January 2023

The estimated cost of the humanitarian response going into 2023 is US$ 51.5 billion, a 25% increase compared to the beginning of 2022. That is less than one-tenth of the total sales of weapons which reached 592 billion US dollars just in one year: 2021. Baher Kamal January 30, 2023 MADRID, Dec 22, 2022 (IPS) – Day after day, international humanitarian organisations launch desperate appeals for funding to continue saving some of the many lives at high risk. When they get a handful of dollars –even just one million– from a rich country, they welcome it as manna from heaven. Not only the available funding for humanitarian aid is already short, but 2023 will also set another record for humanitarian relief requirements, with 339 million people in need of assistance in 69 countries, an increase of 65 million people compared to the same time last year, the United Nations and...

Cameron Leckie January 29, 2023 Western powers appear to have no viable strategy to bring the Ukraine war to an end. The best they can do is keep Ukraine on life support. But, as Sun Tzu put it, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Imagine if Ukraine had capitulated three days after the Russian invasion commenced in February 2022, as some predicted. The Donetsk and Luhansk Republics would likely have gained autonomy within the Ukrainian state, and life would have carried on like normal for most Ukrainians (minus the regular shelling for the residents of the Donbas). No doubt the capitulation would have seen changes in Ukraine’s political leadership – politics is a ruthless game; whilst the casualties resulting from Russia’s incursion would have been (from a numbers perspective) insignificant compared to the mass loss of life that has since occurred. Or even better yet, imagine if the...

Time magazine, March 24, 1999 Živadin Jovanović, Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs 1998-2000 January 29, 2023 If the wording of the ‘Basic Agreement’ presented by the western “Great Five” (EU, USA, Germany, France, Italy) on Kosovo and Metohija, which has been circulated for a while in the Albanian media and as of January 20 in the Serbian social networks as well, is anywhere close to the authentic one, it cannot be viewed as any sort of an agreement. It’s rather an ultimatum compelling Serbia to de facto recognize the enforced secession of her Province. The document, originally attributed to French President Macron and German Chancellor Scholz (1), leaders of two largest European democracies, stands out as another gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, the basic principles of democratic international relations, the UN Charter, the Paris Charter, and the OSCE’s Helsinki Final Act. Inspired by their own power and greatness,...

Branko Marcetic January 28, 2023 Editor’s note This is probably the most detailed and solid documentation of the historical fact that NATO leaders knew perfectly well that Russia was deeply concerned and against NATO’s expansion and stated those concern for more than 20 years. In other words, that NATO decided deliberately not to listen and not to respect those concerns. It also shows that Russia’s thickest red line was – yes, Ukraine. It was originally published by the very important and respected American Committee for US-Russia Accord here. Jan Oberg Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes.  Commentators have rushed to declare the long-criticized policy of NATO expansion as irrelevant to the...

January 28, 2023 Born and brought up in Scotland, David Ferguson moved to China to work and live in 2006. In 2008, he joined the Foreign Languages Press, covering major issues, including the Wenchuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games and the Shanghai World Expo. “I spend quite a lot of my time writing about China. I’ve written six or seven books about China now, and I always take the opportunity to try to correct misperceptions when I’m writing.” Ferguson is also the English editor for President Xi Jinping’s Governance of China books, and says he is glad to have the opportunity to see how Xi Jinping Thought works as a whole. Watch one of a series on CGTN, China’s global TV Channel. In my view, we can do nothing more important but to build bridges, cooperate instead of confronting. That is, if it is peace we want. Jan ObergEditor

Evil is easy to identify and fight against; not so with stupidity. Key Takeaways Jonny Thomson January 28, 2023 There’s an internet adage that goes, “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” It’s funny and astute. It’s also deeply, depressingly worrying. Although we’d never say so, we all have people in our lives we think of as a bit dim — not necessarily about everything, but certainly about some things. Most of the time, we laugh this off. After all, stupidity can be pretty funny. When my friend asked a group of us recently what Hitler’s last name was, we laughed. When my brother learned only last month that reindeer are real animals — well, that’s funny. Good-natured ribbing about a person’s ignorance is an everyday part...

May others avoid that fate… The first Cold War played out between the East and the Western Occident and the East lost with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Both built – more or less faithfully – on Western mechanical thinking, one on Marx and other socialist/communist philosophers, the other on twisting moral philosopher Adam Smith into a God’s hand individualist utility market prophet and pair him with various types of liberal, parliamentary democracy thinking. The Soviet and East European system had come to the end of its history, but what about the twin Occidental brother, the US-EU system? The latter had not only survived or ”won;” it had also forced the Soviet Union to spend an unsustainable proportion of its resources on the military. And now the Second West is destined to follow suit. The point I shall make is that the West – US-EU-based...

Jan Oberg January 26, 2023 Like the Nobel Prizes, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atom Scientists attracts enormous media attention. It simplifies a very complex issue into a time measure: How close is the world to global catastrophe? This year it is at 90 seconds to midnight. Between 2020 and 2022, it was at 100 seconds. 75 years ago, it was ticking at 7 minutes, and in 1991, at the end of the First Cold War, it stood at 17 minutes to midnight. Philosophically, this is highly enigmatic: Out of 24 hours, the world has always been a few minutes or seconds from global catastrophe. Over 75 years! The whole thing is arbitrary or symbolic, if not bizarre. But it does alert the media and does have the positive effect of turning people’s attention at the global rather than regional or local issues. At least for a...

Give yourself 38 min, and you’ll understand how extremely self-destructive the NATO/EU world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been and why all the assumption it made was wrong. Professor Emeritus of Economics (University of Massachusetts) and founder of Democracy at Work, Richard Wolff, talks with brilliant clarity about the economic impact of the Ukraine war. He assesses the impact of Western sanctions on Russia as well as how the war has affected the West economically. And very importantly, he analyses just how destructive arms spending is for the rest of society and the working people. Here are the main themes: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 “Economic War” with Russia? 12:01 Moral significance of Western sanctions 14:20 Economic impact on the United States 21:07 Economic impact of military spending 32:21 Economic impact on Ukraine I cannot recommend this – and the acTVism Munich and The Source Channel – enough. Please share...

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984 Edward Curtin January 24, 2023 As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me. Soon after I was greeted by...

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) of Ukraine, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. “We are dealing with a State that is turning the veto of the United Nations Security Council into the right to die”, President Zelynskyy warned. If it continues, countries will rely not on international law or global institutions to ensure security, but rather, on the power of their own arms. April 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe Thalif Deen January 24, 2023 UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2023 (IPS) – A US Senator once described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps facetiously, as “a Winston Churchill in a tee shirt”. And last month, when he addressed the US Congress – with the presence of about 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen – he tried to re-live that moment. While most of the Senators and Congressmen were in business suits for the formal occasion, Zelensky opted for green military fatigues and...