Kremlin owes about $40bn but has been shut out of international financial system since invasion of Ukraine
Russia is poised to default on its debt for the first time since 1998, further alienating the country from the global financial system after sanctions imposed over its war in Ukraine.
The country missed a deadline of Sunday night to meet a 30-day grace period on interest payments of $100m (£81.2m) on two eurobonds originally due on 27 May, Bloomberg reported on Monday morning.
Today’s U.S.-orchestrated war in Ukraine has been a boon to the crisis-ridden capitalist elite with skyrocketing war spending at record highs
Serious political analysis on the left always begins with the facts. Substituting abstract theories not based on facts is always a deadend for the socialist movement, today terribly divided over how to evaluate and act on the unfolding and complex events attendant to the Ukraine War and the Russian invasion.
Let U.S. begin with some hard facts and context that are today tragically absent from the assessments of large sectors of the left and antiwar movements in the U.S. and worldwide.
The Ukraine tragedy began in February 2014 when rooftop fascist snipers opened fire on Maidan Square Kiev protestors assembled to resist the Victor Yanukovych government’s corruption and austerity measures. The fascists murdered almost 100 in cold blood, including some of their own for good measure. Yanukovych, the elected president, was instantly blamed and pilloried by the world’s corporate media, paving the political road for what followed. He fled for his life.
These facts were attested to by U.S. representative to the European Union, Victoria Nuland. They were based on her taped remarks. No one has denied them. The transcript is readily available on the internet. Nuland revealed that the rooftop assassins were of the fascist Svoboda Party and Right Sector ilk and not Yanukovych’s police or military. The armed thugs had come from across Ukraine and beyond to dominate the Maidan events. U.S. Senator John McCain shared the stage with fascist orator and Svoboda Party leader, Oleg Tyahnybok, while Nuland handed out U.S. friendship cookies. McCain roused the crowd with promises of “democracy, freedom and independence,” contingent, of course, on Ukraine’s reversing the government’s already-approved bail out agreements with Russia.
The fascist Svoboda Party leader, Andriy Parubiy led the storming of the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, barring the two largest and majority parties from entrance. Some were previously armed and trained at U.S.-organized training camps in western Ukraine. Others secured weapons by storming local police stations.
The March 5, 2014 on-line British Channel 4 news account told the story well: “The man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy. He oversees national security for the nation, having previously served as [self-appointed] ‘security commandant’ during the anti-government protests in Kiev.”
Channel 4 identified Parubiy as a member of fascist Svoboda Party and a founder of its pro-Nazi predecessor, the Social National Party, which traces its roots to the pro-Nazis Ukrainian movements of WWII. The British television station’s account continued: “Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector—a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.”
Other Svoboda neo-Nazis leaders instantly “elected” to the top echelons of the coup government were Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych, Ecology Minister Andriy Mokhnyk, Agriculture Minister Ihor Shvaika, and acting Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky. In 2016 Parubiy became Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament.
The fascists in power instantly banned the Russian language from schools and public institutions. They ordered the Ukrainian Army, replete with its now formally integrated fascist Azov, Aidar, Dnipro and Tornado battalions, to march on the Donbass in the east to take control of this largely Russian-speaking population. Now with “government” approval, they attacked anti-coup demonstrators across the country. In Odessa, they murderer 48 coup protestors outright, setting a trade union building afire and slaughtering survivors who were compelled to leap off the flaming edifice. The coup “government” and its subsequent manifestations, formally “rehabilitated” the infamous. WWII-era fascist leader Stephan Bandera, designating major streets in his name, despite the objections from European Union leaders. Bandera was a Nazis collaborator whose troops slaughter tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews at the onset of the war when Hitler’s troops entered Ukraine.
All leftwing parties were banned by the coup government. The bailout agreements negotiated by the Yanukovych government with Russia, on terms far less onerous than those offered by the European Union, were revoked, and instead, an economically punishing “Association Agreement” with the European Union, that largely subordinated Ukraine to the -dominated International Monetary Fund, was approved.
The question then was immediately posed. Who would take Yanukovych’s place? Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, made that decision. Again, in her own taped remarks, Nuland named Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a hard right member of Fatherland, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian formation. The Europeans, especially the Germans, wanted a more moderate figure to head Ukraine. They favored Vitaly Klitschko, a boxer turned politician with more moderate views than Yatsenyuk. During the hacked call, Nuland blurted out, “F***K the EU,” and, of course, the U.S. pick, Yatsenyuk, became the Prime Minister of Ukraine, forming a coalition governing majority with the fascist Svoboda Party. The coup’s finance minister was U.S. citizen and high-ranking diplomat, Natalie Jeresko, who was granted Ukrainian citizenship the day after the coup. Joe Biden’s son took a position on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas company earning a monthly salary of $50,000.
The U.S.-backed rump government declared itself the leader of the nation. Nuland remarked in her intercepted phone call, that Vice President Joseph Biden, in charge of the Ukraine events at that time, would give the ultimate “atta boy” to the coup leaders. The U.S. had previously laid the ground for the coup, pouring $5 billion into Ukraine over the years to support hundreds of NGOs aimed at moving Ukraine into its orbit, one way or another. To our knowledge, none of the facts above have been refuted.
Shortly after the 2014 coup, in 2015, the coup makers established the so-called International Peacekeeping and Security Center, a U.S.-run western Ukraine military base, near the Polish border, that had been, according to the March 14, 2022 New York Times, “a hub for Western military troops to train Ukrainian forces since 2015.” The Times added, “Troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, among others, have trained 35,000 Ukrainians there under a project called ‘Operation Unifier.’” This is the “operation” that aimed to forcibly “unite” western Ukraine, with the Russian-speaking eastern and southern populations that rejected the fascist coup. U.S. paid troops included the modern-day descendants of the privatized Blackwater forces of Erik Prince that slaughtered civilians in Iraq during that “weapons of mass destruction” regime change war that killed 1.5 million Iraqis. Need we note that with the exception of Sweden, all the above nations are NATO affiliates, training, arming and financing non-NATO Ukraine to wage war on behalf of NATO’s U.S. puppet master?
Here we add that the official Ukrainian armies in the east and south also rejected the 2014 coup as they did orders from the coup government to turn their guns on the Russian-speaking populations. Indeed, with near zero exceptions the Ukrainian soldiers deserted the Ukrainian Army and joined the Russian Army without a shot being fired. The same with the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population in Crimea. They voted 97 percent to affiliate with Russia in a referendum result contested by virtually no one. The turnout was 87 percent.
The March 14, 2022 Times article concludes, “But Western nations withdrew their forces ahead of Russia’s [February, 2022] invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the base has been used by Ukraine to train and organize the thousands of foreigners [from 28 nations] who have arrived in the country and volunteered to help defend it.” This single paragraph comes close to defying rational explanation, unless, of course, it is The Times’ explanation of the instant transformation of a secret U.S./NATO military base operating on Ukrainian territory into a solely Ukrainian-run base aimed at training the Ukrainian version of jihadist terrorists. No doubt these instantly discovered “foreign fighters” suddenly flocking to defend “Ukraine’s freedom” are akin to those jihadists murderers armed, trained, financed and deployed by the U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchies to take down the Syrian government in that ten-year failed U.S. regime change war. 500,000 Syrians died in that U.S. regime change horror. By all accounts, today’s Ukrainian “freedom fighters” were drawn from the ranks of Europe’s growing fascist and far right fanatics. Ukraine has become their central focus.
From 2015 to just before the Russian invasion, that is, for seven years, the U.S. and NATO forces have been arming, training and financing, inside Ukraine, the coup government’s war against the Russian-speaking population. That war has killed some 14,000 people in the Donbass and wounded 50,000, mostly civilians. That the victims are pilloried for defending their lives and for seeking and obtaining Russian aid, constitutes yet another travesty of fundamental human and democratic rights, not to mention the right of an oppressed people to self-determination, that is, to be free from annihilation at the hands of the U.S.-installed fascist coup government.
We will add here that in addition to the refugee tragedy of some two-plus million Ukrainians fleeing the war to the west, mostly to Poland, almost 800,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fled to the east, that is, to Russia. We stand in full solidarity with the terrified war refugees fleeing to the east and west. Yet we aim our main fire against the U.S. government and its U.S.-dominated NATO imperialist alliance, centrally responsible for the still unfolding Ukraine catastrophe. We add that we categorically reject the coup government’s segregating out Ukrainians of African and Middle East origin, who have been shunted to the end of the line in the face of NATO ally’s racist, white supremacist policies refusing to accept immigrants “who don’t look like us.” Yesterday’s Polish and Hungarian NATO governments, whose, virulent anti-immigrant venom helped power them to office, have become today’s instant converts to the U.S. “humanitarian” orchestrated agenda!
An April 2, 2022 front-page article by Anton Troianovski, Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times, previously Moscow Bureau Chief of The Washington Post, who spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York, apparently missed the eye of U.S. government censors. Entitled, “Shaken at First, Many Russians Now Rally Behind Putin’s Invasion,” Troianovski wrote, “The public’s endorsement of the war lacks the patriotic groundswell that greeted the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But polls released this week by Russia’s most respected independent pollster, Levada, showed Mr. Putin’s approval rating hitting 83 percent, up from 69 percent in January. Eighty-one percent said they supported the war, describing the need to protect Russian speakers as its primary justification.” [Emphasis in italics added.] That some three-quarters of a million Russian-speaking Ukrainians, mostly from the beleaguered Donbass region, have fled the fascist-led attacks, undoubtedly weighed heavily on the poll results. That Levada is described as “Russia’s most respected independent pollster,” is even more revealing. For the past eight years, prior to the Russian invasion, a state of perpetual war has prevailed in the Donbass region, with the U.S. government backing the reconstituted and ever U.S./NATO reinforced Ukrainian Army’s unrelenting attacks – spearheaded by fascist troops that have been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian army and National Guard.
Putin’s current popularity notwithstanding, there can be no justification for his repression of dissent, including those who disagree with his war policies, including some of our own comrades in Russia with whom we disagree. In the U.S., Biden’s repression takes on the character of the classic iron fist in a velvet glove, wherein the virtual monopoly of the corporate media enforces an Orwellian consensus. And even here, when a rare ray of light breaks through the social media blockade, it is increasingly stamped out by the online censors resort to exclusion and banishment. Even here, we must add, that Biden’s approval ratings, at barely 40 percent, tells us in Shakespeare’s words, “All is not well in Denmark.”
The early post-2014 coup years were punctuated by a series of negotiations referred to as the Minsk Protocols. Signed on Sept. 5, 2014 and Feb. 12, 2015, after negotiations between the Ukrainian coup government, Russia, Germany and France, they were purportedly aimed at stopping the bloodshed via a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, release of prisoners of war, and a Ukrainian constitutional reform granting self-government to specified areas of Donbass. In practice, none of these Minsk Protocols were implemented, as the Ukrainian Army’s ceaseless incursions into the Donbass region aimed at subjugation and conquest as opposed to pursuit of a negotiated settlement. Some 100 “ceasefire” agreements were repeatedly violated, while the fascist-led Ukrainian military wreaked untold horror and devastation on the population. Pressured by the U.S., the Ukrainian government refused to implement the Minsk-projected elections in Luhansk and Donetsk. Endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution, the gist of the Minsk accords was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine via a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in exchange for their local autonomy. The latter implied that the resources of a federated Donbass, especially its vast fossil fuel reserves, and access to pipelines, would be under the control of local/regional governments, a proposition that the U.S. outright rejected. U.S. imperialism has since shifted the Ukrainian goalposts, in essence, moving to obliterate controlling Ukrainian capitalist fossil fuel interests in the east in favor of the U.S. corporate oil monopolies – yet another U.S. imperialist oil war if there ever was one.
Today, admission to the good graces of the U.S. imperialist establishment requires hailing the “democratic” U.S.-led NATO imperial war pact. We decline the invitation. We decline to condemn the beleaguered Donbass people for asking for Russian aid and receiving it. We decline to condemn the Ukrainian and Russian-speaking populations’ opposition to the U.S.-engineered fascist coup and its U.S./NATO perpetuation. We decline to condone NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and its establishing nuclear weapons along Russia’s 1500-mile border. That 27 million Russians died in fighting Hitler’s fascist WWII invasion has not been obliterated from Russian popular consciousness.
And we decline to join the near-deafening bi-partisan war cries, echoed daily by virtually every U.S. corporation, every military contractor, every oil behemoth, every major media outlet and every politician to pursue war in Ukraine without hesitation. If there is any U.S. debate over the war among the corporate parties it is over whether to risk nuclear war via the U.S. implementing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, a doomsday scenario if there ever was one. Meanwhile, President Biden’s $33 billion pledge to Ukraine’s military was upped to $40 billion in a near unanimous vote in Congress, while Biden took the stage at a Lockheed-Martin plant to encourage workers to spare no effort in manufacturing deadly Javelin anti-tank missiles. The U.S. war machine is operating at full-throttle.
We harbor no illusions in the class nature and politics of Putin’s Russia. We have long ago characterized Russia as a lesser capitalist-imperialist state headed by a predatory capitalist class of Stalinist origin. Putin‘s statements citing Czarist Russia’s Great White Russian Empire’s imperialist claim to Ukraine and Putin’s repudiation of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky’s historic championing of an independent socialist Ukraine must be condemned by all serious antiwar and socialist fighters. We have no truck with Russia’s 83 billionaire capitalist elite as we have none with the 780+ U.S. billionaires and China’s 1000! We note with revulsion that today’s neo-fascist and far right newfound U.S. allies in Poland and Hungary were yesterday’s Putin admirers. We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s newly-proclaimed affinity for Zionist Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed people.
Vladimir Putin’s government is no friend of working people. The recent Russian Army intervention in Kazakhstan to crush a nationwide working class rebellion informs us once again that placing political confidence in any capitalist government or leader is inimical to fundamental socialist principles.
The fight for an independent socialist Ukraine today resides only with the workers of Ukraine and Russia and never with their capitalist oppressors, whether in Ukraine, Russia or NATO. The construction today, of mass socialist parties, however difficult, aimed at breaking the capitalist-imperialist stranglehold on every aspect of public life, is the starting point for a socialist future free from every form of exploitation, oppression and denial of human dignity.
Any notion that political or military support to the present U.S.-puppet Ukrainian coup government is the guarantor of Ukrainian independence is as fundamentally flawed as granting support to any of the myriad U.S.-installed governments the world over. The recent U.S.-forced exodus from Afghanistan stands out as a classic example, where after 20 years of U.S. war and occupation, the U.S. puppet government there lacked the slightest credibility among the Afghan masses. The same with the U.S. puppet regimes from the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Chile in decades past, to Bolivia, Honduras and Haiti today, to name a few.
The U.S. imperialist government, with 1,100 military bases around the world in 110 countries is by far the world’s greatest purveyor of force and violence In contrast China maintains a single military base outside its borders – in Djibouti, at the Horn of Africa, while Russia maintains some seven military bases, mostly in the former Soviet Republics and one in Syria. U.S. imperialism spends more on its military — at least $1 trillion annually, including the CIA budget — than most of the world combined. That Russia and China are capitalist/imperialist states does not negate our responsibility to assess their actions in the context of unfolding events. Were we to blind ourselves to the reality of the events that transpired in Ukraine since the 2014 U.S.-instigated fascist coup and place an equal sign between U.S. and Russian imperialism, we would be gravely mistaken. We would be substituting the proposition that whoever fired the first shot is to be categorically condemned, rather than assessing what caused that shot to be fired. That U.S. imperialism planned and orchestrated a fascist-led coup aimed in part at obliterating the minority Russian-speaking people, 30 percent of the population, and that the same U.S. government seeks to orchestrate Ukraine’s affiliation to NATO, replete with nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep, cannot be removed from any serious assessment of today’s unfolding Ukrainian war. Neither are we neutral with regard to Ukraine’s oppressed Russian-speaking population’s right to exist, that is, their right to self-determination. They have legitimately sought Russian aid. We do not object to Russia’s providing it even if Putin’s motives for extending it are dubious to say the least.
Without the slightest equivocation, we support this right of all poor and oppressed nations to be free from imperialist war and conquest. This principle fully applies to all beleaguered nations, including Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
In Syria, the Bashar al Assad government fell victim to a U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchy 10-year war that slaughtered 500,000 Syrians. With the U.S.-backed jihadist armies occupying three-quarters of Syria, poised to take Damascus and with the U.S. government’s Secretary of State at that moment, John Kerry, preparing to install yet another coup government beholden to the U.S., the Syrians, exercising their right to self-determination, asked for Russian aid. The result was the defeat of that U.S. regime change horror.
The same behemoth U.S. oil monopolies on whose behalf the U.S. government wages war today against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Libya Bolivia, and beyond, were critical players in the monstrous wars that killed millions and raped the planet in years and decades past. Four-plus million were slaughtered in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; 400,000 in Guatemala by U.S.-trained death squads; 50,000 slaughtered by Batista’s U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba; 60,000 murdered by Somoza’s Nicaragua dictatorship; 60,000 by Pinochet’s Chilean death squads and tens of thousands more in Argentina, Panama, Haiti, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Brazil – all by U.S.-backed and/or installed dictatorships! The modern era list of U.S. atrocities never ends; 1.5 million were murdered in Iraq; two million more in the U.S.-orchestrated 1980-88 Iraq/Iran War aimed at obliterating both nation’s competitive oil resources; tens of thousands in the U.S.-backed El Sisi Egyptian coup; one million in Afghanistan and today millions perishing in the U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian genocide in Yemen.
Today the U.S. warmakers have scaled unprecedented heights in a scheme to monopolize the world’s largest fossil fuel markets – Western Europe and beyond – by eliminating cheap Russian oil and gas scheduled to be sent directly through the undersea Nord Steam 2 pipeline. The U.S. scheme, forced upon reluctant German and French officials, contemplates closing existing Russian pipelines and Nord Stream 2 and substituting high cost U.S.-fracked liquid national gas. The coup government’s U.S.-backed military conquest of eastern and southern Ukraine is seen as a prerequisite to completing this barely disguised and latest U.S. fossil fuel war – a first magnitude confrontation at a time when the continued, if not expanded use of this deadly resource, spells doom for all humankind.
Today’s U.S.-orchestrated war in Ukraine has been a boon to the crisis-ridden capitalist elite with skyrocketing war spending at record highs, oil and gas prices at historic levels and monopoly control of basic necessities consciously driving inflation close to 10 percent. Meanwhile, the kept corporate media poses the U.S. warmakers as virtual saints while dissenting views are increasingly obliterated.
David Barsamian: Let’s head into the most obvious nightmare of this moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a little background. Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush’s assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east” — and that pledge has been verified. My question to you is, why didn’t Gorbachev get that in writing?
Noam Chomsky: He accepted a gentleman’s agreement, which is not that uncommon in diplomacy. Shake-of-the-hand. Furthermore, having it on paper would have made no difference whatsoever. Treaties that are on paper are torn up all the time. What matters is good faith. And in fact, H.W. Bush, the first Bush, did honor the agreement explicitly. He even moved toward instituting a partnership in peace, which would accommodate the countries of Eurasia. NATO wouldn’t be disbanded but would be marginalized. Countries like Tajikistan, for example, could join without formally being part of NATO. And Gorbachev approved of that. It would have been a step toward creating what he called a common European home with no military alliances.
Clinton in his first couple of years also adhered to it. What the specialists say is that by about 1994, Clinton started to, as they put it, talk from both sides of his mouth. To the Russians he was saying: Yes, we’re going to adhere to the agreement. To the Polish community in the United States and other ethnic minorities, he was saying: Don’t worry, we’ll incorporate you within NATO. By about 1996-97, Clinton said this pretty explicitly to his friend Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whom he had helped win the 1996 election. He told Yeltsin: Don’t push too hard on this NATO business. We’re going to expand but I need it because of the ethnic vote in the United States.
In 1997, Clinton invited the so-called Visegrad countries — Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania — to join NATO. The Russians didn’t like it but didn’t make much of a fuss. Then the Baltic nations joined, again the same thing. In 2008, the second Bush, who was quite different from the first, invited Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Every U.S. diplomat understood very well that Georgia and Ukraine were red lines for Russia. They’ll tolerate the expansion elsewhere, but these are in their geostrategic heartland and they’re not going to tolerate expansion there. To continue with the story, the Maidan uprising took place in 2014, expelling the pro-Russian president and Ukraine moved toward the West.
From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine — advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command. There’s no secret about this. It was quite open. Recently, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, bragged about it. He said: This is what we were doing since 2014. Well, of course, this is very consciously, highly provocative. They knew that they were encroaching on what every Russian leader regarded as an intolerable move. France and Germany vetoed it in 2008, but under U.S. pressure, it was kept on the agenda. And NATO, meaning the United States, moved to accelerate the de facto integration of Ukraine into the NATO military command.
In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected with an overwhelming majority — I think about 70% of the vote — on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium. He was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.
Well, he’s a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had had any backing from the United States. The U.S. refused. No backing, nothing, which meant he was left to hang out to dry and had to back off. The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by step into the NATO military command. That accelerated further when President Biden was elected. In September 2021, you could read it on the White House website. It wasn’t reported but, of course, the Russians knew it. Biden announced a program, a joint statement to accelerate the process of military training, military exercises, more weapons as part of what his administration called an “enhanced program” of preparation for NATO membership.
It accelerated further in November. This was all before the invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed what was called a charter, which essentially formalized and extended this arrangement. A spokesman for the State Department conceded that before the invasion, the U.S. refused to discuss any Russian security concerns. All of this is part of the background.
On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.
The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President De Gaulle’s initiatives to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” integrating Russia with the West, which was a very natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security reasons as well. So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. In fact, it is even inducing Sweden and Finland to join NATO — the worst possible outcome from the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because of that.
So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation on the U.S. side. That’s the background that has led to this. Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.
There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia.
You can read columns in the New York Times, the London Financial Times, all over Europe. A common refrain is: we’ve got to make sure that Russia suffers. It doesn’t matter what happens to Ukraine or anyone else. Of course, this gamble assumes that if Putin is pushed to the limit, with no escape, forced to admit defeat, he’ll accept that and not use the weapons he has to devastate Ukraine.
There are a lot of things that Russia hasn’t done. Western analysts are rather surprised by it. Namely, they’ve not attacked the supply lines from Poland that are pouring weapons into Ukraine. They certainly could do it. That would very soon bring them into direct confrontation with NATO, meaning the U.S. Where it goes from there, you can guess. Anyone who’s ever looked at war games knows where it’ll go — up the escalatory ladder toward terminal nuclear war.
So, those are the games we’re playing with the lives of Ukrainians, Asians, and Africans, the future of civilization, in order to weaken Russia, to make sure that they suffer enough. Well, if you want to play that game, be honest about it. There’s no moral basis for it. In fact, it’s morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what’s involved.
In the media, and among the political class in the United States, and probably in Europe, there’s much moral outrage about Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are occurring as they do in every war. Don’t you find that moral outrage a bit selective though?
The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral outrage. But you go to the Global South, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They condemn the war, of course. It’s a deplorable crime of aggression. Then they look at the West and say: What are you guys talking about? This is what you do to us all the time.
It’s kind of astonishing to see the difference in commentary. So, you read the New York Times and their big thinker, Thomas Friedman. He wrote a column a couple of weeks ago in which he just threw up his hands in despair. He said: What can we do? How can we live in a world that has a war criminal? We’ve never experienced this since Hitler. There’s a war criminal in Russia. We’re at a loss as to how to act. We’ve never imagined the idea that there could be a war criminal anywhere.
When people in the Global South hear this, they don’t know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. There was an interview with the perpetrator, George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq, a major war criminal, in the style section of the Washington Post — an interview with, as they described it, this lovable goofy grandpa who was playing with his grandchildren, making jokes, showing off the portraits he painted of famous people he’d met. Just a beautiful, friendly environment.
So, we know how to deal with war criminals. Thomas Friedman is wrong. We deal with them very well.
Or take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia — “anything that flies on anything that moves” was his phrase. I don’t know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing of Cambodia. We don’t know much about it because we don’t investigate our own crimes. But Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, serious historians of Cambodia, have described it. Then there’s our role in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and instituting a vicious dictatorship there, and on and on. So, we do know how to deal with our war criminals.
Still, Thomas Friedman can’t imagine that there’s anything like Ukraine. Nor was there any commentary on what he wrote, which means it was regarded as quite reasonable. You can hardly use the word selectivity. It’s beyond astonishing. So, yes, the moral outrage is perfectly in place. It’s good that Americans are finally beginning to show some outrage about major war crimes committed by someone else.
I’ve got a little puzzle for you. It’s in two parts. Russia’s military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy’s and Spain’s. That’s one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let’s expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts?
Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West. I just had a long interview in Sweden about their plans to join NATO. I pointed out that Swedish leaders have two contradictory ideas, the two you mentioned. One, gloating over the fact that Russia has proven itself to be a paper tiger that can’t conquer cities a couple of miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army. So, they’re completely militarily incompetent. The other thought is: they’re poised to conquer the West and destroy us.
George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both of them. Orwell mistakenly thought that was something you could only have in the ultra-totalitarian state he was satirizing in 1984. He was wrong. You can have it in free democratic societies. We’re seeing a dramatic example of it right now. Incidentally, this is not the first time.
Such doublethink is, for instance, characteristic of Cold War thinking. You go way back to the major Cold War document of those years, NSC-68 in 1950. Look at it carefully and it showed that Europe alone, quite apart from the United States, was militarily on a par with Russia. But of course, we still had to have a huge rearmament program to counter the Kremlin design for world conquest.
That’s one document and it was a conscious approach. Dean Acheson, one of the authors, later said that it’s necessary to be “clearer than truth,” his phrase, in order to bludgeon the mass mind of government. We want to drive through this huge military budget, so we have to be “clearer than truth” by concocting a slave state that’s about to conquer the world. Such thinking runs right through the Cold War. I could give you many other examples, but we’re seeing it again now quite dramatically. And the way you put it is exactly correct: these two ideas are consuming the West.
It’s also interesting that diplomat George Kennan foresaw the danger of NATO moving its borders east in a very prescient op-ed he wrote that appeared in The New York Times in 1997.
Kennan had also been opposed to NSC-68. In fact, he had been the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. He was kicked out and replaced by Paul Nitze. He was regarded as too soft for such a hard world. He was a hawk, radically anticommunist, pretty brutal himself with regard to U.S. positions, but he realized that military confrontation with Russia made no sense.
Russia, he thought, would ultimately collapse from internal contradictions, which turned out to be correct. But he was considered a dove all the way through. In 1952, he was in favor of the unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin’s proposal as well. Kennan was ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.
Stalin’s initiative. Kennan’s proposal. Some Europeans supported it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington.
There was one foreign policy specialist, a respected one, James Warburg, who wrote a book about it. It’s worth reading. It’s called Germany: Key to Peace. In it, he urged that this idea be taken seriously. He was disregarded, ignored, ridiculed. I mentioned it a couple of times and was ridiculed as a lunatic, too. How could you believe Stalin? Well, the archives came out. Turns out he was apparently serious. You now read the leading Cold War historians, people like Melvin Leffler, and they recognize that there was a real opportunity for a peaceful settlement at the time, which was dismissed in favor of militarization, of a huge expansion of the military budget.
Now, let’s go to the Kennedy administration. When John Kennedy came into office, Nikita Khrushchev, leading Russia at the time, made a very important offer to carry out large-scale mutual reductions in offensive military weapons, which would have meant a sharp relaxation of tensions. The United States was far ahead militarily then. Khrushchev wanted to move toward economic development in Russia and understood that this was impossible in the context of a military confrontation with a far richer adversary. So, he first made that offer to President Dwight Eisenhower, who paid no attention. It was then offered to Kennedy and his administration responded with the largest peacetime buildup of military force in history — even though they knew that the United States was already far ahead.
The U.S. concocted a “missile gap.” Russia was about to overwhelm us with its advantage in missiles. Well, when the missile gap was exposed, it turned out to be in favor of the U.S. Russia had maybe four missiles exposed on an airbase somewhere.
You can go on and on like this. The security of the population is simply not a concern for policymakers. Security for the privileged, the rich, the corporate sector, arms manufacturers, yes, but not the rest of us. This doublethink is constant, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. It’s just what Orwell described, hyper-totalitarianism in a free society.
In an article in Truthout, you quote Eisenhower’s 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech. What did you find of interest there?
You should read it and you’ll see why it’s interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He — or whoever wrote the speech — put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we’re building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves.
He spelled it out in some detail, calling for a decline in the military budget. He had a pretty awful record himself, but in this respect he was right on target. And those words should be emblazoned in everyone’s memory. Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge military budget. Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which represents a major attack on our society, exactly as Eisenhower explained so many years ago.
The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper tiger, so militarily incompetent it can’t move a couple of miles beyond its border without collapse. So, with a monstrous military budget, we have to severely harm ourselves and endanger the world, wasting enormous resources that will be necessary if we’re going to deal with the severe existential crises we face. Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible. That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures. There are people who are happy about this. Go to the executive offices of Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, they’re ecstatic. It’s a bonanza for them. They’re even being given credit for it. Now, they’re being lauded for saving civilization by destroying the possibility for life on Earth. Forget the Global South. If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.
President draws parallel with tsar who waged war on Sweden and says campaign in Ukraine stems from Russia’s ‘basic values’
Russian president Vladimir Putin has paid tribute to tsar Peter the Great on the 350th anniversary of his birth, drawing a parallel between what he portrayed as their twin historic quests to win back Russian lands.
“Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia’s],” Putin said on Thursday after a visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar.
On May 17, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow addressed the upper house of the Russian Parliament…
NBC (4/6/22) referred to making charges against Russia for which there is “no evidence” as having “blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”
Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).
In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies.
The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.” But who determines what is “tangential” and what is relevant, and what are the guiding principles to make such a determination? In this assessment, Western audiences are too fickle to be trusted with making up their own mind.
There’s no denying that Russia’s disinformation campaign is key to justifying its war on Ukraine. But instead of uncritically outsourcing these decisions to Western intelligence officials and weapons manufacturers, and as a result erasing realities key to a political settlement, the media’s ultimate guiding principle for what information is “tangential” should be whether it is relevant to preventing the further suffering of Ukrainian civilians—and reducing tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
For Western audiences, and US citizens in particular, labeling or otherwise marginalizing inconvenient realities as “disinformation” prevents a clear understanding of how their government helped escalate tensions in the region, continues to obstruct the possibility of peace talks, and is prepared to, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman describes it, “fight to the last Ukrainian” in a bid to weaken Russia.
The New York Times (4/11/22) drew a red line through Benjamin Norton for advancing the “conspiracy theory” that “US officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.” Eight years ago, the Times (2/6/14) reported as straight news the fact that US “diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president.”
For example, the New York Times (4/11/22) claimed that US support for the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “conspiracy theory” being peddled by the Chinese government in support of Russia. The article featured an image with a red line crossing out the face of journalist Benjamin Norton, who was appearing on a Chinese news channel to discuss how the US helped orchestrate the coup. (Norton wrote for FAIR.org frequently from 2015–18.) The evidence he presented—a leaked call initially reported by the BBC in which then–State Department official Victoria Nuland appears to select opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be Ukraine’s new prime minister—is something, he noted, that the Times itself has reported on multiple times (2/6/14, 2/7/14).
Not having been asked for comment by the Times, Norton responded in a piece of his own (Multipolarista, 4/14/22), claiming that the newspaper was “acting as a tool of US government information warfare.”
Beyond Nuland’s apparent coup-plotting, the US campaign to destabilize Ukraine stretched back over a decade. Seeking to isolate Russia and open up Ukraine to Western capital, the US had long been “fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED)” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). High-profile US officials like Sen. John McCain even went so far as to rally protesters in the midst of the Maidan uprising.
In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.
When the Times covered the Russian annexation of Crimea, it acknowledged that the predominantly ethnic Russian population there viewed “the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.” But now the newspaper of record is using allegations of disinformation to change the record.
To discredit evidence of US involvement in Ukraine’s 2014 regime change hides crucial facts that could potentially support a political solution to this crisis. When the crisis is reduced merely to the context of Russian aggression, a peace deal that includes, for example, a referendum on increased autonomy for the Donbass seems like an outrageous thing for Ukraine to have to agree to. But in the context of a civil war brought on by a US-backed coup—a context the Times is eager to erase—it may appear a more palatable solution.
More broadly, Western audiences that are aware of their own government’s role in sparking tensions may have more skepticism of Washington’s aims and an increased appetite for peace negotiations.
In 2018, the Atlantic Council (6/20/18) wrote that the Ukraine government “tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups” “sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not.”
The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation.
Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14). In a piece called “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (and No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/20/18) wrote:
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”
To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.
Three years later, the Atlantic Council (6/19/21) was dismissing “the idea of Ukraine as a hotbed of right-wing extremism” as “rooted in Soviet-era propaganda.”
But now Western media attempt to diminish those groups’ significance, arguing that singling out a vocal but insignificant far right only benefits Russia’s disinformation campaign (New Statesman, 4/12/22). Almost exactly three years after warning about Ukraine’s “real problem” with the far right, the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/19/21) ran a piece entitled “The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine,” in which it seemingly forgot that arguments about the electoral marginalization of Ukraine’s right wing are a “red herring”:
In reality, Ukraine’s nationalist parties enjoy less support than similar political parties in a host of EU member states. Notably, in the two Ukrainian parliamentary elections held since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014, nationalist parties have failed miserably and fallen short of the 5% threshold to enter Ukrainian parliament.
Contrary to the Financial Times’ headline (3/29/22), the accompanying article seems to encourage readers to mistake Nazism for patriotism.
Russian propaganda does overstate the power of Nazi elements in Ukraine’s government—which it refers to as “fascist”—to justify its illegal aggression, but seizing on this propaganda to in turn downplay the influence and radicalism of these elements (e.g., USA Today, 3/30/22; Welt, 4/22/22) only prevents an important debate on how prolonged US and NATO military aid may empower these groups.
The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”
That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.
Azov has opened its ranks to a flood of volunteers, the Financial Times continued, diluting its connection to Ukraine’s far-right movement, a movement that has “never proved popular at the ballot box” anyways. BBC (3/26/22) also cited electoral marginalization in its dismissal of claims about Ukraine’s far right as “a mix of falsehoods and distortions.” Putin’s distortions require debunking, but neither outlet acknowledged that these groups’ outsized influence comes more from their capacity for political violence than from their electoral participation (Hromadske, 10/13/16; Responsible Statecraft, 3/25/22).
London Times (3/30/22): You’d have to live in a “warped, strange world” to think that these gentlemen wearing SS-derived shoulder patches were Nazis.
In the London Times piece, Azov commander Yevgenii Vradnik dismissed the neo-Nazi characterization as Russian disinformation: “Perhaps [Putin] really believes it,” as he “lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.” Sure, the article reports, “Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists,” but it also includes “scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor.”
To support such “patriots,” the West should fulfill their “urgent plea” for more weapons. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from NATO,” Vradnik said. Thus Western media use the “Russian disinformation” label to not only downplay the threat of Ukraine’s far right, but even to encourage the West to arm them.
Responsible Statecraft (3/25/22) pushed back on the media’s dismissiveness, warning that “Russian propaganda has colossally exaggerated the contemporary strength of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups,” but
because these groups have been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard yet retain their autonomous identities and command structures, over the course of an extended war they could amass a formidable fifth column that would radicalize Ukraine’s postwar political dynamic.
To ignore the fact that prolonged military aid could reshape Ukraine’s politics in favor of neo-Nazi groups prevents an understanding of the threats posed to Ukrainian democracy and civil society.
Ilya Yaboklov (New York Times, 4/25/22): “NATO is the subject of some of the regime’s most persistent conspiracy theories, which see the organization’s hand behind popular uprisings around the world.”
Much like with the Maidan coup, the corporate media’s insistence on viewing Russian aggression as unconnected to US imperial expansion has led it to cast any blame placed on NATO policy as Russian disinformation.
In “The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized,” New York Times (4/25/22), historian and author Ilya Yaboklov listed the Kremlin’s most prominent “disinformation” narratives. High on his list was the idea that “NATO has turned Ukraine into a military camp.”
Without mentioning that NATO, a remnant of the Cold War, is explicitly hostile to Russia, the Times piece portrayed Putin’s disdain for NATO as a paranoia that is convenient for Russian propaganda:
NATO is Mr. Putin’s worst nightmare: Its military operations in Serbia, Iraq and Libya have planted the fear that Russia will be the military alliance’s next target. It’s also a convenient boogeyman that animates the anti-Western element of Mr. Putin’s electorate. In his rhetoric, NATO is synonymous with the United States, the military hand of “the collective West” that will suffocate Russia whenever it becomes weak.
The New York Times is not the only outlet to dismiss claims that NATO’s militarization of Ukraine has contributed to regional tensions. Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute claimed on CNN Newsroom (4/8/22): “There’s two places where I have seen China carry Russia’s water. The first is, starting long before the invasion, casting blame at the foot of the United States and NATO.” The Washington Post editorial board (4/11/22) argued much to the same effect that Chinese “disinformation” included arguing “NATO is to blame for the fighting.” Newsweek (4/13/22) stated that Chinese disinformation “blames the US military/industrial complex for the chaos in Ukraine and other parts of the world,” and falsely claims that “Washington ‘squeezed Russia’s security space.’”
Characterizing claims that NATO’s militarization of Russia’s neighbors was a hostile act as “paranoia” or “disinformation” ignores the decades of warnings from top US diplomats and anti-war dissidents alike that NATO expansionism into former Warsaw Pact countries would lead to conflict with Russia.
Jack F. Matlock Jr, the former ambassador to the USSR warned the US Senate as early as 1997 that NATO expansion would threaten a renewal of Cold War hostilities (Responsible Statecraft, 2/15/22):
I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.
The US War College’s John Deni (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22) argues that NATO expansion is not to blame for Russian insecurity, because “over the centuries…Russia has experienced military invasions across every frontier,” and so it was going to “demonize the West” regardless.
These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.
The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).
As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):
We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….
What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.
When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.
Alan MacLeod (Mint Press, 4/25/22): “These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying US aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples…for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism.”
As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.
Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.
After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:
Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.
As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:
There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.
The post ‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts appeared first on FAIR.
Russian emperor Alexander III’s reign was a laboratory for reactionary terror. (Corbis via Getty Images)
Russia is usually thought of as an improbable birthplace for the world’s first communist revolution. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ fantastic ambitions of revolution across the planet often overshadow the reality that, over the immediately preceding decades, the Russian Empire had been the bulwark of reaction in the industrialized world.
Though the dubious credit for inaugurating the modern authoritarian playbook is usually awarded to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, there is a strong argument that the last thirty-six years of the Russian Empire — the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, from 1881 to 1917 — provided the ultimate laboratory for state-of-emergency rule and reactionary terror. From weaponized prejudice to paramilitary street terror and the castigation and censorship of the written word, the arsenal of reaction was well developed already in Russia’s late nineteenth century.
With the quasi-enforced exile of almost the entire ruling class after 1917, creating a global diaspora of almost 2 million people, many of its ideas and methods spread around the world — with some fertilizing the political soil for fascism and Nazism.
Following the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881 — after seven different attempts, including basement bombs in the Winter Palace and street shoot-outs — the Russian state was thrown into a tailspin from which it could never right itself. The so-called Tsar Liberator’s program of autocratic liberalism, featuring the emancipation of the serfs (along with modest property reform and land redistribution), selective civic advancement for Jews, localized self-government, and an independent judiciary (progressive by West European standards), was quickly vitiated by a concerted program of counterreform.
The new emperor, Alexander III, marked himself ready to break even with the most long-standing and characteristic traditions of the Romanov dynasty. Smashing the unbroken line of beardless rulers since Peter the Great’s original beard ban and accompanying beard tax of 1698, the new ruler not only appeared with an imposingly long beard but also had himself photographed dressed theatrically in the standard outfit of a Russian muzhik or peasant — a clear populist signal. His building program embraced an anti-modern visual style that hearkened back to the Byzantine and the Old Muscovite, again severing the emulation of the neoclassically oriented European style, which had gone largely unquestioned for two centuries. His historical escapism and fantasy were a new and finely tuned form of turning politics into theater, a staple of modern reaction — and fitting for a ruler who prided himself on never missing a dress rehearsal at the Marinsky Theater.
This new regime had stumbled onto a fundamental truth of modern reaction: that conservatism could be radical, too. And the true brain behind this vision was the Ober-Curator of the Holy Synod and the personal tutor of the last two emperors, Konstantin Pobedonotsev, something of a cross between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader. The critical realist painter Ilya Repin famously depicted him as a living mummy, and the symbolist Russian Jewish poet Alexander Blok envisioned him as a vampiric grand inquisitor, once writing:
In those distant, deaf years
Slumber and haziness reigned in the heart
Pobedonostsev’s owl wings
Stretched over Russia
There was no day or night
Only the shadow of those vast wings
He drew a spellbinding circle
Around Russia, gazing into her eyes
With the vitreous stare of a sorcerer
Pobodonostev labeled popular sovereignty as “the great falsehood of our time.” Decades before Joseph Goebbels, he spoke of the French Revolution as the ultimate nemesis, whose repeal he openly sought. He crafted a concerted program of censorship and vilified the intelligentsia, with dozens of newspapers banned. Further, this Ober-Curator crafted a state ideology explicitly hostile to the notion of education. He and the new emperor decisively ended both university autonomy and any higher education for women. In their correspondence, they were overtly contemptuous of secondary teaching for former serfs, and at the new network of church schools, founded by Pobodonostev, no subjects were taught other than learning to read the Bible. Any student already in university found to be political in any way was to be sent directly into military service.
Alexander III’s rule brought something of an experimental right-wing project. For the first time, a major European state would be ruled under “temporary regulations,” meaning an indefinite and conveniently undefined “state of emergency.” This empowered the state to search for and court-martial anyone deemed a threat to state security. In practice, this meant the ruthless enforcement of what would be known, somewhat speciously, as “Russification” — in essence, a form of nationalist terror. Finns lost their autonomous army and post office, nothing could be printed in Ukrainian, the universities in Warsaw and Vilna were shut down, Polish could no longer be used in high schools (even Polish literature was studied in Russian), and Lithuanians began to lose the right to use the Latin alphabet.
This new regime had stumbled onto a fundamental truth of modern reaction: that conservatism could be radical, too.
Perhaps more familiar to Americans are the waves of pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II — kindred to American lynchings and race riots — infamous for triggering the largest mass exodus in modern Jewish history. Almost half of a 5-million-strong population now saw flight as their only way out. “Pogrom,” derived from “thunder,” is one of the few words in Russian to have gained international currency, especially in its problematic adoption to describe Nazi antisemitic acts. Less understood is the program of apartheid-like lawfare unleashed against the Jewish minority. Hundreds of laws passed as “emergency decrees,” known as the “May or Interim Laws,” stripped the right to vote and to own land, and enacted harsh quotas in all public educational institutions, even restricting Jews’ freedom to adopt Christian names. Officially coordinated mass expulsions from multiple cities followed; newly appointed governor-generals of major cities, like Moscow and Kiev, began their terms with expulsions of Jews.
The early Russian Social Democrat and star of Russian letters, Maxim Gorky, who fled the country in 1906, said in response to recent events:
Is Europe really so unconcerned about having as its neighbor a country of 140 million people whom the authorities are trying to turn into animals, instilling in them hostility and hatred for anything that is not Russian, inculcating not just cruelty and violence, but a passion for violence? Do Jewish bankers in Europe understand that they are giving money to Russia to fund Jewish pogroms?
The construct of modern antisemitism as the key, conspiracy-format reactionary ideology has a clear Russian provenance. The urtext which lays out the very idea and format for demonic conspiracies of global domination, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, called a “warrant for genocide,” first emerged as part of a larger text by the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus entitled “The Great within the Small and the Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility. Notes of an Orthodox Believer.” First serialized in Saint Petersburg newspaper Znamia in 1903, it was repeatedly reprinted thanks to the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, as part of a propaganda campaign in the subsequent decade. This forged document was introduced to Berlin as early as 1919, through Colonel Fyodor Vinberg’s radical right-wing publication Luch Sveta (Ray of light), and then to the United States, in 1920, by Boris Brasol, who provided the assist for Henry Ford’s Americanized version, published as The International Jew. Brasol, a future Nazi agent and member of the German American Bund, was a former tsarist prosecutor for the Ministry of Justice who had served the last major blood libel case in modern European History, that of Mendel Beilis in Kiev in 1913. More than a definitive text of antisemitism, it is also the most profound denunciation of the modern world found in any text of political propaganda. The Protocols frames any kind of political thought or mobilization of workers or the masses as symptom of an apocalyptic design for world destruction; the text aims to silence all critical thought. It was apparently found among the last personal effects on the bedside of the Russian monarchs before their execution in Yekaterinburg in 1918; the whole family are today saints of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The 1905 Revolution — which saw the first general strike, the first military mutiny (aboard the Potemkin, as immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein), and the first soviet, or workers’ council, in Russian history — brought a level of disorder, with waves of pogroms and riots, that almost toppled the regime. And while the tsar’s manifesto, in October 1905, brought the Russian Empire closer to a European standard of parliamentary governance, with some checks and balances and a protected civic sphere, this shift also triggered an even more radical wave of reactionary mobilization. In its wake emerged nothing less than Europe’s first fascist organization, the Union of Russian People (URP), more generally known as the “Black Hundreds,” founded in November 1905.
The Black Hundreds founded ‘combat groups’ that wore yellow shirts long before Mussolini’s Black- and Hitler’s Brownshirts.
While the last two emperors are no longer thought by historians to have been behind any systematic program of pogroms, evidence abounds of their tacit support for these new political movements of the post-1905 radical right. The URP was no elite club but a mass political movement; populist and anti-bourgeois, they appealed to the peasant and the proletarian, and sought workers’ relief in the name of autocracy. Even Vladimir Lenin noted their “benighted peasant democratism,” as they expounded a form of racist anti-industrial capitalism that avoided challenging property relations of the landlord class, so familiar from later fascisms. Notably, their enemies were not just Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries but liberalism as a whole, including those conservative-minded liberals who sought a path to reform. Weapons were received from the police, subsidies from governors, and the last emperor even granted them a reception while he accepted their honorary badge. (At one time, Rasputin, the tsar’s “guru,” counted the miracle monk and Black Hundred spokesperson Iliodor as a close confidant.)
The Black Hundreds founded “combat groups” (boevye druzhiny) that wore yellow shirts (long before Mussolini’s Black- and Hitler’s Brownshirts), initiating street terror and strikebreaking, and pursuing an assassination campaign, especially against Jewish members of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (“Cadet”) Party. The Union unsuccessfully pursued the assassination of Prime Minister Sergei Witte, who had drafted the 1905 manifesto, and, during a thwarted attempt to kill Cadet leader Pavel Milyukov at an exile meeting in Berlin, Black Hundred members murdered Vladimir Dimitrevich Nabokov. A leading Cadet liberal, Nabokov, the father of the great novelist, helped to end the monarchy and the death penalty, and supported full emancipation of the Jews. His murderers, Black Hundred veterans, were sentenced but never served prison time, and went on to collaborate with the Nazis. Along with several former generals that pledged loyalty oaths to the Third Reich, these assassins even created a Russian version of the Hitler Youth under the aegis of the SS, with some ultimately fleeing to South America after the war.
Government terror after 1905 descended into mass murder, with at least three thousand hangings of “revolutionaries” in the Stolypin terror. Even such drastic measures could not stave off the near-total collapse of the Russian state into outright civil war after the February and October Revolutions of 1917. The counterrevolutionary “White” generals openly embraced — or were themselves veterans — of the Russian far right. Their reactionary program decayed into radical antisemitism replete with a biological worldview, with new “racial tests” applied for all those in the army and the provisional governments the Whites fleetingly established in the areas they occupied. The greatest outbreak of systematic killing on the European continent before the Holocaust occurred under the cover of the Whites, by the so-called Volunteer Army, in Ukraine. Organized into military operations, it murdered tens or even hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine by 1921. As a rule, White military governors pardoned those implicated in the murders.
In the wake of their defeat by the Red Army, the Russian ruling class and the leaders of the White Armies formed a diaspora which some termed a “black international.” While few in number, imperial Russian exiles played critical roles in key moments during the birth of Nazism. Propagandists such as Vinberg, with his press outlet Crusade, based in Berlin, continued the civil war by other means. Described as a halfway house between the Black Hundreds and Nazism, he often spoke of the need to be free from both the red and gold internationals. Die Brücke, or Aufbauvereinigung, founded in Munich in 1918–19, was the organization that most firmly planted the Russian roots for Nazism, including press chiefs of former White Army generals and the later Nazi directors of press and foreign affairs. Historians trace Hitler’s conversion to the global conspiratorial element of his antisemitism to their materials.
Such cooperation and even unity among the terrorist German and Russian right had immediate and dire results: the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920, the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, and the assassinations of Nabokov and foreign minister Walter Rathenau, both in 1922. The Russian dimension to the Beer Hall Putsch is largely forgotten, as the mastermind, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a Russian Baltic German and Aufbau editor, died in the attack.
If the term “Wilhelminism” emerged to indicate an imperialist archconservative, anti-socialist political climate in the German Empire, then perhaps “Pobedonotstevism,” or “late-Romanovism,” should be introduced as shorthand for the right-wing radicalization that reached its pre–World War I heights in Russia. When the anti-revolutionary Russian headquarters collapsed in defeat at the end of the Civil War, the resulting resentment was sent spiraling across Europe — with fateful consequences. This stands as a reminder that political concepts do not always only travel from left to right, and that it was the Russian world that first confronted the collapse of the promises of modern life. Underneath Nazi rhetoric or even the modern authoritarian playbook writ large, Russia’s counterrevolutionary past is not far under the surface.
Saying outrageous, verifiably untrue things has sort of become Patriarch Kirill of Moscow’s brand. The…
When both sides accuse their enemies of being the heirs to Hitler, compromise becomes almost unthinkable