Gogoratzekoa
Winners and losers1
George Szamuely@GeorgeSzamuely
Typical projection. Because US aims are invariably “regime change,” pundits assumed that that’s what the Russians were going for. No matter how many times the Russian leaders outlined what their war aims were, pundits refused to believe them. Hence the absurd “Russia lost” meme.
Txioa aipatu
Michael Brendan Dougherty@michaelbd
Are people really going with this line? Russia has lost and so will have to settle for obtaining the fake war aims it announced, rather than the real ones we know, via private revelation, that they truly sought.
Segida
As Ukrainians resented having to take orders from the leaders of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Crimeans hated to take orders from the coup regime in Kiev after 2014.
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ZELENSKY, always the actor, appeals to stoned crowd at Grammys while his people suffer slaughter
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NEW PODCAST! KNEE-JERK LIBERALS & Other Horrible News of the Day + Dr. Pry Interview Part 2
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In 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to US President Bill Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion. It’s a “policy error of historic proportions.”
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Jack F. Matlock was the US Ambassador to the USSR from 1987-1991. In 1997, Matlock warned that NATO expansion was “the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat since the Soviet Union collapsed.”
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They all saw this coming, but they did it anyway. The west has blood on its hands.
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Pentagon can’t independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine’s Bucha, official says
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Conclusions being drawn from this story far exceed what it proves. Some bodies were next to “what appears to be an impact crater” — aka shelling during battle, not execution by gunshot. Hence why NYT also acknowledges that the “causes of death are unclear.”
Txioa aipatu
The New York Times@nytimes
23 h
Breaking News: Satellite images refute Russia’s claim that the killing of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, occurred after its soldiers had left town, a New York Times analysis found. https://nyti.ms/3DEfL8c
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George Szamuely@GeorgeSzamuely
There is actual footage of Ukrainians torturing and murdering their POWs. There is no footage of Russians doing anything like that.
Txioa aipatu
Scott Ritter@RealScottRitter
7 h
As things stand in Ukraine, I believe there is a far greater likelihood that Zelensky will be arrested and charged as a war criminal than Putin. The direct evidence of Ukrainian war crimes, complete with proof of intent, is overwhelming. And yet the western media ignores it.
The truth about Bucha is out there, but perhaps too inconvenient to be discovered
(http://web.archive.org/web/20220405054224/https://www.rt.com/russia/553293-bucha-war-crimes-truth/)
It should be easy to find out what really happened to the massacred civilians in the Ukrainian town
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
“In war, truth is the first casualty.” This quote has been attributed to Aeschylus, a 6th BCE Greek tragedian noted for his “copious use of imagery, mythic allusion, grand language, wordplay and riddles.” It is only fitting, therefore, that the man who first gave word to the concept of modern-day war-time propaganda would see his quote come to life in the present-day Ukraine. The Kiev government and their Western information warfare advisers may have coopted all of Aeschylus’ playwright devices to craft a modern-day tragedy in the Ukrainian town of Bucha that exemplifies the notion of the lie as not just a byproduct, but also a weapon of war.
The main source of the Bucha tragedy reports is a videotape, taken by the Ukrainian National Police, of one of their convoys driving through a street in the town. A dozen or so corpses litter the roadway, many of them appearing to have been bound. This video has gone viral, producing a pandemic of anguish and anger that has swept over much of the world, capturing the attention of heads of state and the head of the Catholic Church alike, resulting in a tidal wave of condemnation and outrage directed at Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The cause-and-effect relationship between the video and the global backlash is clear – the former could not exist without the latter.
One of the first lessons of objectivity is to slow things down to make sure that fact is not obscured by emotion. The Bucha videotape is disturbing. The video has been released in its present form, it appears, with the express intent of producing a visceral “shock and awe” moment for the viewer. If this was indeed the case, then those who released it – the Ukrainian National Police – have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. Or that of their advisors, as the case may be.
The linkage between the dead and the Russian military was established immediately, without any fact-based data to back it up, and subsequently echoed in all forms of media – mainstream and social alike. Anyone who dared question the established “Russia did it” narrative was shouted down and belittled as a “Russian shill,” or worse.
That these conclusions are the byproduct of mass hysteria is beside the point – why seek to be objective when the narrative fits every stereotype that had been carefully assembled beforehand by the same people parroting the Bucha story today. Social “preconditioning” of an audience unused to critical thinking is an essential step in getting this audience to accept at face value anything that is put before it, regardless of how egregiously the facts of the story strain credulity. And let’s be clear – the Ukrainian narrative of the events in Bucha seems to stretch credibility.
The chronology of the narrative produces the first red flag that the story being peddled by Ukraine, and echoed in the West, is not what it seems. It is established fact that Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30. Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that the town was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials. At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia. The videotape in question was released by Ukrainian authorities on April 2; it is not certain if the video had been taken earlier, or on that day. What is certain is that the images shown in the video differed sharply from the narrative initially portrayed by the mayor.
For its part, Russia has vehemently denied the allegations, and has requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss what the Russian Foreign Ministry has called the “criminal provocations by Ukrainian soldiers and radicals” in Bucha. The presidency of the Security Council is held by Great Britain, and the British mission to the UN has denied the Russian request, stating that a discussion on Ukraine currently scheduled for Tuesday, April 4 would serve as a forum for any discussion about Bucha.
One would think that the Security Council, which has shown a readiness in the past to meet on short notice to discuss the events coming out of Ukraine, would seek to accommodate Russia’s request on a matter of such importance. The goal of the British, however, does not appear to be the rapid search for truth and justice, but rather to buy time to allow the political fallout from the alleged massacre in Bucha to develop further.
One example of this tactic manifesting itself is the reaction of US President Joe Biden. “You saw what happened in Bucha,” he explained in comments to reporters, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is a war criminal.” Biden took advantage of the Bucha crisis to advocate for the delivery of more weaponry to Ukraine. “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight,” he said. “And we have to gather all the detail so this can be an actual – have a war crimes trial.”
All this from the president of a country which has refused to recognise the International Criminal Court. For reasons which should be obvious to anyone willing to apply some critical thought.
Fortunately for President Biden and the Ukrainian government, the British chief prosecutor of the court, Karim Khan, announced in early March 2022 that he had launched an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. Given the high profile of the Bucha allegations, one would imagine that Khan has dispatched a forensics team to take control of the crime scene and oversee autopsies on the victims to establish the time of death, mechanism of death, and whether the victims had died where they were allegedly found, or if their bodies had been moved there from another location.
Khan would also be empowered to conduct interviews with the Ukrainian National Police, who have a history of close relations with members of the Ukrainian far right, including the infamous Azov Battalion. Of particular interest would be any investigation into orders given to the police regarding the treatment of those Ukrainian civilians deemed to have collaborated with the Russian military during its occupation of Bucha.
The results of such an investigation would more than likely conflict with the narrative being pursued by the Ukrainian government and echoed in the West by compliant media outlets and politicians alike. This is the prime reason why Khan is not currently on the ground in Bucha. One can assume that if and when Khan is eventually given access to evidence about the Bucha killings, it will have been manipulated by the Ukrainian National Police to such an extent that disproving the allegations will be virtually impossible.
The truth about what happened in Bucha is out there, waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, that truth appears to be inconvenient for those in a position to pursue it aggressively through a forensics-based, on-site investigation. If it so happens that it eventually emerges that the Ukrainian National Police murdered Ukrainian civilians for the crime of allegedly collaborating with the Russians during their brief occupation of Bucha, and the forces of international law are brought to bear against the true perpetrators of that crime, any true pursuit of justice would have to include both the US and UK governments as witting co-conspirators in any crime charged.
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Alfred de Zayas
Five poems for peace2
In the light of the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine, peace-loving people must stand up and shout: “No more provocations, no more hate, no more self-righteousness, no more wars, not in our name!”. Wilfred Owens’ poem “Anthem for doomed youth” (1918) was warning enough. Here my own attempt at poetry against modern aggression, the war industry, merchants of death, war profiteers.
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COUNTERPUNCH: FACTS WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES
“Fake news” and “post-truth” are popular neologisms — but they have actually been part of the political landscape for a very long time. We have learned to live with fake news, fake history and bogus law. We swim in an ocean of lies and dis-information, but somehow manage to survive the economic and political sharks alaround us.
What is far more worrisome is the phenomenon that there are “real facts” that cry out for our attention, that demand urgent action, and that our politicians and media treat as non-existent or marginal, e.g. exorbitant military expenses, skewed national budgets, xenophobic war-mongering, structural violence, military aggression, unilateral coercive measures, financial blockades, the homologation of the media, manifestly unjust laws, the corruption of the “rule of law” through legal scams and “lawfare”, the penetration of public institutions by intelligence services, the “weaponization” of human rights, the imprisonment of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, unjust taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, corporate bribery, economic exploitation, ecocide, extreme poverty, man-made famine, social exclusion, etc.
Now pause, take a breath and ask yourself why these facts are largely ignored or trivialized by politicians and media alike. Why are these “inconvenient” facts shoved aside, as if they were only of marginal importance or as if they did not exist? Without a doubt these facts engender short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences, create or perpetuate imbalances and spread a vague, destabilizing sense of incoherence and cognitive dissonance.
“Facts without consequences” constitute a sui generis category of reality. These facts may be present and available in the internet and generally acknowledged — but only under the tacit condition that no genuine debate will be conducted and no concrete action will be taken thereon. It is worse than a conspiracy of silence. It is a conspiracy of irresponsibility.
There are also “books without consequences”, books without the urgent, imperative follow-up. Whereas some trash books like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man are given enormous attention, hugely relevant and challenging books by Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Kinzer, William Blum, Jeffrey Sachs, Nils Melzer, President Jimmy Carter are published by notable houses, but there is no follow-up. One would have expected that after the publication of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Kinzer’s Overthrow, Sachs’ The End of Poverty, Melzer’s The Trial of Julian Assange, Carter’s Our Endangered Values, or Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion not only polite academic debate and scholarly conferences would follow, but genuine democratic discussion would be conducted in townhalls, in the daily press, in the internet, throughout the spectrum of the media. Politically these and other necessary books were met by silence. They had the potential to advance international law and human rights, and that is precisely why they have been victims of “benign neglect.”
The facts are there and can be consulted in official documents and in the internet. We know that grave crimes have been committed and are being committed by our governments. We should be able to shout “not in our name”, but the corporate media refuses to address the issues, and dissidents are often ignored or ridiculed. We know that the United States government has overthrown government after government throughout Latin America and the world, that the CIA has destabilized countries in Europe and the Middle East and financed coups d’état. We know what Assange and Snowden have revealed, but there is a tacit agreement in the media not to focus on these facts, but to distract us with the demonization of our geopolitical rivals and with other “convenient facts”.
When important facts and publications are deliberately kept out of the political narrative, the core of democracy is being undermined. We observe this in the totally skewed narrative in the Western media concerning the current war in Ukraine. Such manipulation of public opinion is hugely dangerous, because the dis-information and suppression of genuine debate may lead us straight into World War III and nuclear apocalypse. President Carter was not kidding when he said that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”[1] .
This abnormal state of affairs quite naturally generates “conspiracy theories”, because, as Spinoza wrote in his Ethics, “nature abhors a vacuum”. If people are deprived of the truth, if they cannot access information, they quite naturally start formulating hypotheses. No wonder that when the elites ignore or suppress facts, the vacuum is often filled byhalf-baked populists and crackpots.
The phenomenon of selective indignation and application of the law à la carte predictably subverts the system of governance and makes societies lose faith in the rule of law, or at least in the “establishment”. The attempt to deal with “fake news” through censorship and “hate speech” legislation is futile and will only lead to driving discussions underground and provoking an atmosphere of terror and fear, as our societies move closer and closer to the totalitarianism that Orwell anticipated and tried to avert.
What is needed is easier access to all pertinent information and pluralistic views, more open debate — not less! The internet must remain free of political controls – whether by government or the private sector. Official censorship of RT and Sputnik, private-sector censorship by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube constitute a frontal attack on everyone’s right to know, everyone’s right to access to information as stipulated in article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Everyone should be able to arrive at his or her own judgment. Only thus can societies meaningfully exercise democratic rights and responsibilities. Censorship constitutes an assault on democracy.
There must not be “filters” to test the truth of digital exchanges. The only legitimate controls are those to suppress pornography, war-mongering, incitement to violence, racketeering and other scams. In democratic societies no filters should be imposed in order to suppress the dissemination of factual information that the mainstream media deliberately ignores, nor to suppress an alternative interpretation of facts. What we need is a “culture of civilized dissent” – where everyone can express his/her opinions without the threat of career death and social ostracism. We need to reaffirm the right to be wrong — because only by preserving the possibility to err do we remain independent. Artistic, scientific, sociological progress depends on the freedom to postulate hypothesis, different models, different perspectives — which sometimes will be correct and sometimes not. But a failed hypothesis cannot be criminalized. The alternative is stagnation in homologation, robotization, Orwellian dystopia. The conformism of the current Zeitgeist is unworthy of democratic societies. It is up to us to vindicate the right to know and the right to dissent. That is the freedom we desperately need. That is the kind of democracy we must demand from our leaders.
Notes.
[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1115145/former-us-president-jimmy-carter-china-donald-trump
Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of ten books including “Building a Just World Order” Clarity Press, 2021.
