Lobster has posted a very interesting review by their long-term contributor, Scott Newton, of Richard Sakwa’s book on the current geopolitical tensions over Ukraine, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: I.B. Tauris). Sakwa is the professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In this book, he tackles and refutes the story peddled to us by the mainstream media that the current confrontation between NATO and Russia and the civil war in Ukraine are due to Russian imperialism under Putin.
Sakwa is under no illusions how brutal and corrupt Putin’s regime is, but the book argues that in this instance, Russia is the victim. He argues that at the heart of the crisis is a conflict between two forms of Ukrainian nationalism. One wants a strong, united Ukraine centred firmly on Kiev, with Ukrainian as the sole official language, looking to the EU and the West, with its economy based on free trade and private industry. This form of Ukrainian nationalism is hostile to Russia, which is particularly resents because of the Holodomor, the horrific artificial famine created by Soviet collectivisation in the 1930s. The government is roughly liberal, but includes Fascists. The second form of Ukrainian nationalism is popular in the south and east, which are predominantly Russian-speaking, whose families and businesses have links with Russia, and which is dominated by heavy industry and reliant on trade with Russia. This wants a federal Ukraine, with both Ukrainian and Russian as the official languages.
The review discusses the origins of the Maidan Revolution, directed against the corrupt regime of Viktor Yanukovych, who had just signed a trade agreement with Russia. The nationalist regime which replaced him, led by Petro Poroshenko, was of the first, pro-western, anti-Russian type, was strongly influence by the Far Right, whose squads massacred anti-Maidan demonstrators. This regime set about demolishing Soviet-era monuments, establishing Ukrainian as the country’s only official language, and repudiating the agreement allowing Russia to station its ships in Sebastopol until 2042. As a result, Russia seized the Crimea, which had been Russian until 1954 and the Russian-speaking areas in the south and east seceded and split into different autonomous republics. Kiev responded by sending in troops, but this has led to a stalemate so far. The West supports Kiev, seeing Putin’s support of the Ukrainian separatists as the Russian president’s attempt to undermine the political order which emerged after the collapse of Communist in 1991.
Sakwa instead views Putin as reacting purely to preserve Russia from possible NATO aggression. This is the based on the original agreement with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe. Gorby also hoped to create a new international system in which the world would not be dominated by a single superpower, but there would be a number of different leading states, whose cultures and economic and political systems would differ. These difference would be respected, and they would all work together for international peace. This has been violated by the West, which has expanded eastward into Ukraine, which has also signed the Lisbon agreement with the EU. Putin’s response, which you don’t hear about, is to call for a federal, pluralist, non-aligned Ukraine, which cooperates with both Brussels and Moscow, and whose security is guaranteed by both sides.
There is also an economic dimension to this. The West wishes to promote laissez-faire capitalism. But this didn’t work when it was introduced into Russia by Yeltsin. This type of capitalism has been rejected, and 51 per cent of the Russian economy is owned by the state. Sakwa also notes that Putin has been active building up an alternative political and economic system across the globe, in eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Syria, and Cuba and Venezuela, as well as a system of alliances with the BRICS economies, as well as a Eurasian Economic Union with the former Soviet republics of central Asia. It is also cooperating with the China on the new silk road. The result has been that Russia has created a ‘second world alliance’ system with its own financial institutions and systems of international government.
Newton says of the book that
Sakwa’s argument that the Ukrainian crisis results from the destabilization of the country by forces committed to militantly anti-Russian nationalism, egged on by former Soviet bloc countries and external interference by the United States and the European Union, propelled by a dogmatic and triumphalist liberal universalism, is highly persuasive.
This is how it appears to me, from reading previous discussions of events in Ukraine from Lobster and other, alternative news sources. As well as the fact that if Putin really did want to conquer all of Ukraine, he surely would have been able to do so, and not stopped with Crimea and the east.
Newton also wonders why we haven’t seen Sakwa, with his impressive command of Russian and eastern European history, in the media.
There can be very few academics now operating who possess Richard Sakwa’s expertise in modern Russian (including Soviet and post-Soviet) international history. Why, then, do we not seen more of him in the mainstream media, both broadcasting and print? He has been on RT, discussing the Skripal poisonings amongst other things (no doubt leading some to suspect him of being an apologist for Putin, which he certainly is not). But I have never seen him on (for example) BBC or Channel 4 (this does not of course mean he has never been interviewed there but it does suggest that any appearances have been somewhat limited). Why? Is this an accidental oversight, or are his opinions deemed by news and current affairs editors to be ‘unhelpful’?
That’s a very good question. My guess, given how the anti-Putin view is just about the only one accepted and promoted by the media, including Private Eye, is that current affairs editors really do see him as ‘unhelpful’. And this amounts, as Newton discusses at the beginning of his review, to fake news and fake history.
This is the YouTube video I’ve just posted up on my channel for my book, Crimes of Empire, which I’ve published with Lulu. This book describes how what the media have told us about the West’s military and foreign policy interventions around the world are not part of a general campaign of freeing the world’s peoples from evil and murderous dictators and terrorist regimes, but have been done simply to protect western commercial and geopolitical interests. Here’s the blurb for it I’ve put up on the YouTube page for it.
This is a video for another book I’ve written, Crimes of Empire, which details how many of the foreign interventions the West has carried out since 9/11 have definitely not been to give the peoples of the world democracy and freedom, but very firmly to support American and British economic and geopolitical interests.
This includes the seizure of Iraqi oil reserves and state industries, the very carefully orchestrated Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, the overthrow of Jacob Arbenz’s government in Guatemala because he threatened to nationalise the plantations of the American United Fruit Company and so on.
The book draws on works by the former Guardian journalist Greg Palast, and William Blum, a long time critic of American imperialism, as well as the new, alternative media on YouTube and the internet. Like The Young Turks, Jimmy Dore Show, Kyle Kulinski’s Secular Report, Democracy Now, Novara Media, and the British conspiracy magazine, Lobster.
I also talk about how we also destroyed Libya to overthrow Colonel Gaddafy. Like Saddam Hussein, he was a brutal dictator, but this was not why he was overthrown. And the result has been that half the country is now occupied by Islamists, who have brought back slavery. In contrast to Gaddafy, who was anti-racist.
And America and Britain have toppled regimes across the world, like Arbenz’s, under the guise of protecting the free world from Communism. But many of them, like Arbenz’s, were simply democratic socialist, or left-liberal.
I mention some of the books I’ve drawn on, such as Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse, which I’ve reviewed on this blog, and the late William Blum’s Freeing the World to Death and Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, as well as his Anti-Empire Report on the net. I’ve also said that some of it is drawn from RT, which I know is owned by the Russian government, but useful in providing an alternative view, though I state that it, and the mainstream media, should be viewed skeptically. I also recommend the British conspiracy magazine, Lobster, which I make very clear is about real conspiracies by covert groups and the world’s intelligence agencies, rather than stupid and poisonous conspiracy theories about the world being run by the Jews or reptoid aliens.
Yesterday, Mike put up a piece commenting on the resignation of former Bullingdon boy David Dimbleby as the host of Question Time. The man Private Eye dubbed ‘Dimblebore’ has been presenting the show for 25 years, and now considers it the right moment to leave. Dimbleby is another BBC presenter, who is very biased towards the Conservatives. Mike’s photograph of him accompanying his piece shows him raising two fingers, with the comment that it’s probably to a Socialist. Mike also cautions against feeling too good about Dimblebore’s resignation, as we don’t know what monster’s going to replace. He wonders whether the secret of human cloning has been found, and whether the next biased presenter of the programme will be Josef Goebbels.
Last week Dimblebore was off in Russia, presenting a documentary about the country under Putin ahead of the footie there. He wasn’t the only, or even the first person to go. The comedian Frankie Boyle got there over a week earlier, presenting a two-part show about the country, it’s people and football on Sunday evening. Dimblebore was rather more serious in tone, presenting Russia as a country in the grip of a repressive autocrat, and mired in corruption which was strangling the economy.
Dimbleby first explained that Putin was most popular with young people, the generation that everywhere else is rebelling against autocrats, dictators and tyrants. He puts this down to Russians’ experience of economic collapse under Yeltsin. Yeltsin ended communism and dismembered the economy of the Soviet Union, privatising whatever he could. The result was chaos, and massive employment. At one point it got so bad that some factories were paying their workers in the goods they produced. Putin has restored order and economic stability to the country, and so has the support of the younger generation.
He spoke to a great of young professionals, an advertising branding team who were supporters of Putin, working to promote him through images and slogans. He stated that most of the media was controlled by the Russian president, with a few exceptions. He then went to speak to someone from RT’s Moscow branch. Dimbleby explained that some of the staff were British, and asked one of the Brits there whether he was presenting propaganda. The man denied it, said that there was no one watching over him, telling him what to do, and that his conscience was clear. Dimblebore then gave a knowing smirk into the camera.
He then talked to a female presenter on one of the few dissident broadcasters Putin had allowed to remain open. She said that she had not received any threats, but she knew that she could be killed for what she did. But she was still determined to carry on.
He then talked about how those, who criticised the government were arrested and jailed, interviewing a human rights lawyer, who defended them. When asked what people could be arrested and jailed for, the lawyer explained that it could be criticism of the government, or a non-traditional understanding of the Second World War. The other year Putin passed a law criminalising the view that Stalin was partly responsible for the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe and Russia through the Nazi-Soviet pact. From what I remember, I think you can also be arrested for promoting gay rights.
He then spoke to a woman, who was protesting her treatment by the state. She had already been jailed for criticising Putin, but was determined to do so again. She had not been able to get a permit to organise a protest, and so held her own, one-woman demonstration outside the court. This is permitted under Russian law. If you can’t get a permit for a demonstration, you can still protest, so long as there is only one person involved. As she stood with her placard, she was joined by an increasing number of counter-protesters determined to disrupt her protest, and possibly send her to jail. They moved closer to her, and she moved away, telling them to keep their distance. They kept coming, and their numbers kept increasing. Then the cops turned up, and started filming things as they’d been told foreigners were involved. And someone else from one of the TV companies materialised to film the protest as well. Eventually it all ended, and the police and counter-protesters disappeared.
Dimbleby then did a piece about the police’s brutal suppression of dissent, complete with footage of the cops beating what looked like a feminist protester from Pussy Riot.
He also touched on gender roles. He talked to a hairdresser, while having his haircut, who told him that Russia still had very traditional gender roles, in which women wanted a strong man to provide for them.
Putin has also succeeded in reversing the declining Russian birthrate. Instead of falling, it is now rising, with medals and benefits given to couples who have large families. He showed one woman and her husband, who were being presented a medal by Putin for having ten children.
He also went off to talk to a youth organisation, that was set up to get children, including boys of junior school age, interested in the army. The group’s name translates as ‘Net’, and is run by army officers. The children there wear combat uniforms and learn to shoot using air rifles, which they are also taught how to strip down. They were shown blazing away at targets, and competing with each other over who could reassemble a gun while blindfolded the quickest, with Dimblebore cheering the winner. And it wasn’t all boys. One of the youngster there looked like a girl. Dimblebore asked them if they wanted to join the army, to which they gave a very enthusiastic ‘Yes’.
He then went off to speak to a prelate from the Russian Orthodox Church about its support for Putin, where he described Putin as an autocrat attacking human rights and threatening peace in Europe. The prelate responded by saying that there were those, who did not agree with his view. And that was that.
He then went off to discuss the massive corruption in Russia, and how this was undermining the economy as more and more investors and companies left the country because of it. Russia has 144 million people, but it’s economy is 2/3s that of Britain, or about the size of Italy’s, and is declining.
Now all of this is factually true. John Kampfner, in his book Freedom For Sale discusses Russia as another state, where the population has made a deal with its leader. They have absolute power, in return for which they give their people prosperity. Except that, according to Dimbleby, living standards and wages are declining. Putin has passed laws against the promotion of homosexuality, there are massive human rights violations, including the jailing of the type of people, who would have been called dissidents under Communism. Journalists, who haven’t toed the Archiplut’s line have been beaten and killed.
Other aspects of the Russian state, as revealed by this programme, would have been immediately recognisable to the generation raised by Communism. Like the corruption. It was rife under Communism. The Bulgarian journalist, Arkady Vaksberg, wrote a book about it, The Soviet Mafia. And Gogol took a shot at official corruption under the Tsars back in the 19th century in his play, The Government Inspector. So no change there.
As for the Russian Orthodox Church supporting Putin, it was always the state church under the tsars, to which it gave absolute support. The watchword of the tsarist regime was ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy and the People’. And its support of autocratic leadership didn’t begin under Putin. After the restrictions on religion were lifted in the 1990s, the BBC journalists interviewed some of its clergy on their shows. And the clergy had the same preference for absolute state power and total obedience from the people. Putin made the relationship between the Church and his government closer by granting them a sizable share of Russia’s oil.
The youth groups designed to get children interested in joining the army are also little different from what already went on under the Soviet system. Secondary schoolchildren did ‘military-patriotic training’ to prepare them for national service as part of the school curriculum. It was led by retired army officers, who were often the butt of schoolboy jokes. They were taught to handle weapons, complete with competitions for throwing grenades the furthest.
And let’s face it, it also isn’t much different from what used to go on over here. I’ve known young people, who were in the army and naval cadets. And the public schools used to have the CCF – the Combined Cadet Force – which the Tories would dearly love to bring back. And boys, and some girls, do like playing at ‘War’, so I’ve no doubt that if something like the Russian group was set up in this country, there would be many lads and girls wanting to join it.
Russia has also too been a very masculine society with very traditional ideas about gender and masculinity, despite the fact that most engineers were women, who also worked as construction workers and many other, traditionally masculine areas. One of the complaints of Russian women was that the men didn’t do their fair share of standing in queues waiting to get whatever groceries were in store.
And the medals and rewards to the women, who gave birth to the largest number of children is just another form of the Heroic Mother Awards under the Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia continues many of the same aspects of the country’s society from the age of the tsars and Communism, although Dimblebore said the country was going backward.
I’ve no doubt it is, but the programme annoyed me.
What irritated me was Dimblebore’s knowing smirk to camera when the guy from RT denied that he broadcast propaganda. Now I’m sure that RT does. There’s videos I’ve seen on YouTube from RTUK, which could fairly be described as pro-Russian propaganda.
But what annoyed me was Dimblebore’s hypocrisy about it.
The Beeb and Dimbleby himself has also broadcast it share of propaganda supporting western foreign policy interests, including imperialism. Newsnight has finally got round, after several years, to covering the Fascists running around the Ukraine under the present government. But the Beeb has emphatically not informed the British public how the pro-western regime which was put in power with the Orange Revolution, was created by the US State Department under Obama, and run by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland. Far from being a grassroots movement, the revolution was orchestrated by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been handling the US state’s foreign coups since they were taken away from the CIA, and one of George Soros’ pro-democracy outfits.
Putin is also presented as the villainous aggressor in the current war in the Ukraine, and some have compared his annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine to the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. But Crimea had been a part of Russia before 1951, when Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, gave it to that state. And Putin is not looking to take over the country either. The population of Russia is 144 million. Ukraine’s is a little over a third of that, at 52 million. If Putin really had wanted to annex it, he would have done so by now. And under international law, as I understand it, nations are allowed to intervene in foreign countries militarily to defend members of their ethnic group that are being persecuted. That was the pretext for the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, and it’s also the reason why Putin’s invaded eastern Ukraine. But it’s legal under international law. And I don’t doubt for a single minute that Russians, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, were being persecuted by the new, pro-Western government.
In his documentary, Dimbleby met a very angry, patriotic Russian, who told him that the British had tried to invade Russia three times in the past three centuries. Once in the 19th century during the Crimean War; then in 1922 during the Russian Civil War. And now we were preparing to do the same. He angrily told us to ‘get out!’. Dimbleby looked shocked, and said to him that he couldn’t really believe we were ready to invade.
This was another continuation of the Soviet paranoia and hostility towards the West dating from the Communist period and before. Russia has always felt itself encircled by its enemies since the tsars. But the man has a point. We did invade Russia in 1922 in an effort to overthrow the Communist regime. Pat Mills has talked about this in his presentation on comics he gave to the SWP a few years ago. He tried to get a story about it in Charlie’s War, the anti-war strip he wrote for Battle. This is another piece of history that we aren’t told about.
And when Gorbachev made the treaty with Clinton pledging the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism, Clinton in turn agreed that these state would not become members of NATO. He broke his promise. They now all are, and NATO’s borders now extend to Russia. At the same time, western generals and NATO leaders have been predicting a war between Russia and NATO. One even wrote a book about it, 2017: War with Russia. Thankfully, 2017 has been and gone and there has, so far, been no war. But with this in view, I can’t say I blame any Russian, who is afraid that the West might invade at any moment, because it does look to me like a possibility.
And there are other matters that the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream news aren’t telling us about. They’re still repeating the lie that the invasion of Iraq was done for humanitarian reasons, whereas the reality was that western corporations and the neocons wanted to get their hands on Iraqi state industries and privatise the economy. And the American and Saudi oil industry wanted to get their mitts on the country’s oil reserves.
The civil war in Syria is also presented in simplistic terms: Assad as evil tyrant, who must be overthrown, and Putin as his bloodthirsty foreign ally. Assad is a tyrant, and one of the causes of the civil war was his oppression of the Sunni majority. But we are constantly being told that the rebels are ‘moderates’, while the fact is that they still have links to Islamists like the al-Nusra Front, the former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Nor have I seen the Beeb tell anyone how the Syrian rebels have also staged false flag chemical weapons attacks against civilians in order to draw the west into the war.
And objective reporting on Israel is hindered by the pro-Israel lobby. Any news item or documentary, which shows Israel’s horrific crimes against Palestinian civilians is immediately greeted with accusations of anti-Semitism from the Israeli state and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I’ll be fair to the Beeb. Some of their presenters have tried to give an objective reporting of events, like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. But they’ve been accused of anti-Semitism, as was Dimblebore himself when he tried to defend them. In this instance, the bias isn’t just the fault of the Beeb. But it is there, and newsroom staff have said that they were under pressure from senior management to present a pro-Israel slant.
Domestically, the Beeb is very biased. I’ve discussed before how Nick Robinson in his report on a speech by Alex Salmond about Scots devolution carefully edited the SNP’s answer, so it falsely appeared that he had been evasive. In fact, Salmond had given a full, straight answer. Salmond’s reply was whittled down further as the day went on, until finally Robinson claimed on the evening news that he hadn’t answered the question.
And numerous left-wing bloggers and commenters, including myself, have complained about the horrendous bias against the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in the Beeb’s reporting. Dimblebore himself has shown he has a very right-wing bias on Question Time, allowing right-wing guests and audience members to speak, while silencing those on the left. Not that he’s alone here. Andrew Marr has done exactly the same on his programme on Sundays.
Dimblebore is, quite simply, another right-wing propagandist, with the Beeb backing current western imperialism. His smirk at the RT journalist’s denials of doing the same is just gross hypocrisy.
Oh dear, the various crimes and misdeeds of prominent members of the Israel lobby are starting to come to home to roost. Mike yesterday put up a series of article discussing the various shady figures in the Jewish Labour movement, their criminal activities, and the connections of the organisation’s leading members to the Israeli embassy at the time when Shai Masot, an official at that embassy, was taking it upon himself to decide what Conservative politicians should be in our cabinet.
First of all, Jonathan ‘No Morals’ Newmark, as I have decided to dub him, the former chair of the JLM, is now being investigated by the fuzz at the request of the organisation he once headed. No Morals has been credibly accused of stealing funds from Jewish charities when he was one of the head honchos of the Jewish Leadership Council. They released him, but decided not to start a police investigation in order to avoid a scandal. No Morals denied this, of course, and claims that he resigned instead due to health reasons. Well, we shall see.
The JLM is the morally corrupt organisation, which the Labour party wanted Mike to go to for a ‘training day’. They’re the outfit that smeared Jackie Walker as an anti-Semite for questioning the exclusive concentration on the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War at their workshop on Holocaust Remembrance Day. She wanted other groups, who had also suffered genocide, like Blacks, to be included. It was meant to be a ‘safe space’ where anyone could speak freely without repercussions, but they taped her comments and then released them. She also committed the unforgivable sin in their eyes of rejecting their tortured attempts to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel. As Israel is a racist apartheid state, she was right to do so. The anti-Semites themselves defined anti-Semitism, a word coined by their leader and founder, Wilhelm Marr, as hatred of Jews based on their biology and race. But this is forgotten by the Israel lobby, who are more concerned with defending Israel than really battling genuine anti-Semitism. Mike refused to attend their wretched training day, because he believes that this would be an admission of guilt on his part. And he’s absolutely right.
Then Mike posted up this 2016 article from the Electronic Intifada, pointing out that the JLM’s new director, Ella Rose, was an official at the Israeli Embassy during Shai Masot’s interference with our politics at the highest level. She did not declare this connection on her CV, stating only that she was head of the Union of Jewish Students. No Morals Newmark has declared her appointment a good career move, which seems to Mike to be highly suspicious.
And he’s also put up a piece showing that Labour Against Anti-Semitism have also been libelling Jennie Formby, the new left-wing candidate for the post of General Secretary of the Labour Party. They claim that in 2016 she was forced to leave her post as Political Director of Unite the Union, because she questioned the impartiality of Baroness Royall to head an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitism amongst Labour students at Oxford University. This is supposedly because Baroness Royall had made several trips to Israel. Mike makes clear that this is based on the tortured definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the Zionist organisations, which states
“it is antisemitic to accuse ‘Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’.”
This isn’t actually part of the definition, but just a guide to deciding what is or isn’t anti-Semitic.
There’s only problem with the LAA’s accusation against Ms. Formby. T’ain’t true. The union has issued a statement refuting the LAA’s accusation, pointing out that her departure had nothing to do with such allegations, and that she was a valued and respected part of their team. They state that rather than opposing Royall’s appointment, she actually supported her and wanted her investigation to be properly resourced. And also, nobody actually knows if Royall herself is anti-Semitic or not. And if she isn’t, this alone blows their accusation away. You cannot be anti-Semitic against someone who isn’t Jewish.
Mike’s article ends with this statement
LAAS is fronted by Euan Philipps, chair of Tonbridge and Malling Constituency Labour Party. He wrote a libellous blog article about This Writer on the Huffington Post website, so it is clear that he enjoys a questionable relationship with factual accuracy. The HuffPost‘s lawyers reckon his comments were “honest opinion” but that has to be based on accurate facts, so they are both in a highly actionable situation.
And a promise that he’ll let his readers know how this strand will develop.
Mike states that he is actually fully in agreement with the IHRC’s guideline that it is anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to the Israel, or the interest of Jews worldwide, than to the nations of their birth. As a generally principle, so do I. But I make an exception to certain members of the Israel lobby, who clearly do make it clear that their priorities are elsewhere.
Like Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who is one of the most vocal supporters of Israel in America and a lavish political donor. Adelson states very clearly that he is ‘Israel first’. So by his own admission, he is more loyal to Israel than to the America in which he lives and made his money.
As for Ella Rose and her connections to the Israeli embassy while Shai Masot was trying to manipulate the Tories’ selection of cabinet ministers, if she was involved in this, then she too has dangerously divided loyalties. People who genuinely love their country don’t conspire with officials of a foreign power to manipulate their nation’s politics. They may try to alter the policies or appointment of personnel through negotiation at official levels, which is natural. But they do not do so at private, secret meetings, carefully hidden from scrutiny.
I am not saying that the Israelis are unique in this. America has plenty of form in manipulating the politics of other nations, either trying to stop the election of parties they don’t like, or then overthrowing them when they do get in. And it’s a long list of countries, about 54 or more. The latest was the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, overseen by Obama’s woman Victoria Nuland, and Hillary ‘Queen of Chaos’ Clinton. And Killary herself has gone on recorded saying that she regretted not interfering in the Palestinian elections.
But just because the Americans are doing it, doesn’t make it any better for the Israeli lobby over here to do so too.
There are series questions to be asked of all the pro-Israel organisations in the Labour party because of their smears, libels and political manipulation. And this isn’t anti-Semitic, because amongst the decent people they’ve vilified are decent, self-respecting, anti-racist Jews, many of whom have suffered anti-Semitic abuse and violence.
It’s time to end the charade that the JLM and similar bodies care anything about anti-Semitism. They’re just right-wingers terrified of the Left, and afraid that Israel’s Fascist character is being increasingly exposed.
This is another piece of brilliant journalism, of the type that the lamestream media are trying to suppress as ‘fake news’ from the internet. This piece comes from The Real News Network, in which host Aaron Mate talks to Max Blumenthal about the Trump administration arming real neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, and Poland’s criminalisation of references to ‘Polish death camps’.
The Azov Battalion are a paramilitary militia, which grew out of the Patriot party. Their ideological leader is a street demagogue called Andrei Baletsky, and they are now part of his Social National Party. Whose names tells you exactly what they are – Nazis. Just like Hitler’s squad of murderous goons called themselves ‘National Socialist’. The group stands for ‘upholding the honour of the White race’. They at against race-mixing, and see themselves as part of the vanguard in the Ukraine in what they term a ‘reconquista’ – a reconquest of the White countries of Europe.
These thugs emerged in the Donbass in the east of Ukraine, fighting the pro-Russian separatists after the Maidan Revolution. The Russian and Russian-speaking separatists wished to secede as their language would not be recognised by the new, nationalist government. They have very strong support from the interior minister, and have been incorporated into the Ukrainian state national security apparatus. More recently, an special corps of the Battalion have been installed in the capital, Kiev, ‘to keep order’. They have begun to throw their weight around, and have disrupted a council meeting. Blumenthal states that this amounts to a coup against the current Ukrainian premier, Poroshenko. For some reason that Blumenthal doesn’t understand, Poroshenko’s position is weak, and he’s been attacked by the pro-Western politicos and activists.
The promotion of the Azov Battalion as a part of Ukrainian state security has alarmed the Jewish community in Ukraine, as well as severely normal Ukrainians. The campaigner against anti-Semitism, Ephraim Zurov, has commented that Ukraine seems to have a greater number of statues to Jew killers than any other country. This includes the nationalist hero, Stepan Bandera, who was a Nazi collaborator in the Holocaust. Blumenthal describes with disgust the way Stepan Bandera boulevard leads to Baba Yar. This was the site of one of the most infamous massacres of Jews in the former Soviet Union during the Nazi occupation. It’s the subject of a poem of the same name by one of the great Soviet writers commemorating the atrocity and its victims.
And, like the Polish senate, the Ukrainian government has also passed legislation banning any ascription of the Nazi atrocities and persecution of the Jews to Ukrainians. As Blumenthal states, this is to wipe out of history the huge amount of collaboration with the Nazis in Poland and Ukraine.
Blumenthal notes the various liberal commenters, who assured us all that the Maidan revolution wasn’t full of Fascists. It was, and Blumenthal describes it as a right-wing coup.
And America is funding them. Trump has sent a shipment of grenade launchers to the Battalion, as well as US army personnel to train their troops. These troopers have been photographed wearing the Battalion’s uniform, which includes the Nazi Wolfsangel, a badge, whose lettering is very much in the style of the SS badge. There have been attempts by Congress to stop the supply of arms and military aid. Legislation specifically prohibiting the supply of arms to the Azov Battalion has been tabled, only to be pushed back for debate later. And while this occurred, Trump sent a consignment of rocket launchers from the arms manufacturer Raytheon over there. Blumenthal also wonders what else the US is funding. The Battalion’s corps, sent in to keep the people of Kiev down, has 600 members. Supplying them with coats alone costs $1.6 million. So he wonders just who’s paying for that.
And the Azov Battalion aren’t just a threat to Ukraine, but to other European countries. Blumenthal makes the point that they’re like ISIS and al-Qaeda in that they attract foreign fighters. One of these was a French Nazi, Montot, who took back with him a vast cache of arms which he was going to use to attack a soccer match and bomb synagogues.
As for the Polish government outlawing any connection between their country and the Holocaust, Blumenthal and Mate state that this has drawn criticism from a number of countries, including Israel. But last year Israel also signed a memorandum of understanding with Poland, which recognised the country’s need to distance itself from the crimes of the Nazi era. And Poland has been a very strong supporter of Israel. They’ve signed a deal to purchase $14 million of arms from an Israeli arms manufacturer. Blumenthal here makes the point that Israel has a long history of collaborating with anti-Semites, including the Nazis during the Holocaust. He also states that the Nazis right in Poland and the Israeli government have the same ideology. Just as the Poles are trying to cover up their complicity in the Holocaust, so the Israeli are trying to cover up their perpetration of the Nakba, the Palestinian term for their ethnic cleansing.
This is very definitely not something you’re going to read in the Times or any of the other mainstream papers. Remember when we were all told that the ‘Orange Revolution’ was pro-democracy, and was a spontaneous uprising by Ukrainians against their pro-Russia president? It was a pack of lies. The Revolution was organised by the CIA, the US state department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been the NGO to which the US has outsourced is coups and changes of regime since the CIA got a bad reputation for it all during the 1970s. The whole affair was overseen by Obama and his secretary of state, Victoria Nuland.
But the media keeps repeating the lie, including Ian Hislop’s mighty organ, Private Eye. They’ve published several pieces in their ‘Letter from’ column from Ukraine, presenting the Revolution very much as the Ukrainian people fighting off evil pro-Putin oligarchs. The opposite is true. The Maidan Revolution was set up and controlled by pro-Western oligarchs and politicos, as a coup against their elected president.
The media’s unqualified acceptance of the lie that the new government isn’t at all Fascist is now so gross, that the long term critic of America foreign policy, William Blum, in the latest issue of his Anti-Empire Report has commented that the Nazis could walk down Kiev’s main street in full Nazi uniform, and the media would still tell us all there were no Nazis there.
It also shows how craven and mendacious the mainstream press and media is over here. While the Sunset Times, the Heil, Scum and Jewish Chronicle have libelled Mike and other decent anti-racists as anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, manufacturing lies and smears against them because they had the audacity to talk about Israel’s own crimes against humanity and collaboration with the Nazis, they are silent on the real Fascist and Nazis seizing power in eastern Europe.
Or perhaps that’s the point. The Tories, Blairites and Israel lobby are terrified of Corbyn and his supporters, not because they’re anti-Semitic – they aren’t, and they know it – but because they represent genuine socialism and a commitment to real social justice for the Palestinians. In fact, Steve Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in the page of the Guardian to deny that the Polish government was full of anti-Semites, because the current president is ‘a good friend to Israel’. Thus showing once again that the pro-Israel lobby will collaborate with real anti-Semites when it serves them. And so they have to be destroyed. But it also serves as a distraction from the way America is supplying and funding real Nazis in eastern Europe.
On Wednesday, BBC 2 launched a new documentary series looking at the British army as it’s stationed around the world, Army: Behind the New Frontlines. In next weeks edition, subtitled ‘The New Cold War’, to be shown at 9.00 O’clock pm on 25th October 2017, the programme will look at British forces stationed in Estonia and Ukraine. The blurb for the programme on page 94 of the Radio Times runs
Tensions between the West and Russia have been heightened since 2014, when Russia seized the Ukrainian region of Crimea and also began secretly arming pro-Russian separatists fighting in Eastern Ukraine. But as Ukraine is not part of Nato, no western troops have been deployed to fight. Instead, British soldiers from the Mercia regiment are sent to train Ukrainian soldiers to defend their country, helping Nato and Britain avoid direct involvement while offering a cost-effective way to learn how the Russians fight. Meanwhile, the Baltic states, which are members of Nato, fear that an attack from Russia is a very real threat, so soldiers from 5 Rifles battalion travel to Estonia as part of a major operation to deter invasion.
There’s a further couple of paragraphs about the programme on page 93 by Jack Seale. These state
Just as the British Army is undergoing an existential crisis due to a slowdown in active operations, so this documentary about soldiers not firing their guns struggles to find an impetus. Not that you’d wish for war as a remedy, of course.
The liveliest threat is in eastern Europe, where Russia has encroached in Ukraine and massed troops on Estonia’s border. This week we follow Brits quietly training Ukrainians and openly allying with Estonians, since the latter is in Nato. The memorable stories are of the awfully young local fighters who hope the wolf next door won’t come in, but say they’re ready to die if it does.
I don’t know, but reading those pieces about the programme makes me strongly suspect that it won’t tell you the whole truth about what’s really going on in those countries, and why we’re really there. And we’ve certainly been fed a pack of lies about the Ukraine already.
If you believe the lamestream media, the present government in Ukraine is an entirely democratic regime, which gained power through a power revolution in Kyiv’s Maidan Square. Tired of the misrule of their government present and his pro-Russian policies, the people of Ukraine spontaneously rose up and toppled him. The ousted president then ran off to Putin for aid to get back into power. Putin then responded by sending Russian troops into the east of the country, where there is a sizable ethnic Russian, and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population.
Comparisons have been made with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia shortly before World War II. These are completely wrong.
Firstly, Putin is corrupt, is a dictatorial thug, and his regime is acute nationalistic, xenophobic and militaristic. This week his government proposed legislation that would penalise parents and educators taking part in political protests if they took their children with them. And as Simon Reeve showed in his programme about European Russia last week, when he covered the case of a woman campaigning to keep her Khrushchev era flat in Moscow against a Putin-backed development scheme, Russian law means that protests of more than one person have to be registered first with the police. And if there’s only you there, you will be still be carted off to chokey by the stern minions of Putin’s police force. Putin’s party has a youth wing, Nashi, a Russian word which means ‘Ours’, which is ultra-patriotic, picketing and threatening those it regards as insufficiently patriotic. It also serves to encourage young men to do their National Service. This is despite the fact that the Russian army is even more brutal, and bullying more rife and horrific under the ‘rule of the grandfathers’ than in the British army. New squaddies, and especially Pentecostal Christians, are beaten up, sometimes to the point where they need hospital treatment. Comparisons have been made with the Nazis’ Hitler Youth.
As for Putin himself, recent documentaries have shown how he’s supposedly funnel hundreds of thousands of roubles to his own personal account. And his former chums in the judo clubs in which he trained have similarly done very well indeed. They’ve all risen to become heads of companies. A friend of mine told me once that the pop band, Clean Bandit, took their name from a Russian idiom which means a criminal, who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than he is. And it’s very commonly applied to Putin. So you could fairly describe him as an ‘arkhiplut’, a Russian word meaning arch-criminal or scoundrel.
But the impression I have is that Putin is justified in his intervention in Ukraine. The Crimea historically belonged to Russia. It was only given to Ukraine in the 1950s by Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian. As for the Maidan Revolution, it was categorically not a popular revolution. It was a very cleverly crafted piece of American-sponsored regime change by the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as George Soros’ pro-democracy foundation. It was organised by Ukrainian oligarchs with the aid of the US state department, Victoria Nuland and Hillary Clinton.
The composition of the new, entirely democratic government, honest guv’, is deeply suspect. I’ve blogged before about how it contains thugs from the Fascist Pravy Sektor. These are real, unreconstructed Nazis. They dress in the uniform and regalia of the auxiliary SS regiments that invaded the country during Operation Barbarossa in World War II. They are anti-democratic, anti-Semitic and extremely violent. During the Maidan Revolution, they chased a group of trade unionists into one of the buildings, caught and savagely beat them. And just as Putin’s regime has cracked down on journalists, who have published material against the Russian president, so the Ukrainian regime is persecuting and intimidating opposition journalists. I’ve got a feeling several have been murdered, just like they have in Putin’s Russia. The various characters in Trump’s government backing and urging support for the Ukrainian regime all have connections to Ukrainian Fascists, who were recruited after the War to provide anti-Communist propaganda to their homeland. And no surprise there, as Reagan gave expatriate Ukrainian nationalists considerable support under their leader, Vladimir Stetso, during the new Cold War of the 1980s.
I’ve seen Russian programmes on YouTube, which claimed very strongly that Russia intervened and invaded because the Russian and Russian-speaking minority in the east of the country was being persecuted and was being prevented from voting. I know this is all dubious considering that Putin does make sure that the media broadcasts his propaganda, but I think that this is very likely to be true. A government that has seized power through secret deals with the Americans and which contains outright Nazis, is not going to have any qualms about persecuting an ethnic group some of them probably see as their invaders and oppressors.
I know much less about Estonia, but it seems to me that we’re probably not being told the whole truth about what’s going on there. The Baltic states were, at various times, part of the Swedish empires and Germany, before they were conquered by Russia. They had a brief, 20 year period of autonomy from the end of the First World War to the 1930s, when Stalin invaded to reclaim them under the deal made with Nazi Germany in Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact. One third of the population are ethnic Russians. During the Communist era, the Baltic States were determined to gain their independence. This may have been partly because they were the some of the most industrially developed parts of the Soviet Union, and were afraid that Russian immigration would swamp them, so that they would become minorities in their own countries.
Since they gained their independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians have claimed that the Russian minority in those states have been persecuted. I don’t know how much truth there is to this, but even under Communism Russians performed the lowest-paid, dirtiest and most menial jobs. And there are real Nazis goose-stepping about there as well. Colin Thubron in his 1980s travel book, Among the Russians, describes a nationalist demonstration in Lithuania, whose participants screamed ‘Lithuania for the Lithuanians! Russians to Russia! Poles to Poland! And Jews to the cemetery!’ Veterans from the SS auxiliary regiments that fought – and butchered the Jewish population – in the Baltic States have been allowed to take part in the independence day parades in Lithuania or Latvia. Or perhaps both. Possibly the governments of these countries also include their own, very real Nazis, like that of Ukraine. I don’t know.
As for the British army facing an existential threat because of a lack of operations abroad, I thought it faced an existential threat because of serious underfunding by the previous governments, and a crisis in recruitment with young men and women deciding that they want to do something better with their lives than be killed or mutilated just to let the big oil companies plunder nations like Iraq in the Middle East.
When Communism fell, we signed a deal with Russia promising that Nato would not expand up to their borders. The Russians have been paranoid about Western encirclement since before the Communist seizure of power. This was broken when the Baltic States joined NATO. I supported that move, as I thought that there was a real possibility that the Russians would invade, based on Stalin’s invasion shortly before the Nazis invaded Russia.
Now I think that perhaps the better option would have been to let the Baltic states remain neutral. Both NATO and Russia could have been signatories guaranteeing the countries’ neutrality. They could have been given the ‘Finnish option’. Meaning that, like Finland, they were neutral and enjoyed certain privileges, like relatively unrestricted access to Russia. It could have preserved peace and their independence, while not provoking the Russians.
Now we have had an increase in tensions on these countries’ borders. Tensions which Killary seems determined to stoke, not least by claiming that Trump is somehow being blackmailed by Putin. She, the Democrats and the Republicans in America are creating a new Cold War, part of the purpose of which is, in Killary’s case, to distract everyone from her own corruption and very dubious dealings with Russian capital.
We are not being told the truth about the nature of the regimes in Ukraine or the Baltic. And it seems to me very much that our brave women and men are not there to defend their freedom, but simply as part of America’s campaign of global imperialism for its multinational corporations.
I’ve put up a couple of pieces a few days commenting on Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and how in her book, What Happened?, which she’s been touting at this and other events across the world, she blames everyone except herself for her failure to gain the presidency.
In this short piece, RT asks people coming out of another book signing, this time at the South Bank Centre, ‘what went wrong?’ A few people recognise that she stood on the wrong platforms and campaigned on the wrong issues. One individual remarks that you can’t win elections simply by promising more of what your predecessor did. One man also comments that it was ‘the Rust Belt, populism, you know, Donald Trump’.
Most of the women, and one or two men, reply that Hillary’s gender was against her. They state that America wasn’t ready yet for a female president, and possibly not ready for one after a Black man. A lady in a hijab states that American politics is dominated by White men, and so Hillary suffered what has always happened to women everywhere, and was ‘Trumped’ by a poorly qualified man. And a couple blamed it on the Russians.
One of the women questioned is the head of Democrats Abroad, or at least the British chapter of it. She blames Killary’s defeat partly on the voter suppression and gerrymandering that went on. And a couple of people simply blame Russians. Nevertheless, she still has her supporters, with one Black young lady still saying that ‘we have faith’ in her.
Now it is true that Hillary’s gender was against her. America is a very masculine society, and politics over there, as they are in most White majority countries, is dominated by White men. And Killary was the victim of some very bitter, anti-feminist rhetoric when she and her husband became the first family back in the 1990s. One Republican Pastor angrily declared that she was the ‘type of woman, who turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft, leaves her husband, and kills her children.’ And to a certain extent, some of those slurs have continued. There have been rumours throughout her political career that Shrillary’s a lesbian, and during Obama’s presidency these rumours became very specific. She was supposed to be having a lesbian affair with one of her advisors, Huma Abeddin. A male official, who had been sacked, also claimed that she and Nancy Pelosi were both man-hating lesbians, who delighted in humiliating men.
As for witchcraft, Alex Jones on his Infowars channel was coming out with all manner of complete and utter nonsense. He claimed that she, and Obama, were both demonically possessed. Or it could be that she was an evil alien, or under alien control. An invitation by a New York performance artist provided Jones with further ammunition to claim that she was involved in black magic. The performance artist specialised in ‘spirit cooking’ as part of her performances, which involved human blood. Jones pointed out that it was also what the black magician Aleister Crowley called his own vile magical cuisine, which used menstrual blood and semen. Hillary was therefore accused of performing various black magic rituals with this woman. In fact, she and Bill had been friends with her since the ’60s or ’70s, and as far as I could see, the ‘spirit cooking’ she talked about really was just weird performance art. It might have been inspired by Crowley, but as far as I could see it had very little to do with genuine occultism.
However, there are people in America more than willing to vote for a female candidate. I was told by one of the American postgraduate students on an archaeology course I did several years ago at Bristol Uni, that she was so sick and tired of every candidate being another White male that she would vote for anybody, who wasn’t. And the political landscape had shifted so much that she wasn’t the only female candidate for the presidency. The Greens put forward Jill Stein. As the candidate of a third party, Stein very much was an outsider, but she’s still blamed by Killary as part of the reasons for her defeat. In fact, as a feminist candidate, Stein was the stronger party. She was a doctor, who supported single-payer healthcare as well as protecting the environment, because her experience taught her that women particularly needed it.
Killary, by contrast, was very much a political insider. She was a professional businesswoman, who sat on the boards of multiple corporations. She was also very, very much in Wall Street’s pockets, having been paid hundreds of thousands for speeches she delivered at their various dinners. One of the companies she headed was Walmart, which does not recognise trade unions, and treats its staff extremely badly. Despite making a speech to trade unionists that she would defend their rights and those of their members, she had actually made no attempt to reverse Walmart’s union-bashing policy. And at a time more and more Americans were coming round to support single-payer healthcare, like the Germans have had for nearly a hundred and forty years, she blocked this and called it ‘utopian’.
People also remembered how racist Killary was. In her youth back in the ’60s she’d been a Goldwater Girl, supporting the pro-segregationist Republican Barry Goldwater. She and Bill were responsible for the 1990s legislation that led to a far greater proportion of young Black men being convicted of and serving longer prison sentences for drug offences that Whites. There was also a racist edge to her previous electoral campaign against Barack Obama. She promoted the whole Republican ‘birther’ nonsense, in which it was claimed that Obama, because of his Kenyan ancestry, was not born in the USA and was therefore not eligible to become president.
She also treated the traditional blue-collar Democrat supporters with a very obvious contempt. She stated that she wanted to appeal more to Republican voters, and was true to her word. She ignored, or only did the most cursory campaigning in traditionally Democrat strongholds, expecting the folks there to vote for her. Just as Blair and ‘Progress’ treated the British working class over here.
As for foreign policy, she boasted that she was proud to have Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s old adviser, as her friend and that she regularly spent her hols with him. This is the man, whose policy of backing Fascist dictators across the world, and support for carpet-bombing in Vietnam, has caused him to be denounced as the world’s biggest unindicted war criminal. He is really has shed enough blood, as Shakespeare put in MacBeth, to make ‘all the seas incarnadine, turning the green red’.
This was at a time when the American public was becoming increasingly war weary. People were becoming sick of waving their sons and daughters off proudly, only to see them coming back in coffins, or with shattered bodies and minds from a series of wars that seem to only profit multinationals.
In short, Killary was the consummate corporate and political insider. But she still claimed that she was an outsider, because of her gender. Well, her biological gender was immaterial. She was as hawkish as any of the men in Bush’s and Obama’s cabinets, and was responsible for much legislation that actively harmed women. Her claims of feminism rang very hollow to ordinary American women concerned about bread and butter issues. Like, you know, actually finding paying jobs, being able to afford to eat and have somewhere to live, pay the utility bills and being able to afford to see the doctor. Oh yes, and being able to see their daughters and sons go through college without being burdened by staggering amounts of debt.
As for the Russians being to blame, this is quite frankly a massive lie. Yes, Putin wants to influence what’s going on in the West. No, he wasn’t responsible for Killary’s defeat. Killary was damaged by the WikiLeaks revelations, which showed how she and the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fiddled the internal election process to steal the nomination from Bernie, as well as the incriminating documents which showed just how far she was in Wall Street’s and corporate America’s pockets. This had nothing to do with Russian hacking. They were handed over by disgruntled insiders within the Democrat Party. But Killary couldn’t admit this, and so has started a bogus campaign to blame Russian.
And there’s more than a little bit of hypocrisy about this too. Killary’s got no problem with fiddling Russian politics. America poured millions into Boris Yeltsyn’s campaign to become president of the USSR during the 1990s, and so complete the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of its state concerns. All of which were sold at knock-down prices. The results were massive profits for the oligarchs, who bought them, the complete melt-down of the Russian economy, a massive surge in mafia violence as organised crime tried to take over industry. Millions of Russians were thrown out of work in a nation that had never developed unemployment benefit, ’cause the state’s policy was to have everyone in work. Left without benefits and with medicine increasingly privatised, there was a massive increase in sickness and suicide.
And she’s continued meddling in Russian/east European affairs. The Orange Revolution in Kiev against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president was carefully stage managed by Shrillary and the state department, down to the orange clothing being given out to protesters. It was an astro-turf coup, which carefully resembled a popular uprising but which was scripted by the American state and western capital. As for the composition of the new Ukrainian government installed with Killary’s help, these include Nazi thugs from the Pravy Sektor, real Fascists, who wear SS uniforms and scream Nazi slogans, and who have a bitter hatred of Jews, trade unionists and real democrats.
She was also caught on tape moaning about how she regretted not fiddling the elections for the Palestinian authority to get the right party in power.
Hillary’s a very intelligent woman. I think some of the misogynist abuse directed against her is because she’s probably the brighter than her husband, Bill. But intelligence does not equate with morality. Trump’s a grotesque monster, but he made some of the right noises. At one point he said he was in charge of single-payer healthcare, and that he didn’t want to start more wars. He’s since gone back on these promises. But despite the fact that Trump’s stupid with a disgusting attitude to women, these are issues that did appeal to many ordinary people. 45,000 people a year die in America because they can’t afford medical treatment. Bush’s wars abroad have pushed taxes up for the state to be able to pay for it, and the burden has fallen again on the ordinary man and woman in the street, just as it has over here. And if you’re a parent wondering if your child will come back for his or her tour of duty in one piece and compus mentus, Trump’s promise not to put boots on the ground in Syria is welcome indeed.
For some people, these are life and death issues, and the grotesque personality of the person proposing them won’t matter. And especially not after Clinton’s own dubious affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the rumours of indiscretions, if not something far worse, with other female staffers.
And let’s put some of the blame for Killary’s defeat on a factor, that I haven’t heard she herself has cited: the American Constitution. As one of the speakers in the above video shows, Killary actually got more votes than Trump. But she lost because of the electoral college, an antiquated and byzantine electoral organ that was set up to give the slave-holding states a disproportionate amount of power in the 19th century. Slaves couldn’t vote, but were defined as being partial humans for the purposes of voting, and the electoral college set up so that the southern states could still successfully field presidential candidates against those from the northern states, which had a far greater proportion of free and White men, and so a greater voting population.
This isn’t the only problem with the American Constitution. It was drafted at the end of the 18th century by patrician White men, who were terrified that the Revolution would see power slip from the hands of the monied, landed elite to ordinary working Americans – the ‘leather apron men’, as they referred to the industrial craftsmen, who flocked to town hall meetings and provided the basis for American popular democracy. And so checks have been placed within the Constitution that make the kind of radical change now desperately needed impossible. The result is that millions of ordinary Americans feel disenfranchised, and so stayed away from the election.
Hillary has no-one to blame but herself. She was a horrible Conservative, serving a stifling Conservative political and social order, who was beaten by another horrible Conservative, but one who actually understood how to appeal to the public.
But it ain’t just in Britain that Killary’s touring, telling little lies. She also appeared on Australia’s ABC television station to tell porkies Down Under. Michelle, one of the great commenters to this blog, sent me this link to an article in Medium by Caitlin Johnstone exposing five of the lies she told in her interview with Sarah Ferguson.
This is very interesting. In this clip, the left-wing American comedian and his co-hosts discuss Barak Obama’s voted against a UN resolution last year condemning Nazism. The resolution was for ‘combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and other practices contributing to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’. America was one of only three countries which voted against it. One of the others was Palau Palau, which I think is a Polynesian island nation.
The reason Obama gave for voting against it was that while his administration condemned all forms of racism and ethnic and religious hatred, they objected to it because it contravened free speech. As Dore points out, the right to free speech does not cover crimes such as libel and incitement to criminal activity. And these crimes surely cover being a Nazi, who wishes to exterminate others simply because of their race.
Reporting the vote, the newspaper USA News stated it was because America was afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Dore states he doesn’t know how that would work, but suspects it has something to do with the Nazis in the Ukraine. He also concludes the piece stating that this is an issue to watch, as there is something else going on there behind the scenes.
He also makes the point right at the beginning of the clip that this incident is very interesting, considering that everyone is now criticizing Donald ‘Donnie Tiny Hands’ Trump for his highly equivocal comments about the White supremacists, racists and Nazis in Charlottesville. Trump says that there are ‘fine people on both sides’. There obviously aren’t, as being a hate-twisted Nazi clearly definitely makes you not a ‘fine person’.
Dore has already made the point many times in his videos that for all his fine talk about egalitarianism, racial and religious tolerance, fairness and so on, Obama was as ruthlessly corporatist as his predecessors, giving generous handouts to the banks and other corporations, and privatizing vital public services like America’s school system. This was often against the wishes of parents, the local community, the teaching staff and local clergy. Afro-Americans were particularly concerned about the changes and the damage this would do to their children’s education.
Dore has also made the point that Obama took the two wars Bush had started, and expanded them into seven.
One reason Obama got away with this was probably because of his colour. The election of an Afro-American to the White House was hailed as showing that racism was dead in America, and that the country was now ‘post-racial’. The Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize even before he had actually done anything.
And yet under Obama, America became even more bitterly racist, and racially divided. Some of this was due to an extreme right-wing reaction, which saw Republicans and talk radio hosts claiming that the new president was filled with a burning hatred for Whites, and was a crypto-Communist-Nazi-Maoist-Muslim infiltrator, who was going to outlaw guns, put everyone in concentration camps, and kill more people than Mao or Stalin.
It’s possible that one reason why Obama did not vote for the UN’s condemnation of Nazism and its glorification is because Nazis and White supremacists in America have used the Second Amendment guaranteeing free speech to avoid prosecution for their own vile sputterings. Dore and The Young Turks have made the point that Obama delayed giving any money to the anti-racist, anti-Nazi group, Life After Hate, until the very end of his presidency because he was afraid of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s a long-time feature of America Conservative radio, who’s been fouling the airwaves with his vitriolic hatred of the organized working class, Socialism, ethnic minorities, feminism, climate change and liberals since the days of Ronald Reagan. It’s possible that Obama was afraid of him and those like him on this issue too. Some members of the Right, which automatically hate and despise the UN as anti-American anyway, would automatically seize on any support Obama gave to the resolution as showing his determination to exterminate the White race. Even though Israel, which America wholeheartedly supports, had also voted for it.
But the real reason is undoubtedly what USA News said it was: the Americans were afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Which also include Ukraine. The Maidan Revolution, which overthrew the previous, pro-Russian Ukrainian president and installed the present nationalist, pro-Western regime, was a carefully staged coup, partly orchestrated by Victoria Nuland, the American ambassador, and the American embassy, as well as pro-democracy organisations like those of George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a quasi-governmental organization, which William Blum has shown in his books has taken over the CIA’s role of overthrowing awkward foreign government the Americans don’t like.
And the coalition now governing Ukraine includes real, unreconstructed Nazis, who are every bit as violent and vicious as those in the West. They proudly wear the uniforms of the auxiliary SS regiments in which many Ukrainian nationalists served during the Second World War. And the beat and persecute trade unionists, ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and real democrats.
Russian forces are in the Ukraine, but they are there very much to protect ethnic Russians from attack and persecution from the Ukrainian nationalists. It’s why they’ve stayed in the east of the country. If Putin was really set on reconquering Ukraine for a new, Soviet empire, he’d be in Kiev by now, rather than the Donbass.
I’m therefore very sure that this resolution was voted down by Obama, because of the threat it posed to American attempts to interfere with Ukraine, and contain or break Russia as a geopolitical power. And in so doing, Obama also gave a little more help to the Fascists that ran amok in Charlottesville the Friday before last.
Okay, the BBC have started running trailers for the new series of Have I Got News For You that’s due to begin on Friday. The trailer jokes about how the programme won’t be dominated by fake news, before going into a series of clips in which the panellists are dubbed over by a voice with a Russian accent, going on about how wonderful Putin’s Russia is.
Ho ho! We all know how corrupt the Russian media is, ever since the days of the Soviet Union, if not the Tsar. So all good fun and fair comment, eh?
Well, no. I stopped watching the show last year, because I got sick and tired of the way it retailed fake news, cleverly masked as fair comment on the news stories of the week, and wrote a post about it. Jokes like that are dangerous, because they promote a very false image of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, as well as ramping up international tensions, which could all too easily lead to war. Remember, last year a NATO general wrote a whole book about how, by next month, we would be at war with Russia. Considering the stupid actions of Trump and the American military-industrial complex and its poodles in the media, I don’t know if that was a genuine prediction or a prepared script that has been laid down for NATO to follow.
But let’s take the connection between Russia and ‘fake news’. This has been heavily promoted by the Democrats to excuse their defeat in the American presidential elections. They lost, not because they had no policies that would really benefit the poor, not because Hillary Clinton is a corporatist hawk, who has been paid obscene amounts by the Wall Street banks for making sure they can get away with wrecking the economy and impoverishing the country’s working people. Or the way she sneered at implementing single-payer healthcare, and has worked for companies like Wallmart, which stamped on trade unions. No! It was all because the Russians hacked into the Democrats’ computer and handed all the incriminating evidence of their crooked deals with industry and to rig the nominations to keep Bernie Sanders out, and then gave it to WikiLeaks. Except that there’s no evidence of this, and WikiLeaks itself has denied this, saying instead that they were given the material in a Chicago park by a Democratic insider, who was annoyed at the way the party was being run.
And there’s more, much more. Since then the Democrats and their corporate shills, like Rachel Maddow, have been not only banging on about this, but also about how they supposedly hacked into Trump, and have some kind of hold over him, blackmailing him to support their interests. There’s no evidence for that, but nevertheless, that’s what’s being sold the American public. There are two videos from the Jimmy Dore show where he reports on the finding by an American media monitoring organisation that stories about Russian hacking now comprise over 50 per cent of the stories covered by Maddow on her show. Despite the fact that figures from the FBI and CIA have said that it’s all rubbish.
Dore points out how McCarthyite this all is, and how it is dangerously ratcheting up tensions with Putin in a new ‘Red Scare’.
Added to this already volatile situation is the current war in Ukraine. If you believe the media, including Private Eye, Putin doing the same thing as Hitler did to Czechoslovakia. He using the supposed persecution of his people in that country to invade and overthrow its democratically elected government and annex the entire nation.
Except that Putin isn’t. He is in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population, who are genuinely being persecuted by the Ukrainian government. However, Crimea was never historically part of Ukraine, is overwhelmingly Russian, and was only given to Ukraine in 1950 or so. And its people voted, perfectly constitutionally, to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
As for the current Ukrainian government, they are anything but nice, western-style democrats. The Orange Revolution was not a spontaneous revolution at all, but a carefully funded astroturf coup staged by George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s quango in charge of fomenting coups against governments the American state doesn’t like. Which means, in practice, those countries that try to stop American corporations exploiting them and treating their people as slaves.
The Ukrainian government also contains genuine Nazis from the Pravy – ‘Right’ – Sektor. These organisations dress in the costume and use the regalia – the flags, signs and insignia – of the Ukrainian SS auxiliaries during the Second World War. These organisations, and the leaders they revere, where responsible for some of the pogroms and actively aided the Holocaust during the Nazi invasion. And they are still bitterly anti-Semitic today.
But from Reagan onwards, the American government has supported elements of the Ukrainian far right, and its leaders, like Vladimir Stetso, as freedom fighters.
None of this is being reported in Private Eye, or mentioned on the BBC, not even on Have I Got News For You. Indeed, Private Eye, in their ‘Letter from Ukraine’, actively retailed the narrative that democratic Ukraine is under attack from Putin’s Russia. This is all to serve British, and indeed, western, corporate and military interests.
And so Have I Got News For You, and its hosts, are actively feeding us fake news, all the while pretending to be acting as a kind of humorous check, holding politicians accountable through satire and humour. But there are limits to the joking, beyond which they clearly don’t want to go. And the jolly irreverence then becomes actively dangerous, as it adds an entirely spurious verisimilitude to the lies they are telling about Russia, Ukraine and the former eastern bloc.
I had enough of this a couple of years ago, and have stopped watching it. I am not saying it doesn’t do some good, and that the team and panellists don’t genuinely hold some politicos to account. I’m just saying that it’s also peddling fake news, and that, if you watch it, you need to be very careful about what Hislop, Merton and the guest presenter for that week say.
There’s a very interesting article in today’s Counterpunch by Mike Whitney, which suggests that the current demonization of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin in the American media and the build up of troops and military installations on Russia’s borders – in Poland and Romania, for example – is to prevent Russia joining the EU. It begins with a speech by Putin, from February 2012, in which Putin declared that Russia was an inalienable part of greater Europe, its people think of themselves as Europeans, and that is why Russia is moving to create a greater economic space, a ‘union of Europe’, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The carefully orchestrated ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, which saw the pro-Russian president ousted in favour of the current, pro-Western government, which includes unreconstructed Nazis, is part of Washington’s programme to prevent the emergence of this massive superstate.
The article revisits the Mackinder doctrine. This was the thesis, put forward by a geographer in the early 20th century, that the crux for global power is control of the Eurasian landmass. Mackinder believed that the powers that ruled it would become the dominant global power, while those on the Atlantic fringe of the landmass, such as Britain, would be doomed to decline. He notes that Russia is rich in supplies of oil and natural gas, which it can easily supply through the construction of projected pipelines, to Europe.
Whitney states that the Americans are also concerned at the way the Chinese are also increasing their economic connections across Eurasian through the construction of roads and railways allowing the rapid and efficient transhipment of their consumer goods. Hence the construction and reinforcement of American military bases in South Korea and in the Far East. The Americans hope to block China’s economic growth by dominating the sea lanes militarily.
Whitney also argues that the Russians and Chinese are emerging as the new, global economic powers against America because they are actually better at capitalism than the Americans are. They are building new infrastructure – roads, railways and pipelines, to allow them to exploit the markets in central Asia and Europe, while the Americans can only try to compete with them through threatening them with military force. Hence the continuation of the conflict in Syria with as a proxy war against Russia.
Whitney also makes the point that blocking the emergence of a single free trade block in Eurasia is vital for the survival of the American economy. The moment such a free trade zone stopped using the dollar it would knock one of the key financial supports out of the American economy, causing markets to collapse, the dollar to slump and the economy to fall into depression.
This is very interesting, as it shows just how far current international tensions with Putin’s Russia are caused by America’s fears of a resurgent Russia and China, and its own looming economic irrelevance. The use of the dollar as the international currency is absolutely critical in this. One of the reasons why Colonel Gadaffy was overthrown was because the ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ wanted to create an Arab economic bloc like the EU, which would use the dinar rather than the dollar as its international currency. America’s economy is propped up to a very large degree through the use of the dollar as the international currency of the petrochemical industry. Once that goes, the American economy, and its status as the world’s only superpower, goes up. Hence the Americans determination to have him overthrown, even if that meant the collapse of Libya as a functioning state and the replacement of its secular welfare state by a hardline theocratic regime.
There’s a considerable amount wrong with the EU, but it also has enormous economic, legal and political benefits. In the 19th century, British companies played a large part in Russia’s industrialisation. Before the Revolution, one of the main Russian cities was called Yusovska, a name derived from ‘Hughes’, the surname of the British industrialist, who had set up a company there. By voting to leave the EU, we may also have missed the opportunity to benefit from closer economic contacts with Russia and China. Or rather, England has. Scotland voted to remain, and this may well begin the break-up of the United Kingdom. In which case, Scotland may well be in an economically stronger position than England. We English may well have consigned ourselves to increasing irrelevance and decline on the global stage, just to satisfy the xenophobic wishes of the Tory right.
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