Betty Krawczyk Speaking in Victoria

Betty Krawczyk Speaking in Victoria

 by Betty Krawczyk - BettysEarlyEdition

What are the mental and spiritual processes involved in making decisions that may call for great self-sacrifice? Sacrifices that may lead to one's arrest, even imprisonment? 

Betty Krawczyk will speak and invite conversation on this subject in relation to peaceful civil disobedience surrounding environmental protests.

Unitarian Church in Victoria 

May 18

10:30-11:30

 

Vietnam, China, and Vietnam's Chinese

Big Bullies and Local Nationalism in Vietnam and Ukraine

by Peter Lee - China Matters

First off, Vietnam.

There has been some bewilderment expressed as to why Vietnamese--demonstrating against the PRC’s provocative positioning of its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone--attacked Taiwanese factories.

The answer is depressingly simple.

Anti-Chinese prejudice—including prejudice against all Chinese, including Taiwanese Chinese, PRC Chinese, and Vietnam’s own ethnic Chinese citizens—is baked into Vietnam’s current political and social narrative.

It is not a matter that Vietnam was colonized by China in the far off imperial era or, for that matter, the fact that Chiang Kaishek’s KMT army behaved extremely poorly when it made a clumsy play to claim northern Vietnam as part of China’s political sphere immediately following World War II.

Anti-Chinese sentiment grew out of the Vietnamese government’s sense of threat in the 1970s, as it pursued its alliance with the Soviet Union while spurning the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Chinese dominated the commercial sector of the economy, especially in recently liberated/conquered Saigon, and were seen as an undesirable social element capable of disloyalty to the Communist government, divided loyalties vis a vis the PRC, and also serving as a key component in the bourgeoise economy that presented obstacles to the socialization.

So the Vietnamese government adopted and implemented various policies hostile to its ethnic Chinese community. Hostile enough, in fact, that over half a million ethnic Chinese fled. Here’s a good, if perhaps dated, discussion of the period.

Remember the “boat people” of the 1970s? Maybe not. But they were predominantly ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.

The Vietnam government also implemented extremely harsh measures against Chinese communities in Cambodia during its invasion to topple the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge.

This combination of toxic elements contributed to the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 which, in a development little recognized in Vietnam today, was executed by the PRC after US president Jimmy Carter gave Deng Xiaoping the green light as part of the whole “contain Soviet influence in Asia” exercise (now, of course, succeeded by the whole “contain PRC influence in Asia” exercise).

Distrust of Chinese—not just China i.e. the PRC—is still an essential social and political element in modern Vietnamese nationalism, as well as the government’s effort to maintain its a central, legitimate position in that nationalistic narrative.

So, it’s not much of a stretch for angry nationalists demonstrating against a (PRC) Chinese oil rig to burn down an (ROC) Chinese plastics factory.

The good news, if there is any, is that this level of anti-Chinese resentment and violence has always been bubbling near the surface in Vietnam. It’s been managed before, and I’m sure the government in Hanoi hopes it will be able to get the lid on again.

As for Ukraine, some critics of US Ukraine government and the government in Kyiv have been rather dismayed and befuddled by the appearance of a leading scholar of Soviet and Eastern European studies, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, in the ranks of the regime’s defenders. Snyder is a vociferous supporter of the new, West-backed government and is the author of numerous seemingly ludicrous attempts to minimize the ultra-nationalist & fascist component of the Kyiv regime while striving to paint the Hitler moustache on Putin.

Critique of the regime is much more comfortable if the ranks of the opposition is limited to over-the-top cold warriors, ultra-nationalists, and neo-liberal EU loving fantasists, and not authoritative Ivy League profs.

It is presumptuous of me to try to put myself into Dr. Snyder’s head, however I wish to point out a perspective which to some extent may explain and justify his position to his detractors.

Poland and Ukraine are two proto-nations whose aspirations and existence were denied and destroyed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR during the twentieth century.

Germany has atoned. Post-USSR Russia did…kinda. Now, under Putin, Russia is pitching its moral and political debts to eastern Europe in the wastebasket. Instead of acknowledging and atoning for the abuses to which it subjected its neighbors—including hideous crimes like the Katyn massacre, the slaughter of over 20,000 Polish military officers as part of Stalin’s effort to extinguish Poland as a meaningful force and national identity; Stalin’s brutal collectivization campaign that killed hundreds of thousands in Ukraine; and, even more recently, the Chernobyl disaster—Putin is headed in the opposite direction.

Putin is concentrating on Russia’s own sense of grievance, its own nationalism, and its own regional aspirations, aspirations that center on the fate of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the eastern European states and inevitably conflict with aspirations in Ukraine--as Putin seeks to neuter Ukraine, and turn it into a federalized, helpless buffer against intrusion from the West.

In the callous realist view—which, I might add, seems to be the view from most of Europe, including Berlin--agreeing with Putin to Finlandize Ukraine is a smart, split-the-baby solution.

The baby i.e. Ukraine, at least the Ukraine of anti-Russian Ukraine nationalists, understandably doesn’t feel this way.

And I think that might be where Professor Snyder stands.

He sees the current situation as a recapitulation of the destruction of Poland at the hands of Stalin and Hitler. He perhaps yearns for an alternative future, in which the West redeems itself for its abandonment of Poland by supporting Ukraine in its efforts to achieve genuine political, military, and psychological independence of Russia.

In other words, for Snyder perhaps he sees the struggle in Ukraine is an attempt to regain moral agency both for Ukraine and for its Western backers, just as Putin is trying to strip it away.

For most of the world, perhaps, the current crisis in Ukraine is primarily a dust-up between an inept and hopelessly compromised pro-Western government in Kyiv versus suspicious and aggrieved ethnic Russians in the east.

Professor Snyder views Ukraine as a colossal moral struggle—The Battle in Ukraine Means Everything, in the title of his most recent piece for The New Republic. His hyperbolic critique also takes the rather creepy, borderline racist clash of civilizations view of Ukraine as a Gotterdammerung between Europe and the bastard son of Genghis Khan and Fu Manchu, uhm, excuse me, “Eurasia”, an Orientalizing construct whose rather obvious problems will perhaps come back to haunt his recollection after he’s cooled off a bit:

All of this is consistent with the fundamental ideological premise of Eurasia. Whereas European integration begins from the premise that National Socialism and Stalinism were negative examples, Eurasian integration begins from the more jaded and postmodern premise that history is a grab bag of useful ideas. Whereas European integration presumes liberal democracy, Eurasian ideology explicitly rejects it. ..

Ukraine has no history without Europe, but Europe also has no history without Ukraine. Ukraine has no future without Europe, but Europe also has no future without Ukraine. Throughout the centuries, the history of Ukraine has revealed the turning points in the history of Europe. This seems still to be true today. Of course, which way things will turn still depends, at least for a little while, on the Europeans.

My personal feeling, in any event, is that politics is a poor vehicle for moral redemption and Professor Snyder has taken on an insurmountable task in attempting to regenerate Ukraine as a national and moral force with the sorry situational and human capital burdening the regime in Kyiv.

However, I guess I can’t fault him too much for trying.

Israeli Snipers Mark Nakba Day by Assassinating Children

Ongoing Nakba

Mazin Qumsiyeh - Qumsiyeh.org

One 15 year old boy and one 17 year old boy where both assassinated within a few minutes of each other by an Israeli sniper today. Mohammad and Nader were murdered as they participated in demonstrations marking the 66th anniversary of the Nakba (the catastrophic and continuing ethnic cleansing of Palestine to create the apartheid Jewish state of Israel on its ruins).

Several other youth were also hit with live ammunition, some in critical condition. Video can be seen here:
http://www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/news/2014/05/15/538367.html

Excellent documentary on life in Palestine before the Nakba (before the Palestinian holocaust) Arabic with English subtitles

UNRWA audiovisual archive of Palestinian refugees: half a million photos and videos digitized: http://archive.unrwa.org/

Video, the Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PStoP2g6K2k

Denying the “Nakba”: ‘Not An Option, Israel’

http://mideastposts.com/middle-east-politics-analysis/denying-nakba-option-israel/

Gum Films: 'The Lab': An investigative documentary revealing how the Israeli military occupation in Palestine has become a business rather than a burden.
http://www.gumfilms.com/lab

This is just one of the reasons Israel does not want peace: 10 billion from tested-in-Palestinians weapon sales. Other reasons:

• direct profit from stealing Palestinian property; 

• direct profit from a captive market under occupation;

• direct profit from foreign aid extorted from US and other tax-payers. 

It is also the financial reason why Israel does not want refugees to return and reclaim their stolen property. A thief wants to get away with theft, a murderer with murder. The absence of enforcement of international law lets this travesty go on. That is why we need more push on resistance, activism, and Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)

While we are still awaiting the implementation of "reconciliation" between Hamas and Fatah and the hope of reconstituting a democratic PLO, we must continue to act vigorously and strongly. We owe it to our martyrs.

Mazin Qumsiyeh
http://qumsiyeh.org

DoubleThinking Right

Thinking the Right Thoughts

by David Cromwell and David Edwards  - Media Lens

Falluja 2003

There are always convenient news-hooks on which corporate journalists can hang their power-friendly prejudices about the West being 'the good guys' in world affairs. Channel 4 News is not immune from this chauvinism. For example, Matt Frei introduced a report about last month's elections in Iraq with this propaganda bullet:

'Now, America once invaded Iraq so that, in large part, Iraqis could do what they did today – go to the polls.' (Channel 4 News, April 30, 2014)

Frei was, in fact, diligently reading out the first line of a blog piece by his colleague Jonathan Rugman, C4 News foreign affairs correspondent. The actual overriding reason for the West's war of aggression – strategic geopolitical dominance, including control of valuable hydrocarbon resources in the Middle East – was simply brushed aside. As ever, 'we' must be seen to be acting out of benign intent and pure desire to bring democracy to people around the globe. The reality is that 'we' must stifle other countries' independent development and, if required, bomb them into submission to Western state-corporate hegemony.

Frei acting as a mouthpiece to Rugman's bizarrely skewed perspective on the Iraq War was yet another case of sticking to the editorial line from the C4 News 'team you know and trust'. When we asked C4 News correspondent Alex Thomson whether he agreed with this particular editorial monstrosity from his team he ducked out:

'whoah - I'm surfing right now and staying well out of this one!'

To be fair to Thomson, that was his jovial way of not defending his colleagues. He knows we know, and we know he knows we know, where his sympathies lie on that one.

Whereas Thomson has enough savvy to see behind much US-UK government rhetoric, he is aware that he must rein in any expressed scepticism to hang on to his job. As a general rule, journalists in the public eye are constrained to direct scepticism in one direction only: towards the propaganda output of officially declared enemies.

Thus, BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg was free to make this observation via Twitter:

'Dominating the Russian airwaves, Moscow's lexicon for the Ukraine conflict: "junta", "fascists", "Banderovtsy", "genocide", "extremists"'

That's fine. But when has Rosenberg, or any of his colleagues, ever highlighted how 'our' airwaves are dominated by 'London's lexicon' and 'Washington's lexicon'? Why is it the job of a supposedly impartial BBC journalist to expose 'Moscow's lexicon', but not that emanating from London or Washington? Rosenberg ignored us when we asked him those questions on Twitter.

The Journalism Of Amnesia

It is also a requirement for continued employment that corporate journalists forget about 'our' past crimes, or at least maintain a studied silence. For instance, reporting from Iraq, BBC Middle East correspondent Quentin Sommerville stated blandly on BBC News at Ten:

'This is the road to Fallujah – the city that American troops fought so hard to take.' (BBC One, April 30, 2014)

Yes, Fallujah - the city that was twice subjected to massive US onslaughts in April and November 2004 with devastating high-tech weaponry, killing at least 800 civilians in the second onslaught alone; the city that suffered numerous US war crimes, including the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions, leaving an ugly legacy of birth defects and increased incidence of infant mortality and cancer. (See our alert from September 2013 and the links therein to earlier media alerts). Casting this appalling devastation as 'the city that American troops fought so hard to take' strips meaning from BBC 'journalism'. We might kindly call this 'amnesia'.

A similar ailment afflicted journalists when they reported the announcement that star BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman would be leaving the flagship Newsnight programme. Nobody in the news media knew, or could be bothered to recall, Paxman's ludicrous assertion that he, a much-vaunted robustly inquisitive and sceptical journalist, had been simply 'hoodwinked' by Bush and Blair's deceptive claims about Iraqi WMD.

Over a month before the invasion of Iraq, we had asked Paxman why, in his Newsnight interview with Tony Blair (February 6, 2003), he had failed to present even the most basic counter-arguments to Blair's deceptive case for war. Despite providing the Grand Inquisitor with details in advance, Paxman did not put to Blair that Iraq had been 'fundamentally disarmed' by 1998, according to chief UN arms inspector Scott Ritter. Paxman did not challenge Blair that Iraq's nuclear capability had been 100% destroyed. The BBC alpha-male interviewer did not raise the fact that limited shelf-lives for any residual Iraqi chemical and biological weapons meant they would have already turned into harmless sludge.

Perhaps even more damning, Paxman failed to refer to the many credible and authoritative voices arguing that the impending war on Iraq was about oil and geostrategic power, and would have the effect of exacerbating the terrorist threat against the West. That Paxman could claim years later that he was 'hoodwinked' was a ludicrous attempt to abdicate responsibility for arguably the biggest betrayal of his career.

On the front page of the Guardian, Hannah Ellis-Petersen compiled some of 'Paxman's more memorable moments' from his Newsnight stint. These included a 1998 interview with Denis Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator who had resigned his post in Iraq in protest at what he rightly called genocidal sanctions. Ellis-Petersen wrote:

'Questioning his motives, Paxman asked him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?"'

For the Guardian, this outrageous question was merely a 'memorable moment'. Anyone remotely familiar with the facts of the appalling UN sanctions regime - imposed most cruelly by Washington and London, and leading to the deaths of an estimated half a million children under five; and likely well over one million people in total – would have hailed Halliday's bravery, outspokenness and compassion. Paxman's insulting challenge of Halliday was not so much a 'memorable moment', which casts the event as a tribute to the interviewer's supposed pedigree of truth-finding, but it was instead a shameful episode.

'A Gunner On The Lookout For Threats From Below'

In short, to be a successful corporate journalist with high public visibility, two of the most important attributes are to direct one's scepticism in the required direction - towards state 'enemies' - and to overlook or play down Western crimes. But perhaps the most important asset is the ability to believe sincerely in the essential ideological framework that drives Western government policies and public pronouncements: that 'we' are committed to making the world a better place.

BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins can always be relied upon to provide fine examples of such power-friendly journalism. Reporting recently on Syria for BBC News at Ten (April 28, 2014), he said ominously:

'So, crucially, could President Assad eventually win this civil war? He has a clear strategy: regime survival, whatever the cost.'

'Whatever the cost' carried the heavy implication that this would include the use of chemical weapons (see earlier media alerts here and here). The sheer evil of the Syrian leader radiated through Robbins' report.

Robbins added:

'President Assad is running again in elections in June. Much of the outside world regards that process as a grotesque sham. But Bashar Ashad looks strong with very powerful backers: Russia, Iran and the fighters of Hezbollah.'

It is de rigueur to describe elections in Syria as 'a grotesque sham', but not when reporting on a country that is a Western ally or is militarily occupied by the West (see our recent alert on elections in Afghanistan).

As well as Robbins' choice of words, it was notable to hear the menacing tone when he described Assad as looking 'strong with very powerful backers: Russia, Iran and the fighters of Hezbollah'. The BBC correspondent was clearly intent on portraying demonic enemies of the West all lined up against 'us': Russia, Iran and 'the fighters' of Hezbollah (not merely 'Hezbollah'.) There was no mention of the other 'very powerful backers' fuelling the mass death in Syria – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, 'liberated' Iraq, 'liberated' Libya and other US client states. As the Washington Post recently reported:

'the arrival at the ['rebel'] base last month of U.S.-made TOW antitank missiles, the first advanced American weaponry to be dispatched to Syria since the conflict began, has reignited long-abandoned hopes among the rebels that the Obama administration is preparing to soften its resistance to the provision of significant military aid and, perhaps, help move the battlefield equation back in their favor'.

The kind of BBC reporting cited above requires that the reporter buys into the propaganda system that shapes how we, as news 'consumers' and compliant subjects, are supposed to see the world. It is faith-based belief in the core ideology that Western leaders uphold genuine democracy and freedom that enables corporate journalists to deliver propaganda to the public in the most effective and persuasive way.

BBC 'defence' correspondent Caroline Wyatt is another repeat offender in this system of elite-friendly 'news'. Reporting from Afghanistan after a UK helicopter had crashed with the loss of five military personnel, she said (BBC Weekend News, April 27, 2014):

'Lynx helicopters have been vital there [in Afghanistan]. This is footage we took from a flight with the Army Air Corps in Helmand last year. A gunner on the lookout for threats from below. The pilot and copilot in the front; their skills honed by long years of training.' (Our emphasis).

Wyatt's report for BBC News gave an official, Western-power slant on war:

'The tragedy has brought tributes from the Prime Minister and many others. David Cameron said it brought home the sacrifices made by the UK's armed forces in Afghanistan.'

But then, Caroline Wyatt has a long dishonourable record in reporting Afghanistan in pro-Nato mode. In 2011, Wyatt was given 'a tour around' an Apache attack helicopter where she was shown laser-guided Hellfire missiles and learned that 19 rockets could be fired out of one 'rocket pod'. And in 2012, she wrote this:

'Nato leaders want to send out a clear message of financial and political support for Afghanistan for the years after 2014, not least so that the manner of Nato's exit doesn't tarnish the alliance itself or the many sacrifices made over the past decade on Afghan soil.' (Our emphasis.)

We wrote to her at the time and asked:

'What about the Narang night raid, reported by Jerome Starkey of The Times and followed by strenuous Pentagon efforts to silence and discredit him?'

In the Narang raid, ten civilians, including eight boys, were killed in a Nato-authorised operation, possibly even led by US forces. (See our media alerts here and here).

Our email to Wyatt continued:

'What about the numerous Nato airstrikes and drone attacks that have killed Afghan civilians, many of them women and children? What about the multiple instances of wedding parties being bombed?

'Given all that has happened in Afghanistan, what would it take to "tarnish" Nato? Can you explain how your standpoint can reasonably be described as "impartial", please?'

The BBC journalist never did respond.

In the classic dystopian novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of a world in which the population is provided with a drug called 'soma' to keep them content and docile, and thus distracted from challenging power. In the real world today, state and corporate elites have yet to drug the population in this way. But we do have the endless drip of poisonous propaganda courtesy of BBC News.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to:

Paul Royall, editor of BBC News at Ten, and BBC News at Six
Email: paul.royall@bbc.co.uk
Twitter: @paulroyall

Caroline Wyatt, BBC defence correspondent
Email: caroline.wyatt@bbc.co.uk

Steve Rosenberg, BBC Moscow correspondent
Email: steve.rosenberg@bbc.co.uk
Twitter: @BBCSteveR

Please blind-copy us in on any exchanges or forward them to us later at:
editor@medialens.org

Nakba Day, 2014

On Nakba Day, Israelis forced to confront a guilty secret

by Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

For 66 years Israel’s founding generation has lived with a guilty secret, one it successfully concealed from the generations that followed. Forests were planted to hide war crimes. School textbooks mythologised the events surrounding Israel’s creation. The army was blindly venerated as the most moral in the world.

Once, “Nakba” – Arabic for “Catastrophe”, referring to the dispossession of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 – would have failed to register with any but a small number of Israeli Jews. Today, only those who never watch television or read a newspaper can plead ignorance.

As marches and festivals are held today by Palestinians across the region to mark Nakba Day – commemorating the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the erasure of more than 500 villages – Israelis will be watching.

In fact, the Israeli media have been filled with references to the Nakba for the past 10 days, since Israel celebrated its Independence Day last week. The two anniversaries do not quite coincide because Israel marks its founding according to the Hebrew calendar.

While Israeli Jews were trying to enjoy guilt-free street parties last week, news reports focused on the activities of their compatriots – the Palestinians who remained inside the new state of Israel and now comprise a fifth of the population. Estimates are that one in four of these 1.5 million Palestinian citizens is from a family internally displaced by the 1948 war.

More than 20,000 staged a “March of Return” to one destroyed village, Lubya, buried under a forest near Tiberias and close to a major Israeli highway. Long tailbacks forced thousands of Israeli Jews to get a close-up view as they crawled past the biggest nakba procession in Israel’s history.

For others, images of the marchers waving Palestinian flags and massively outnumbering Israeli police and a counter-demonstration by Jewish nationalists were seen on TV news, websites and social media.

The assault on Israel’s much cherished national mythology is undoubted. And it reflects the rise of a new generation of Palestinians no longer willing to defer to their more cautious, and traumatised, elders, those who directly experienced the events of 1948.

These youth see themselves as representing not only their immediate relatives but Palestinians in exile who have no chance to march back to their village. Many of Lubya’s refugees ended up in Yarmouk camp in Damascus, where they are suffering new horrors, caught in the midst of Syria’s civil war.

Palestinians in Israel are also being galvanised into action by initiatives like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to legislate Israel as a Jewish state. They see this as the latest phase of an ongoing nakba – an attempt to erase their nativeness, just as the villages were once disappeared.

Palestinians are making a noise about the Nakba on every possible front – and not just on Nakba Day. Last week media around the world reported on one such venture: a phone app called iNakba that maps the hundreds of destroyed villages across Israel. Briefly it became one of the most popular iPhone downloads, connecting refugees through new technology. iNakba visibly restores a Palestine that Israel hoped literally to have wiped off the map.

The app is the initiative of Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that is jointly run by Jews and Palestinians. They have been finding ever more creative and provocative ways to grab headlines.

They arrange regular visits to destroyed villages that a growing number of curious Israeli Jews are participating in, often in the face of vehement opposition from the communities built on the rubble of Palestinian homes.

Zochrot has created a Hebrew information pack on the Nakba for teachers, though education officials ban it. Last year it staged the first Nakba film festival in Tel Aviv. It is also creating an archive of filmed interviews with Israeli veteran fighters prepared to admit their part in expulsions.

Zochrot also held last year the first-ever conference in Israel discussing not just the principle but how to put into practice a right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees across the region.

Palestinian youth are taking up the idea enthusiastically. Architects are designing plans for new communities that would house the refugees on or near their old lands.

Refugee families are trying to reclaim mosques and churches, usually the only buildings still standing. Israeli media reported last month that internal refugees had been attacked as they held a baptism in their former church at al-Bassa, now swamped by the Jewish town of Shlomi.

Workshops have been arranged among refugee groups to imagine what a right of return might look like. Youth from two Christian villages, Iqrit and Biram, have already set up camps at their old churches, daring Israel to hound them out like their grandparents. Another group, I Won’t Remain a Refugee, is looking to export this example to other villages.

The size of the march to Lubya and the proliferation of these initiatives are a gauge of how Palestinians are no longer prepared to defer to the Palestinian leadership on the refugee issue or wait for an interminable peace process to make meaningful progress.

“The people are sending a message to the leadership in Ramallah that it cannot forget or sideline the right of return,” says Abir Kopty, an activist with the Lubya march. “Otherwise we will take the issue into our own hands.”

Meanwhile, progress of a kind is being made with Israeli Jews. Some have come to recognise, however reluctantly, that a tragedy befell the Palestinians with Israel’s creation. But, as another march organiser notes, the struggle is far from over. “That is a first step. But now they must take responsibility for our suffering and make amends.”

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

Names on a Map: Does "Who" We Fight Matter Anymore?

In Ukraine, The US Is Dragging Us Towards War With Russia

by John Pilger - ICH - via The Guardian

Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk?

The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".

The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.

Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.

A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said:

"It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."

In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state.

Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?

www.johnpilger.com

BBC Whipping Boys and English Racism

Eeny Meeny Madness - Beyond Racism

by David Edwards - Media Lens

Jeremy Clarkson is star presenter of the BBC's Top Gear show which, tragically for anyone who cares about the climate, holds a 2013 Guinness world record for most widely watched factual programme in the world.

Clarkson asked for his viewers' forgiveness following the publication of a clip that showed him reciting the nursery rhyme, 'Eeny, meeny, miny, moe; catch a nigger by the toe', in unaired footage obtained by the Daily Mirror. Clarkson can clearly be seen mumbling a portion of the N-word.

The Blairite Deputy Labour leader, Harriet Harman, who voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was part of the government that waged the war, said:

'Anybody who uses the N-word in public or private in whatever context has no place in the British Broadcasting Corporation.'

In the Guardian, senior columnist Suzanne Moore commented:

'Clarkson is not stupid. Nor is he a maverick or outlier. He is a central part of the establishment. He parties with Cameron. Just as Ukip is not a maverick party, but made up of disgruntled Tories; just as Boris Johnson is not a maverick but a born-to-rule chancer... this section of the right deludes itself that it is somehow "outside" the establishment rather than its pumping heart.'

We wrote to Moore on Twitter:

'You say the right "deludes itself" it is "somehow 'outside' the establishment rather than its pumping heart". But which paper sold us Blair, the man who destroyed resistance to the establishment? Which paper told us to vote Blair in 2005, after Iraq? And which paper sold us "R2P" ["Responsibility to protect"] in Libya and Syria, which has clearly involved "the rich and powerful deriding the powerless"?'

Moore ignored us but noted on her Twitter feed:

'Media Lens have roused themselves to tell me off? Why this week? Why not every week?'

But the point we were making to Moore was a serious one. As John Pilger commented to us in 2008:

'Since Blair and Brown closed down the last vestiges of Labour as a social democratic party, the task of the media has been to deny the great political happening of the post-war years: the convergence of Labour and the Conservatives as one political entity with two factions serving a single ideology state.' (Email to Media Lens, November 24, 2008)

Pilger has also described how, for many years, the Guardian 'swooned over Blair as a mystic of the "Third Way".'

On May 3, 2005 - two days before the UK general election and two years after the criminal invasion of Iraq - a leading article in the Guardian opined:

'While 2005 will be remembered as Tony Blair's Iraq election, May 5 is not a referendum on that one decision, however fateful, or on the person who led it, however controversial...'

The editors concluded:

'We believe that Mr Blair should be re-elected to lead Labour into a third term this week.'

The leader was titled: 'Once more with feeling.'

The Guardian has continued to boost Blair on numerous occasions since then.
A Citizen Among Us?

Suzanne Moore perceived a slippery declivity:

'If you can say nasty stuff about gay people, then why not about black people? Once you voice the idea that women ask for rape and can't have careers, the next stage is to get rid of naggy old human rights because women don't count as human anyway.'

'The biggest con of all', Moore concluded, 'is that this coalition of "mavericks" is not seen for what it is. The establishment: in bullying, red-faced self-pitying mode.'

A dread threat is identified, then – casual racism percolating through the society and eroding human rights. This is circulated by the 'pumping heart' of 'the establishment' and must be resisted by the rest of us - people of sound heart and mind.

And this is the great lie of the Guardian, that it is not also the 'pumping heart' of the establishment, that it has not itself played a key role in facilitating the devastation of democracy at home and wars of aggression abroad. The lie is that the Guardian is offering us hope of something different, when in fact it supplies more of the same, or worse.

Writer and researcher Alice Bell, who has appeared regularly in the Guardian since 2010, also joined the bandwagon suggesting to her Twitter followers:

'If you haven't complained to the BBC about Clarkson, but think you'd like to, this is the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/'

We asked Bell:

'How many complaints have you suggested for BBC journalists who helped make war possible in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya?'

Bell replied:

'there are many things the BBC have done that piss me off that I haven't bothered to tweet a link to the complaints page for.'

Bell, it seems, 'bothered' to tweet about Clarkson's 'eeny, meeny' scandal but not about her government's responsibility for some of the great crimes of modern history.

This is a common and disastrous theme in contemporary society. As long as we are willing to perceive, or deem ourselves responsible for, only one small part of our world, the suffering of the world as a whole can be overlooked, or declared beyond our job spec: 'I'm an oil executive, it's not my job to protect the climate.' 'I'm an arms manufacturer, it's not my job to prevent people killing each other.' 'I'm a science writer, it's not my job to comment on my government's war crimes.'

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:

'We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, musicians and painters in plenty, but we no longer have a citizen among us.'

Noam Chomsky argues that racism does not in fact explain the West's willingness to kill so many brown-skinned people in so many needless wars. He highlights something 'far more depraved':

'Namely, knowing that you are massacring them but not doing so intentionally because you don't regard them as worthy of concern. That is, you don't even care enough about them to intend to kill them. Thus when I walk down the street, if I stop to think about it I know I'll probably kill lots of ants, but I don't intend to kill them, because in my mind they do not even rise to the level where it matters.

'There are many such examples. To take one of the very minor ones, when Clinton bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Sudan, he and the other perpetrators surely knew that the bombing would kill civilians (tens of thousands, apparently). But Clinton and associates did not intend to kill them, because by the standards of Western liberal humanitarian racism, they are no more significant than ants. Same in the case of tens of millions of others.' (Chomsky ZNet blog, 'Samantha Power, Bush & Terrorism,' July 31, 2007)

In his book, A Different Kind Of War - The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, wrote:

'At no time during the years of comprehensive economic sanctions were there adequate resources to meet minimum needs for human physical or mental survival either before, or during, the Oil-For-Food programme.' (Hans von Sponeck, A Different Kind Of War - The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq, Bergahn Books, 2006, p.144)

For example, during 'phase v' of the Oil-For-Food programme, from November 1998 to May 1999, each Iraqi received a food allocation worth $49, or 27 cents per day. Von Sponeck commented that 'the UN was more humane with its dogs than with the Iraqi people': $160 was allocated for food for each UN dog over the same period (ibid, p.38).

In the last two weeks, the Lexis media database finds 385 articles mentioning Jeremy Clarkson in UK national newspapers. Since 2006, von Sponeck's definitive book on Iraq sanctions has been mentioned once and has never been reviewed.

It is fine to rage at a BBC presenter's political incorrectness. The responsibility of our country for crimes treating millions of human beings as less than dogs, less than insects, is of no interest.

Bigger, Better, Stronger Me

The additional absurdity of the filtered, 'mainstream' response to racism and sexism, is that these forms of prejudice are treated as exotic and incurable diseases from which most decent folk are free. Evidence is sought of any slip, any tiny evidence of infection. If discovered, an individual's reputation is deemed to have been destroyed; their career should now be brought crashing down and the perpetrator replaced by someone infection-free.

We are not for one moment defending racial and gender bias, but these need to be recognised as symptoms of a far deeper malaise affecting essentially all of us.

Some 2,000 years ago, the great yoga master Patanjali said:

'The link between the seer and the seen that creates misery, is to be broken.'

Patanjali was pointing to the tendency of human awareness, 'the seer', to identify with phenomena external to itself, 'the seen', and for the mind to judge the self as 'superior' and 'inferior' to others on that basis. For example, our awareness identifies with our physical body - 'I'm strong', or, 'I'm tall' - and we decide we are superior to others who are weaker or shorter. We may identify strongly with our profession – 'I'm a tenured professor' - and feel far more substantial and important than, say, a taxi driver.

We can place ourselves on a pedestal as a result of identifying with almost anything: 'my salary', 'my house', 'my postcode', 'my car', 'my university', 'my degree', 'my football team', 'my nationality', and so on, almost without end. We may identify with our gender - 'I'm a man' – judging ourselves smarter than, or physically superior to, women. And, yes, many people generate feelings of superiority through attachment to nationality, colour, race - and through a less taboo pride in 'our' greater scientific, technological and military prowess - dismissing others as 'primitives', as 'untermensch'.

Patanjali's point, identically with every great spiritual teacher, is that we all play this game – it is in the very nature of the human ego to seek to be exceptional in some way. Perceiving ourselves to be 'special', we reflexively place our needs, and those of the people closest to us, at the centre of our personal universe. We then pursue these needs with little regard for the impact on others.

The point is that bogus 'superiority' based on gender and race are only two aspects of egotistical self-aggrandisement. Certainly, the consequences have been catastrophic throughout history, but these are symptoms of an underlying egotism that now threatens to end history.

Lost in self-obsession, we are all currently prejudicing the future of all people and animals on the planet, now and into the future. Reciting the 'eeny, meeny' rhyme is an ugly reminder of the deluded attitude that views people of colour as comical and absurd. But in truth most of us are treating the whole world with even greater contempt.

The epitome of this view is found in the legal corporate obligation to subordinate every other human concern to the maximisation of profit, with the resultant suffering literally not figuring in profit and loss accounts (beyond the concerns of public relations spin doctors). What kind of prejudice subordinating others is this?

It may not involve dehumanising others with words like 'nigger', 'slope' and 'terrorist'. But, as discussed, it involves treating others, not merely as inferior, not even at the level of insects, but as actually non-existent. It represents a level of indifference to all other beings – not just women and people of colour - that is so extreme, so toxic, so far beyond even racism, that it threatens all life on earth, including the lives of the people running the corporations!

But, again, as with the placing of Iraqis on the level of dogs and insects, this truly biocidal, suicidal prejudice is simply ignored. It is undiscussed by corporate journalists – people working for the very corporations pursing exactly these insane goals – when they castigate Jeremy Clarkson for reciting 'eeny, meeny, miny, moe'.

Petras: Meditations on Greece, Odessa, Scholars, and Farm Workers

Meditations: Greece Past and Present

by James Petras

I stopped. A funeral was going by. A pauper’s burial. Only a woman and a child followed. I asked an old man looking on who it was.

“A neighbor who sold fruit and vegetables and couldn’t pay the rent”.

He looked up puzzled. “How could they afford a coffin, a burial site and a stone if he couldn’t put food on the table when he was alive?”

≠

My grandfathers, stone cutters would find plenty of work: people of all ages are dying every day .The authorities call them “unnatural deaths”. But how many grave sites have tomb stones?

≠

I gaze up at the Acropolis and the marble columns of the Parthenon shimmer under a brilliant blue sky . . . and I trip over a ragged body stretched across the sidewalk, a blackened hand grasping a crust of bread.

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I walk past the dead. I walk over the dying. And I hurry away from a wild-eyed, white bearded raving madman screaming in a high-pitched hoarse voice. “The crises is over! The banks are rich! We are saved!”

≠

I enter the Byzantine museum, a refuge from the turmoil, an inexpensive escape into the past . . . or is it? The ticket sellers, guards and guides are nowhere to be seen … Are they on strike? Or have they been fired? Or both? I walk alone, unmolested, through a thousand years: the rise and fall of Constantinople.

≠

Is there a museum of modern Greece? Two hundred years of revolutions and imported monarchs. Of Great Ideas that bred Catastrophes.Of unsavory dictators and collaborators.Of heroic resistance fighters and concentration camps.Of juntas and student martyrs.Of alternating Conservative and Socialist kleptocrats.

≠

A museum depicting the collapse of illusions of wealth and streets paved with euros. A European city converted into the home for one hundred thousand beggars and two million unemployed.

≠

The bagmen are coming – its election time. The scrawny hands of impoverished pensioners reach out . . . A grizzly bald Socratic look-alike lines up at a soup kitchen. He questions the Athenians : “Do you believe the democratic authorities will add meat to the watery soup?”.

≠

Kimon, a recent graduate of Athens University, a classical scholar, sells counterfeit ancient coins on a street corner. He tells me an authentic fifth century Arethusa dekadrachm signed by Kimon or Euainetos or Eumenos would feed a thousand unemployed Greeks for a year, maybe two, if they are vegetarians.

≠

I stood behind a small crowd in front of a kiosk reading the headlines of the newspapers (who buys them these days?). An excited woman pushed her way out of the semi-circle and screeched to the silent on-lookers. “The Nazis called the Jews, Communists… the gas chambers, showers. The Americans call the fascists who burned alive three dozen workers in Odessa, Ukrainian Nationalists”. She turned abruptly and walked quickly down the street. The others mumbled incoherently and drifted away. A nattily dressed businessman smiled at me and nodded his head as if to say “Only a crazy woman screams in the street like her”.

Reflections on Odessa

Some things do not change, despite world-historic catastrophes. Back in the late 19th century, Isaac Babel witnessed and described mobs, self-described as “Black Hundreds”, rampaging the streets of Odessa, dragging red-bearded Jews through the streets, sacking and burning their stores. Dozens of Jews were murdered and hundreds fled to sanctuaries. Terrible times, indeed!

But how much worse today when the progeny of the Black Hundreds and the proud descendants of Nazi collaborators, who now call themselves the ‘Right Forum’, roam the streets of Odessa with impunity and license, beating whomever they encounter.

Women, adolescents and pensioners fled, seeking refuge in a Trade Union Center. The contemporary Nazi’s firebombed the Center, incinerating forty and forcing others to jump from windows to their death. And those injured from their fall… beaten to a bloody pulp.

The Right Forum flaunts the worst of the Black Hundreds and Nazi legacy of mayhem and massacres.

The pogroms of the Black Hundreds of the pre-revolution were nothing compared to the genocide of the Ukrainian Waffen Galician Nichtengall and Roland Division. Eighty thousand Ukrainian fascists led by Stepan Bandera served as Hitler’s willing executioners. They murdered millions of Poles and Jews and Ukrainians. Even their Nazi overseers were appalled by the buzz-saw assassinations.

The children of the Bandera genocidists, in recognition of their Nazi roots, first called themselves the “Social-National Party of the Ukraine”. They changed to “Right Sector” and “Svoboda”, so as not to offend the sensibilities of their new Western paymasters. Still, in remembrance of times past, the Right Sector, in the tradition of Bandera, knows best how to burn alive those “fake Ukrainians” who speak Russian or support socialists or protest the American designated junta that they, the Right Sector, brought to power.

Ukrainian fascists have been given license to kill: in the past at the service of the Tsar, later with Hitler, today for the United States. The Ukraine is the center of the resurgence of European fascism taking state power: armed and willing to exterminate any enemy of the puppet junta.

Yes, Odessa has ‘changed’ since the time of Babel. It was liberated by Revolution, ravaged by civil war, starved by Stalin, genocided by Germans and Ukrainian Nazis . . . who juxtaposed the swastika to a background of national colors.

Yes, the Nazis were defeated . . . but not forever!

Yes, the pogroms of the Jews ended . . . because there were so few.

Yes, half the population speaks Russian . . . but for how long?

Yes, there are new industries . . . but they are closing.

Yes, the “black earth” was the granary of Russia . . . but now it is owned by foreign billionaires.

Yes, the Ukraine was independent . . . but elections, uprisings and coups were bought and sold in, by and for… the free market.

The Ukraine is ruled by a US appointed junta that seized power through a US financed coup. A junta which rules through pogroms and military massacres. They terrorize the towns and countryside; they roam the city streets and occupy the squares. They hate to death the workers self-governing councils and popular militias which have sprang up spontaneously, free of Russian tutelage and junta appointed oppressors.

In Babel’s time, Jewish workers, under fascist siege, joined the Red Army and wealthy merchants offered their daughters in marriage to Bolshevik commanders.

Today the architect of the pogroms, the ethnic cleansing of Russian speakers, is a leading American policymaker, a Jew ,who calls herself Victoria Nuland (nee Nudelman).

In Odessa and throughout the Ukraine , under the heel of the Kiev junta, the legacy of the Black Hundreds and the Nazi collaborators lives on, despite a century of world shattering events. Only the sponsors, organizers and paymasters have changed.

But let’s not forget the other legacy of the Ukraine: the four million heroic Ukrainians who fought in the victorious Red Army that defeated Nazi Germany and decimated its Ukrainian collaborators. That legacy lives on, in today’s self-governing workers councils and popular militias.

Conversations: Scholars and Farm Workers

Conversations with farm workers, migrants and other subjects of academic publications.

The basic question, never asked by established and up and coming academics is: What do the subjects who answers my questions get out of it? The academic will write an article in a professional journal or a book for a scholarly press. Publication leads to an appointment, a promotion, and life time employment, a substantial salary with health insurance, a pension, travel funds and time paid to conduct studies.

A Mexican farm worker who was asked for an interview, walked away. The scholar followed him explaining the importance of the study and its relevance “to improving the life of the community through greater understanding”.

The worker stopped and looked his pursuer in the eyes “How much will you pay me for my time?”

The scholar was taken aback hesitated and asked; “Why do you expect to be paid?”

And the peasant answered; “Why not? You are paid to write books . . . my interview will help you write your books. You pay me for my time and answers.”

The scholar argued in vain: “My publications take the side of the farm workers, peasants, the immigrants, my writing exposes the exploitation by landlords and supports peasant resistance.”

The peasant answered; “But those exploiters, at least pay me. I am resisting your attempt to secure my labor without remuneration”.

The scholar moved on to interview another peasant and explained that “the study would improve the life of the community by making the world aware of the plight of the immigrant Indians”.

The Indian asked “What ‘world’ reads about Indians in the fields. Only others like you. They read your writings in order to interview other Indians in order to publish books. And, all of you live in a different world. Will your books or articles raise my wages, secure me credit, build a road to market”?

Some demanded equality of wages: one hour interviews at the pay rates of the scholars.

Others, the wisest, demanded pre-payment of village improvements. Because they quickly learned that the wily, scholars did not fulfill their promises; the interviews were completed, with handshakes and promises. But the streets were never paved.

According to peasants, it turned out that the worst exploiters were not the landowners who paid a miserable wage, but the scholars who insisted on work without pay. And worst, deprived the peasants of family time, of free time among friends and companions.

The peasants have yet to write their book about scholars who profit from unpaid labor and academics who refuse to answer the peasants’ basic question “What do we get out of it?”

 

America Declares Voting Illegal (for Ukrainians)

Blood-soaked US Has No Business Opposing Sovereignty Plebiscites: Look who’s calling voting ‘divisive’ and ‘illegal’

by Dave Lindorff - ThisCantBeHappening.net

The rot at the core of US international affairs, domestic politics and the corporate media is evident in the American approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Just look at the freak-out from all quarters as the people of the eastern part of that country conduct, under conditions of attack and violence fomented by military units sent in by the Kiev putsch government, a peaceful plebiscite asking people to give their view as to whether they want some kind of sovereignty separating them from western Ukraine.

The official US State Department position on the balloting in Dohansk and Luhansk is that this voting effort was "illegal" and "an attempt to create further division and disorder."

"The United States will not recognize the results of these illegal referenda," said State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki.

The White House called the voting “illegitimate” and “illegal.”

The US has not once called the violent coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government illegitimate or illegal.

Indeed any violence during the voting, which appeared to actually be celebratory, came from Ukrainian troops. Even the Associated Press, which has largely been parroting the US line on separatists in eastern Ukraine, wrote:

“Although the voting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions appeared mostly peaceful, armed men identified as members of the Ukrainian national guard opened fire on a crowd outside a town hall in Krasnoarmeisk, and an official with the region's insurgents said people were killed. It was not clear how many.” 

(Actually the reporter on this story wrote that he saw the shooting, and witnessed two dead bodies as a result, so AP didn't have to weaken the story's authority by attributing it to "officials with the region's insurgents+ -- the latter an odd term to give to armed people working, clearly has the support of the communities, to defend them from attack by armed, uniformed thugs sent in from the Kiev regime to disrupt and kill people.)

The US corporate media have largely toed the official line, referring to the separatists in eastern Ukraine as violent when they have been in reality surprisingly restrained in the face of overt violence by military forces dispatched by Kiev. And they never mention the balloting in the east without also mentioning that the US believes that Russia is behind that effort, though in fact Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin actually angered and annoyed separatists by calling on them -- unsuccessfully -- to delay their voting plan. (Even that arch cold-warrior and war criminal Henry Kissinger has told CNN that it "makes no sense" to claim Putin is behind the unrest and the separatist movement in western Ukraine.)

But let’s analyze that position calling the voting “illegal.”

How is a plebiscite ever illegal?

In Texas, politicians periodically call for secession from the US. Within days of President Obama’s election as president, several states, including Texas, saw petitions filed in Washington calling for secession. In 2012, there was a petition filed on the White House Website with over 119,000 signatures calling for Texas secession, according to a report on ABC news. No FBI agents or federal troops were dispatched to arrest the perps.

In fact, if I were to launch a petition drive to get a secession question on my town’s ballot, and it were placed there by the town government, it would not be illegal for the people of Upper Dublin to cast votes saying whether or not they wanted the town to secede from the union.

The same is true for a state like Texas, California, or New York City or New Hampshire -- all places where there has been talk of secession at one time or another.

Of course, if a state actually tried to secede, like Scotland is now attempting to do from the United Kingdom, or like the province of Catalonia is attempting to do in Spain, it’s likely that the US would block the move, either with federal troops or, more likely, by economic threats--for example warning that secession would mean an end to transfer payments like welfare, Medicare, Social Security, education funding, etc., plus the assumption by the seceding jurisdiction of its share of the accumulated federal debt.

But it wouldn’t be “illegal” to vote on the idea.

Actually the idea of splitting up nations where there are geographically separated ethnicities that have been thrown together through geopolitics has a long history--some good, some bad. We have the division of India and Pakistan as the British abandoned colonial control of South Asia, we have the division of Czechoslovakia into two separate countries -- the Czech Republic and Slovakia -- and of course the fragmentation of Yugoslavia into a number of republics -- Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro. And in Africa we have Sudan and Ethiopia and the breakaway province of Eritrea. We also, as I have mentioned, have votes scheduled for the possible independence of Scotland and Catalonia, we have the perennial campaign in Quebec to gain sever itself from English-speaking Canada, and even in the core of Western Europe, there is a strong campaign in Belgium to split into two nations, one Flemish-speaking and one French-speaking.

Clearly, it has proven to be much better when such divisions were accomplished by the ballot, as in Czechoslovakia, and as is being attempted in Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium and Quebec, rather than by force, as in India, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia or Sudan.

Judging by the historical record, the US appears to have generally favored the violent approach to separations, though--whether it has been promoting them or trying to prevent them. It is the US, after all, that imposed the post-war division of Korea into two parts that has left a legacy of over nine million dead. It is the US that also forced the post colonial division of Vietnam into two halves, and then fought a bloody war for a decade to try and keep it divided, killing over three million people in the process. The US also provided diplomatic support and over 90% of the arms that Indonesia used in brutally suppressing the independence movement in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony where a UN-sponsored plebiscite showed overwhelming support for independence from Indonesia.

Who, we should be asking ourselves and our violence-obsessed leaders in Washington, not to mention the craven editors and publishers of our leading “news” organizations, is the US to call sovereignty ballots by anyone “illegal” or “divisive”? (Who, for that matter, is the US to criticize Russia for "meddling" or creating "divisions" in Ukraine, when the US spent over $5 billion by its own admission meddling and sowing such divisions, and ultimately supporting a coup that ousted the country's elected government, turning it over to fascists dedicated to "killing Russians, Poles and Jews.")

In a world riven by ethnic and racial strife, it would appear that letting people use the ballot to decide whether they should try and get along with their neighbors inside some often arbitrary polyglot national boundary, or as two separate nation states, is a much better approach than having them fight it out to the bitter end, usually with larger states like Russia and the US and China, all with their own selfish geopolitical and commercial interests, vying from the outside and sometimes with their own troops to influence the internal outcome of such struggles.

Voting can never be “illegal.” It is, simply put, the best way for people to express their opinions. As for being “divisive,” there’s no way that voting can be as divisive as sending in tanks, planes and drones to kill people whose opinions one particularly leader or political group doesn’t like.

America Justice on Trial: Cecily McMillan's Message One from Rikers Island

Cecily’s Statement from Rikers, 5/9/14

by Cecily McMillan - #Justice4Cecily

Good morning. I’m writing from the Rose M. Singer Correctional Facility, dorm 2 East B on Rikers Island – where I’ve been held for the past 4 days.

Admittedly, I was shocked by the jury’s verdict on Monday, but was not surprised by the events that followed. An overreaching prosecutor plus a biased judge logically adds up to my being remanded to Rikers.

I was prepared then, as I am now, to stand by my convictions and face the consequences of my actions – namely that of refusing to forsake my values and what I know to be true in exchange for my “freedom.”

Packed into a room with 45 other women – often restricted to my cot – I’ve had nothing but time to measure the strength of my beliefs alongside that ambiguous concept – “freedom.” (I’ve come to the conclusion that it is far easier to weigh such tradeoffs from the comfort of one’s own bed.)

At Rikers, the day begins with 4:30am breakfast. Milk cartons in hand, the women echo a common set of concerns – “can’t reach my lawyer, my family won’t speak to me, no commissary” – and I become painfully aware of how privileged I am, despite what is supposed to be the great equalizing suffering of the prison experience.

Unlike my peers, I have a hell of a lawyer – Marty Stolar – who made the long journey to hold my hand and promise “I will not stop fighting for you.” I also have a gifted team of friends and organizers – #Justice4Cecily – that continue to provide around-the-clock care and mobilize public support. Finally, I’m incredibly lucky to have a vast and very much alive movement at my side, sending me “Occupy Love” from across the world.

Despite how obscenely unbalanced our circumstances are, my new-found friends – who have quickly become my comrades – are outraged by my story and resolve to do their part to keep me out of prison. After lunch, they spend their free time writing letters to Judge Zweibel, defending my character and pleading for leniency.

At 6:00pm dinner, the cramped circle of ladies ask me “What exactly is social justice organizing?” Over the complex choreography of food trading I tell them about Democratic Socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs. How nearly 100 years ago he publicly criticized U.S. involvement in WWI – in violation of the Wartime Sedition Act – and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for exercising his constitutional right to free speech. “Sort of like that,” I explain, “But he’s way out of my league – he’s my hero.”

By lights out, a subtle peace has begun to wash over me. I page through a book stopping at Debs’ speech to the Federal Court of Cleveland, Ohio – I read and reread, as if a personal mantra, these opening lines -

“Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said it then, as I say it now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

At the close of the night, I smile and shut my eyes. As I drift off, “Somehow,” I think, “this is all a part of the plan.”

Funeral Pyre: Peace Coalition Consigns "Arlington Midwest" to the Flames

AND WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

by Mike Ferner

Last month, they emptied the storage locker and took all the displays to individuals’ homes. On Saturday, an immense funeral pyre consumed the 6,800 wooden tombstones.

Members of the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition (NWOPC) have decided they will no longer mount their “Arlington Midwest” memorial to the Iraqi and Afghan civilians and American soldiers killed in over a decade of war and occupation.

It cost about $1,000 a year to store the massive display, but mostly it’s ending because for some time now, nobody with a highly visible acre of land has been willing to offer their property to set it up. Fact is, when you ask people on the street, just about everyone says the wars are over – except for a heartbreaking number who respond, “What war are you talking about?”

The second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, March 19, 2005, saw the debut of NWOPC’s Arlington Midwest, at the University of Toledo. Overnight, on a rolling campus hillside 1,678 tombstones appeared, each labeled with the name and rank of a soldier and the date and place where he or she died. Laid out on a precise grid like the tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery, the wooden markers were arranged by state and within each state by dates of death.

It quickly became a major task to make enough markers to keep up with the hundreds and then thousands of names added to the “Killed in Action” lists from Iraq and Afghanistan.

No one knows for sure, but the hours the activists spent scrounging materials, painting, assembling, loading, transporting, setting up, staffing, taking down, re-loading, re-transporting, re-painting and storing the tombstones without a doubt numbered in the many thousands. For over eight years, Arlington Midwest was NWOPC’s primary focus.

After “peace candidate” Obama took office in 2009, a growing portion of Arlington Midwest’s tombstones wore black ribbons for the soldiers killed on his watch: 1,923 to date. A separate section was reserved for those who silenced their war-induced demons by killing themselves. And wherever it went, the exhibit included a large circle of posts, escalating in height, listing the names of thousands of murdered Iraqi and Afghan civilians, even though the names were only a small fraction of the total.

Volunteers took unpaid time from work or vacation days to set up the memorial at the University of Toledo, Notre Dame, Kent State, Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, churches and convents, county courthouses and the grounds of the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital.

Family members of the dead would travel 100 miles and more to see the exhibit, place a flower or photo on a loved one’s marker and water the ground with their tears. People in the millions saw the memorial via news media.

As Jeff Zenz, a Unit Control Operator at a local electric plant and one of the organizers of Arlington Midwest, said;

“It was a protest of the human cost of war…a massive re-creation of Arlington cemetery on college campuses, church yards, and along highways, meant to put that cost in the face of folks, unavoidably. A lot of debates, arguments and conversations took place that wouldn’t have without the draw of Arlington Midwest.”

In addition to the sunburn, frostbite, sweat, frustration, blood and tears required to put the human cost of war “in the face of folks, unavoidably,” many of the volunteers gained a greater sense of accomplishment, purpose and camaraderie than they’d ever known or may ever experience again.

Indeed, just as the title of Chris Hedges’ book, “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning,” described how war energizes whole nations, one could also observe that “antiwar” was a force that gave meaning and a sense of purpose to a whole host of caring, dedicated campaigners across America.

But as more than one of them has asked, “…and what do we do now?”

Now that most people perceive the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be over, will this legion of tenacious, tireless citizens from backwoods, big cities and everything in between, redirect their energies and skills, perhaps to gain reparations for those harmed by the war, or to address concerns on the home front like the environment, healthcare, homeless veterans or human rights?

As a whole generation did 40 years ago when the war in Viet Nam finally ended, many people will again search their souls to discover the best way to keep on working for a better world and just as importantly, how to restore the deep sense of purpose they gained with their comrades by publicly opposing war.

The young among these stout souls will vow “never again.” The old will recall saying those words long ago, only to have their hearts broken many times since.

So where can we invest our limited time, passion and skills to greatest advantage? How can we maintain a vibrant sense of purpose? How can we do more than just react to what the Empire throws at us? How can we strike at the very roots of war and poverty and injustice, not just at the branches, which forever spring anew?

Asking the same things two generations ago, I had no answers. Even having seen war’s carnage first hand as a Navy corpsman I had only questions, just like so many others.

Initially I joined the environmental movement opposing nuclear power plants, then union organizing and opposing our proxy war in Central America, followed by a stint in public office that provided openings to demand we rebuild our cities with the “peace dividend” expected at the end of the Cold War. Eventually and to my utter revulsion, I had to join another antiwar movement.

But today, unlike the period following the war in Viet Nam, there is a movement that has a clear, fundamental goal that addresses these questions and a strategy to achieve it: to greatly expand democracy so that we the people, not corporations, do the governing; so our elections aren’t sold to the highest bidder; so private interests can’t determine national policy in healthcare or education or energy…or war.

What I’m talking about is MoveToAmend.org, a national grassroots campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution to remove corporate money from elections and end the insane practice of giving the legal fictions we call corporations the same constitutional rights as real human beings.

Of course we can continue doing what’s comfortable – call it serial activism – and wage campaigns against drones, the F-35 fighter, the rush to boil the oceans, the bankrupt policies in education, healthcare and criminal justice…or we can step back for a moment, take a deep breath and ask our heart of hearts what can we do that will make a truly essential difference so we can achieve a government that serves Us instead of Empire for a change.

Without a doubt we need fewer weapons, more renewable energy, better education, health care and criminal justice systems. But ask this key question: will we get any of those things without more democracy?

If we choose to work for greater democracy, we will begin to see the public interest prevail over the private. Our own government will eventually cease to be the biggest barrier to a better life because it will be owned by us and not by corporations and billionaires.

Human nature being what it is, fires will always break out and those dangers most surely deserve some of our time and energy. But if all we do is fight fires and react to Empire’s evils then that is truly all we will ever do.

A particular point about Move to Amend deserves special mention here.

Across great swaths of the U.S., the peace movement or the progressive movement, as loosely defined, looks much like a loaf of Wonder Bread – maybe with a slice of whole wheat or pumpernickel here and there, but by and large it’s white bread. Move to Amend has addressed that shortcoming from the outset. Its leadership and its materials send the clear message that we won’t get anywhere unless we get there together; that we have to stop dividing and start combining the most powerful forces in society working for radical change. That sounds to me like people who believe it’s time we start playing offense.

Personally, I’ve been a chump on defense long enough and I’d like to start winning for a change. Move to Amend is the only game I know of with a vision to change the rules of the game so that “winning” actually means we start running the show, not just rejoicing that we’ve stopped a weapons system or elected Tweedledum instead of Tweedledummer.

This is my hope and my invitation to each of my fellow laborers in the peace movement when you start thinking about “what’s next?”

Mike Ferner is an Ohio writer. You can contact him at mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net

Lies of Omission: Western Media Mushroom Farming on Ukraine

U.S. Media Ignores Putin’s Peace Plan

by MIKE WHITNEY - CounterPunch

“Let me repeat again, that in Russia’s view, the blame for the crisis in Ukraine lies with those who organized the coup d’etat in Kiev on February 22-23… But whatever the case, we must look for a way to solve the situation as it is today….And, as I said, what is needed is direct, full-fledged and equal dialogue between the Kiev authorities and the representatives of people in southeast Ukraine….I don’t know whether a Geneva-2 round of talks.. is realistic. (But) I believe that if we want to find a long-term solution to the crisis, there must be an open, honest and equal dialogue . That is our only option.” - Russian President Vladimir Putin, press statement, OCSE meeting, Moscow, May 7, 2014

So many lie beneath the eternal granite
But of those honored by this stone
Let no one be forgotten
Let nothing be forgotten.

-Olga Berggolts, “Leningrad”

On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a proposal for ending the violence in Ukraine at an OCSE (Organization for the Cooperation and Security in Europe) in Moscow. Unfortunately, most Americans never heard what he had to say because the media failed to publish his statement. The reason for the omission is fairly obvious, the media doesn’t want people to know that Putin is not the ghoulish, authoritarian caricature he’s portrayed to be, but a levelheaded pragmatist who wants a swift and peaceful resolution to the crisis.

Here is what he said:

“We think the most important thing now is to launch direct dialogue, genuine, full-fledged dialogue between the Kiev authorities and representatives of southeast Ukraine. This dialogue could give people from southeast Ukraine the chance to see that their lawful rights in Ukraine really will be guaranteed.”

Does that sound like a bloodthirsty “KGB thug” who’s driven by dreams of territorial expansion and empire-building or does it sound like a responsible leader who wants to facilitate a cease-fire until cooler heads prevail?

Did you know that Putin called for a “genuine…dialogue between the Kiev… and representatives of southeast Ukraine”? Don’t you think the media should publish critical information like that so people can decide for themselves how they feel about Putin? Or do you think the media is entitled to withhold whatever information they choose as long as it benefits their corporate bosses? Is that how a free press is supposed to work?

Putin made a number of concessions in his speech that are worth noting. For example, he agreed to move his troops away from the Ukrainian border which has been a bone of contention with the Obama administration since the Kiev crackdown began more than two weeks ago. Putin agreed to withdraw his army even though he may have weakened Russia’s defenses in the process. This is no small matter, in fact, it’s a question national security which is a president’s primary responsibility and one that Putin does not take lightly, especially now that neo Nazi-crackpots are roaming the countryside armed to the teeth and threatening to kill ethnic Russians wherever they find them. But Putin made the concession anyway hoping that his good-faith gesture would help put an end to the violence. Here’s what he said:

“We have withdrawn our forces and they are now not on the Ukrainian border but are carrying out their regular exercises at the test grounds. This can be easily verified using modern intelligence techniques, including from space, where everything can be seen. We helped to secure the OSCE military observers’ release and I think also made a contribution to defusing the situation.”

Does that sound like a man who’s lying?

Of course not, which is why the media doesn’t want you to hear what he has to say. Because it doesn’t jibe with the “Putin is Satan” trope.

Putin is a plain-speaking guy who shoots from the hip and says what he means. He’s not a bullshitter. People know that, which is why the media won’t publish what he says. It’s because they’re afraid that people will believe him and all their jingoistic, pro-war propaganda will be for naught. The fact is, people have a sense of what the truth sounds like. Call it intuition, call it whatever you like. But people know the difference between a guy like Putin and a dissembling fraud like Kerry. That’s just the way it is.

Putin also asked representatives of the southeastern regions of Ukraine to postpone the referendum scheduled for May 11.

Why would he do that? After all, if he really wanted to rebuild the Russian Empire, as his critics say, then he’d want the balloting to take place so he could show the world that the people in the East reject the junta government and demand greater autonomy from Kiev. But that’s not what Putin wants. What he wants is an end to the carnage, which is why he asked the people to postpone the voting so the government wouldn’t have an excuse for launching another bloody crackdown. Putin doesn’t want to see Ukraine ripped to shreds and reduced to Iraq-type anarchy by external enemies who are using it as a staging-ground for their own geopolitical ambitions. He wants to restore stability and security. He wants the hostilities to stop. Here’s what he said:

“We are asking representatives of the southeastern regions of Ukraine and federalization supporters to reschedule the referendum scheduled for May 11.”

Okay, so he moved his troops back from the border and called on pro-Russian activists to put off the vote on greater political autonomy. That’s two significant concessions, right? But, why is Putin doing this?

Does he have something up his sleeve? Is he trying to lull his enemies to sleep before he orders a full-blown blitz on Kiev?

Be serious. Putin doesn’t want to take over Ukraine, that’s just neocon hogwash. He has his own problems to deal with. He’s not going to add to them by annexing a broken, basket-case failed state that’s rapidly sliding into a major Depression. Why would he do that?

Then why is he so eager to make concessions? Is it because he’s scared? Maybe he’s afraid of a confrontation with NATO and the US so he’s caving in before war breaks out on his western flank?

Is that it? Is Putin a coward?

According to the western media he is, but that’s because the coverage has focused exclusively on his willingness to move his troops which makes it look like Washington’s hardline policies (sanctions, threats, saber-rattling) are actually working instead making things worse. Which they are. What’s been left out of the reporting is Putin’s plan to end the violence. That never gets mentioned because the media doesn’t want Putin to look like a peacemaker. That doesn’t serve their interests at all.

Putin’s not afraid. He’s not going to end up like Gadhafi or Saddam. But he is worried. He’s worried that the US is going block access to his biggest market, the European Union. Russia can’t simply reroute its gas from west (EU) to east (China) as many of the pundits seem to think. That’s nonsense. Russia needs Europe, just as Europe needs Russia. There is a strong, natural business/trade relationship between the two that Washington wants to sabotage so it can be the big cheese in Central Asia. That’s what this is all about, right? The pivot to Asia.

So, yes, Putin’s interest in peace is not entirely altruistic. It’s also about money too. Big money. But, so what? What difference does that make? So Putin is not as pure as the driven snow. Big deal. The fact is, he’s still pushing for peace, which is not only beneficial for Moscow, but Europe and Ukraine as well. The only one that doesn’t benefit from peace is Washington, which is why the media is suppressing information that promotes de-escalation. It’s because Washington wants a war. War is the vehicle for breaking up the Russian Federation into tiny statelets that pose no threat to US military bases spread throughout Asia. War is the means by which Washington can make its pivot, surround China, and control its future growth. War paves the way for establishing US outposts in Ukraine and subverting greater economic integration between Russia and Europe. War is US policy because war advances US interests. Period.

Washington cannot achieve its strategic or economic objectives without a confrontation. That’s why the present situation so worrisome, because –judging by the scalding rhetoric emerging from the White House, the US State Department, and all the major media– Obama is going to continue to provoke Moscow until he gets the reaction he wants. If 40 dead in Odessa doesn’t do the trick, then the next provocation will be 400, or 4,000, or 400,000. Whatever it takes. It doesn’t matter. As Madeleine Albright noted some time ago when she was asked if the sanctions on Iraq were worth the half million lives they cost, she answered without the slightest hesitation, “We think the price is worth it.”

Whatever it takes. That’s US foreign policy in a nutshell.

Here’s more from Putin:

“The responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine now lies with the people who carried out an anti-constitutional seizure of power,.. and with those who supported these actions and gave them financial, political, information and other kinds of support and pushed the situation to the tragic events that took place in Odessa. It’s simply blood-chilling to watch the footage of those events.”

Try to imagine Obama saying something like that. Try to imagine Obama even caring about the people who died in Odessa. It’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? By now, Obama has seen the same videos as Putin. He’s seen the people hurtling themselves out of windows to escape the flames. He’s seen the victims being pummeled to death on the streets by neo Nazi goons. He’s seen the charred remains of the people who were incinerated in the fire. But he’s said nothing. He hasn’t even offered his condolences to the families who lost loved ones. He’s remained stone silent since the incident took place believing that any reference to the massacre would only undermine US policy. His callousness is all part of a political calculation. People don’t matter, what matters is the policy. Obama is no different than Albright or any other high-ranking member of the US political establishment in that regard. They’re all the same. Life means nothing to any of them. All that matters is the objectives of their constituents.

So, what does Putin really want?

Here’s what he says:

“Russia urgently appeals to the authorities in Kiev to cease immediately all military and punitive operations in southeast Ukraine. This is not an effective means of resolving internal political conflicts and, on the contrary, will only deepen the divisions.”

“Cease all military and punitive operations”? In other words, he wants peace.

Unfortunately, Obama’s crew strangled Putin’s peace plan before it ever left the cradle. Just yesterday, the US-backed puppet regime in Kiev promised to step up attacks on protestors in the east. According to Defense Secretary Andriy Parubiy:

“The counter-terrorist operation will continue unhindered, despite the presence of terrorist and insurgent groups in the Donetsk region.”

As for Putin’s appeal for peace, puppet-PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk swiftly dismissed it as “hot air.”

So, there you have it. The threat of peace has been skillfully avoided giving Obama’s fascist friends the green light to pursue their strategy of tearing Ukraine apart, killing untold thousands of civilians, and deploying NATO to Russian’s western perimeter.

And that’s why Putin’s speech was blacked out by the media, because it conflicted with Washington’s plan to launch another war.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.