BBC 2 Programme Next Week on British Forces in Ukraine and Estonia

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.

Vox Political: Don’t Let the Rain Stop You From Voting!

It’s also been raining in many parts of the country today. Mike’s clearly had it in Wales, and we’ve had some rain down here in Bristol. So just in case that stops some people from voting, Mike has put up a meme urging them to defy the weather and go and vote.

The meme says:

Could you bear
To tell your children
The Tories sold off their free healthcare
Because you couldn’t be bothered
To vote Labour
IN THE RAIN?

If you haven’t voted yet, get your coat on, put your umbrella up, and get down to a polling station.
It doesn’t take long but the effect could last your lifetime.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/08/dont-let-the-rain-stop-you-from-voting/

If you haven’t already, go down to the polling station, and vote Labour.

And stop the Tories from privatising the NHS.

Elections and the Communist Democracy of Gracchus Babeuf

On Thursday we go to the polls again. In Bristol, the elections are partly about deciding who is to be the new elected mayor. The Tories were very keen to introduce this idea from America into Britain, along with elected Police and Crime Commissioners. I find the name of the latter post rather amusing, rather like the term ‘solicitor’ for a type of lawyer, when the term ‘soliciting’ is also used to describe the attempt to procure sexual favours illegally. A Crime Commissioner sounds exactly the opposite of the job it describes. The term ‘commission’ is, after all, used to describe the process by which someone or an organisation hires someone else to perform a task. Like a government or company may commission a report. A Police and Crime Commissioner therefore sounds like someone, who not only hires the police, but also arranges to hire the criminals to commit the crimes.

Of course, this was all part of the Tories’ localism campaign, which was ostensibly about extending democracy and creating a quasi-anarchistic society through privatising everything, and trying to get volunteers to run local services, like libraries, unpaid. While throwing the unemployed and disabled off social security for the sake of giving tax cuts to billionaires.

I doubt somehow the Tories would be quite so keen on democracy if it came in the totalitarian form envisaged by ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf. Babeuf was a French Revolutionary, who was executed, along with his comrades, for trying to organise a Communist revolution, the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’, to overthrow the liberal regime of the Revolutionary state. Babeuf wanted the state to own all property, but unlike the later Marxist Communist states, elections would still be held. These would include not only political authorities, like the local and national governments, but also for the posts running businesses, including local shops.

The Tories aren’t keen on democracy at the best of times. Their electoral reforms, which were supposed to be passed to prevent voter fraud, are modelled on American legislation, which one Southern US government admitted was to stop the Democrats’ supporters – young people, the poor and Blacks, from voting. They really wouldn’t want democracy if that meant people could elect everything, including who ran the local corner shop. And they definitely don’t the workers having anything to do with the way their businesses are run.

Exercise Your Political Rights: VOTE!

Today’s polling day, as I’m sure just about every one of my readers is aware. I’ve reblogged a number of memes from Vox Political over the past few days, urging people not to vote the Tories and Lib Dems back in. Mike’s posted another piece over on his site, simply asking people to vote. And he’s produced this graphic for further encouragement.

Remember – the Tories and Lib Dems have reformed the registration system, just to prevent people from voting. This is how they view democracy, despite all the rhetoric about defending and promoting it through ‘localism’, or some such ideological camouflage. They fear it. Just have tyrants have always feared it.

So defy them. Don’t give in to apathy, or pessimism. Use your franchise.

The Francophone Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, said that the man, who votes, but doesn’t want anyone else to, wishes to be a master. The one, who doesn’t, wishes to be a slave.

The Tories are always keen to get their people to vote, and vote first. Because they do see themselves as the masters.

Mike’s short piece is over at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/05/07/at-long-last-election-day-is-here-vote/. Go there for further electoral encouragement.

But you don’t have to accept the status of slaves.

38 Degrees Video against the Privatisation of the NHS

The political petitioning group, 38 Degrees, are running a campaign to prioritise the NHS as one of the very most important issues in the coming election. They posted this video to their members about the NHS and the magnificent work it does, asking them to watch and then share on the social media.

I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or any of the others. I only have this blog, and so I’m posting it here. The video’s extremely brief – just under two minutes. It does, however, contain snippets of interview from people, who have been treated by the Health Service for cancer, liver failure and infertility.

It states that these are all threatened by privatisation, and asks people to use their vote to defend the Health Service. Here it is:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/content/nhs-video

The message doesn’t name or mention specific parties, but it’s clear enough.
The biggest threat to the NHS comes from the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers.

As this, and so many other left-wing blogs, like Johnny Void, Vox Political, Pride’s Purge, and Another Angry Void have pointed out, over and over again, the Tories are privatising the health service piecemeal. There are 92 Tory and Lib Dem MPs who either own, or have senior management positions with private healthcare firms seeking to profit from the NHS’ privatisation. The Tories’ Health Secretaries, Jeremy Hunt and Andrew Lansley, have stated that they want the NHS privatised. One of the two even spoke about it at an event sponsored by one of the private healthcare firms at a Tory party conference.

As for the Lib Dems, it is not remotely surprising that they also want to privatise the NHS. It’s in the Orange Book, the Lib Dem ideological guide advocating neo-Liberalism now guiding their policies under Nick Clegg.

Ed Miliband, by contrast, has said that he will protect the NHS from privatisation, and will undo the Tories’ disastrous legislation privatising the NHS.

If you genuinely don’t want to see the NHS privatised, and the sick and disabled suffer and die as they do in America, when they can’t afford medical insurance, then don’t vote Tory or Lib Dem.

The Young Turks on Fox News Telling Young People Not To Vote

Young peoples’ alienation from politics isn’t just a problem in Britain. It’s also a problem in the US, though not all members of the American political establishment recognise this. In this clip, The Young Turks take apart Fox New’s recommendation that young people should actually be prevent from voting, ’cause they’re too stupid.

Say whaaat? Fox News calling others ‘stupid?’

The Young Turks is a liberal news analysis show on the internet. It appears to take it’s name from the fact that most of the hosts are ethnically Turkish, like one of their main anchors, Cenk Uyghur. The Uyghur are a Turkic people, who are one of the ‘National Minorities’ in China. They do have members of other ethnicities on, so it ain’t exclusively Turkish, however.

In this piece, Uygher and one of the women hosts point out that young people, contrary to what Fox says, are actually highly politically informed, as shown by the Occupy protests and other radical movements. The reason they don’t vote is probably because, in Uyghur’s words, ‘the options aren’t great.’ He points out that when you get to the voting booth, you either have a choice of a corporatist Democrat, or a corporatist Republican.

Obviously, it’s not much of a choice. They also make the point that if you take large numbers of young people into political offices, as with the Wolf Pack movement, the politicos staffing it really don’t know what to do, nor where all these kids came from.

And of course, Fox has its own ideological reasons for not wanting anyone under thirty to vote. Young people don’t share their ideological biases. They tend to vote Democrat, which is obviously not something the Super-Republicans at Fox want to encourage. Young kids are worried about a range of issues, like job opportunities, that involve government expenditure. Fox, however, stands for tax reductions, which necessarily benefits the older and richer.
And The Young Turks make the point that Fox’s viewer demographic does not include the young. The average viewer of Fox News is 68. They have zero appeal to young people, which makes their comments about trying to stop kids voting pointless. Da yoof ain’t watching them anyway. Which probably confirms the point already made, that today’s kids are better educated than their elders, and particularly Fox, would like.

Here’s the clip:

Fight the Right-Wing Parties: Register to Vote!

Warning! This piece does contain some strong language. As it’s about UKIP and the Tories, this is only to be expected. But viewer discretion is advised.

Politicians and political commentators from all shades of the political spectrum are worried about the increasingly low turn-out at elections. They rightly fear the death of democracy from apathy and cynicism. However, UKIP, it seems, have managed to energise people to go out and register to vote.

Just not their supporters.

Instead, it’s the very people they demonise and campaign against, as this highly amusing piccie shows.

I found it on the Slatukip page. It’s a great response to Farage and his army of swivel-eyed loons.

The Tories have passed legislation making it more awkward to register to vote. As a result, about 700,000 people, mostly students, have fallen off the electoral register.

This isn’t an accident. Too many people despise the Coalition. Students particularly resent the Lib Dems for reneging on their promise not to support tuition fees. And the right takes very seriously the perceived wisdom that young people are more likely to be left-wing than the old and middle aged.

The Tories are also considering stripping Irish people, and citizens of Commonwealth nations resident in the UK of their right to vote as well. Because Irish, Pakistanis, Indians and Africans tend to vote Labour.

So here’s my considered response to the Tories and their electoral reforms.

And just to remind you how long and hard Black people had to fight for the vote, just remember that in 196th century America a Black man was shot dead for daring to try to cast a vote at an election.

Regardless of whatever race or creed you are, don’t let the Tories take your right to vote away!

Private Eye on Corporate Interests Favoured over Members 2013 Tory Party Conference

Jeremy Hunt, the man in charge of the NHS. He would rather talk to the private health care companies than grass roots Tories, it would seem.

One of the pieces I put up this week was on the group, Bite the Ballot, which tries to get young people interested in politics and voting. I remarked that if the government and other political partiers were serious about encouraging more people to vote, then they should actually try to expand their party’s membership amongst ordinary people, rather than simply give all their attention to wealthy donors from private industry.

I’ve also blogged on the similarity between the Tory’s policy of taking over experts from the private sector and putting them in charge of government departments and other concerns, in order to have them run according to the wishes of private industry, and the Nazis’ policy of ‘commission management’. This was the industrial policy in which the heads of private companies were co-opted into the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. Carl Krauch, the head of I.G. Farben, for example, was appointed general plenipotentiary for chemicals in 1938 and Director of the Reich Office for Economic Consolidation.

In their issue for the 23 August to 5 September of last year, Private Eye covered the way card carrying members of the Tory party were in a minority at their conference, and were even excluded from some events altogether. The article runs:

‘That only 38 percent of those attending the Tory party conference next month will be card-carrying Conservatives has attracted a lot of attention. But even they won’t be allowed entry to some key events.

The schedule for Reform, a think-tank with links to the party top brass, reveals a number of invitation-only talks paid for by those who really matter: the commercial and other lobbying interest who make up 36 percent of the attendees.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt, for example, will have a “private roundtable discussion” on NHS reform, paid for by BMI Healthcare, one of the UK’s largest private hospital groups. Reform has also arranged a private chat with health minister Dan Poulter, paid for by Baxter Healthcare, a US firm that sells blood and kidney services to the NHS.

Elsewhere Damian Green MP will speak on “policing and technology” at a meeting “in partnership with” Airwaves, which sells radios to the police; Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester, will speak courtesy of private security firm G4S; and Hastings Tory MP Amber Rudd will discuss “infrastructure investment” thanks to train leasing firm Angel Trains. How cosy!’

Apart from showing us who some of the firms lobbying the Tory party for the privatisation of the NHS are – Reform, BMI Healthcare and Baxter Healthcare, it also shows how low the party’s view of their own grassroots membership is, when they are excluded from so much of their conference.

If the Tories really are serious about encouraging people to vote, as they claimed to be when backing Bite the Bullet, then they will have to start by listening to their own members and opening up their conferences to them fully.

But given the elitism and preference for the company of respectable members of private industry over the masses, that probably won’t be happening any time soon