December 2022

Amit Sengupta December 29, 2022 Editor’s note This is a rare piece of public education. It offers you a wider – in time and space – analysis of the background of what so tragically is going on in Ukraine now. Spend those intensive 16 minutes and you’ll see how much you are not told by Western mainstream media. How much FOSI they give you – Fake + Omission + Source Ignorance. Their main role continues to be to present a narrative that is in total support of the West – the US/NATO policies. In the case of the German press, you’ll see a mind-boggling analysis elsewhere on The Transnational. You should, however, also be aware that Amit Sengupta does not at all mention a number of other relevant facts – such as Russia being a dwarf compared with NATO in terms of military expenditures, the latter spending 12 times more...

Andrei Kortunov December 28, 2022 Poland’s defiant refusal to allow the Russian foreign minister’s attendance at the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting in Lodz on December 1-2 provoked a boisterous diplomatic uproar. As might be expected, it gave a new impulse to the long-standing debate about the OSCE’s value to Russia. With less than a month remaining before the Polish OSCE chairmanship expires, it is barely possible to imagine that the new chairmanships—North Macedonia in 2023, Estonia in 2024 and even Finland in 2025—might change the general algorithm of Moscow’s interaction with this organization for the better. It is not surprising that the voices of those calling for a withdrawal from the OSCE altogether are getting louder in Russia, especially given that our country has already left the Council of Europe this spring. The cases for withdrawal range from ideological (“the OSCE promotes values alien to Russians”) to financial (“Russia could...

Martin Jacques December 28, 2022 The West could learn a great deal from China’s system of governance. It is highly unlikely this will happen, at least anytime soon. On the contrary, the West believes that its governance system is the best in the world, cannot be improved upon, and is incomparably superior to that of China. Why then is the West in rampant decline? And why has China, in contrast, enjoyed a dramatic rise over the last four decades. Have these contrasting fortunes got nothing to do with their respective governing systems? Are national success and the system of governance utterly disconnected from each other? Is the system of governance little more than an ornament of decoration, with little bearing on the performance of a nation? This is obviously nonsense. The quality of governance is fundamental to the success or failure of a country. If a country is doing well, then...

Maria Popova December 20, 2022 “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of actuality.” The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means, “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in...

An academic shock study exposes how the press is pushing for confrontation with Moscow in the EU’s most powerful state Felix Livshitz December 22, 2022 Last week, the University of Mainz published a study of German news coverage of events in Ukraine, and Berlin’s official response to the crisis. The conclusions confirm that since February 24, the media has played a major role in keeping the conflict going, and making a negotiated settlement less likely, due to almost universally biased, pro-war, anti-Russia content being published at all stages. Researchers at the university analyzed German-language reporting on the Ukraine conflict between February 24 and May 31, assessing the content of around 4,300 separate articles published by the country’s eight leading newspapers and TV stations: FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, Spiegel, Zeit, ARD Tagesschau, ZDF Today, and RTL Aktuell. Originally published on RT, December 22, 2023 During this time, Ukraine was portrayed positively...

Dan Kovalik December 16, 2022 Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there. Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States. Originally published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on November 30, 2022 The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best-known element, as the Nation Magazine reported...

Paul Krugman June 19, 2018 – published here on December 15, 2022 Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs and breaking up trade agreements are all about turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations. The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely. What do these stories have in common? Obviously, they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst person ever to hold his position. But there’s...

Josep Borrell High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,Vice President of the European Commission December 11, 2022 Normally, The Transnational does not reproduce policy papers or analyses from government sites which, one must suppose, are readily available to the public through mainstream media. But in this case, we assume that rather few have even mentioned this urgently important message of vastly increased militarism in the EU space. Mr Borell – who was recently accused of racism because of his ‘jungle’ comment – writes that “defence spending within the EU grew in 2021 to €214 billion. This is a 6% increase compared to 2020 – and the strongest yearly growth rate since 2015. But we are still far away from the 2% NATO benchmark.” But he conveniently omits every mention of the fact that the military expenditures of Russia are about € 70 – that is,...

John F. Copper December 15th, 2022 US intelligence agencies do not say China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan. Why? Taiwan’s role as the ‘reverse great wall’ in US containment policy and Xi’s 2049 reunification deadline are missing from Western narratives. They explain why the US is provoking war with China in Taiwan and why China refuses to be provoked. Originally posted by Pearls and Irritations on October 26th, 2022 The US-Taiwan relationship is a long-discussed subject. Now it is even more a topic in the news with experts and government officials speaking of it being an immediate cause of a war between the United States and China. There are two issues, however, considering their importance, are not a central part of the narrative about US Taiwan policy but should be. One is Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States. The other is China’s President Xi Jinping’s declaring a...

Institut Montaigne’s broad-spectrum interview, on October 13, 2022, with Fyodor A. Lukyanov, Chairman of the Russian Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and editor-in-chief of the “Russia in Global Affairs” journal. Note to our readers We intend in the future to publish more materials by Russian scholars and intellectuals because the de facto cancellation by NATO/EU countries of such views and of access to leading Russian media is both unfair, a violation of human rights and an element in a self-serving media warfare which, regrettably, only makes a peaceful, negotiated resolution even more difficult. We believe it is necessary to hear all conflict participants’ motives and views to be able to help solve a conflict peacefully. Any professional conflict analyst and mediator knows that and also that that does not mean an implicit endorsement of everything stated. Earlier ones are published here, here and here. – Jan...

An account of the situation and of the worst and best-case scenarios for Iran’s future Oxford (Special to Informed Comment) Various Iranian and foreign news agencies have reported that Iran’s Prosecutor General has announced the shutting down of the. Guidance Patrol (often referred to in the West as the morality police). In response to a question about the dismantling of the Guidance Patrol, Prosecutor General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said: “The Guidance Patrol has nothing to do with the Judiciary. It was dismantled by the same organisation [presumably the Revolution Guards and the law-enforcement forces] that had established it.” In another meeting held in Qom on the recent protests, he said: “The Majlis [the Parliament] and Supreme Islamic Revolution Council are studying and working on the issue of hijab, and the outcome of those decisions will be announced in 15 days. Such decisions should be based on wisdom.” He added: “After...

(The text is an adaption of an earlier article on Chinasquare.be) As one of the editors of chinasquare.be, the Dutch language site for neutral news about China, I recently set out to write about the possible prohibition by the Dutch government for ASML to export chip-making machines to China, based on a directive from Washington. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade has publicly stated about that directive that ‘the Netherlands will not copy the US policy completely’. It is heartening to see that an EU politician is at least willing to give the impression that she is not on an American leash, but I need to add to this statement that the Dutch government had already stopped ASML from selling its high-end Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology to China in 2020. This is already hurting ASML’s China business. Reportedly, the number of orders from China has decreased and there is a...