April 2022

Members of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment march in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2019. Their flags display the group’s Wolfsangel logo, a variant of that used by the Nazi SS. (Goo3 / Wikimedia Commons) Branko Marcetic April 29, 2022 The same Western media that once documented and decried Ukraine’s far right is now playing it down and even rehabilitating its leaders — including actual Nazis. Such apologetics aren’t doing any favors for Ukrainians or their fight against Russia’s aggression. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of neighbouring Ukraine a month ago, something curious has happened with Western media coverage of the country’s far-right. Amid the global wave of indignation at Russia’s war of aggression, which Moscow has justified on the pretext of “denazification,” the Western press — fixated for the last five years on the prospect of fascism and the far right at home — has begun playing the issue down....

Chris Hedges April 28, 2022 The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia. Originally posted on Sheer Post homepage on April 11th, 2020, here The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.  They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within...

The Guardian of April 25, 2022, and several other media brought the news top front page about the Russia-Ukraine war: US ‘wants to see Russia weakened’ – the sensational headline statement by US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, after his and Secretary of State, Antony Blinken’s surprise visit to Kyiv. It was stated also in connection with yet another US arms package for Ukraine (US$ 738 million – making total US military assistance to Ukraine pass US$ 3,4 billion) and before the meeting on April 26 in Ramstein, Germany where more than 40 countries gathered to intensify their cooperation about further militarizing the conflict with Russia played out of Ukraine. Please note – there has been no similar meeting about how to de-escalate, mediate or whatever else to stop the war. Here is the Pentagon transcript of what Austin said and Blinken endorsed: “SECRETARY AUSTIN: I’ll just start and I’ll...

Trita Parsi April 18, 2022 The West appears blind to its own hypocrisy and narrow interests in calling for a rules-based order. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been nothing short of brilliant in his outreach to Western audiences. The overwhelming Western support for Ukraine is due not only to the brutality of Russia’s illegal invasion, but also to the astuteness and charisma with which Zelenskyy has made Ukraine’s case for aid. But as effective as Zelenskyy has been in drumming up Western support, Ukraine’s message has been far less compelling to audiences in the Global South, where many countries have declined to join Western campaigns to sanction Russia’s economy and isolate it diplomatically. This was vividly clear at the Doha Forum last month in Qatar, where Zelenskyy and Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova were given a big platform. A powerful communicator in her own right, Dzhaparova — a Muslim Tatar from Crimea...

Photo: GT Martin Jacques April 16, 2022 The overwhelming assumption in the West is that the world, with a few exceptions, is strongly opposed to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. The West itself, including the great majority of Europe, seems to be of one voice in its condemnation. But worldwide the picture is rather more complicated. In the UN General Assembly on March 3, while 141 countries condemned Russia’s invasion and called for an immediate withdrawal, 35 countries abstained and five voted against. In the recent vote to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, 93 countries voted in favour, 58 abstained and 24 were against.  Originally published at Global Times in China While there are clearly deep misgivings on the part of many countries about Russia’s actions, there is also widespread concern about the stance of the US. The most interesting, and potentially by far the most significant...

Edward Kienholz, “Portable War Memorial,” 1968  Sabir Shah April 14, 2022 The US Has Been at war for more than 92 percent of the time The American history of overt and covert foreign interventions dates back to 1811, when it had invaded Chile, just a year after this South American country had gained independence from Spain. Research conducted by the “Jang Group and Geo Television Network” reveals that the United States has been at war for about 225 of the 243 years since its inception in 1776. While the number of US foreign military interventions had stood at 188 till 2017, the world super power was found involved in 117 “partisan electoral interventions” between 1946 and 2000 or around one of every nine ballot exercises held since Second World War. Originally posted on The News International in Pakistan on January 9th, 2020 This means that the United States has been...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, is 73 years old. When the First Cold War was over, it was about 40. Its raison d’etre until then had always and unambiguously been the very existence of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact (established 6 years after NATO, in May 1955) and its socialist ideology. But NATO chose triumphalistically to expand – today 30 countries of which 10 former Warsaw Pact members. It broke the Western promises to not expand given to the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. And that is, fundamentally what the NATO-Russia conflict, tragically playing out in Ukraine, is all about. Over the years, NATO has come to violate its own 1949 Treaty which states (my italics): Preamble“The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and...

Truth will out, as they say, and sometimes it in strange ways. On March 9, 2022, the former Danish Prime Minister and former NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, gave an interview to Danish Television 2. Here a 30 sec excerpt. In my view, it was deeply shocking for three reasons. First, what he actually says: “If we send planes, it’s to protect Ukrainian airspace, and then we have to be ready to shoot down Russian planes. That would undeniably mean war between NATO and Russia.” That doesn’t worry him. He does not say that the West/NATO should therefore refrain from doing so. See below how he thinks it will go. “I think if it’s going to deter Putin, we shouldn’t rule anything out. And I’m among those who say we should keep Putin in maximum uncertainty.” Not ruling out anything in NATO parlance indisputably means that the use of nuclear...

Boaventura de Sousa Santos April 8, 2022 Originally posted on Independent Media Institute’s homepage on April 4th, 2022 More than 100 years after World War I, Europe’s leaders are sleepwalking toward a new all-out war. In 1914, the European governments believed that the war would last three weeks; it lasted four years and resulted in more than 20 million deaths. The same nonchalance is visible with the war in Ukraine. The dominant view is that the aggressor should be left broken and humbled. Then, the defeated power was Germany. Some dissenting voices, such as John Maynard Keynes, felt that the humbling of Germany would be a disaster. Their warnings went unheeded. Twenty-one years later, Europe was back at war, which lasted six years and killed 70 million people. History neither repeats itself nor seems to teach us anything, but it does illustrate similarities and differences. The hundred years before 1914...

John Pilger April 5, 2022 Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain. On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now. Originally published by EurasiaReview on February 19, 2022 But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”....

Edward Curtin April 5, 2022 Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in US history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events. Originally published at Off-Guardian While Kennedy was the last US president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness that the promotion of war and the military-industrial...

Richard Falk April 4, 2022 Russia launched its massive invasion of Ukraine on February 24 flagrantly violating the most fundamental norm of international law—the prohibition of recourse to international force encroaching upon the territory of a sovereign state except in exercising the right of self-defense against a prior armed attack. Yes, there were a series of irresponsible provocations by NATO that aroused understandable security concerns in Moscow, including the relentless expansion of the Cold War NATO alliance after the Cold War was over, the threat from the Soviet Union had disappeared, and promises were made by Western leaders to Gorbachev of no further NATO expansion. Such geopolitical behaviour amounted to imprudent statecraft by the West, especially given Russian historical anxieties about being surrounded and attacked by hostile forces. Such eminent public figures as George Kennan, Jack Matlock (respected former U.S. ambassador to Russia), and even Henry Kissinger issued warnings to...