying in neighborhoods where Jews and non-Jews comingled peacefully. What drove non-Jews to turn on Jewish neighbors were worsening economic and social problems affecting both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In both communities, few identified the sources of their problems as capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism: the taboos against such reasoning were too strong.
There were still too few Marxists to teach and explain the effects of capitalism. The Marxists and their allies that were active then analyzed social problems in ways and using terms heavily influenced by the Russian Revolution and the specific interpretation of Marxism promoted by the USSR. That interpretation became dominant over other, alternative interpretations because the unrivaled prestige of the first and only successful Marxist revolution in 1917 Russia made its interpretation dominant. Soviet Marxism defined capitalism as an economic system that combined private property (privately owned and operated enterprises) with free markets (enterprises and workers distributing goods and services to one another via exchange). Soviet Marxists and those who followed their lead argued that the capitalist system produced the inequalities of wealth and income, the instabilities of the “business cycle,” and the corruptions of politics by money that all together could lead to fascism and Nazis. In contrast, socialists proposed to advance beyond capitalism via (1) seizure of the state by the working class (by revolution or ballot victories), (2) state takeovers of enterprises, and (3) state planning instead of markets. They called such a socialism a rational economic system working in the interests of the majority working class rather than a minority capitalist class of owners. Such a socialism was the opposite, the antidote for, and the alternative to fascism.
Meanwhile, the emerging Nazis analyzed society by focusing on altogether different concepts such as race and nation. They defined the social problem as national and racial in origin: the German nation/Aryan race was being victimized by the Jewish nation/race. My father quoted Engels to the effect that such antisemitism was the stupid person’s socialism.
How had Germans in fact suffered (or, in Nazi terms, been victimized)? In and by the loss of World War I (1918), the huge reparations bill charged to Germany afterward, the worst inflation in modern European history that devastated its middle classes’ savings (1923), and then the Great Crash (1929) and its global Depression aftermath. German capitalists and the right-wing parties they funded took political advantage of all those events by deeming them victimizations. They blamed non-Germans for them: Bolsheviks from whom German socialists and communists had imported their evil ideologies. Nazis stressed the presence of Jews in the German left as their basis to rewrite history as a conspiracy to subordinate Germans (and others) to Jewish global financial rule. That project drew much inspiration from earlier writings across Europe accompanying antisemitic upsurges there. Casting Jews as thus a threatening race/nation, Nazis could mobilize Germans for their self-defense against the Jewish threat. Self-defense could and did justify repression, property dispossession, arrest, and eventually physical extermination of Jews. Similarly now for many Israelis, the war on Gaza is justified as an exercise in defense against Palestinians and the deep threat they are seen to represent. Aggressive U.S. foreign policies likewise refer to their military arm as the Department of Defense.
Germany’s extreme problems after World War I culminating in the impact of the global Great Depression after 1929 overwhelmed its leaders. They found no traditional way forward as the mass of Germans became ever more desperate. Therefore they accepted the way offered by Hitler. His genocidal tendencies found a fertile ground that led to scapegoating especially of Jews. The Nazis filled the jails, concentration camps, and eventually the ovens and graves of Germany and many of its allies (Poland, Austria, Italy, Spain, and occupied France) with all their scapegoats.
There was always opposition to Nazism. Alongside the Jewish opposition, there were also many others, especially among socialists and communists. Those oppositions suffered countless tragic losses but also proved spectacularly productive of heroic and productive breakthroughs in thought, association, and action. Those breakthroughs shaped world history after 1945. They helped to make us the critics of received norms of racial, gender, and class discrimination. In particular, they strengthened and transformed post-war anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Most colonialisms were overthrown by the colonized.
My parents’ and their families’ traumas generated among the survivors a certain sympathy and empathy for the idea that Jews (and also LGBTQ+ people, the Roma, and others persecuted by Nazis) might finally and somehow find safety in the world. That extended to a romanticized early image of Israel—and especially its kibbutzim collectivities. But starting in the 1950s, as the kibbutzim declined and Israeli governments accepted ever more subordination to U.S. foreign policies, my parents’ sympathies diminished.
Qua religion, Judaism had been long abandoned not only by my mother and father but also by their parents. Those generations were proudly “free-thinkers” or what my father once called “post-religion.” Holding on to religious symbols and rituals at a time when they seemed ever more inappropriate, absurd, or worse struck them as unwanted modes of separation from the progressive tendencies of the larger society. Both my sister and I grew up and shared in that framework as have my children.
The previous paragraphs sketch some context for how I approach the Israeli-Palestine conflict and U.S. student protests. The Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a dead-end. Different as it is in most details from Germany in the 1930s, the Palestine-Israel conflict is similarly driven toward ever more deeply irrational objectives and strategies. For safety, some Jewish Zionists undertook a 20th-century settler colonialism in Palestine similar to what the British, French, German, and other European nations had undertaken in earlier centuries. Back then it was possible to “succeed” in military, political, and ideological terms in establishing and profiting from such settler colonialisms for long periods. There were centuries of time to ethnically cleanse indigenous people, to enable invading settler colonists to herd them into areas “reserved” for their impoverishment. Israel’s is the attempt much, much later to establish and secure a settler colonialism in radically altered historical conditions. Now most of the world’s people fight for and celebrate freedom from (ending) settler and other colonialisms. Their opposition offsets and now threatens to overwhelm the immense support Israel received and receives from the US and its shrinking number of other supporters.
Colonial subjects always resisted and fought back against the colonizers. Resistance repressed went and grew underground. Periodically then it exploded into view surprising the colonizers with its ever deeper roots, persistence, and intensities. Eventually and everywhere, resistance to colonialism developed the self-consciousness, theories, organizations, and weaponry to overcome colonialism at least to the point of acquiring formal political independence. My own PhD dissertation sought to identify the roots overdetermining this process in Britain’s settler colonialism in Kenya. There, accumulated resistances and repressions peaked in the Mau Mau rebellion. It freed Kenya’s people by ending Kenya’s colonial status. Acquiring real political independence is the next step now engaging many formerly colonized territories. Real economic independence—as required by real freedom—is yet a further step now gingerly explored by China, India, and Brazil.
Colonial history thus suggests the poorest of prospects for Israeli settler colonialism prevailing over a colonized Palestine. The conditions of existence for any such prevalence are not there now nor likely to emerge. Israel’s history thus displays repeated Palestinian uprisings and repeated Israeli repressions. Both become increasingly violent and vindictive. Stuck in a dead end, resistors and repressors resort to ever more extreme actions such as Hamas’s attack last October and Israel’s destruction of Gaza ever since. Israeli officials refer to Palestinians as “animals” and speak publicly about expelling millions of them from the country. Palestinian officials insist a genocide is being imposed by Israel upon them. Netanyahu’s allies join in banning and arresting opponents of his policies. How much further along that road will they go? U.S. students in response have given birth to a new mass movement that is changing the country as you read this.
Hitler’s genocide ended when outside forces intervened to fight and win World War II. Inside forces (Jewish resistance, resistance to German occupation, and anti-fascism) helped in key ways. Will the forces already inside Israel and Palestine together with outside forces intervene and stop the Palestine-Israel catastrophe? Students and faculties at colleges and universities across the world are now in the movement for such interventions. Each of them is now making personal choices about whether and how to participate in that movement. Each person’s choice will affect the rest of that person’s life.
Many students and teachers are at work trying to understand honestly how Palestinian and Israeli societies evolved, separately and in relation, such that they came to today’s horrific situation. They use classes, readings, and libraries seriously to interrogate concepts like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” “self-defense,” and “antisemitism/anti-Zionism.”
Many students and teachers proceed unafraid to ask about how capitalism may have operated on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides—and among their supporters—in producing today’s dead end. The point of asking is to inquire further about an urgent issue: could basic social changes help overcome the Israeli-Palestine dead end by providing a new beginning on an economic foundation better than capitalism? Might the kibbutzim, had their numbers and importance within the Israeli economy been facilitated, have produced a different politics? Might the growth of worker cooperatives within the Palestinian territories have functioned likewise? Had such coops and kibbutzim built upon their shared economic structures to fashion political alliances, how differently might the whole Middle East have evolved?
Yes, these are big, bold, new ways of thinking about the present, horrific dead-end in Gaza. Students and universities have often led the rest of society in such new ways. Yes, universities around the world now struggle with huge free-speech vs. police issues provoked by the Gaza events. But the old, defensive, aggressive ways of thinking and acting have more than failed to solve the Israeli-Palestine problem. They made it worse. Old defensive, aggressive ways of thinking also misunderstand a changed world, one in which the U.S. dominance coming out of World War II has now peaked and is receding. A declining empire is a new experience and context for everything else happening around us. Our generation is living through that process of decline. We need to think critically about historic dead ends without past generations’ fear of using anti-capitalist traditions of thought.
The student and faculty protest movement around demands for a Gaza ceasefire is doing that. For that it deserves applause and to be joined. To the students now leading us I offer my gratitude.
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Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.
Chaque escalade rapproche Washington de la défaite en Ukraine – par Mike Whitney – 4 juin 2024
Il y a une grande différence entre « ne pas gagner » et « perdre » une guerre. Dans le cas de l’Ukraine, « ne pas gagner » signifie que le président Zelensky et ses collaborateurs à Washington choisissent de rechercher un règlement négocié qui permettrait à la Russie de conserver le territoire qu’elle a conquis pendant la guerre tout en répondant aux modestes exigences de sécurité de Moscou. (Remarque : l’Ukraine doit rejeter toute intention d’adhérer à l’OTAN)
D’un autre côté, « perdre » la guerre signifie que les États-Unis et l’OTAN continuent sur la même voie qu’ils suivent aujourd’hui – en injectant des armes mortelles, des entraîneurs et des systèmes de missiles à longue portée en Ukraine – en espérant que l’offensive russe soit progressivement affaiblie afin que l’Ukraine puisse prédominent sur le champ de bataille. Cette voie alternative – qui équivaut à un « vœu pieux » – est la voie qui mène à la « perte » de la guerre.
Contrairement au scénario « ne pas gagner » la guerre, « perdre » la guerre aura un effet catastrophique sur les États-Unis et sur leur avenir. Cela signifierait que Washington n’a pas été en mesure d’empêcher une incursion militaire russe en Europe, qui est la principale raison d’être de l’OTAN. Cela remettrait en question l’idée selon laquelle les États-Unis sont capables d’agir en tant que garant de la sécurité régionale, rôle dont ils jouissent depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La perception d’une défaite américaine face à la Russie déclencherait inévitablement une réévaluation des relations de sécurité actuelles conduisant à la dissolution de l’OTAN et, très probablement, de l’UE également. En termes simples, perdre la guerre serait un désastre. Voici comment le Colonel Daniel Davis a résumé la situation la semaine dernière :
“Nous ne pouvons pas laisser la Russie gagner.”
J’ai entendu cela tout au long de plus de deux années de guerre. Mais voici ce que je dis : si vous continuez sur cette voie, en ignorant toutes les réalités dont nous parlons, non seulement la Russie gagnera, mais nous perdrons. Et je vous assure que si vous pensiez que c’était une mauvaise chose de « laisser Poutine gagner » – ce qui signifie avoir un règlement négocié dans lequel Poutine se retrouve avec un territoire avec lequel il n’a pas commencé la guerre –… Mais si vous dites cela – parce que je ne le fais pas. Je ne veux pas que cela arrive, je vais continuer à me battre – cela implique que vous pensez que vous pouvez gagner. Mais si vous ne parvenez pas à gagner, le résultat probable est que vous perdrez encore plus, et c’est ce qui va vraiment nuire à notre crédibilité, car imaginez si l’ensemble des forces de l’OTAN s’avérait incapable d’empêcher la Russie de gagner ? Aujourd’hui, notre crédibilité est bien plus endommagée que si un règlement était négocié Colonel Daniel Davis, You Tube
Ainsi, même si « ne pas gagner » n’est pas la solution parfaite, il est largement préférable à « perdre », ce qui saperait gravement la crédibilité de l’Alliance, éroderait considérablement la puissance de Washington en Europe et obligerait les États-Unis à repenser leurs plans de projection de puissance en Asie centrale. . (pivot vers l’Asie) En bref, une défaite américaine face à la Russie en Ukraine serait un coup dur porté à « l’ordre fondé sur des règles » et au dénouement du siècle américain.
L’enjeu est donc considérable pour les États-Unis. Malheureusement, il n’y a pas de véritable débat dans les cercles d’élite du pouvoir sur la meilleure voie à suivre. Et c’est parce que la décision a déjà été prise, et cette décision est étroitement liée aux vues maximalistes exprimées dans un article du Conseil atlantique intitulé « L’OTAN à 75 ans : l’avenir de l’Alliance réside dans la victoire de l’Ukraine contre la Russie ».
L’OTAN marquera son soixante-quinzième anniversaire le 4 avril en tant qu’alliance militaire la plus réussie de l’histoire. Cependant, son avenir en tant que moyen de dissuasion crédible face à l’agression réside désormais dans le succès ou l’échec de l’invasion injuste et brutale de l’Ukraine par la Russie.
Les dirigeants alliés ont sans ambiguïté lié la sécurité de l’OTAN à cette guerre. Les sommets de l’OTAN ont condamné à plusieurs reprises l’invasion et exigé que la Russie « retire complètement et sans condition toutes ses forces et équipements du territoire ukrainien ».
Et la rhétorique s’est intensifiée. Le président français Emmanuel Macron a récemment qualifié la guerre d’« existentielle » pour l’Europe. « Si la Russie gagne cette guerre, la crédibilité de l’Europe serait réduite à zéro », a déclaré Macron…
Si le prochain sommet de Washington veut inspirer une confiance continue dans la crédibilité de l’OTAN, et donc dans son avenir, alors l’Alliance doit prendre des mesures pour placer l’Ukraine sur la voie claire de la victoire…
Les dirigeants alliés doivent soutenir sans ambiguïté les objectifs de guerre de l’Ukraine, c’est-à-dire une reconstitution territoriale totale jusqu’aux frontières de 1991. Tout ce qui est en deçà de cela constitue un signal désillusionnant pour l’Ukraine et un encouragement pour Poutine à poursuivre son invasion. L’OTAN a 75 ans : l’avenir de l’Alliance réside dans la victoire de l’Ukraine contre la Russie, atlanticcouncil . org
Je le répète : les dirigeants alliés doivent approuver sans ambiguïté les objectifs de guerre de l’Ukraine, c’est-à-dire une reconstitution territoriale totale jusqu’aux frontières de 1991. Tout ce qui est en deçà de cela constitue un signal désillusionnant pour l’Ukraine et un encouragement pour Poutine à poursuivre son invasion.
Comme nous l’avons dit plus tôt, cette vision maximaliste des objectifs de l’OTAN n’est rien d’autre qu’un vœu pieux. L’UAF anémique ne va pas chasser l’armée russe d’Ukraine ni gagner la guerre. Néanmoins, les points de vue ci-dessus sont partagés par la grande majorité des élites de politique étrangère qui n’ont pas ajusté leur pensée pour qu’elle corresponde aux pertes sanglantes de l’Ukraine sur le champ de bataille. Voici davantage d’extraits d’un article d’opinion des Affaires étrangères :
L’administration Biden et ses homologues européens n’ont pas réussi à articuler la fin de cette guerre. Trois ans après le début du conflit, la planification occidentale continue d’être stratégiquement arriérée : aider Kiev est devenu une fin en soi, séparée d’une stratégie cohérente visant à mettre un terme à la guerre.
Mais la « théorie de la victoire » présentée par Zagorodnyuk et Cohen pour remplacer le malaise stratégique dans lequel se trouve l’Occident est, remarquablement, encore plus dangereuse et mal conçue que le statu quo. Les auteurs appellent la Maison Blanche à soutenir sans réserve les objectifs de guerre de Kiev : à savoir expulser toutes les forces russes des frontières ukrainiennes de 1991, y compris la Crimée, soumettre les responsables russes aux tribunaux pour crimes de guerre, obtenir des réparations de Moscou et fournir à l’Ukraine des « arrangements de sécurité à long terme ». En d’autres termes, l’Occident ne doit s’engager que dans la défaite totale et inconditionnelle de la Russie sur le champ de bataille.
Comment l’Ukraine, avec son armée en difficulté, sa démographie en déclin et son économie entièrement dépendante des apports de capitaux occidentaux, peut-elle accomplir cette noble tâche ? En faisant toujours la même chose, mais à plus grande échelle. La nouvelle théorie de la victoire ukrainienne est la même que l’ancienne théorie conservatrice américaine
Ce que nous essayons de démontrer, c’est que ce type de pensée délirante est pratiquement universelle parmi les élites américaines en matière de politique étrangère, dont aucune n’est prête à accepter la réalité fondamentale sur le terrain. En conséquence, il n’y a aucune chance que l’administration Biden corrige son cap ou tente d’empêcher un affrontement direct entre les deux adversaires dotés de l’arme nucléaire, l’OTAN et la Russie.
Alors, comment une personne raisonnable aborderait-elle le conflit actuel en Ukraine ?
Ils chercheraient un moyen d’y mettre fin le plus tôt possible tout en infligeant le moins de dégâts possible au camp perdant. Voici ce que le professeur Mark Episkopos de Marymount avait à dire dans le même article ci-dessus :
Les dirigeants occidentaux auraient dû articuler depuis longtemps une théorie cohérente de la victoire, une théorie qui s’attaquerait aux compromis et aux limites auxquels sont confrontés Kiev et ses partisans plutôt que de les balayer dans la poursuite d’objectifs maximalistes sur le champ de bataille, de plus en plus détachés des réalités sur le terrain. Cela ne signifie pas se résigner à une capitulation inconditionnelle de l’Ukraine. Cependant, cela exigera que les décideurs politiques reconnaissent qu’il n’existe aucune voie viable menant à une défaite inconditionnelle de la Russie et qu’ils adaptent leur réflexion sur la fin de la guerre en conséquence. Il n’est pas trop tard pour mettre fin à la guerre dans des conditions garantissant la souveraineté de l’Ukraine tout en faisant progresser les intérêts américains. L’Occident dispose toujours d’une influence considérable sur et en dehors du champ de bataille, mais la clé pour exercer efficacement cette influence est d’abandonner enfin le concept de victoire à somme nulle qui a empêché les dirigeants de se tourner vers une approche plus pragmatique et stratégiquement plus agile. La nouvelle théorie de la victoire ukrainienne est la même que l’ancienne théorie conservatrice américaine
Conclusion : un accord peut être conclu qui minimisera les dommages globaux causés aux États-Unis et à l’Ukraine, mais il appartient aux diplomates américains et aux élites de la politique étrangère d’identifier les domaines de terrain d’entente afin de parvenir à un accord qui évitera une catastrophe encore plus grande. .
Le problème avec la recommandation du professeur Episkopos est qu’il s’agit d’une suggestion raisonnablement raisonnable, ce qui signifie qu’elle sera rejetée d’emblée par les faucons de guerre qui fixent la politique. Même aujourd’hui, les dirigeants américains sont certains que la guerre peut être gagnée s’ils font preuve de prudence et appliquent une force militaire plus brutale. Cela devrait faire l’affaire. (ils pensent)
C’est le genre de raisonnement erroné qui anime la machine de guerre américaine. Les élites politiques croient honnêtement que si elles adoptent pleinement une platitude ridicule comme « Nous ne pouvons pas perdre », la réalité de la supériorité de la puissance de feu, de la main-d’œuvre, du soutien logistique et de la capacité industrielle russes disparaîtra dans les airs et la nation « exceptionnelle » prévaudra. encore une fois. Mais cela n’arrivera pas.
D’accord. Alors, que va-t-il se passer ?
Pour cela, nous nous tournons vers l’analyste militaire Will Schryver et vers un article récent sur Twitter :
Il faut comprendre que les États-Unis et l’OTAN ne pouvaient pas rassembler, équiper, envoyer et soutenir ne serait-ce qu’une douzaine de brigades de combat compétentes pour engager les Russes en Ukraine.
Réalisez-vous ce qui arriverait aux 50 000 soldats de combat de l’OTAN – dont aucun n’a JAMAIS connu une guerre de haute intensité – s’ils étaient soudainement envoyés, avec un leadership et une coordination nécessairement déficients, sur le champ de bataille ukrainien ?
Ils seraient impitoyablement massacrés. Saigner la bête, Will Schryver, Twitter
« Impitoyablement massacré » ? Cela ne semble pas très prometteur.
La France a néanmoins déjà annoncé qu’elle enverrait des formateurs militaires en Ukraine, et d’autres suivront certainement. Dans le même temps, des armes plus meurtrières, notamment des missiles à longue portée et des F-16, sont déjà en route et seront probablement utilisées dans un avenir proche. Mais est-ce que cela aura de l’importance ? La fourniture de nouvelles armes et de troupes de combat inversera-t-elle la tendance et empêchera-t-elle l’effondrement de l’armée ukrainienne ? Voici à nouveau Schryver :
Pourquoi les Russes devraient-ils s’opposer à ce que les États-Unis et l’OTAN envoient davantage de leurs maigres stocks de missiles balistiques à courte portée et de missiles de croisière à longue portée ? Les taux de réussite des missiles ATACMS et Storm Shadow ont été épouvantables et diminuent régulièrement avec le temps. Ils n’ont aucune signification stratégique. Et la capacité de réapprovisionnement est effectivement nulle !
Pourquoi les Russes devraient-ils s’opposer à ce que les États-Unis et l’OTAN envoient un escadron – ou même cinq – de F-16 désuets en Ukraine ? Oui, bien sûr, ils seraient pilotés par des « volontaires » de l’OTAN, et ils pourraient même remporter une poignée de « succès » surfaits et éphémères au début. Mais s’ils tentent réellement d’organiser des sorties sérieuses au-dessus du champ de bataille ukrainien, les vieux F-16 dotés d’une logistique et d’un maintien en puissance inadéquats auront une durée de vie comptée en HEURES seulement. Saigner la bête, Will Schryver, Twitter
Schryver a-t-il raison ? Ces éventuelles frappes de missiles à longue portée sur des cibles en Russie seront-elles simplement des attaques à coups d’épingle que Poutine ignorera pendant que ses troupes continuent d’écraser les forces ukrainiennes le long de la ligne de contact de 800 milles ? Et Poutine devrait-il saluer l’introduction de « troupes terrestres » des États-Unis et de l’OTAN en Ukraine pour faire face à l’armée russe ? Cela permettra-t-il réellement de mettre fin plus rapidement à la guerre ? Voici Schryver une fois de plus :
Au rythme où se déroule toute cette débâcle en Ukraine, pratiquement toute la puissance militaire basée en Europe… va être considérée comme « inefficace au combat » pendant au moins une décennie, et probablement plus. Si j’étais les Russes, je considérerais cet objectif comme le summum bonum (« Le plus grand bien ») à atteindre à la suite de cette guerre, et je serais réticent à interrompre les Maîtres de l’Empire alors qu’ils sont en train de le remettre. pour moi sur un plateau d’argent….
Donc, si j’étais Gerasimov, je dirais : « Amenez-les ! Saigner la bête, Will Schryver, Twitter
La fureur suscitée par l’utilisation de missiles à longue portée fournis par l’OTAN (et le déploiement de F-16 et d’entraîneurs français) ne fait que détourner l’attention du fait incontournable que l’OTAN sera vaincue par les forces armées russes si elles entrent en guerre. Ainsi, un homme sage rechercherait un règlement négocié maintenant avant que les choses ne deviennent incontrôlables. Mais ce n’est pas ce que font nos dirigeants, en fait, ils font exactement le contraire et intensifient à chaque instant la situation.
Examinons donc les faits d’un peu plus près. Découvrez cette analyse récapitulative réalisée par les pros de War on the Rocks :
Lorsqu’on lui a demandé il y a deux semaines lors d’un témoignage devant la commission sénatoriale des services armés si l’armée était « indisposée » par un adversaire quelconque, le chef d’état-major de l’armée américaine, le général Mark Milley, a répondu : « Oui… ceux d’Europe, vraiment la Russie. Nous n’aimons pas cela, nous n’en voulons pas, mais oui, techniquement, [nous sommes] dépassés, désarmés sur le terrain.
Compte tenu de l’agression russe en Ukraine, ce témoignage donne à réfléchir. Mais est-ce exact ? Malheureusement, oui : près de deux ans de jeux de guerre et d’analyses approfondis montrent que si la Russie devait mener une attaque d’avertissement de courte durée contre les États baltes, les forces de Moscou pourraient se diriger vers la périphérie de la capitale estonienne de Tallinn et de la capitale lettone de Riga en 36. à 60 heures. Dans un tel scénario, les États-Unis et leurs alliés seraient non seulement en infériorité numérique et en armement, mais également en infériorité numérique.
Dépassé en armes ? (Les Russes) disposent de blindages, d’armes et de capteurs beaucoup plus avancés et, dans certains domaines – comme les systèmes de protection active pour se défendre contre les missiles guidés antichar (ATGM) – sont supérieurs à leurs homologues occidentaux.
Au-delà des inconvénients d’être en infériorité numérique, en marge et en armement, une multitude d’autres problèmes aggravent le problème. Premièrement, les alliés de l’OTAN et l’armée américaine apporteraient une aide immédiate limitée pour compenser ces désavantages. Les alliés européens ont suivi l’exemple américain en réduisant le blindage et en optimisant leurs forces restantes pour des missions « hors zone » comme l’Afghanistan. Ainsi, la Grande-Bretagne poursuit ses projets de retrait de ses dernières troupes d’Allemagne, tandis que l’Allemagne réduit ses effectifs.
Cela montre que – malgré les fulminations délirantes des généraux de fauteuil à la télévision par câble braillant d’infliger une « défaite stratégique » à la Russie – cela n’arrivera pas. La Russie a l’avantage dans pratiquement tous les domaines en termes de puissance de feu, de main-d’œuvre, de préparation au combat et de matériel. Ils disposent également d’une capacité industrielle inégalée en Occident. Voici comment Schryver l’a résumé :
Il n’y a pas eu d’augmentation significative de la production d’armements dans l’Occident collectif, et il n’y en aura pas de si tôt. L’Europe a été effectivement démilitarisée, et les États-Unis sont gravement épuisés et effectivement désindustrialisés….
En dehors de la population désespérément propagée des soi-disant « démocraties occidentales », personne au monde ne croit que la Russie semble « douce » à l’heure actuelle. Au lieu de cela, ils se rendent compte que les Russes ont complètement déjoué les plans de l’empire et révélé sa faiblesse…
L’Occident n’a aucun avantage. L’OTAN est une coquille vide…. Je suis totalement convaincu qu’une force expéditionnaire de l’OTAN en Ukraine serait massacrée AU MOINS aussi complètement que l’AFU l’a été, et très probablement BEAUCOUP PIRE, et BEAUCOUP PLUS RAPIDEMENT…. Will Schryver, Twitter
Le voilà en noir sur blanc : l’Occident « désindustrialisé » est une coquille vide qui n’a aucune chance de l’emporter dans une guerre terrestre interarmes avec la Russie. Malgré cela, Washington est déterminé à poursuivre son plan insensé qui rapproche le monde de l’Armageddon tout en semant la ruine du peuple américain.
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Every Escalation Brings Washington Closer to Defeat in Ukraine – by Mike Whitney – 4 June 2024
• 2,700 WORDS •
There is a vast difference between “not winning” and “losing” a war. In the case of Ukraine, “not winning” means that President Zelensky and his handlers in Washington choose to pursue a negotiated settlement that would allow Russia to keep the territory it captured during the war while addressing Moscow’s modest security demands. (Note—Ukraine must reject any intention of joining NATO)
On the other hand, “losing” the war means that the US and NATO continue on the same path they are today—pumping lethal weapons, trainers and long-range missiles systems into Ukraine—hoping that the Russian offensive is progressively weakened so Ukraine can prevail on the battlefield. This alternate path—which amounts to ‘wishful thinking’—is the path to “losing” the war.
Unlike the “not winning” the war scenario, “losing” the war will have a catastrophic effect on the United States and its future. It would mean that Washington had been unable to prevent a Russian military incursion into Europe which is NATO’s primary raison d’etre. It would challenge the idea that the US is capable of acting as the guarantor of regional security which is the role the US has enjoyed since the end of WW2. The perception of a US defeat at the hands of Russia would unavoidably trigger a re-evaluation of current security relations leading to the dissolution of NATO and, very possibly, the EU as well. Simply put, losing the war would be a disaster. Here’s how Colonel Daniel Davis summed it up just last week:
“We can’t let Russia win.”
I’ve heard that throughout the entire 2-plus years of the war. But here’s what I’m saying: If you keep going down this path—ignoring all the realities we keep talking about—not only will Russia win, we’ll lose. And I assure you if you thought it was bad to ‘let Putin win’—which means having a negotiated settlement in which Putin ends up with territory he didn’t start the war with—…But if you say that—because I don’t want that to happen, I’m going to keep fighting—that implies you think you can win. But if you can’t win, then the likely outcome is that you lose even more, and that’s what’s really going to hurt our credibility because, imagine if the whole force of NATO was shown to be unable to stop Russia from winning? Now our credibility is damaged far worse than having a negotiated settlement Colonel Daniel Davis, You Tube
So, while “not winning” is not the perfect outcome, it is vastly superior to “losing” which would severely undermine the Alliance’s credibility, greatly erode Washington’s power in Europe, and force the US to rethink its plans for projecting power into Central Asia. (pivot to Asia) In short, a US defeat by Russia in Ukraine would be a serious body-blow to the “rules-based order” and the denouement of the American Century.
So, there’s a lot at stake for the United States. Unfortunately, there is no real debate in elite power circles about the best way forward. And, that’s because the decision has already been made, and that decision hews closely to the maximalist views articulated in an article at the Atlantic Council titled “NATO at 75: The Alliance’s future lies in Ukraine’s victory against Russia”
NATO will mark its seventy-fifth anniversary on April 4 as history’s most successful military alliance. However, i ts future as a credible deterrent to aggression now lies in the success or failure of Russia’s unjust and brutal invasion of Ukraine…..
Allied leaders have unambiguously bound NATO’s security to this war. NATO summits have repeatedly condemned the invasion and demanded that Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its forces and equipment from the territory of Ukraine.”
And the rhetoric has escalated. French President Emmanuel Macron recently described the war as “existential” for Europe. “If Russia wins this war, Europe’s credibility would be reduced to zero,” Macron said…
If the upcoming Washington summit is to inspire continued confidence in NATO’s credibility, and thus its future, then t he Alliance must take action to place Ukraine onto a clear path to victory…
Allied leaders must unambiguously endorse Ukraine’s war objectives—that is, total territorial reconstitution back to the nation’s 1991 borders. Anything short of that is a disillusioning signal to Ukraine and encouragement to Putin to sustain his invasion. NATO at 75: The Alliance’s future lies in Ukraine’s victory against Russia, atlanticcouncil.org
Repeat: Allied leaders must unambiguously endorse Ukraine’s war objectives—that is, total territorial reconstitution back to the nation’s 1991 borders. Anything short of that is a disillusioning signal to Ukraine and encouragement to Putin to sustain his invasion.
As we said earlier, this maximalist view of NATO’s objectives is nothing more than wishful thinking. The anemic UAF is not going to drive the Russian Army out of Ukraine nor are they going to win the war. Even so, the views above are shared by the vast majority of foreign policy elites who have not adjusted their thinking so that it corresponds to Ukraine’s bloody battlefield losses. Here’s more from a Foreign Affairs op-ed:
The Biden administration and its European counterparts have failed to articulate their endgame for this war. Three years into the conflict, Western planning continues to be strategically backwards—aiding Kiev has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close.
But the “theory of victory” presented by Zagorodnyuk and Cohen to replace the strategic malaise in which the west finds itself is, remarkably, even more dangerous and ill-conceived than the status quo. The authors call on the White House to come out in full-throated support of Kiev’s war aims: namely, ejecting all Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders including Crimea, subjecting Russian officials to war crimes tribunals, extracting reparations from Moscow, and providing Ukraine with “long-term security arrangements.” Put differently, the West must commit itself to nothing short of Russia’s total and unconditional battlefield defeat.
How is Ukraine, with its battered military, collapsing demography, and an economy entirely reliant on Western cash infusions, to accomplish this lofty task? By doing more of the same, but on a larger scale. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old, The American Conservative
The point we’re trying to make is that this type of delusional thinking is virtually universal among US foreign policy elites none of whom are prepared to accept the fundamental reality on the ground. As a result, there is no chance that the Biden administration will make a course-correction or make any attempt to prevent a direct clash between the two nuclear-armed adversaries, NATO and Russia.
So, how would a reasonable person approach the current conflict in Ukraine?
They’d look for a way to end it ASAP while inflicting as little damage as possible on the losing side. Here’s what Marymount Professor Mark Episkopos had to say in the same article above:
Western leaders are long overdue in articulating a coherent theory of victory—one that grapples with the trade-offs and limitations confronting Kiev and its backers rather than sweeping them aside in pursuit of maximalist battlefield objectives that are increasingly detached from realities on the ground. This does not mean resigning oneself to Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Yet it will require policymakers to acknowledge that there is no viable pathway to Russia’s unconditional defeat and to shape their thinking around war termination accordingly. It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old, The American Conservative
Bottom line: A deal can be made that will minimize the overall damage to the United States and Ukraine, but it’s up to US diplomats and foreign policy elites to identify areas of common ground so an agreement can be reached that will avoid an even bigger catastrophe.
The problem with Professor Episkopos recommendation, is that it is an imminently reasonable suggestion which means it will be dismissed out-of-hand by the warhawks who set policy. Even now, US powerbrokers are certain that the war can be won if they just throw caution-to-the-wind and apply more raw, military force. That ought to do it. (they think)
This is the kind of flawed reasoning that drives the US war machine. Policy elites honestly believe that if they fully embrace a ridiculous platitude like “We can’t lose”, that somehow the reality of superior Russian firepower, manpower, logistical support and industrial capability will vanish into thin air and the “exceptional” nation will prevail once again. But that’s not going to happen.
Okay. So, what will happen?
For that, we turn to military analyst Will Schryver and a recent post on Twitter:
It… must be understood that the US/NATO could not assemble, equip, send, and sustain even a dozen competent combat brigades to engage the Russians in Ukraine.
Do you realize what would happen to 50k NATO combat troops — none of whom have EVER experienced high-intensity warfare — if they were suddenly thrust, with necessarily deficient leadership and coordination, into the Ukraine battlefield?
They would be mercilessly slaughtered. Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter
“Mercilessly slaughtered”? That doesn’t sound very hopeful.
Even so, France has already announced that it will send military trainers to Ukraine, and others will certainly follow. At the same time more lethal weaponry, particularly long-range missiles and F-16s are already en route and will likely be used sometime in the near future. But, will it matter? Will the provision of new weapons and combat troops turn the tide and prevent the collapse of the Ukrainian army? Here’s Schryver again:
Why should the Russians object if the US/NATO sends more of its scant stockpiles of short-range ballistic and longer-range cruise missiles? The success rates for ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles has been abysmal, and steadily decreases with the passage of time. They are strategically meaningless. And there is effectively zero replenishment capacity!
Why should the Russians object if the US/NATO sends a squadron — or even five — of antiquated F-16s to Ukraine. Yes, of course, they would be piloted by NATO “volunteers”, and they might even achieve a handful of overhyped and fleeting “successes” in the early going. But if they actually attempt to mount serious sorties over the Ukraine battlefield, old F-16s with inadequate logistics and sustainment are going to have a life span numbered in mere HOURS. Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter
Is Schryver right? Will these prospective long-range missile strikes on targets inside Russia merely be pinprick attacks that Putin will ignore while his troops continue to crush Ukrainian forces along the 800-mile Line of Contact? And should Putin welcome the introduction of US/NATO “ground troops” into Ukraine to face the Russian army? Will that actually bring the war to a swifter end? Here’s Schryver one more time:
At the rate this whole Ukraine debacle is going, essentially all European-based military power… is going to be attrited to “combat-ineffective” for at least a decade, and probably more. If I were the Russians, I would view that objective as the summum bonum (“The highest good”) to be achieved as a result of this war, and I would be loath to interrupt the Masters of Empire while in the process of handing it to me on a silver platter….
So, if I’m Gerasimov, I would say, “Bring ’em on! Bleeding the Beast, Will Schryver, Twitter
The furor over the use of NATO-provided long-range missiles (and deployment of F-16s and French trainers) only diverts attention from the inescapable fact that NATO is going to be defeated by the Russia Armed Forces if they enter the war. So, a wise man would pursue a negotiated settlement now before things get out of hand. But that is not what our leaders are doing, in fact, they are doing the exact opposite and escalating at every turn.
So, let’s examine the facts a bit more thoroughly. Check out this summary analysis by the pros at War on the Rocks:
When asked two weeks ago in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee whether the Army was “outranged” by any adversary, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said: “Yes … the ones in Europe, really Russia. We don’t like it, we don’t want it, but yes, technically [we are] outranged, outgunned on the ground.”
Given Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, this is sobering testimony. But is it accurate? Unfortunately, yes: Nearly two years of extensive wargaming and analysis shows that if Russia were to conduct a short-warning attack against the Baltic States, Moscow’s forces could roll to the outskirts of the Estonian capital of Tallinn and the Latvian capital of Riga in 36 to 60 hours. In such a scenario, the United States and its allies would not only be outranged and outgunned, but also outnumbered….
Outgunned? (The Russians) have much more advanced armor, weapons, and sensors, and in some areas — such as active protection systems to defend against anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) — are superior to their Western counterparts….
Beyond the disadvantages of being outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned, a slew of other issues compounds the problem. First, NATO allies and the U.S. military would be of limited immediate help offsetting these disadvantages. European allies followed the American lead by cutting armor and optimizing their remaining forces for “out-of-area” missions like Afghanistan. Thus, Great Britain is continuing with plans to withdraw its last troops from Germany, while Germany has reduced its army from a Cold War level of 10 heavy divisions to the equivalent of two.
But it’s not just the numbers here that matter. The United States and its partners have also steadily reduced the infrastructure necessary to support any kind of substantial deterrent or defensive effort in Europe. Today, there are no U.S. division or corps headquarters forward-based on the continent, nor any Army aviation, engineer, and associated logistics brigades….
Russia fields perhaps the most formidable array of surface-to-air missile (SAM) defenses in the world. Operating from locations within Russian territory, these SAMs far outrange existing defense-suppression weapons and present a credible threat to U.S. and allied airpower that would be costly and time-consuming to counter….
Today NATO is indeed outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned by Russia in Europe and beset by a number of compounding factors that make the situation worse….
A war with Russia would be fraught with escalatory potential from the moment the first shot was fired; and generations born outside the shadow of nuclear Armageddon would suddenly be reintroduced to fears thought long dead and buried. Outnumbered, Outranged, and Outgunned: How Russia Defeats NATO, War On The Rocks
What does this analysis show?
It shows that—despite the delusional fulminations of armchair generals on cable TV braying about inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia—it’s not going to happen. Russia has the edge in virtually every area of firepower, manpower, combat-readiness and material. They also have the industrial capability that is unmatched in the West. Here’s how Schryver summed it up:
There has been no meaningful increase in armaments production in the collective west, and there won’t be anytime soon. Europe has been effectively demilitarized, and the US is severely depleted and effectively deindustrialized….
Outside of the hopelessly propagandized populace of the so-called “western democracies”, no one in the world believes Russia looks “meek” at this point in time. Instead, they realize the Russians have completely defeated the empire’s plans and exposed its weakness….
The west has no advantage whatsoever. NATO is an empty shell…. I am utterly convinced a NATO expeditionary force in Ukraine would be massacred AT LEAST as comprehensively as the AFU has been, and quite likely MUCH WORSE, and MUCH MORE RAPIDLY…. Will Schryver, Twitter
There it is in black and white: The “deindustrialized” West is an empty shell that has no chance of prevailing in a combined-arms ground war with Russia. Even so, Washington is determined to proceed with its lunatic plan pushing the world closer to Armageddon while bringing ruin on the American people.
Deaf and Blind: The Maladies of American Diplomats – by Patrick Lawrence – 2 June 2024
• 1,800 WORDS •
Here is a modest proposal, nothing too radical, just good sense. Turn over Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to the Iranian authorities on the understanding the two statesmen, very loosely defined, would spend 444 days at the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran. Let’s think of it as a reenactment.
Said premises, long a mess of barbed wire, weeds, brambles, mold and anti–American graffiti, is now a museum. The Den of Espionage, as it is called, is dedicated to the shameful history of U.S.–Iranian relations leading up to that fateful day, Jan. 16, 1979, when the shah was deposed by a nation that had had enough of him. Those unkind Iranians had to rub it in: The old graffiti is now covered over with mocking murals featuring Mickey Mouse and McDonald’s.
All the better, I say. My theory is that the Biden regime’s secretary of state and national security adviser would return from their year and 79 days in the embassy—sitting on the floor, sleeping in the offices, washing their socks in bathroom sinks, the whole nine—transformed almost beatifically into… into statesmen of high purpose and deep insight, the two being devoid of both as we have them now.
I am inspired to these thoughts by a good obituary The New York Times ran in its May 18 editions on the death of a good man named Moorhead Kennedy. Moorhead Kennedy’s blood ran very blue: Upper East Side childhood, Groton, Princeton, Harvard Law, a career in the Foreign Service. Having learned Arabic, he was something of a Middle East man, his assignments over the years including Yemen and Lebanon. And then destiny placed its gentle hand on Kennedy’s shoulder: He was on a temporary assignment as economics attaché in Tehran when the fecal matter hit the fan.
And so Kennedy was among those 52 Americans—diplomats, others in civil service jobs—who spent the famous 444 days captives of militant but nonviolent, I would say altogether righteous students who had broken down the embassy gates and climbed over its walls. They were of many stripes, secular and religious, but they were all repelled by the shah’s coercive insistence on Westernizing Iran in the worst kind of way—“Westoxicity,” as it came to be called. Many of them spent their days poring through the embassy files and diplomatic cables to reconstruct just how, covertly and criminally, the U.S. had been attempting to overthrow the Iranian government for the second time in 26 years.
I recall years later seeing black-and-white news footage of the hostages as they filed up the stairs to board an Air Algeria flight home on Jan. 20, 1981. One of the diplomats turned back a few steps short of the cabin door, shouted something the film did not record, and gave the Islamic Republic and all its citizens a great big middle finger. Ah, yes, I recall thinking, with what dignity are we represented to the world.
Moorhead Kennedy would have had as much reason to vent his anger as that vulgarian on the stairs. He was blindfolded and tied to a chair when students filed into his office. But something happened to Kennedy during the long months that followed. He began talking to those who had stormed the embassy. And most of all, he began listening to them. I have long argued that the first signs that an imperium is in decline are when it goes blind and deaf; it can neither see others for who and what they are nor hear what they have to say. Kennedy proved to suffer from neither of these symptoms.
As he later recounted his experience in an interview with a small public-affairs journal in Connecticut, Kennedy seemed to have brought a singularly open mind to what was supposed to be a brief assignment filling in for an absent colleague. “I was very interested in seeing a revolution in progress,” he told a reporter from CT Mirror in 2016. “It was a very fruitful time until, all of a sudden, I heard a shout from the Marines, ‘They’re coming over the wall!’ And then a whole new experience began.”
There is a wonderful photograph of Kennedy atop The Times’s obit, taken in the embassy during his captivity. It shows him sitting at his desk, calmly reading with his fingers to his chin. On the floor beside him are two colleagues whose beards make them look like they are among Kennedy’s captors. On his desk you see the paraphernalia of makeshift meals: a jar of mustard, a jar of Sanka repurposed as a sugar bowl, a box of Cocoa Krispies. I suspect Kennedy’s apparent composure had something to do with that unshakable aplomb you often find in American bluebloods.
It is odd now to think you are looking at a man midway through a life-altering metamorphosis from which he had the integrity never to turn back. It was in the embassy that Kennedy began to reflect on what he was doing as an American foreign service officer and to conclude that what he was doing was emphatically not what he ought to have been doing because the nation he served had it all wrong. “Mr. Kennedy’s thoughts on U.S. foreign policy,” as The Times’s obit explains, “were partly shaped by discussions with his captors.”
“Those Americans who applauded the Westernizing efforts of the shah had little notion of how his programs had disrupted lives at all levels of society,” Kennedy wrote, when he looked back later, in The Ayatollah in the Cathedral: Reflections of a Hostage (Hill & Wang, 1986). “Many Iranians, disoriented, forced to think in new and strange ways, to perform unfamiliar tasks in accordance with unfamiliar norms, humiliated by their inadequacies as they tried to behave as Westerners, and disinclined to become proximate Westerners, second-class at best, sought above all for a renewed sense of their own identity.”
There is something brilliant, in a certain way almost miraculous, in the deep, personal transformation implicit in those observations. Kennedy was telling us he learned while in the embassy a lesson I have long considered the most fundamental that our time requires of us but one too few of us even attempt: This is the capacity to see from the perspectives of others by way of seeing them with clear eyes and hearing them with open ears.
That “whole new experience” when Iranian students burst into his office does not seem to have ended until Kennedy died at 93 on May 3 in Bar Harbor, that waspy redoubt along the Maine coast. Upon his return to the States, he acted swiftly once the ticker-tape parades were over and the Klieg lights were off. He resigned from the Foreign Service without hesitation and turned himself into a dedicated, admirably insightful critic of U.S. foreign policy, bringing to bear his years of experience on the inside.
He lectured widely, interviewed often, and wrote extensively. As soon as he left the Foreign Service he founded the Cathedral Peace Institute at St. John the Divine on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the longtime home of many an activist in international affairs. The Times quotes an appearance he made on a public-access television show in 1986, when his book came out:
When it comes to foreign affairs, the last thing in the world an American is willing to do is to think or to try to think what it would be like to be a Soviet, to be an Arab, to be an Iranian, to be an Indian. And the result is that we think of the world as a projection of ourselves, and we think that others must be thinking along the lines we’re thinking. And when they don’t, we’re troubled by it.
This is luminous thinking. Kennedy did not limit his concerns to this or that mistaken policy—we got it wrong in Lebanon, in Angola, or wherever the world over. I value him in part because he took on the psychological deformations that have so much to do with what has made American foreign policy a rolling disaster since the 1945 victories and Washington’s pursuit of “global leadership,” that polite term for aggressive hegemony.
Here he is on what has become a familiar obsession within the policy cliques since his time in captivity began 45 years ago:
The elements in the Arab world and in Iran are reacting against us through another kind of war—a low-intensity war called terrorism. And I think it is a way of trying to make us understand, or at least be aware, that they have a different point of view.
When I read this remark my mind went immediately to that intellectual charlatan of the Bush II years, Richard Perle, who argued with supreme and consequential stupidity following the 2001 attacks, “Any attempt to understand terrorism is an attempt to justify it.” And then I thought of the discourse concerning Hamas: One must call Hamas “terrorist” at all times and without exception and in every mention so as to avoid all understanding, just as Perle insisted.
The line of thinking we call perspectivism—the recognition that none of us has a monopoly on truth, “values” or interpretations of reality—has been around since Nietzsche pondered it in the late 19th century. Moorhead Kennedy is what it looks like in practice, on the ground, reading at a desk while captive.
How impoverished have we made ourselves since Kennedy’s time. How vast a distance lies between his thinking and the ideological non-thinking of Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. They are guilty on a daily basis of every sin Kennedy identified.
The day before The Times published its Moorhead Kennedy obituary, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, reflected on the state of U.S.–Russian relations in an interview he gave TASS, the Russian news agency, in mid–May. “They live in a bubble,” he said of the Biden regime’s policy cliques, “and do not perceive outside signals that go against their preconceptions.” He went on to say of the Atlantic nations as a whole, “We feel not an ounce of trust, which triggers political and even emotional rejection.” Isn’t this a good description, albeit coincidental, of how the Iranian students thought and felt toward the U.S. when they climbed over the wall and burst through the gates in 1979?
Send Blinken and Sullivan to the Den of Espionage, I say. Wouldn’t there be some slim chance the bubble they share would burst? And that maybe they would come home with a perspectivist grasp of the world they might suddenly see and hear, and they would stop running America’s standing in the world straight into the ground?
……………………………………….
(Republished from Scheerpost)
US: Washington DC Protest To Defend The Palestinians – 8 June 2024
Defend The Palestinians – Stop The Israeli War Machine – Resist The Jewish Police State
Pourquoi les Russes soutiennent toujours la guerre – par John P. Ruehl – juin 2024
Le président russe Vladimir Poutine est arrivé à Pékin pour un voyage de deux jours le 15 mai 2024 et a été accueilli avec un accueil rouge par le président chinois Xi Jinping. Les deux dirigeants ont promis une «nouvelle ère» pour la relation Russie-Chine, s’inscrivant sur leur «partenariat sans limites» frappé juste avant l’invasion de l’Ukraine en 2022 en Russie. En tant que premier voyage étranger de Poutine depuis sa réélection en mars, la visite a présenté sa stature durable et la Russie au milieu de la guerre en Ukraine.
Malgré les élections de la Russie en 2024 marquées par la répression systémique de partis alternatifs sérieux et de candidats et des décennies de déclarations effrontées sur la démocratie «gérée» de la Russie, Poutine a capturé 87% des voix par une participation des électeurs record. Even with some self-censorship and a slight drop in approval, the Russian public still largely backs the war, despite a largely static frontline, the severance of ties with Europe, declines in living standards, and the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands of Soldats russes. Le nombre stupéfiant de victimes se reflète en Ukraine, une nation que Poutine et de nombreux Russes considèrent comme une nation fraternelle et la culture mère de la Russie.
En revanche, le soutien domestique américain aux guerres en Afghanistan et en Iraqbegan refuse considérablement quelques années après le début des conflits, et les prédictions d’un effondrement du soutien public russe à la guerre ont émergé peu de temps après son début. Pourtant, bien que les coûts de la guerre de la Russie en Ukraine continuent de dégénérer et cela semble loin d’être conclue, plusieurs raisons ont obligé les citoyens russes à continuer de soutenir la guerre et le président qui l’a initié.
L’opposition à la guerre en Russie est confrontée à des défis uniques qui ne sont pas rencontrés aux États-Unis, mais convaincre une population que la guerre est inévitable est essentielle pour tout gouvernement de soutenir un effort de guerre. Le Kremlin a formulé les actions militaires de la nation comme un noble combat pour sauver les Russes ethniques et les russes dans l’Ukraine d’un régime fasciste à Kiev – un récit qui résonne avec de nombreux Russes et l’histoire du pays pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La mise en évidence des restrictions croissantes sur la langue russe en Ukraine favorise ce message, tandis que l’excuse de la Russie qu’ils répondaient aux cris pour obtenir de l’aide en Ukraine fait écho à leur invasion de Tchécoslovaquie en 1968. Les médias russes décrivent également leurs forces comme minimisant les victimes civiles, car l’Ukraine est accusée d’avoir ciblé des civils en Russie, et l’incapacité de l’Ukraine à organiser des élections prévues en 2024 a été utilisée pour remettre en question la légitimité du président Zelensky.
En dépeignant l’Ukraine comme la culture mère de la Russie, Poutine a jeté l’invasion à travers une lentille historique et patriotique. Le conflit est considéré comme une question intérieure de réaffirmation de la domination russe sur la patrie ancestrale qui a donné naissance à la langue russe, à la religion et aux origines politiques, contre un gouvernement ukrainien illégitime qui occupe actuellement le pays. Le nationalisme russe peut être rallié en invoquant l’unité ethnique, le patrimoine territorial et la nécessité de rectifier la séparation de l’Ukraine de Moscou, ce qui facilite la réduction de la souveraineté de l’Ukraine.
La Russie a également dévié ses violations de la Charte des Nations Unies contre la non-agression en se décrivant comme un parti lésé, contraint la guerre par l’Occident dirigé par les États-Unis et ses états vassaux, le sentiment reflété dans les sondages nationaux et soutenus par des chiffres notables comme la Slovaquie principale de la Slovaquie Le ministre Robert Fico, qui en janvier 2024 a déclaré que l’Ukraine était sous le contrôle total de Washington. Le 1er mai 2024, une exposition d’armes, de véhicules et d’équipements occidentaux capturés depuis le début de la guerre a ouvert ses portes à Moscou – un peu comme Kiev en mai 2022 qui montrait des équipements russes capturés. Le Kremlin relie tout à la guerre, y compris la récente attaque par Isis à Moscou. En revanche, le public américain a de plus en plus commencé à croire que les dirigeants américains les avaient induits en erreur dans la guerre contre le terrorisme, en particulier la guerre en Irak, ce qui aurait pu être évité.
Le soutien des Russes à la guerre s’est manifesté comme l’aboutissement de décennies de «mobilisation patriotique» qui a eu lieu depuis le premier mandat de Poutine. La culture du sentiment nationaliste, omniprésent dans les médias, la culture et la politique, s’est considérablement intensifié depuis l’invasion. L’identité russe est de plus en plus liée au besoin existentiel de protéger les Russes à l’étranger, de protéger la Russie de l’OTAN et de renforcer le statut de la Russie comme une grande puissance.
Préparer et instiller la confiance dans la capacité des forces armées russes à maintenir un conflit majeur est en cours depuis des décennies. Russian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Russia’s restive region of Chechnya in the 2000s and supported a limited conflict in support of two restive regions in neighboring Georgia in 2008. Subsequently, Russian forces seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supported a limited conflict in support of La région frontalière réalisée de l’Ukraine avec la Russie. En 2015, ils ont lancé une opération militaire majeure pour sauver le président syrien Assad en 2015. Avec le succès relatif en Syrie, l’escalade importante du conflit de la Russie en Ukraine en 2022 n’a pas été une surprise. Cela contraste avec les défaillances perçues des interventions militaires occidentales au 21e siècle, ce qui fait que la confiance intérieure dans les militaires américains diminuait ainsi que l’ampleur des opérations militaires.
Pour atténuer les préoccupations intérieures résultant de la séparation des liens historiques de la Russie avec l’Europe, ainsi que de la distanciation par d’autres pays pour se conformer aux sanctions occidentales, Poutine s’est lancée dans une série de voyages étrangers pour montrer la résilience de la Russie. Les visites au Bélarus et à d’autres anciens États soviétiques en Asie centrale et au Caucase ont contribué à stabiliser son influence régionale. Les visites en Iran, en Arabie saoudite et aux Émirats arabes unis ont servi à démontrer l’influence durable de la Russie au Moyen-Orient, tandis que la Russie a également accueilli des dizaines de dirigeants étrangers du Sud mondial, ainsi que ceux de la Hongrie et de l’Autriche.
Cependant, les liens de la Russie avec la Chine forment sa relation bilatérale la plus cruciale. Malgré le déséquilibre du pouvoir, la visite de Poutine en Chine a réaffirmé la relation stratégique de Moscou avec Pékin. La capacité de la Russie à affronter les États-Unis et à collaborer avec d’autres grandes puissances offre une assurance qui a effacé une grande partie de la douleur du déclin géopolitique qui a accompagné l’effondrement soviétique.
Moscou vise également à contrer toute supériorité morale par l’Occident en Ukraine en mettant en évidence le soutien de Washington et Kiev à Israël depuis le 7 octobre. et élargir l’attrait de la Russie aux Sud mondiaux. À la suite de l’expulsion par le gouvernement nigérien des troupes américaines en mai 2024 et de l’invitation des forces russes, des images de troupes russes entrant dans la même base aérienne où le personnel militaire américain était stationné a souligné la lutte affirmée par la Russie avec les ambitions géopolitiques de l’Occident et plus larges.
En outre, les citoyens russes ont été protégés des répercussions économiques de la guerre par le biais de carburant subventionné, de nourriture et d’autres ressources essentielles. Les réserves substantielles d’or et étrangères de la Russie ont contribué à financer la guerre et ont empêché la volatilité des devises prolongés, tandis que l’imposition de prises sur les sociétés étrangères qui envisagent de quitter la Russie ont dissuadé de nombreuses entreprises occidentales de quitter ou de les avoir obligées à payer des coûts importants.
Les principaux partenaires économiques de la Russie, surtout la Chine et l’Inde, ont contribué à maintenir la stabilité des exportations et des importations de la Russie. Les sanctions occidentales n’ont pas également paralysé l’économie russe, car empêcher les ressources russes d’atteindre les marchés mondiaux entraînerait une augmentation des prix.
De plus, le public russe a également été largement épargné par la dévastation. Les attaques ukrainiennes en Russie se sont principalement limitées aux petites évasion dans les régions frontalières et aux attaques contre les installations d’énergie et de transport, et les forces ukrainiennes sont toujours liées à l’utilisation d’armes occidentales. Les attaques de sabotage en Russie ont également augmenté, mais la situation est gérable.
Contrairement aux citoyens ukrainiens, aucun civil russe ne s’est engagé avec force à se battre. La mobilisation partielle de 2022 a appelé les réservistes, tandis que les modifications récentes apportées aux lois ont signifié que la Russie a été plus facilement en mesure d’offrir des contrats généreux aux conscrits annuels peu de temps après la fin de leur formation. Par rapport aux vidéos de conscription forcée en Ukraine, les médias russes peuvent affirmer qu’il n’utilise que des bénévoles et ceux qui font déjà partie des forces armées.
Les soldats russes blessés, ainsi que les familles de soldats russes décédés en service, reçoivent une indemnisation substantielle. Bien que le paiement soit souvent retardé, les antécédents de la plupart des soldats russes signifient que ces fonds peuvent changer la vie. L’utilisation de prisonniers dans des opérations militaires particulièrement périlleuses a également protégé des soldats russes réguliers, Ukraine uniquement en considérant cette pratique plus tôt cette année.
Néanmoins, des dizaines de milliers de soldats russes ont été tués et des centaines de milliers de plus gravement blessés. Cela teste l’hypothèse des victimes, qui stipule que la volonté du public de rester engagée dans une intervention militaire diminue à mesure que les victimes montent. La guerre de 10 ans de l’Union soviétique en Afghanistan a vu 15 000 soldats soviétiques tués et a finalement contribué à la chute du pays, tandis que la guerre en Irak profondément impopulaire a vu 4 500 décès de soldats américains et a vu la popularité de l’administration Bush diminuer considérablement.
Sans aucun doute, le gouvernement russe déforme les personnalités officielles. Pourtant, il est crucial de contextualiser les pertes de la Russie en Ukraine dans le contexte de l’histoire récente. La pandémie Covid-19 a remporté plus de 400 000 vies russes, dépassant de loin les victimes en Ukraine.
En outre, l’estomac du public russe face à de telles pertes importantes peut être influencée par le grand nombre de décès de russes éminents depuis le début de la guerre. Dans les médias russes, la guerre et ses répercussions ont montré que même les individus les plus influents du pays peuvent être tués et faire en sorte que leurs actifs contribuent à un sentiment de sacrifice collectif au milieu du conflit.
Au milieu du chaos de la guerre, des dizaines d’oligarques russes et de figures politiques ont été tués dans des circonstances suspectes à la fois en Russie et à l’étranger, dans un établissement public des scores, de l’opportunisme et de la punition du Kremlin pour la désobéissance. Un jour après que les forces russes sont entrées en Ukraine, le corps d’Alexander Tyulyakov, un cadre supérieur de la sécurité d’entreprise de Gazprom, a été retrouvé accroché dans son garage. Ravil Maganov, président du conseil d’administration du géant du pétrole russe, Lukoil, serait tombé d’une fenêtre de l’hôpital de Moscou en septembre 2022. En décembre, l’homme d’affaires Vladimir Bidenov est décédé de problèmes cardiaques à l’hôtel Sai International en Inde – deux jours plus tard, son associé associé et Le député de l’Assemblée législative de l’oblast de Vladimir, Pavel Antov, est tombé par la fenêtre du même hôtel.
Bien que la mort d’oligarques et de politiciens puisse offrir un certain réconfort aux soldats russes ordinaires servant en Ukraine, il y a également eu une perte importante de responsables militaires de haut rang. Certains, comme le lieutenant-général Vladimir Sviridov, ont également été tués dans des circonstances suspectes. Cependant, la nécessité pour les responsables militaires russes de haut rang de rester à proximité des lignes de front, en raison d’une structure militaire de décision plus descendante et du risque d’écoute électronique des conseillers ukrainiens et occidentaux, contribue à leur taux de victime plus élevé.
Parallèlement à des centaines d’autres décès de haut niveau, la Russie a confirmé que sept officiers généraux avaient été tués en Ukraine d’ici 2024, Ukraine affirmant que plus de 14 avaient été tués au début de 2023. La dernière fois qu’un général américain a été tué au combat, c’était en 2014 lorsqu’un militaire afghan a ouvert le feu sur le personnel de l’OTAN à Kaboul; Avant cela, aucun général américain n’avait perdu la vie au combat depuis la guerre du Vietnam. Avec cette toile de fond du sacrifice et de la solidarité parmi les élites russes, l’effet «rallye-rallye» peut se maintenir plus longtemps que prévu.
Les Russes semblent croire que le temps et la démographie sont de leur côté. Selon un sondage de mars 2024 du Russia’s Levada Center, après des décennies d’émigration, la part des Russes exprimant le désir de déménager à l’étranger a atteint un record, en partie en réponse à beaucoup de ceux qui souhaitent partir. Néanmoins, Finion, une société de déménagement basée à Moscou, a déclaré que 40 à 45% des Russes qui ont fui à l’étranger étaient depuis revenus, motivés par des facteurs tels que la réduction des travaux à distance, les problèmes de visa, les craintes de conscription réduites et le désir général de retour.
Et tandis que des dizaines de milliers de soldats russes ont péri, ainsi que des milliers de Russes ethniques dans des régions occupées de l’Ukraine, des millions de personnes vivant dans les territoires occupés ont déjà été incorporées dans les 144 millions de citoyens préexistants de la Fédération de Russie. À l’inverse, l’Ukraine, avec 37 millions de personnes avant la guerre, a fait face à une population exode aggravant déjà la démographie.
Au début de 2024, le sentiment dominant était que la Russie avait gagné un fragile supérieur. La victoire, bien que potentiellement pyrrhique, semble de plus en plus probable, si elle est défini sans danger, en Russie. Pourtant, alors que le conflit s’éloigne, soutenu par une économie russe de plus en plus dirigée vers la guerre, la poursuite de la victoire peut décliner alors que les victimes et les autres coûts montent. Les angoisses du Kremlin se concentrent désormais sur les pays occidentaux, dirigés par le Royaume-Uni, la France et la Pologne, permettant à l’Ukraine d’utiliser des armes occidentales en Russie, ce qui ramener la guerre aux civils russes et aux infrastructures internes.
Tout en projetant une image de sang-froid au public, les tensions mijotent incontestablement dans le Kremlin. Les estimations concernant la capacité de la Russie à maintenir la guerre dans son état actuel oscillent généralement environ deux à trois ans. Pourtant, un soutien inébranlable à Poutine, associé à l’absence d’alternatives viables, peut étendre indéfiniment son fort engagement personnel à la guerre. Alors que la Russie semble capable et déterminée à poursuivre la guerre, son avenir incertain continuera de tester l’enthousiasme tacite du public russe.
La volonté de Poutine de poursuivre la guerre est considérée comme quelque chose à exploiter en Occident. Les décideurs occidentaux ont vu la Russie commettre de plus en plus ses ressources intérieures dans le conflit, ainsi que récemment de l’appeler une «opération militaire spéciale» à une guerre. L’augmentation constante de la capacité technique de l’Ukraine à lutter contre une guerre d’attrition continuera de porter l’arsenal soviétique de la Russie et le déploiement d’armes à l’étranger, démontrant la faiblesse de la production russe et des systèmes d’armes avancés. En provoquant une défaite russe, on espère qu’une deuxième convulsion majeure dans l’ancienne Union soviétique réduira davantage l’influence géopolitique de Moscou. La campagne militaire prolongée de la Russie et la stratégie de l’Occident pour prolonger le conflit grâce à la gestion de l’escalade continueront de donner un péage catastrophique sur la vie et les infrastructures ukrainiennes.
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Why Russians Still Support the War – by John P. Ruehl – June 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing for a two-day trip on May 15, 2024, and was greeted with a red-carpet welcome by Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders pledged a “new era” for the Russia-China relationship, building on their “no limits partnership” struck just before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As Putin’s first foreign trip since winning reelection in March, the visit showcased his and Russia’s enduring stature amid the war in Ukraine.
Despite Russia’s 2024 election being marked by systemic repression of serious alternative parties and candidates and decades of brazen statements about Russia’s “managed” democracy, Putin captured 87 percent of the vote from a record-high voter turnout. Even with some self-censorship and a slight drop in approval, the Russian public still largely backs the war, despite a largely static frontline, the severance of ties with Europe, declines in living standards, and the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. The staggering number of casualties is mirrored in Ukraine, a nation that Putin and many Russians consider a brotherly nation and the mother culture of Russia.
In contrast, U.S. domestic support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraqbegan to decline markedly a couple of years after the conflicts began, and predictions of a collapse in Russian public support for the war emerged soon after it began. Yet although the costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine continue to escalate and it appears far from conclusion, several reasons have compelled Russian citizens to continue supporting the war and the President who initiated it.
Opposition to war in Russia faces unique challenges not encountered in the U.S., but convincing a population that war is unavoidable is essential for any government to sustain a war effort. The Kremlin has framed the nation’s military actions as a noble fight to save ethnic Russians and Russian speakersin Ukraine from a fascist regime in Kyiv—a narrative that resonates with many Russians and the country’s history in World War II. Highlighting growing restrictions on the Russian language in Ukraine furthers this message, while Russia’s excuse that they were answering cries for help in Ukraine echoes their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Russian media also portrays their forces as minimizing civilian casualties, as Ukraine is accused of targeting civilians in Russia, and Ukraine’s failure to hold scheduled elections in 2024 has been used to question President Zelensky’s legitimacy.
By portraying Ukraine as the mother culture of Russia, Putin has cast the invasion through a historical and patriotic lens. The conflict is framed as an internal matter of reasserting Russian dominance over the ancestral homeland that birthed Russian language, religion, and political origins, against an illegitimate Ukrainian government that currently occupies the country. Russian nationalism can be rallied by invoking ethnic unity, territorial patrimony, and the need to rectify Ukraine’s separation from Moscow, making it easier to dismiss Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Russia has also deflected its violations of the UN Charter against non-aggression by depicting itself as an aggrieved party, forced into war by the U.S.-led West and its vassal states, sentiment reflected in national polls, and supported by notable figures like Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, who in January 2024 stated that Ukraine was under the complete control of Washington. On May 1, 2024, an exhibition of captured Western weapons, vehicles, and equipment since the start of the war opened in Moscow—much like Kyiv’s in May 2022 which showed captured Russian equipment. The Kremlin connects everything to the war—including the recent attack by ISIS in Moscow. In contrast, the American public increasingly began to believe that U.S. leaders had misled them into the War on Terror, particularly the War in Iraq, which it felt could have been avoided.
Russians’ support for the war has manifested as the culmination of decades of “patriotic mobilization” that has taken place since Putin’s first term. The cultivation of nationalist sentiment, pervasive across media, culture, and politics, has intensified significantly since the invasion. The Russian identity is increasingly intertwined with the existential need to protect Russians abroad, shield Russia from NATO, and bolster Russia’s status as a great power.
Preparing and instilling confidence in the Russian armed forces’ ability to sustain a major conflict has been ongoing for decades. Russian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Russia’s restive region of Chechnya in the 2000s and supported a limited conflict in support of two restive regions in neighboring Georgia in 2008. Subsequently, Russian forces seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supported a limited conflict in support of Ukraine’s restive border region with Russia. In 2015, they launched a major military operation to rescue Syrian President Assad in 2015. With relative success in Syria, the significant escalation of Russia’s conflict in Ukraine in 2022 did not come as a surprise. This contrasts with the perceived failures of Western military interventions in the 21st Century, causing domestic confidence in the U.S. military to decline as well as the scale of the military’s operations.
To alleviate domestic concern stemming from severing Russia’s historical connections with Europe, as well as distancing by other countries to comply with Western sanctions, Putin has embarked on a series of foreign trips to show Russia’s resiliency. Visits to Belarus and other former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus have helped stabilize its regional influence. Visits to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have served to demonstrate Russia’s enduring influence in the Middle East, while Russia has also hosted dozens of foreign leaders from the Global South, as well as those of Hungary and Austria.
However, Russia’s ties with China form its most crucial bilateral relationship. Despite the power imbalance, Putin’s May visit to China reaffirmed Moscow’s strategic relationship with Beijing. Russia’s capacity to confront the U.S. and collaborate with other major powers offers reassurance that has erased much of the pain of the geopolitical decline that accompanied the Soviet collapse.
Moscow has also aimed to counter any moral superiority by the West in Ukraine by highlighting Washington’s and Kyiv’s support for Israel since October 7. Framing it as part of Russia’s confrontation with the West for a new multipolar world order, the Kremlin hopes to legitimize its policies and broaden Russia’s appeal to the Global South. Following the Nigerien government’s expulsion of U.S. troops in May 2024 and the invitation of Russian forces, images of Russian troops entering the same airbase where U.S. military personnel were stationed further underscored Russia’s assertive struggle with the West and wider geopolitical ambitions.
Furthermore, Russian citizens have been shielded from the economic repercussions of the war through subsidized fuel, food, and other essential resources. Russia’s substantial gold and foreign reserves have helped fund the war and prevented extended currency volatility, while the imposition of hefty penalties on foreign companies considering leaving Russia has deterred many Western firms from exiting or compelled them to pay significant costs.
Russia’s major economic partners, most importantly China and India, have helped maintain stability in Russia’s exports and imports. Western sanctions have also by design not crippled the Russian economy, as preventing Russian resources from reaching global markets would cause prices to spike.
Moreover, the Russian public has also been largely spared from devastation. Ukrainian attacks within Russia have mostly been limited to small flareups in border regions and attacks on energy and transport facilities, and Ukrainian forces are still restricted from using Western weapons. Sabotage attacks in Russia have also risen, but the situation is manageable.
In contrast to Ukrainian citizens, no Russian civilians have been forcefully committed to fight. The 2022 partial mobilization called up reservists, while recent changes to laws have meant Russia has been more easily able to offer generous contracts to annual conscripts soon after their training has concluded. Compared to the forced conscription videos in Ukraine, Russian media can claim it only uses volunteers and those already part of the armed forces.
Russian soldiers who are injured, as well as the families of Russian soldiers who died in service, receive substantial compensation. Though payment is often delayed, the modest backgrounds of most Russian soldiers mean that these funds can be life-changing. The use of prisoners in particularly perilous military operations has also shielded regular Russian soldiers, with Ukraine only considering this practice earlier this year.
Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and hundreds of thousands more seriously wounded. This tests the casualties hypothesis, which states that the public’s willingness to remain engaged in a military intervention declines as casualties mount. The Soviet Union’s 10-year war in Afghanistan saw 15,000 Soviet troops killed and eventually helped lead to the downfall of the country, while the deeply unpopular Iraq War saw 4,500 U.S. soldier deaths and saw the Bush administration’s popularity decline considerably.
Undoubtedly, the Russian government distorts official casualty figures. Yet it is crucial to contextualize Russia’s losses in Ukraine within the context of recent history. The COVID-19 pandemic claimed more than 400,000 Russian lives, far surpassing the casualties in Ukraine.
Furthermore, the Russian public’s stomach in the face of such significant losses may be influenced by the large number of deaths of prominent Russians since the beginning of the war. Across Russian media, the war and its repercussions have shown that even the country’s most influential individuals can be killed and have their assets stripped, contributing to a sense of collective sacrifice amid the conflict.
Amid the chaos of the war, dozens of Russian oligarchs and political figureshave been killed in suspicious circumstances both in Russia and overseas, in a public settling of scores, opportunism, and punishment from the Kremlin for disobedience. A day after Russian forces entered Ukraine, the body of Alexander Tyulyakov, a senior executive of Gazprom’s corporate security, was found hanging in his garage. Ravil Maganov, chairman of the board of Russia’s oil giant Lukoil, allegedly fell out of a Moscow hospital window in September 2022. In December, businessman Vladimir Bidenov died of heart problems at the Hotel Sai International in India—two days later his business associate and deputy in the Legislative Assembly of Vladimir Oblast, Pavel Antov, fell out of a window at the same hotel.
While the deaths of oligarchs and politicians may offer some solace to ordinary Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine, there has also been a significant loss of high-ranking military officials. Some, like Lieutenant General Vladimir Sviridov, were also killed in suspicious circumstances. However, the necessity for high-ranking Russian military officials to remain near the frontlines, owing to a more top-down decision-making military structure and the risk of electronic eavesdropping by Ukrainian and Western advisors, contributes to their higher casualty rate.
Alongside hundreds of other high-profile deaths, Russia has confirmed that seven general officers had been killed in Ukraine by 2024, with Ukraine claiming more than 14 had been killed by early 2023. The last time a U.S. general was killed in combat was in 2014 when an Afghan serviceman opened fire on NATO personnel in Kabul; prior to that, no American general had lost their life in combat since the Vietnam War. With this backdrop of sacrifice and solidarity among Russian elites, Russia’s “rally-‘round-the-flag” effect may sustain itself longer than expected.
Russians appear to believe time and demographics are on their side. According to a March 2024 poll by Russia’s Levada Center, after decades of emigration, the share of Russians expressing a desire to move abroad hit a record low, partly in response to many of those wanting to leave having already done so. Nevertheless, Finion, a Moscow-based relocation firm, stated that 40 to 45 percent of Russians who fled abroad had since returned, driven by factors such as cracking down on remote work, visa issues, reduced fears of conscription, and a general desire to return.
And while tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have perished, along with thousands more ethnic Russians in occupied parts of Ukraine, millions of those living in those occupied territories have already been incorporated into the Russian Federation’s pre-existing 144 million citizens. Conversely, Ukraine, with 37 million people before the war, has faced a population exodus compounding already challenging demographics.
By early 2024, the prevailing sentiment was that Russia had gained a fragile upper hand. Victory, though potentially pyrrhic, appears increasingly likely, if loosely defined, in Russia. Yet, as the conflict drags on, sustained by a Russian economy increasingly geared toward the war, the pursuit of victory may wane as casualties and other costs mount. The Kremlin’s anxieties are now focused on Western nations, led by the UK, France, and Poland, allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons in Russia, which would further bring the war home to Russian civilians and internal infrastructure.
While projecting an image of composure to the public, tensions are unquestionably simmering in the Kremlin. Estimates regarding Russia’s capacity to sustain the war in its current state typically hover around two to three years. Yet unwavering support for Putin, coupled with the absence of viable alternatives, may extend his strong personal commitment to the war indefinitely. While Russia appears capable of and determined to continue the war, its uncertain future will continue to test the Russian public’s tacit enthusiasm for it.
Putin’s willingness to continue the war is seen as something to exploit in the West. Western policymakers have witnessed Russia increasingly commit its domestic resources to the conflict, as well as recently shift from calling it a “special military operation” to a war. Steadily increasing Ukraine’s technical capacity to fight a war of attrition will continue to wear down Russia’s Soviet arsenal and deployment of arms abroad, demonstrating the feebleness of Russia’s production and advanced weapons systems. By provoking a Russian defeat, it is hoped a second major convulsion across the former Soviet Union will further reduce Moscow’s geopolitical influence. Russia’s protracted military campaign and the West’s strategy of prolonging the conflict through escalation management will keep exacting a catastrophic toll on Ukrainian lives and infrastructure.
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Distributed by the Independent Media Institute
John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications.
Russia, SCO, BRICS: The Normalization of Afghanistan – by Pepe Escobar – 1 June 2024
• 1,200 WORDS •
The whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity.
This past Sunday in Doha, I had a meeting with three high-level representatives of the Taliban Political Office in Qatar, including a founding member of the body (in 2012) and a key official of the previous Taliban government of 1996-2001. By mutual consent, their names should not be made public.
The cordial meeting was brokered by Professor Sultan Barakat, who teaches at the College of Public Policy at Hamad bin Khalifa University – set in an outstanding, immaculate campus outside of Doha which attracts students from across the Global South. Prof. Barakat is one of those very few – discreet – players who knows everything that matters in West Asia, and in his case, also in the intersection of Central and South Asia.
With my three Taliban interlocutors, we talked extensively about the challenges of the new Taliban era, new development projects, the role of Russia-China, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). They were particularly curious about Russia, and posed several questions.
Professor Barakat is working on a parallel angle. He is conducting the work of the Afghanistan Future Thought Forum, whose 9th session took place in Oslo in mid-May, and was attended by 28 Afghans – men and women – as well as an array of diplomats of Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Turkey, U.S., UK and EU, among others.
The key discussions at the forum revolve around the extremely complex issue of the Taliban engagement with that fuzzy entity, the “international community”. In Doha, I directly asked my three interlocutors what is the Taliban’s number one priority: “The end of sanctions”, they replied.
For that to happen, the UN Security Council must overturn its 2003 decision of designating several members of the Taliban as a terrorist organization; and simultaneously, discrimination/demonization/sanctions by Washington need to go. As it stands, that remains an immensely tall order.
The forum – the next session should be held in Kabul, possibly in the Fall – is patiently working step by step. It’s a matter of successive concessions from both sides, building trust, and for that it’s essential to appoint an UN-recognized mediator, or “adviser for normalization” to supervise the whole process.
In this case, full support by UNSC members Russia and China will be essential.
We’re the Taliban, and we mean business
I left the meeting in Qatar with the impression that positive steps ahead – in terms of the normalization of Afghanistan as a whole – are possible. And then some magical intervention turned the whole game around.
The day after our meeting, before I left Doha for Moscow, both the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice informed President Putin that the Taliban could be excluded from the Russian list of terrorist organizations.
The exceptionally competent Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, went straight to the point: without the Taliban’s removal from the list, Russia cannot recognize the new administration in Kabul.
And just like clockwork, on the same day Moscow invited the Taliban to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), which starts next Wednesday.
Kabulov noted how “traditionally, the Afghans are interested in continuing cooperation on the purchase of petroleum products in Russia and other goods of high demand. Of course, in the future it will be possible to talk about transit capabilities of Afghanistan to expand trade turnover.”
And then Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, also on the same day, in Tashkent during Putin’s official visit, all but clinched the deal, saying that the normalization of the Taliban reflects objective reality: “They are the real power. We are not indifferent to Afghanistan. Our allies, especially in Central Asia, are not indifferent to it either. So this process reflects an awareness of reality.”
Kazakhstan has already manifested its “awareness of reality”: the Taliban was out of Astana’s terror list last year. In Russia, in practice, the Taliban will be excluded from the terror list if the Supreme Court approves it. That may even happen within the next 2 months.
This love affair comes with a huge package
The normalization of Russia-Taliban ties is inevitable for several reasons. The main priority is certainly related to regional security – implying joint efforts to fight the hazy, dark, destabilizing role of ISIS-K, a terror ISIS spin-off that is actively supported, in the shade, by CIA/MI6 as a Divide and Rule tool. FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov is fully aware that a stable Afghanistan means a stable Taliban government.
And that sentiment is fully shared by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a whole. Afghanistan is a SCO observer. Inevitably, it will become a full member within the next two years at most – consolidating its normalization.
Then there’s the connectivity corridor bonanza ahead – which matters as much to Russia as to China. Beijing is building another road engineering marvel across the Wakhan corridor to connect Xinjiang to northeastern Afghanistan. And then the plan is to bring Kabul as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): lightning-speed geoeconomic integration.
Moscow – as well as New Delhi – are eyeing the spin-offs of the multimodal International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia, Iran and India. The port of Chabahar in Iran is an essential node for the India Silk Road to connect it to Afghanistan and beyond to Central Asian markets.
Then there’s the still not exploited Afghan mineral wealth, worth at least $1 trillion. Lithium included.
Kabul is also planning to build no less than a Russian hub to export energy to Pakistan – all part of an upcoming Pak-Russian strategic energy deal.
What Putin told Pakistani Prime Minister Shebhaz Sharif on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Samarkand in 2022 is immensely significant: “The objective is to deliver pipeline gas from Russia to Pakistan (…) Some infrastructure is already in place in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.” Afghanistan now enters the picture.
As connectivity corridors go, there’s a new, huge kid on the block – according to a Memorandum of Understanding signed in Tashkent in November 2023 on the sidelines of the SCO International Transport Forum: that’s the Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan transport corridor.
The missing piece in this fascinating puzzle is to connect what is already on – railways spanning Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan – with a brand new Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan railway. The last two sections of this Pak-Afghan-Uz project began construction only a few months ago.
It was exactly this project that was featured in the joint statement issued by Putin and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev earlier this week in Tashkent.
As TASS reported, “Putin and Mirziyoyev rated positively the first meeting of the working group on development of the multimodal transport corridor Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan that took place on April 23, 2024 in the Uzbek city of Termez.”
So the whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity.
There’s no doubt a lot of juicy extra details will emerge at the upcoming St. Petersburg forum – as a Taliban delegation including their Labor Minister and the head of the Chamber for Commerce and Industry will be there.
And there’s more: Afghanistan under Taliban 2.0 is bound to be invited to the upcoming BRICS+ summit next October in Kazan. Talk about a mega strategic convergence. The UNSC better hurry up to normalize Afghanistan for the “international community”. Oh, wait: who cares, when Russia-China, the SCO and BRICS are already doing it.
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(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)
One Hour of Afghan Communist Music
To Continue the Gaza Genocide, Israel and the US Must Destroy the Laws of War – by Jonathan Cook – 31 May 2024
The world’s two highest courts have made an implacable enemy of Israel in trying to uphold international law and end Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Separate announcements last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) should have forced Israel on to the back foot in Gaza.
A panel of judges at the ICJ – sometimes known as the World Court – demanded last Friday that Israel immediately stop its current offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Instead, Israel responded by intensifying its atrocities.
On Sunday, it bombed a supposedly “safe zone” crowded with refugee families forced to flee from the rest of Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s rampage for the past eight months.
The air strike set fire to an area crammed with tents, killing dozens of Palestinians, many of whom burnt alive. A video shows a man holding aloft a baby beheaded by the Israeli blast.
Hundreds more, many of them women and children, suffered serious injuries, including horrifying burns.
Israel has destroyed almost all of the medical facilities that could treat Rafah’s wounded, as well as denying entry to basic medical supplies such as painkillers that could ease their torment.
This was precisely the outcome US President Joe Biden warned of months ago when he suggested that an Israeli attack on Rafah would constitute a “red line”.
But the US red line evaporated the moment Israel crossed it. The best Biden’s officials could manage was a mealy-mouthed statement calling the images from Rafah “heart-breaking”.
Such images were soon to be repeated, however. Israel attacked the same area again on Tuesday, killing at least 21 Palestinians, mostly women and children, as its tanks entered the centre of Rafah.
‘A mechanism with teeth’
The World Court’s demand that Israel halt its attack on Rafah came in the wake of its decision in January to put Israel effectively on trial for genocide, a judicial process that could take years to complete.
In the meantime, the ICJ insisted, Israel had to refrain from any actions that risked a genocide of Palestinians. In last week’s ruling, the court strongly implied that the current attack on Rafah might advance just such an agenda.
Israel presumably dared to defy the court only because it was sure it had the Biden administration’s backing.
UN officials, admitting that they had run out of negatives to describe the ever-worsening catastrophe in Gaza, called it “hell on earth”.
Days before the ICJ’s ruling, the wheels of its sister court, the ICC, finally began to turn.
Karim Khan, its chief prosecutor, announced last week that he would be seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
Both Israeli leaders are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attempts to exterminate the population of Gaza through planned starvation.
Israel has been blocking aid deliveries for many months, creating famine, a situation only exacerbated by its recent seizure of a crossing between Egypt and Rafah through which aid was being delivered.
The ICC is a potentially more dangerous judicial mechanism for Israel than the ICJ.
The World Court is likely to take years to reach a judgement on whether Israel has definitively committed a genocide in Gaza – possibly too late to save much of its population.
The ICC, on the other hand, could potentially issue arrest warrants within days or weeks.
And while the World Court has no real enforcement mechanisms, given that the US is certain to veto any UN Security Council resolution seeking to hold Israel to account, an ICC ruling would place an obligation on more than 120 states that have ratified its founding document, the Rome Statute, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should either step on their soil.
That would make Europe and much of the world – though not the US – off-limits to both.
And there is no reason for Israeli officials to assume that the ICC’s investigations will finish with Netanyahu and Gallant. Over time, it could issue warrants for many more Israelis.
As one Israeli official has noted: “The ICC is a mechanism with teeth”.
‘Antisemitic’ court
For that reason, Israel responded by going on the warpath, accusing the court of being “antisemitic” and threatening to harm its officials.
Washington appeared ready to add its muscle too.
Asked at a Senate committee hearing whether he would support a Republican proposal to impose sanctions on the ICC, Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, replied: “We want to work with you on a bipartisan basis to find an appropriate response.”
Administration officials, speaking to the Financial Times, suggested the measures under consideration “would target prosecutor Karim Khan and others involved in the investigation”.
US reprisals, according to the paper, would most likely be modelled on the sanctions imposed in 2020 by Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s predecessor, after the ICC threatened to investigate both Israel and the US over war crimes, in the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan respectively.
Then, the Trump administration accused the ICC of “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels” – allegations it never substantiated.
Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, was denied entry to the US, and Trump officials threatened to confiscate her and the ICC judges’ assets and put them on trial. The administration also vowed to use force to liberate any Americans or Israelis who were arrested.
Mike Pompeo, the then US secretary of state, averred that Washington was “determined to prevent having Americans and our friends and allies in Israel and elsewhere hauled in by this corrupt ICC”.
Covert war on ICC
In fact, a joint investigation by the Israeli website 972 and the British Guardian newspaper revealed this week that Israel – apparently with US support – has been running a covert war against the ICC for the best part of a decade.
Its offensive began after Palestine became a contracting party to the ICC in 2015, and intensified after Bensouda, Khan’s predecessor, started a preliminary investigation into Israeli war crimes – both Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza and its building of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their lands.
Bensouda found herself and her family threatened, and her husband blackmailed. The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, became personally involved in the campaign of intimidation. An official briefed on Cohen’s behaviour likened it to “stalking”. The Mossad chief ambushed Bensouda on at least one occasion in an attempt to recruit her to Israel’s side.
Cohen, who is known to be close to Netanyahu, reportedly told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
Israel has also been running a sophisticated spying operation on the court, hacking its database to read emails and documents. It has tried to recruit ICC staff to spy on the court from within. There are suspicions at the ICC that Israel has been successful.
Because Israel oversees access to the occupied territories, it has been able to ban ICC officials from investigating its war crimes directly. That has meant, given its control of the telecommunications systems in the territories, that it has been able to monitor all conversations between the ICC and Palestinians reporting atrocities.
As a result, Israel has sought to close down Palestinian legal and human rights groups by designating them as “terrorist organisations”.
The surveillance of the ICC has continued during Khan’s tenure – and it is the reason Israel knew the arrest warrants were coming. According to sources that spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, the court came under “tremendous pressure from the United States” not to proceed with the warrants.
Khan has pointed out that interference in the court’s activities is a criminal offence. More publicly, a group of senior US Republican senators sent a threatening letter to Khan: “Target Israel and we will target you.”
Khan himself has noted that he has faced a campaign of intimidation and has warned that, if the interference continues, “my office will not hesitate to act”.
The question is how much of this is bravado, and how much is it affecting Khan and the ICC’s judges, making them wary of pursuing their investigation, expediting it or expanding it to more Israeli war crimes suspects.
Legal noose
Despite the intimidation, the legal noose is quickly tightening around Israel’s neck. It has become impossible for the world’s highest judicial authorities to ignore Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza and near-complete destruction of its infrastructure, from schools and hospitals to aid compounds and bakeries.
Many tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, maimed and orphaned in the rampage, and hundreds of thousands more are being gradually starved to death by Israel’s aid blockade.
The role of the World Court and the War Crimes Court are precisely to halt atrocities and genocides before it is too late.
There is an obligation on the world’s most powerful states – especially the world’s superpower-in-chief, the United States, which so often claims the status of “global policeman” – to help enforce such rulings.
Should Israel continue to ignore the ICJ’s demand that it end its attack on Rafah, as seems certain, the UN Security Council would be expected to pass a resolution to enforce the decision.
That could range from, at a minimum, an arms embargo and economic sanctions on Israel to imposing no-fly zones over Gaza or even sending in a UN peacekeeping force.
Washington has shown it can act when it wishes to. Even though the US is one of a minority of states not a party to the Rome Statute, it has vigorously supported the arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2023.
The US and its allies have imposed economic sanctions on Moscow, and supplied Ukraine with endless weapons to fight off the Russian invasion. There is evidence, too, that the US has been waging covert military operations targeting Russia, most likely including blowing up the Nordstream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe.
The Biden administration has orchestrated the seizing of Russian state assets, as well as those of wealthy Russians, and it has encouraged a cultural and sporting boycott.
It is proposing to do none of that in the case of Israel.
Divisions in Europe
It is not just that the US is missing in action as Israel advances its genocidal goals in Gaza. Washington is actively aiding and abetting the genocide, by supplying Israel with bombs, by cutting funding to UN aid agencies that are the main lifeline for Gaza’s population, by sharing intelligence with Israel and by refusing to use its plentiful leverage over Israel to stop the slaughter.
And the widespread assumption is that the US will veto any Security Council resolution against Israel.
According to two former ICC officials who spoke to the Guardian and 972 website, senior Israeli officials have expressly stated that Israel and the US are working together to stymie the court’s work.
Washington’s contempt for the world’s highest judicial authorities is so flagrant that it is even starting to fray relations with Europe.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has thrown his weight behind the ICC and called for any ruling against Netanyahu and Gallant to be respected.
Meanwhile, on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his outrage over Israel’s attacks on Rafah and called for them to stop immediately.
Three European states – Spain, Ireland and Norway – announced last week that they were joining more than 140 other countries, including eight from the 27-member European Union, in recognising Palestine as a state.
The coordination between Spain, Ireland and Norway was presumably designed to attenuate the inevitable backlash provoked by defying Washington’s wishes.
Among the falsehoods promoted by the US and Israel is the claim that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel’s military actions in Gaza because neither of them have recognised Palestine as a state.
But Palestine became a state party to the ICC way back in 2015. And, as Spain, Ireland and Norway have highlighted, it is now recognised even by western states usually submissive to the US-imposed “rules-based order”.
Another deception promoted by Israel and the US – a more revealing one – is the claim that the ICC lacks jurisdiction because Israel, like the US, has not ratified the Rome Statute.
Neither believes international law – the legal foundation constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War to stop future Holocausts – applies to them. Which is yet more reason to discount their assurances that there is no genocide in Gaza.
But in any case, the argument is entirely hollow: Palestine is a party to the ICC, and the Rome Statute is there to protect its signatories from attack. It is only violent bullies like the US and Israel who have no need for the ICC.
Might makes right
Both the ICJ and the ICC are fully aware of the dangers of taking on Israel – which is why, despite the dissembling complaints from the US and Israel, each court is treading so slowly and cautiously in dealing with Israeli atrocities.
Pick at the Israeli thread of war crimes in Gaza, and the entire cloth of atrocities around the world committed and promoted by the US and its closest allies starts to unravel.
The unspoken truth is that the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and years of brutal occupation of Iraq by US and British troops, and the even lengthier and equally bloody occupation of Afghanistan, eviscerated the legal constraints that would have made it harder for Putin to invade Ukraine and for Israel to put into practice the erasure of the Palestinian people it has dreamed of for so long.
It is Washington that tore up the rulebook of international law and elevated above it a self-serving “rules-based order” in which the only meaningful rule is might makes right.
Faced with that stark axiom, Moscow had good reason both to take advantage of Washington’s acts of vandalism against international law to advance its own strategic regional aims and to suspect that the relentless military expansion of a US-led Nato towards its borders did not have Russia’s best interests at heart.
Now, as Netanyahu and Gallant risk being put in the dock at The Hague, Washington is finally finding its resolve to act. Not to stop genocide. But to offer Israel protection to carry on.
War crimes overlooked
For that reason, Khan did everything he could last week to insulate himself from criticism as he announced that he wants Netanyahu and Gallant arrested.
First, he made sure to weigh the accusations more heavily against Hamas than Israel. He is seeking three Hamas leaders against two Israelis.
In his indictment, he implicated both the Hamas political and military wings in war crimes and crimes against humanity over their one-day attack on Israel on 7 October and their hostage-taking.
By contrast, Khan completely ignored the Israeli military’s role over the past eight months, even though it has been carrying out Netanyahu and Gallant’s wishes to the letter.
Notably too, Khan charged the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, not Gaza. All the evidence, however, is that he had no foreknowledge of the attack on 7 October and certainly no operational involvement.
Further presenting Hamas in a worse light, Khan levelled more indictments against its leaders than Israel’s.
That included a charge rooted in a prominent western establishment narrative: that Israeli hostages held in Gaza have faced systematic sexual assault and torture. There appears to be little persuasive evidence for this allegation at this stage, unless Khan has access to facts no one else appears to know about.
By contrast, there is plenty of objective evidence of Palestinians being kidnapped off the streets of Gaza and the occupied West Bank and subjected to sexual assault and torture in Israeli prisons.
That, however, is not on the charge sheet against Netanyahu or Gallant.
Khan also ignored plenty of other Israeli war crimes that would be easy to prove, such as the destruction of hospitals and United Nations facilities, the targeted killing of large numbers of aid workers and journalists, and the fact that 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock has been made uninhabitable by Israel’s US-supplied bombs.
Taking on Goliath
In making the case against Israel, Khan clearly knew he was taking on a Goliath, given Israel’s stalwart backing from the US. He had even recruited a panel of legal experts to give its blessing, in the hope that might offer some protection from reprisal.
The panel, which unanimously endorsed the indictments against Israel and Hamas, included legal experts like Amal Clooney, the nearest the human rights community has to a legal superstar. But it also included Theodor Meron, a former legal authority in the Israeli government’s foreign ministry.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, explaining his reasoning, Khan seemed keen to preempt the coming attacks. He noted that an unnamed senior US politician had already tried to deter him from indicting Israeli leaders. The prosecutor suggested that other threats were being made behind the scenes.
The ICC, he was told, was “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” – a criticism of the court that echoed complaints long levelled against it by the Global South.
In Washington, the ICC is expected to serve as nothing more than another institutional tool of US imperialism. It is not there to uphold international law dispassionately. It is there to enforce a US “rules-based order” in which the US and its allies can do no wrong, even when they are committing atrocities or a genocide.
The predictably skewed framing of the interview by Amanpour – that Khan needed to explain and justify at length each of the charges he laid against Netanyahu and Gallant but that the charges against the Hamas leaders were self-evident – was one clue as to what the court is up against.
The ICC prosecutor made clear that he understands all too well what is at stake if the ICC and ICJ turn a blind eye to the Gaza genocide, as Israel and the US want. He told Amanpour: “If we don’t apply the law equally, we’re going to disintegrate as a species.”
The uncomfortable truth is that such disintegration, in a nuclear age, may be further advanced than any of us cares to acknowledge.
The US and its favourite client state give no sign of being willing to submit to international law. Like Samson, they would prefer to bring the house down than respect the long-established rules of war.
The initial victims are the people of Gaza. But in a world without laws, where might alone makes right, all of us will ultimately be the losers.
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xenagoguevicene 