Looking at the books the man has done, I look forward to being able to spend more time on his work.
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top of the heap to third world status in one generation
- Thread starter Gry
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Looking at the books the man has done, I look forward to being able to spend more time on his work.
Very impressive, thank you so very much.
Yes - Gareth Jones - a very interesting - but little known (today) journalist/writer from the history of nearly 100 years ago - He came from South Wales - where my Grandparents on my Mothers side lived and worked and had to leave - due to The Great Depression - they could no longer work down the coal mines due to being made unemployed - they were VERY hard times for the working classes - and my Gramps joined The British Army - as did many thousands of other Welshmen - I urge you to read all of his reports/articles - and he never got to be an old man - due to being hunted down and killed by the Russian/Soviet secret police -
''Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones
1905 -1935
Gareth Jones accomplished a great deal in his very short life. As a child he had heard many stories of the happy times his mother spent with the family of Arthur Hughes from 1889 to 1892 as tutor to his children. Arthur Hughes was the son of the Welshman, John Hughes the steel industrialist who founded the town of Hughesovska, later the tragic town of Stalino in World War II and today known as the city of Donetz.
These stories instilled in him a desire to visit the Soviet Union and Ukraine. So with this goal in mind he studied languages and had a brilliant academic career at University, both in Aberystwyth and Cambridge where he gained first-class honours in French, German and Russian; all of which he spoke fluently.
Graduating from Cambridge in 1930, he obtained the position of Foreign Affairs Adviser to David Lloyd George and it was during the summer of this year he made his first 'pilgrimage' to Hughesovka. The visit was brief as all the food he could obtain him was one roll of bread.
In the following year 1931, he was offered employment in New York by Dr. Ivy Lee, Public Relations adviser to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler foundation and Standard Oil to research a book on the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he accompanied Jack Heinz II to the Soviet Union (fortified with food from the Heinz organisation) when at the end of their tour they visited Ukraine. Gareth wrote a comprehensive diary of this visit and Jack Heinz was to publish a book anonymously entitled Experiences in Russia 1931. A Diary, which includes probably the first recorded (seven) references to the word 'starve' or 'starving' of the Soviet peasants as a result of Collectivisation.
But due to the severe depression of 1931-32 in the U.S.A. he was forced, due to financial reasons, to leave 'Ivy Lee and Associates' in Wall Street and he returned to work for David Lloyd George. At this time and little known to many, he assisted the former Prime Minister in writing his War Memoirs.
In the autumn of 1932, there were rumours in London of the famine occurring under Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union and so Gareth Jones made further plans to visit the country. But dramatic events were occurring in Germany and so in late January and early February 1933 he visited this country. He was present in Leipzig the day Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor and a few days later flew with the dictator in his famous plane 'Richthofen' to Frankfurt. There, Gareth Jones was present at a great rally where the newly appointed Fuehrer was given a tumultuous reception and where the hall echoed to the ovation given to the newly appointed Chancellor of Germany.
It was early the next month, in March 1933, that he made his third and final visit to Soviet Russia and Ukraine to investigate the earlier reports he had heard of starvation. In his diary he records that he met Malcolm Muggeridge in Moscow, before setting-off on a walking tour of villages within OGPU-restricted Ukraine.
Whilst Gareth was in Ukraine, Muggeridge posted his three articles to The Manchester Guardian, but when they were eventually printed unsigned in late March, they had also been drastically edited and lay 'buried' deep-within the then, Communist-sympathetic newspaper.
However, returning to Berlin, Gareth Jones then made his famous press release on the 29th of March 1933 and this was printed in many American and British newspapers including the New York Evening Post and The Manchester Guardian:
I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
On the 31st of March, the infamous denial of Jones' statement was made by Walter Duranty in the New York Times stating there was no famine and these were the headlines to that article: RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING. Duranty maintained that the high death rate was from diseases due to malnutrition, that the larger cities had food and that it was Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga Regions that suffered from shortages. He said the Kremlin denied the doom and that: 'Russian and foreign observers in country could see no grounds for predications of disaster'. He then stated that:
Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones's judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.
On May 13th the New York Times published a stinging reply from Jones which reiterated that he stood by every word he had said:
... I stand by my statement that Soviet Russia is suffering from a severe famine. It would be foolish to draw this conclusion from my tramp through a small part of vast Russia, although I must remind Mr. Duranty that it was my third visit to Russia, that I devoted four years of university life to the study of the Russian language and history and that on this occasion alone I visited in all twenty villages, not only in the Ukraine, but also in the black earth district, and in the Moscow region, and that I slept in peasants' cottages, and did not immediately leave for the next village.
My first evidence was gathered from foreign observers. Since Mr. Duranty introduces consuls into the discussion, a thing I am loath to do, for they are official representatives of their countries and should not be quoted, may I say that I discussed the Russian situation with between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and that their evidence supported my point of view. But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent.
Journalists, on the other hand, are allowed to write, but the censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give "famine" the polite name of "food shortage" and "starving to death" is softened down to read as "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." Consuls are not so reticent in private conversation.
My second evidence was based on conversations with peasants who had migrated into the towns from various parts of Russia. Peasants from the richest parts of Russia coming into the towns for bread. Their story of the deaths in their villages from starvation and of the death of the greater part of their cattle and horses was tragic, and each conversation corroborated the previous one.
Third, my evidence was based upon letters written by German colonists in Russia, appealing for help to their compatriots in Germany. "My brother's four children have died of hunger." "We have had no bread for six months." "If we do not get help from abroad, there is nothing left but to die of hunger." Those are typical passages from these letters.
Fourth, I gathered evidence from journalists and technical experts who had been in the countryside. In The Manchester Guardian, which has been exceedingly sympathetic toward the Soviet régime, there appeared on March 25, 27 and 28 an excellent series of articles on "The Soviet and the Peasantry" (which had not been submitted to the censor). The correspondent, who had visited North Caucasus and the Ukraine, states: "To say that there is famine in some of the' most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth: there is not only famine, but - in the case of the North Caucasus at least - a state of war, a military occupation." Of the Ukraine, he writes: "The population is starving."
My final evidence is based on my talks with hundreds of peasants. They were not the "kulaks"- those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia-but ordinary peasants. I talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which are an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy. 'The peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers had died or were dying.
Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried and that there the dead animals are devoured.
May I in conclusion congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the U.S.S.R.? Moscow is not Russia, and the sight of well fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.
My first evidence was gathered from foreign observers. Since Mr. Duranty introduces consuls into the discussion, a thing I am loath to do, for they are official representatives of their countries and should not be quoted, may I say that I discussed the Russian situation with between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and that their evidence supported my point of view. But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent.
Journalists, on the other hand, are allowed to write, but the censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give "famine" the polite name of "food shortage" and "starving to death" is softened down to read as "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." Consuls are not so reticent in private conversation.
My second evidence was based on conversations with peasants who had migrated into the towns from various parts of Russia. Peasants from the richest parts of Russia coming into the towns for bread. Their story of the deaths in their villages from starvation and of the death of the greater part of their cattle and horses was tragic, and each conversation corroborated the previous one.
Third, my evidence was based upon letters written by German colonists in Russia, appealing for help to their compatriots in Germany. "My brother's four children have died of hunger." "We have had no bread for six months." "If we do not get help from abroad, there is nothing left but to die of hunger." Those are typical passages from these letters.
Fourth, I gathered evidence from journalists and technical experts who had been in the countryside. In The Manchester Guardian, which has been exceedingly sympathetic toward the Soviet régime, there appeared on March 25, 27 and 28 an excellent series of articles on "The Soviet and the Peasantry" (which had not been submitted to the censor). The correspondent, who had visited North Caucasus and the Ukraine, states: "To say that there is famine in some of the' most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth: there is not only famine, but - in the case of the North Caucasus at least - a state of war, a military occupation." Of the Ukraine, he writes: "The population is starving."
My final evidence is based on my talks with hundreds of peasants. They were not the "kulaks"- those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia-but ordinary peasants. I talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which are an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy. 'The peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers had died or were dying.
Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried and that there the dead animals are devoured.
May I in conclusion congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the U.S.S.R.? Moscow is not Russia, and the sight of well fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.
Gareth Jones was to write many other freelance articles on the famine in British and American newspapers up until June 1933. In Danzig, two months later he met the German consul to Kharkov who had praised these articles but said the conditions were far worse than Jones had described them and that millions were dying in Ukraine.
As a result of Gareth Jones' embarrassment to the U.S.S.R., Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinoff, (whom he had interviewed whilst in Moscow) accused him of espionage. In a personal letter from Litvinov to Lloyd George, Gareth Jones was informed that he had been banned from ever returning to the U.S.S.R.. This was no doubt a disappointment to Jones as he was unable to return to a country which he had spent so much time studying her literature, history and language.
With further journalistic investigation of the Soviet Union being curtailed to Jones, he turned his professional attention towards the Orient. The Far East was an enigma to the West and Gareth therefore wanted to investigate the Japanese intentions of expansion in the Far East and in particular, in northern China and Manchukuo. He left Britain in late 1934 and embarked on a 'Round-the-World Fact-Finding Tour'. He spent five or six weeks in Japan, interviewing several important generals and leading politicians - and in his usual fashion, asking some very embarrassing questions regarding Japanese intentions in the Orient. Whilst in Tokyo, Jones resided, unbeknown to himself, in the apartment of the radio operator of the major Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, and he would have clearly been aware of Gareth Jones' previous embarrassing reports from Soviet Ukraine...
After leaving Japan, he visited many countries across the Far East before he eventually reached Beijing. From there, the intrepid journalist travelled into Inner Mongolia with a native German believing it to be free of bandits. They ventured into newly-created Manchukuo territory that had been had infiltrated by the Japanese just a few days earlier and where troops were amassing. Apprehended by the Japanese they were eventually told that there were three ways back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, only one of which was safe. Taking this route the following day, they were captured by bandits and held for ransom for 100,000 Mexican dollars. The German was released within two days, but after 16 days in captivity, the bandits, disbanded Chinese soldiers whose families may have been held to ransom by the Japanese murdered Gareth Jones.
Gareth Jones' death in August 1935, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday was a tragic loss not only to his family but to the world and society as a whole. He had revealed to the world the terrible famine in the Soviet Union and Ukraine; he predicted the Second World War in Europe would breakout following the Danzig Corridor dispute and the designs of territorial expansion by the Japanese would bring about a conflagration in the Far East.
Jones family photograph, at Barry, South Wales, circa 1930. Gwyneth (Gareth's sister), Annie Gwen and Major Edgar (Gareth's parents), Margaret Siriol (on lap), Gareth, Eirian (Siriol's mother) and auntie Winnie (Annie's sister).
Short Biography of Gareth Jones, by his niece Margaret Siriol Colley
Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones
Hero of Ukraine
(1905 -1935)
A Man Who Knew Too Much...
"That part of the world is a cauldron of conflicting intrigue and one or other interests concerned probably knew that Mr Gareth Jones knew too much of what was going on... He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk... I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many. Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered."
London Evening Standard, quoting former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 26th August 1935.
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Walter Duranty
How ‘The New York Times’ Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/...ine-new-york-times-mr-jones-agnieszka-holland
How ‘The New York Times’ Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/...ine-new-york-times-mr-jones-agnieszka-holland
Interesting idea.
Here's another one:
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/soy-bean-car/
A rep for the family of a former US Marine sentenced to 9 years in Russian prison said he'd bet his car that WNBA player Brittney Griner didn't have cannabis when she was detained
https://news.yahoo.com/family-rep-former-us-marine-183202003.html
https://news.yahoo.com/family-rep-former-us-marine-183202003.html
Exposed: The Trump, Putin & Saudi Connection to High Gas Prices
It was a double-whammy for two of then-President Donald Trump’s biggest patrons, Vladimir Putin and American fossil-fuel billionaires and their industry: the price of oil was too damn low.
Between the pandemic-induced collapse in demand for oil and the price war Saudi Arabia was then fighting with Russia — two of the world’s largest to know why gas costs so much? Trump may be long out of power, but the impact of hisWant corrupt treachery lives on...
— Putin was being pinched badly. And in America, from Pennsylvania to Texas, oil producers were outright losing money on the oil they pumped. Gas prices were at record lows, gutting the profits even of refiners.
So, Trump acted. It seemed inexplicable at the time, but in retrospect (knowing now how tied to Putin he was) it makes perfect sense.
In the second year of his presidency, Trump had blown up the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had a hand in fashioning, letting us all think it was because he was trying to erase Obama’s legacy. But the real and immediate impact of Trump’s decision was to pull almost 3 million barrels of Iranian oil a day off the world market, boosting profits for Russia, Saudi Arabia and the US fossil fuel industry.
But that was 2018 and by 2020 prices were again sagging — and thus about 40 percent of the total revenue/income to Russia’s economy was sagging — as demand dropped because of the pandemic. Saudi Arabia was making the situation worse for Putin, keeping their oil production high to compete with Russia for worldwide market share, particularly in Chinese oil markets, and in retaliation for Russia refusing to go along with price-supporting production cuts.
Oil prices had fallen as low as $15 a barrel because Saudi Arabia had opened their spigots full-on, according to Reuters:
So Trump took decisive action.
He called up his buddy, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and essentially threatened that if MBS didn’t cut production (and thus raise worldwide oil prices, which would help out Putin and US petrobillionaires) the United States would reconsider its seven-decade-long military support for the kingdom.
As Reuters reported on April 30, 2020, in an article titled Special Report: Trump told Saudi: Cut Oil Supply or Lose U.S. Military Support:
Oil-drenched Republican Senators Kevin Cramer and Dan Sullivan had drafted legislation to pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia, giving Trump the club he could wield against the Saudis to help out both Putin and the US oil industry that was seeing bankruptcies spread across the country.
Thus, in the last year of his presidency, Trump oversaw the worldwide cuts in oil production that would lead to today’s prices soaring well past $130 a barrel.
Which brings us to today, with oil prices soaring. When President Biden tried to reach out to our allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to ask them to restore the production they’d cut under threat from Trump, both refused to take his call, according to press reports.
Meteor Blades reports at Daily Kos that The Wall Street Journal laid it out:
It was a double-whammy for two of then-President Donald Trump’s biggest patrons, Vladimir Putin and American fossil-fuel billionaires and their industry: the price of oil was too damn low.
Between the pandemic-induced collapse in demand for oil and the price war Saudi Arabia was then fighting with Russia — two of the world’s largest to know why gas costs so much? Trump may be long out of power, but the impact of hisWant corrupt treachery lives on...
— Putin was being pinched badly. And in America, from Pennsylvania to Texas, oil producers were outright losing money on the oil they pumped. Gas prices were at record lows, gutting the profits even of refiners.
So, Trump acted. It seemed inexplicable at the time, but in retrospect (knowing now how tied to Putin he was) it makes perfect sense.
In the second year of his presidency, Trump had blown up the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had a hand in fashioning, letting us all think it was because he was trying to erase Obama’s legacy. But the real and immediate impact of Trump’s decision was to pull almost 3 million barrels of Iranian oil a day off the world market, boosting profits for Russia, Saudi Arabia and the US fossil fuel industry.
But that was 2018 and by 2020 prices were again sagging — and thus about 40 percent of the total revenue/income to Russia’s economy was sagging — as demand dropped because of the pandemic. Saudi Arabia was making the situation worse for Putin, keeping their oil production high to compete with Russia for worldwide market share, particularly in Chinese oil markets, and in retaliation for Russia refusing to go along with price-supporting production cuts.
Oil prices had fallen as low as $15 a barrel because Saudi Arabia had opened their spigots full-on, according to Reuters:
“Despite the agreement to cut a tenth of global production, oil prices continued to fall to historic lows. U.S. oil futures dropped below $0 last week as sellers paid buyers to avoid taking delivery of oil they had no place to store. Brent futures, the global oil benchmark, fell towards $15 per barrel - a level not seen since the 1999 oil price crash – from as high as $70 at the start of the year.”
So Trump took decisive action.
He called up his buddy, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and essentially threatened that if MBS didn’t cut production (and thus raise worldwide oil prices, which would help out Putin and US petrobillionaires) the United States would reconsider its seven-decade-long military support for the kingdom.
As Reuters reported on April 30, 2020, in an article titled Special Report: Trump told Saudi: Cut Oil Supply or Lose U.S. Military Support:
“Trump delivered the message to the crown prince 10 days before the announcement of production cuts. The kingdom’s de facto leader was so taken aback by the threat that he ordered his aides out of the room so he could continue the discussion in private, according to a U.S. source who was briefed on the discussion by senior administration officials.”
Oil-drenched Republican Senators Kevin Cramer and Dan Sullivan had drafted legislation to pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia, giving Trump the club he could wield against the Saudis to help out both Putin and the US oil industry that was seeing bankruptcies spread across the country.
As Reuters noted, “Support for the measure was gaining momentum amid Congressional anger over the ill-timed Saudi-Russia oil price war.”
Thus, in the last year of his presidency, Trump oversaw the worldwide cuts in oil production that would lead to today’s prices soaring well past $130 a barrel.
Which brings us to today, with oil prices soaring. When President Biden tried to reach out to our allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to ask them to restore the production they’d cut under threat from Trump, both refused to take his call, according to press reports.
Meteor Blades reports at Daily Kos that The Wall Street Journal laid it out:
“The Saudis have signaled that their relationship with Washington has deteriorated under the Biden administration, and they want more support for their intervention in Yemen’s civil war, help with their own civilian nuclear program as Iran’s moves ahead, and legal immunity for Prince Mohammed in the U.S., Saudi officials said. The crown prince faces multiple lawsuits in the U.S., including over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.“The Emiratis share Saudi concerns about the restrained U.S. response to recent missile strikes by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen against the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, officials said. Both governments are also concerned about the revival of the Iran nuclear deal, which doesn’t address other security concerns of theirs and has entered the final stages of negotiations in recent weeks.”
The outcome is predictable. Saudi Arabia and Russia keep oil production tight to keep oil prices and profits high, while President Biden is attacked from every direction in the US for high prices at the pump. Republican politicians grandstand on the issue and hammer it daily into the news, blaming the increased price of gasoline on a president who’s trying to both get Iranian oil back on the market and increase Saudi production. The high price of gas and diesel, meanwhile, keep jacking up US inflation, giving the GOP another lead pipe to hit Democrats over the head with.
Neither of Biden’s efforts to lower oil prices are working, though, as the result of Trump’s two gutless actions on behalf of his patrons.
The Iranian talks are bogged down (the Iranians can see what happens to a country that gives up its nukes just by turning on the news and looking at Ukraine) and Saudi Arabia wants Biden to come on bended knee and approve of their slaughter in Yemen, something that would be very costly to American moral standing in the world.
The result is more money for Putin’s war machine and the Saudi crown prince, and a significant increase in the chances an oil-industry-friendly Republican Congress will be installed next year and a Putin/Saudi-friendly Republican President will win election in 2024.
Trump may be long out of power, but the impact of his corrupt treachery lives on.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/exposed...-and-saudi?s=r
The outcome is predictable. Saudi Arabia and Russia keep oil production tight to keep oil prices and profits high, while President Biden is attacked from every direction in the US for high prices at the pump. Republican politicians grandstand on the issue and hammer it daily into the news, blaming the increased price of gasoline on a president who’s trying to both get Iranian oil back on the market and increase Saudi production. The high price of gas and diesel, meanwhile, keep jacking up US inflation, giving the GOP another lead pipe to hit Democrats over the head with.
Neither of Biden’s efforts to lower oil prices are working, though, as the result of Trump’s two gutless actions on behalf of his patrons.
The Iranian talks are bogged down (the Iranians can see what happens to a country that gives up its nukes just by turning on the news and looking at Ukraine) and Saudi Arabia wants Biden to come on bended knee and approve of their slaughter in Yemen, something that would be very costly to American moral standing in the world.
The result is more money for Putin’s war machine and the Saudi crown prince, and a significant increase in the chances an oil-industry-friendly Republican Congress will be installed next year and a Putin/Saudi-friendly Republican President will win election in 2024.
Trump may be long out of power, but the impact of his corrupt treachery lives on.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/exposed...-and-saudi?s=r
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Casualties of Empire
The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.
My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.
As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?
Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.
Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?
Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.com last Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.
The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.
Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979
To an extent I find surprising given its calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.
President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.
If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.
Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:
And this, which I find especially fiendish:
No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.
And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.
This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.
Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.
There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.
Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?
The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.
What Has Become of Us
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”
That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.
The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.
What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.
It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.
It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.
Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?
I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.
If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.
And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.
I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.
Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/0...ies-of-empire/
The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.
My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.
As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?
Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.
Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?
Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.com last Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.
The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.
Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979
To an extent I find surprising given its calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.
President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.
If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.
Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:
“In particular, the brain:
is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:
is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;
accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“
is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:
is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;
accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“
And this, which I find especially fiendish:
“At the political and strategic level, it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of emotions…. Emotions—hope, fear, humiliation—shape the world and international relations with the echo-chamber effect of social media.“
No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.
And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.
This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.
Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.
There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.
Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?
The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.
What Has Become of Us
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”
That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.
The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.
What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.
It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.
It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.
Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?
I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.
If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.
And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.
I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.
Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/0...ies-of-empire/
Scott Ritter
Pity the nation
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/07/pity-the-nation/
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In the past few months, the United States has undergone a kind of transformation that one only reads about in history books — from a nation which imperfectly, yet stolidly, embraced the promise, if not principle, of freedom, especially when it came to that most basic of rights — the freedom of expression. Democracies live and die on the ability of an informed citizenry to engage in open debate, dialogue and discussion about difficult issues. Freedom of speech is one of the touch-stone tenets of American democracy — the idea that, no matter how out of step with mainstream society one’s beliefs might be, the retained right to freely express opinions thus derived without fear of censorship or repression existed.
No more.
In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russophobia which had taken grip in the United States since Russia’s first post-Cold War president, Boris Yeltsin, handed the reins of power over to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has emerged much like the putrid core of an over-ripe boil. That this anti-Russian trend existed in the United States was, in and of itself, no secret. Indeed, the United States had, since 2000, pushed aside classic Russian area studies in the pursuit of a new school espousing the doctrine of “Putinism,” centered on the flawed notion that everything in Russia revolved around the singular person of Vladimir Putin.
The more the United States struggled with the reality of a Russian nation unwilling to allow itself to be once again constrained by the yoke of carpetbagger economics disguised as “democracy” that had been prevalent during the Yeltsin era, the more the dogma of “Putinism” took hold in the very establishments where intellectual examination of complex problems was ostensibly transpiring — the halls of academia which in turn produced the minds that guided policy formulation and implementation.
Outliers like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen were cashiered in favor of a new breed of erstwhile Russian expert, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, Fiona Hill and Anne Applebaum. Genuine Russian area studies was supplanted by a new field of authoritarian studies, where the soul of a nation that once was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow caricature of one man — Putin.
We had seen this play before, in the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, when the national identity of a people who traced their heritage back to the Biblical times of Babylon was encapsulated in the person of one man, Saddam Hussein. By focusing solely on a manufactured narrative derived from a simplistic understanding of one man, the United States papered over the complex internal reality of the Iraqi nation and its people, and in doing so set itself up for defeat. It was if Iraq’s long and storied history ceased to exist.
The impact this erasure of context and relevance from the national discourse was felt in the lead up to the decision to initiate what was, by all sense and purposes, an illegal war of aggression — the greatest war crime of all, according to U.S. Supreme Court justice and U.S. chief prosecutor during the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson.
My own personal experience serves as witness to this reality. As a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998, I was uniquely positioned to comment on the veracity of the claims made by the United States that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction capability in violation of its obligation to be disarmed of such. When my stance was deemed convenient to a narrative attacking a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, I was readily embraced. However, when my fact-based narrative ran afoul of the regime-change policies of Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, I was cast aside as a pariah.
Politics of Personal Destruction
The politics of personal destruction were employed in full, and I was attacked for being a shill of Saddam and, perhaps worst of all for someone who served his nation proudly and honorably as an officer of U.S. Marines, anti-American. It didn’t matter that, without exception, the fact-based arguments I made challenging the case for war with Iraq proved to be accurate — at the time and place where the arguments could have, and should have, resonated greatest (during the buildup to the invasion) — that my voice had been effectively silenced.
I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened.
The problem with the pro-Ukrainian narrative is that it is at best incomplete, and worse incredibly misleading. NATO expansion has been consistently identified by Russia as an existential threat. The domination of the hate-filled neo-Nazi ideology of the Ukrainian far-right is well documented, up to and including their threat to kill the incumbent president, Volodymyr Zelensky, if he did not do their bidding. And the fact that the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, promised to make the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass cower in the basements under the weight of Ukrainian artillery fire is well documented.
Unfortunately for those seeking to have an informed, fact-based discussion, dialogue, and debate about the complex problem that is Ukraine-Russian relations is the reality that facts are not conducive to the advancement of the “Putinism” dogma that has gripped American academia, government, and mainstream media today.
The Saddam-era tactics of smearing the character of anyone who dares challenge what passes for conventional wisdom when it comes to Russia and its leader is alive and well and living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The age-old tactic of boycotting such voices by the mainstream media is in full-swing — the so-called news channels are flooded with the acolytes of “Putinism,” while anyone who dares challenge the officially sanctioned narrative of “Ukraine good, Russia bad” is excluded from participating in the “discussion.”
‘Russian Misinformation’
And, in this age where social media has, in many ways, supplanted the mainstream media as the source of choice for most Americans, the U.S. government has colluded with the commercial providers of the major platforms used to share information to label anything that deviates from the official line as “Russian misinformation,” going so far as to label data derived from Russian sources as “state-sponsored,” along with a warning that supposes the information within is somehow flawed and dangerous to normal democratic discourse.
The ultimate sanction, however, came when the U.S. government pressured the corporate internet providers to shut down all Russian-affiliated media, leading to the closure of RT America and other media outlets whose accuracy and impartiality, upon examination, far exceeded that of their American counterparts.
Now America is taking it to the next level when it comes to the pandemic of Russophobia that is sweeping across the country, purging everything Russian from the national discourse and experience. Russian books are being banned and Russian restaurants boycotted and worse, attacked. The massive economic sanctions enacted against Russia and the Russian people has extended to what amounts to an erasure of all things Russian from the American experience.
Where will this stop? History shows that America is capable of healing itself — the national shame that was the treatment of Japanese- Americans during World War II is a clear demonstration of this phenomenon. However, the politics of cancellation which has emerged in the American body politic has never carried with it the kind of potential blow-back that exists in the case of Russia.
In the pell-mell rush toward cancelling Russia in the name of defeating Putin, emotion has replaced common sense, to the point that people are ignoring the fact that Russia is a nuclear power willing and able to use its Armageddon-inducing arsenal in defense of what it views as its legitimate national security interests.
There has never been a time when a national discussion has been more essential to the continued survival of the American people and all humanity. If this discussion could occur armed with the full range of facts and opinions relating to Russia, there might be hope that reason would prevail, and all nations would walk away from the abyss of our collective suicide. Unfortunately, the American experiment in democracy is not conducive for such near-term embrace of sanity and reason.
“Pity the nation,” Ferlinghetti wrote, “whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.”
Pity America.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Pity the nation
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/07/pity-the-nation/
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In the past few months, the United States has undergone a kind of transformation that one only reads about in history books — from a nation which imperfectly, yet stolidly, embraced the promise, if not principle, of freedom, especially when it came to that most basic of rights — the freedom of expression. Democracies live and die on the ability of an informed citizenry to engage in open debate, dialogue and discussion about difficult issues. Freedom of speech is one of the touch-stone tenets of American democracy — the idea that, no matter how out of step with mainstream society one’s beliefs might be, the retained right to freely express opinions thus derived without fear of censorship or repression existed.
No more.
In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russophobia which had taken grip in the United States since Russia’s first post-Cold War president, Boris Yeltsin, handed the reins of power over to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has emerged much like the putrid core of an over-ripe boil. That this anti-Russian trend existed in the United States was, in and of itself, no secret. Indeed, the United States had, since 2000, pushed aside classic Russian area studies in the pursuit of a new school espousing the doctrine of “Putinism,” centered on the flawed notion that everything in Russia revolved around the singular person of Vladimir Putin.
The more the United States struggled with the reality of a Russian nation unwilling to allow itself to be once again constrained by the yoke of carpetbagger economics disguised as “democracy” that had been prevalent during the Yeltsin era, the more the dogma of “Putinism” took hold in the very establishments where intellectual examination of complex problems was ostensibly transpiring — the halls of academia which in turn produced the minds that guided policy formulation and implementation.
Outliers like Jack Matlock, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Cohen were cashiered in favor of a new breed of erstwhile Russian expert, led by the likes of Michael McFaul, Fiona Hill and Anne Applebaum. Genuine Russian area studies was supplanted by a new field of authoritarian studies, where the soul of a nation that once was defined by the life and works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Lenin, Stalin, Sakharov, and Gorbachev was distilled into a shallow caricature of one man — Putin.
We had seen this play before, in the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, when the national identity of a people who traced their heritage back to the Biblical times of Babylon was encapsulated in the person of one man, Saddam Hussein. By focusing solely on a manufactured narrative derived from a simplistic understanding of one man, the United States papered over the complex internal reality of the Iraqi nation and its people, and in doing so set itself up for defeat. It was if Iraq’s long and storied history ceased to exist.
The impact this erasure of context and relevance from the national discourse was felt in the lead up to the decision to initiate what was, by all sense and purposes, an illegal war of aggression — the greatest war crime of all, according to U.S. Supreme Court justice and U.S. chief prosecutor during the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson.
My own personal experience serves as witness to this reality. As a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998, I was uniquely positioned to comment on the veracity of the claims made by the United States that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction capability in violation of its obligation to be disarmed of such. When my stance was deemed convenient to a narrative attacking a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, I was readily embraced. However, when my fact-based narrative ran afoul of the regime-change policies of Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, I was cast aside as a pariah.
Politics of Personal Destruction
The politics of personal destruction were employed in full, and I was attacked for being a shill of Saddam and, perhaps worst of all for someone who served his nation proudly and honorably as an officer of U.S. Marines, anti-American. It didn’t matter that, without exception, the fact-based arguments I made challenging the case for war with Iraq proved to be accurate — at the time and place where the arguments could have, and should have, resonated greatest (during the buildup to the invasion) — that my voice had been effectively silenced.
I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened.
The problem with the pro-Ukrainian narrative is that it is at best incomplete, and worse incredibly misleading. NATO expansion has been consistently identified by Russia as an existential threat. The domination of the hate-filled neo-Nazi ideology of the Ukrainian far-right is well documented, up to and including their threat to kill the incumbent president, Volodymyr Zelensky, if he did not do their bidding. And the fact that the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, promised to make the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass cower in the basements under the weight of Ukrainian artillery fire is well documented.
Unfortunately for those seeking to have an informed, fact-based discussion, dialogue, and debate about the complex problem that is Ukraine-Russian relations is the reality that facts are not conducive to the advancement of the “Putinism” dogma that has gripped American academia, government, and mainstream media today.
The Saddam-era tactics of smearing the character of anyone who dares challenge what passes for conventional wisdom when it comes to Russia and its leader is alive and well and living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The age-old tactic of boycotting such voices by the mainstream media is in full-swing — the so-called news channels are flooded with the acolytes of “Putinism,” while anyone who dares challenge the officially sanctioned narrative of “Ukraine good, Russia bad” is excluded from participating in the “discussion.”
‘Russian Misinformation’
And, in this age where social media has, in many ways, supplanted the mainstream media as the source of choice for most Americans, the U.S. government has colluded with the commercial providers of the major platforms used to share information to label anything that deviates from the official line as “Russian misinformation,” going so far as to label data derived from Russian sources as “state-sponsored,” along with a warning that supposes the information within is somehow flawed and dangerous to normal democratic discourse.
The ultimate sanction, however, came when the U.S. government pressured the corporate internet providers to shut down all Russian-affiliated media, leading to the closure of RT America and other media outlets whose accuracy and impartiality, upon examination, far exceeded that of their American counterparts.
Now America is taking it to the next level when it comes to the pandemic of Russophobia that is sweeping across the country, purging everything Russian from the national discourse and experience. Russian books are being banned and Russian restaurants boycotted and worse, attacked. The massive economic sanctions enacted against Russia and the Russian people has extended to what amounts to an erasure of all things Russian from the American experience.
Where will this stop? History shows that America is capable of healing itself — the national shame that was the treatment of Japanese- Americans during World War II is a clear demonstration of this phenomenon. However, the politics of cancellation which has emerged in the American body politic has never carried with it the kind of potential blow-back that exists in the case of Russia.
In the pell-mell rush toward cancelling Russia in the name of defeating Putin, emotion has replaced common sense, to the point that people are ignoring the fact that Russia is a nuclear power willing and able to use its Armageddon-inducing arsenal in defense of what it views as its legitimate national security interests.
There has never been a time when a national discussion has been more essential to the continued survival of the American people and all humanity. If this discussion could occur armed with the full range of facts and opinions relating to Russia, there might be hope that reason would prevail, and all nations would walk away from the abyss of our collective suicide. Unfortunately, the American experiment in democracy is not conducive for such near-term embrace of sanity and reason.
“Pity the nation,” Ferlinghetti wrote, “whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.”
Pity America.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Casualties of Empire
The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.
My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.
As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?
Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.
Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?
Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.com last Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.
The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.
Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979
To an extent I find surprising given its calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.
President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.
If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.
Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:“In particular, the brain:
is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:
is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;
accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“
And this, which I find especially fiendish:“At the political and strategic level, it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of emotions…. Emotions—hope, fear, humiliation—shape the world and international relations with the echo-chamber effect of social media.“
No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.
And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.
This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.
Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.
There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.
Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?
The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.
What Has Become of Us
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”
That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.
The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.
What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.
It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.
It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.
Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?
I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.
If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.
And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.
I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.
Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/0...ies-of-empire/
This is simply some guys distorted writings.
How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?
The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...s-death-rate/626972/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...s-death-rate/626972/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Three Berries
Active member
Your guess is less than worthless, you are a constant source of anti American anti human bullshit.
When you thought you could hurt others, you spewed with joy and glee.
Looks like you called it correctly once again...
Three Berries
Active member
