Israel has once again stormed Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital. Israel spent the first few weeks of the Gaza assault churning out fake audio clips of Hamas fighters exonerating the IDF from attacking hospitals and healthcare workers, and has spent all the months since just unapologetically attacking hospitals and healthcare workers.
CNN’s Dana Bash just gave an adoring rimjob of an interview to Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him “You’re not Hamas. Israel is a democracy, and as a Jewish state supports and believes in every life mattering.”
If Netanyahu was interviewed by an actual journalist he’d be forcefully interrogated with extremely uncomfortable questions about his genocidal atrocities in Gaza. When Netanyahu goes on CNN the anchor recites all of his pro-genocide talking points for him so he that doesn’t have to.
The underlying assumption behind the claim that Hamas needs to be eliminated is that Israel should be able to inflict nonstop violence on Palestinians day after day, year after year, generation after generation, without ever receiving any violence in return.
You can’t equate the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed. They’re not the same, and the oppressor is the ultimate source of the violence from both sides.
*
Say you’ve got a group of blue guys and a group of green guys. If the blue guys have power over the green guys and are constantly oppressing them, stealing from them, using violence on them and generally making life intolerable for the people they have power over, then the blue guys have no moral standing to get indignant and outraged when the green guys start responding to this with their own violence. That would be a ridiculous and illogical position for anyone to take.
In fact, if you look at what happened in our hypothetical scenario here, the blue guys are morally responsible for both their own violence AND the violence of the green guys, because they created the dynamics in which both happened. Had the blue guys not been oppressing and abusing the green guys, the green guys would not have responded with violence.
And you can argue “But the green guys aren’t making things any better with their violence! It’s just making the blue guys madder and more violent!” But that’s completely irrelevant to the question of responsibility, and to the fact that if the blue guys stop their violence and abuse there will be a cessation of violence from both sides.
The solution therefore is not to spend any energy whatsoever yelling at the green guys to stop being violent, the solution is to demand the blue guys stop being violent, abusive and oppressive toward the green guys — because that is the source of violence between the two groups. The violence of the blue guys is a cause, while the violence of the green guys is only an effect. You cannot therefore regard them in the same way, either morally or practically.
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Niger kicking the French military out of the country was interesting and potentially significant. Niger kicking out both France and the US is a major development. To borrow a line from Django Unchained, gentlemen you had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.
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The US is backing a genocide and waging a proxy war against a nuclear superpower while the American people struggle with stagnant wages, a broken healthcare system and soaring costs of living, so naturally Americans are being told they need to be very, very worried about China.
Right wingers who regard themselves as bold anti-establishment freethinkers are currently defending the world’s most powerful government supplying bombs to drop on a giant concentration camp with arguments that ultimately boil down to “But the TV would never lie to me!”
If opposition to an active genocide shocks and offends you, that’s a character flaw, and you should change that about yourself. If it shocks and offends you because of your religious identity, that too is a character flaw. Supporting mass murder because of your religion is not a legitimate position to have.
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The West tried, but they couldn’t screw up the Russian election. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:
The Russian Federation conducted an impressive presidential election with civility and efficiency despite a concerted attempt by the Western powers to sabotage it.
A nation of 143 million people and 112 million voters covering a vast geographic territory encompassing 11 time zones (out of the Earth’s total of 24 zones) went to the polls over a three-day period (March 15-17) to facilitate democratic participation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was re-elected from four candidates, winning 88 percent of the vote. It was the Russian Federation’s seventh presidential election as a modern state formed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putin wins a sixth term in office which will take him to 2030 as the head of the Russian state.
The voter turnout was the highest ever at 74 percent (67.5 percent at the last election in 2018). This time around, Putin won significantly more votes than he had in his previous four elections.
The impossibility of Western propaganda is staggering. Western claims that such a mass demonstration of Russian democratic power was somehow “rigged” or a “farce” only served to show how desperately Russophobic the West is. For, if the Western narrative were true, it implies that the whole of Russia is a nation of dupes and dummies with no free will.
The United States and its NATO minions tried their best to sabotage the Russian election – and failed miserably.
On the one hand, there was a surge in terrorist attacks against Russia’s regions bordering Ukraine. Several Russian civilians were killed and injured from artillery shelling and drone attacks on polling stations in Belogorod, Zaporozhye, and Kherson. There were also attempted border incursions by NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Bryansk and Kursk regions.
Then, in conjunction, there was a massive effort by Western forces to foment sabotage by agents within Russia.
The resistance is not playing by the West’s rules, and it may well win. From Alasdair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:
Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, Alastair Crooke writes.
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,
“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …
“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.
“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.
[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).
“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.
Google’s Gemini problems are deep-seated and not easily eradicated. From Ben Swanson at brownstone.org:
When the stock markets opened last Monday morning, February 26, Google shares promptly fell 4%, by Wednesday were down nearly 6%, and a week later have now fallen 8%. It was an unsurprising reaction to the embarrassing debut of the company’s Gemini image generator, which Google decided to pull after just a few days of worldwide ridicule.
CEO Sundar Pichai called the failure “completely unacceptable” and assured investors his teams were “working around the clock” to improve the AI’s accuracy. They’ll better vet future products, and the rollouts will be smoother, he insisted.
That may all be true. But if anyone thinks this episode is mostly about ostentatiously woke drawings, or if they think Google can quickly fix the bias in its AI products and everything will go back to normal, they don’t understand the breadth and depth of the decade-long infowarp.
Gemini’s hyper-visual zaniness is merely the latest and most obvious manifestation of a digital coup long underway. Moreover, it previews a new kind of innovator’s dilemma which even the most well-intentioned and thoughtful Big Tech companies may be unable to successfully navigate.
GEMINI’S DEBUT
In December, Google unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model called Gemini. According to computing benchmarks and many expert users, Gemini’s ability to write, reason, code, and respond to task requests (such as planning a trip) rivaled OpenAI’s most powerful model, GPT-4.
The first version of Gemini, however, did not include an image generator. OpenAI’s DALL-E and competitive offerings from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have over the last year burst onto the scene with mindblowing digital art. Ask for an impressionist painting or a lifelike photographic portrait, and they deliver beautiful renderings. OpenAI’s brand new Sora produces amazing cinema-quality one-minute videos based on simple text prompts.
Have you noted the shining faces of RINOs on broadcast TV in the past few days? Do they not look relieved? Their grins are wide, their auras shimmering with greed and power. They are back in command. And damned happy about it too.
Did we really think that the people in power could afford a resounding victory for populists? Many of them belong in jail, all of them are on the take, from county councilor to lobbyist to senior bureaucrat to judge, and most of them live their lives swinging between triumph and terror that they will be caught.
Meanwhile, like Beyonce, they are stacking their paper.
To refresh:
Whitney Webb’s One Nation under Blackmail published late last month, explains in exhaustive detail how the American government was taken over by well-dressed thieves. Webb started out writing from the anarcho-libertarian-left, but she is dispassionate. In 1,000 pages, she explains the history of the turning of democracy, starting post WW2 with the heinous Dulles brothers, moving through Reagan with country club thugs calling themselves The Enterprise, to Jeffrey Epstein’s seduction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Promising riches beyond their imaginings, the seduction led the couple, by increments, to sell out the country to China and Wall Street.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and starving hundreds of thousands more is a reasonable response to a thousand Israelis being killed.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that criticizing the actions of the state of Israel is antisemitic.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that saying “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone to think about this onslaught and the discourse around it in terms of “Jews vs Jew haters”.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that it was fine and normal to keep an unwanted ethnic group in a walled-in area whose resources are tightly controlled by those in power.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that TikTok is a massive problem that needs to be eliminated.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that Israel should be able to inflict violence and abuse upon the Palestinian population for generations without ever receiving any violence in return.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that Israel using the Israeli army to murder civilians in an Israeli military campaign is something that can be blamed on Hamas.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that it is fine and acceptable for the IDF to be targeting healthcare workers, journalists and scholars and destroying hospitals, universities and mosques.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that dozens of Israeli hostages are more important than the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are being starved and murdered.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the US war machine should be bombing people in Yemen, Iraq and Syria to stop their retaliations for the destruction of Gaza.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the governments who are backing a genocide are not personally responsible for it.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the unfathomable suffering that is taking place in Gaza right now should not be at the forefront of our attention.
Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the genocide in Gaza should be allowed to continue instead of being brought to an immediate end.
And that’s why we’ve been seeing such extensive narrative manipulation — from our news media, from our government officials, and from Israel apologists on social media.
It’s because without extensive narrative manipulation, none of this would be consented to.
Any president who serves the interests of the majority of his people and protects the nation from foreign interference will naturally be chosen to remain in power.
The main Western newspapers already had articles prepared in advance about Putin’s victory in the Russian elections. With the confirmation of this victory, they just took them out of the drawer and published the barbarities that we already know.
“Orchestrated election”, accuses the New York Times. The Washington Post calls the election a “farce.” CNN, of “stage-managed election devoid of credible opposition”. BBC and The Guardian present the allegations of Golos, an NGO accused by the Russian government of being a “foreign agent” due to its links with European organizations.
This NGO says the elections were not clean because “a significant proportion of Russian society was not represented by any presidential candidate.”
But participation in these elections was the highest in Russian history, with 77.44% turnout among voters eligible to vote. This means that less than 23% of voters did not vote.
We could consider that all these 23% of voters did not vote for the sole reason that they did not feel represented by any candidate, which is obviously not true — there are a series of reasons for not voting, from lack of interest in politics to difficulties in access and movement.
In the 2020 American elections, only 60.8% of voters participated — and yet this was the highest percentage of participants in 56 years!
If we take that criterion into account, we should conclude that a third of voters did not feel represented by either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. In fact, although there is an official opening for candidates from other parties, Democrats and Republicans have monopolized elections for more than a hundred years.
In 2020, Jo Jorgensen from the Libertarian Party achieved a measly 1.18% of the popular vote and came third in the electoral race. Fourth place went to Howie Hawkins, from the Green Party (0.26%). Candidates who do not belong to bipartisanship do not participate in debates and do not appear in journalistic coverage.
In fact, no one knows that there are other candidates who are not from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party — who are nothing more than two sides of the same coin of the American regime.
But, contrary to the coverage of the Russian elections, the American elections are the cleanest and most democratic of all, according to media coverage.
This year Biden and Trump will repeat the 2020 confrontation. All American citizens have known for a long time that this will be the presidential contest. The press has been admitting this for months — if not years. These are marked card elections, extremely predictable. But this is treated naturally.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll released at the end of January showed that 26% of voters would not vote for either candidate — more than the 23% who did not turn out in the Russian elections.
Russian voters had four options. The Americans, two. Americans have no idea whether there are candidates other than Democrats and Republicans and the vote to elect the president is not direct, as it is in Russia. Candidates in Russia represent a greater variety of political and ideological positions, ranging from nationalism to communism, democracy to liberalism, than candidates in the U.S., who are always jingoistic neoliberals.
The four candidates in Russia were men over 40. The two candidates in the U.S. are men over 77 years old, which has been heavily criticized by voters.
But in the U.S. there is never any press dispute over the electoral result. This same press, however, always seeks to discredit the results of Russian elections — except when their puppets win, as occurred in 1996 when there was clear U.S. interference to elect Boris Yeltsin.
Putin won a landslide victory, with more than 87% of the vote. This only happens in dictatorships, according to common sense. The same propaganda was made against Alexander Lukashenko when he won the 2020 elections in Belarus with 81% of the vote.
But Nayib Bukele has just won with 84% of the votes in El Salvador and none of the major Western media outlets have said that it was a fraud and that the elections were controlled by Bukele’s dictatorship. On the contrary. CNN, New York Times, Reuters, BBC and The Guardian used the same adjective to refer to the right-wing leader’s victory: “landslide”.
Putin’s victory, in fact, is very consistent with his trajectory. In his first election, he obtained 51.95% of the votes — when he was still a mere unknown bureaucrat, with the disadvantage of being supported by the unpopular Yeltsin and running at a time of extreme popularity for the Communist Party.
But as his policy rehabilitated the Russian economy and society, the population recognized the improvements in their living conditions and handed 71.31% of the votes in 2004 to Putin. Unable to run for a third consecutive term, he nominated his ally Dmitry Medvedev, and he received 70.28% of the votes in 2008. Running again in 2012, Putin was elected again with 63.6% of the votes, a percentage that rose to 76.69% in 2018.
It is very noticeable to all observers that this is Putin’s most popular moment in his entire career. A month after the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the Levada Center found that 83% of the population approved of the president’s activities. Around the same time, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion showed that 81.6% of Russians trusted Putin.
The intervention in the Ukrainian War raised Putin’s popularity to such a level that, in (private) stores in Moscow, you can find a wide variety of souvenirs with the face of the Russian president and the probability of receiving a positive response when approach a Russian on the street and ask him what he thinks of Putin.
Putin has also received growing support around the world, both from governments and ordinary citizens, particularly in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Vladimir Putin, as everyone recognizes, rebuilt Russia, regained national control over the main sectors of the economy, raised the population’s quality of life, recovered national pride and defends the country’s sovereignty against imperial threats and attacks. That’s why he has so much support.
An article published in February in Foreign Affairs magazine, a body that advises the American establishment, admits that for more than ten years Putin has primarily benefited the Russian working classes. His policies were, as we can see, recognized by this population.
Putin’s re-election, in fact, is no secret. Any president who serves the interests of the majority of his people and protects the nation from foreign interference will naturally be chosen to remain in power.
In many cases, the accusation of fraud and control over elections is certainly legitimate, as in the case of El Salvador or many countries in Africa and Asia — or Germany under Angela Merkel. But in others this is nothing more than propaganda against the enemies of imperial interests, who are enemies precisely because they prioritize the will of their people over the will of foreign powers.
That’s why Nicolás Maduro has been — and will be — re-elected in Venezuela, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Kim Jong Un in North Korea, for example. That’s why Evo Morales suffered a coup d’état in Bolivia and the same happened to the Workers’ Party in Brazil.
The lesson that remains is that the ruler who is deposed, even if he receives the support of the majority of the population, did not value national sovereignty enough and allowed imperialism to overthrow him in order to control his country. Putin has been very successful in this regard and, once again, serves as an inspiration to the nations of the so-called “Global South”, which suffer from incessant meddling and oppression by imperialist forces.
Une unité militaire française en Ukraine deviendra une cible légitime et prioritaire pour les forces armées russes ;
L’armée française s’inquiète des pertes en Ukraine, elles sont les plus importantes depuis la guerre d’Algérie au XXe siècle ;
Dans le même temps, Macron ne reconnaît pas la mort des Français en Ukraine, craignant des protestations ;
A Paris, on cache soigneusement non seulement le nombre de pertes, mais aussi le fait même de l’implication de l’armée française en Ukraine ;
C’est pour cette raison que les autorités se précipitent à la recherche de solutions aux problèmes pratiques : il faut enterrer les morts, verser des indemnisations aux familles et verser des pensions aux personnes handicapées.
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Hier soir, deux avions transportant des troupes françaises ont atterri à l’aéroport de Sofia (Bulgarie). Ils ont été chargés dans des camions fermés. Les chauffeurs (ils sont locaux) n’ont pas été informés de leur destination. Les proches ne peuvent pas les contacter.
On suppose qu’ils traversent la Roumanie — Izmail — Odessa.
Disrupting the Russian presidential election and creating an atmosphere of weakness around Putin is precisely what the U.S. intelligence agency would seek to engender.
Russian President Vladimir Putin after take a flight in a military aircraft, Feb. 22. (Dmitry Azarov, Kommersant)
In the days leading to the Russian presidential election that concluded on Sunday, a network of three Russian paramilitary organizations working under the auspices of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, or GUR, launched a series of attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation.
The purpose of the attacks was clear — to disrupt the three-day Russian presidential election by creating an atmosphere of weakness and impotence around President Vladimir Putin designed to undermine his authority, legitimacy and appeal at the voting booth.
The operation was months in the planning, and involved the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR), and the Siberia Battalion. All three of these organizations are controlled by the GUR, whose spokesman announced the attacks.
Left unsaid is the degree to which the C.I.A. was involved in what amounts to an invasion of the territory of the Russian Federation by forces operating under the umbrella of what is openly acknowledged to be a proxy war between the United States and its NATO allies against Russia.
While Ukraine maintains the attacks by the RDK, LSR, and Siberia Battalion are the actions of “patriotic Russians” opposed to Putin, the involvement of the GUR in organizing, training, equipping, and directing these forces makes their attack on Russian soil a direct extension of the proxy war between Russia and the West.
Given the extensive involvement of the C.I.A. in the work of the GUR, it is highly unlikely that an action of this scope and scale could have been executed without the knowledge of the C.I.A. and in the attacks, including its goals and objectives.
Indeed, the presence of high-end U.S. military equipment, including M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), in the order of battle in the attack by Russian insurgent forces points to a direct U.S. role, as does the political nature of the mission of election disruption, which has been a long-term objective of the C.I.A. in Russia stretching back decades.
2014
Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine in Kiev, 2013. (Dmitry Trikutko, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The C.I.A.’s relationship with the GUR is well-established, dating back to 2014, according to The Washington Post, when the C.I.A. worked with the GUR to establish a network of bases along the Ukrainian-Russian border from which to conduct intelligence operations against Russia, including missions that involved operations on Russian soil.
The C.I.A. intercepted Russian communications, captured Russian drones for follow-on technical exploitation, and oversaw the recruitment and operation of spy rings operating on Russian soil.
In the lead up to Russia’s initiation of the Special Military Operation (SMO) against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. expanded its relationship with the GUR to include specialized training provided by members of the Ground Division of the C.I.A.’s Special Activities Group, responsible for covert paramilitary operations.
[C.I.A. first began secret operations using fascists against Moscow in 1948 with the CARTEL and later AERODYNAMIC programs. See: On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine.]
The training was focused on unconventional and guerrilla warfare skills that would help facilitate the creation and sustainment of anti-Russian insurgencies carried out by “stay behind” teams operating on any Ukrainian territory that was occupied by Russian forces.
After the SMO began, ethnic Russians who had served since 2014 within the ranks of the neo-Nazi, Ukrainian nationalist, paramilitary organization known as the Azov Regiment organized themselves into a separate organization known as the Russian Volunteer Corps, or RDK.
Members of the Russian Volunteer Corps on 24 May 2023. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
The RDK modeled itself after the Russian Liberation Army, an entity organized, trained, and equipped by the Nazi Germans during World War Two which was comprised of Russian prisoners of war. Russians today often refer to the RDK members as “Vlassovites,” after Russian General Andrei Vlasov, who was captured by the Germans and later defected to their cause.
Vlasov recruited Russian prisoners of war into what was known as the Russian Liberation Army, which eventually consisted of two divisions comprising some 30,000 troops. Most of Vlasov’s “army” were either killed in combat, or taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, where they were treated as traitors and punished accordingly (the enlisted sentenced to lengthy terms in the Gulag, and the leaders hung.) The RDK was able to attract several hundred former Azov fighters and new recruits into its ranks.
A second ethnic Russian military unit, created in the aftermath of the SMO, is comprised primarily of Russian military defectors and prisoners of war. Known as the Freedom of Russia Legion (LSR), it consists of several hundred soldiers organized into two battalions. The LSR operates as part of the International Legion of the Ukrainian Territorial Army.
However, it is controlled by the GUR, according to GUR chief Kyrylo Budanov, as opposed to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The third ethnic Russian military unit operating with Ukraine is the so-called Siberian Battalion, composed of ethnic Russians and non-Russian ethnicities from the Siberian territories of the Russian Federation.
The members of this formation are volunteers from Russian Siberia who are opposed to Putin’s government. Like the LSR, the Siberian Battalion operated as a GUR-controlled part of the Ukrainian Territorial Army and is said to consist of around 300 men, according to a report in Euronews.
The incursion over the weekend by the GUR-controlled, anti-Putin, Russian forces is not the first instance of its kind. In March and April 2023, several small cross-border attacks were carried out by forces affiliated with the Russian Volunteer Corps RDK.
More telling was a larger attack made on May 22, 2023. The timing of this attack, which lasted less than a day, seemed to coincide with the fall of the hotly contested city of to the Russian private military company Wagner.
The capture of Bakhmut by Wagner signaled the beginning of a rapid deterioration in relations between the head of the Wagner Group, the one-time Putin loyalist, insider Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Russian military leadership, in particular Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff General Valeri Gerasimov.
From left: Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov during a 2019 military exercise. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
On June 23, 2023, Prigozhin led thousands of his Wagner fighters in a rebellion which saw him occupy the Russian headquarters of the SMO in Rostov-on-Don, and march on Moscow. While the rebellion was quashed within 24 hours, many of the Wagner fighters said that they had participated only because they were told they would be deploying on to Russian soil, where Wagner was prohibited by law from operating, to defend against further incursions from the RDK.
Information that emerged after Prigozhin’s abortive rebellion showed that the Wagner leader had been in frequent contact with the Ukrainian GUR in the months leading up to his insurrection, and that the RDK attacks were part of a coordinated effort orchestrated by the GUR, designed to weaken and perhaps bring down Putin’s government.
The Biden administration acknowledged having detailed intelligence beforehand about Prigozhin’s revolt, and yet did not provide any warning to the Russian government, suggesting that the C.I.A. was at a minimum cognizant of the GUR operation and tacitly supported it.
A crowd in Rostov-on-Don watching a tank with flowers sticking out of its muzzle during the so-called Wagner Rebellion, June 24, 2023. (Fargoh, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
The presence of U.S. weapons, including Humvee vehicles, in the possession of the RDK fighters on the weekend likewise hinted at a broader U.S. involvement in their training and equipping, involvement which, given the prohibition on the deployment of U.S. military forces in a training capacity on Ukrainian soil since the initiation of the SMO, pointed to the C.I.A.’s Ground Division as the facilitating unit.
The Russian government has assessed that the total strength of the GUR-controlled forces that attacked Russia in the leadup to the presidential election completed on Sunday numbered around 2,500 men, supported by at least 35 tanks and scores of armored vehicles, including a significant number of U.S.-supplied M-2 Bradley IFVs.
The scope and scale of the military operation, which included helicopter-borne forces inserted behind Russian lines, is such that it could not have been accomplished without the knowledge of the C.I.A. Moreover, the tactics and equipment used (helicopter raids, M-2 Bradley vehicles) strongly suggest a more direct role by the C.I.A. in both the planning and training of the mission and the troops involved.
The C.I.A.’s Ground Division is composed of veterans of the C.I.A.’s secret wars in both Syria and Afghanistan, where the C.I.A. trained secret armies to carry out their own secret wars in support of C.I.A. objectives.
Ukrainian special forces unit in Kabul during the 2021 Kabul airlift. (Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
The discrediting of Putin’s government with an eye to his removal from power has been a goal of the C.I.A. since 2005, when the C.I.A., together with British intelligence, began actively working to create viable political opposition movements inside Russia.
While these efforts have largely failed (the recent death in a Russian prison of Alexei Navalny, believed to have been a creation of the C.I.A., underscores the scope and scale of this failure), the C.I.A.’s covert political warriors in the Political Action Group of the Special Activities Center continue to try to undermine Putin through various means.
Given the Russian government’s stated goal of producing a large turnout in the election as a way to certify Putin’s legitimacy, disrupting voter turnout by creating instability and a lack of confidence would be precisely the kind of cause and effect relationship the C.I.A. would seek to engender.
The fact that the RDK leadership openly bragged that their ongoing attacks were a) designed to disrupt the Russian presidential election and b) were planned months before the attack, is a strong indicator that, given the intimate nature of the C.I.A.-GUR relationship, that the C.I.A. was at a minimum knowledgeable of, and most likely a facilitator, of the GUR-led attacks using Ukrainian-controlled Russian insurgents.
To understand the gravity that surrounds the possibility — indeed, probability — that the C.I.A. was involved, however peripherally, in an attack on Russian soil designed to disrupt a Russian presidential election, one only need reflect on how the United States would react if Russian intelligence services collaborated with Mexican drug cartels to create a well-armed insurgent army composed of Mexican-Americans who attacked U.S. territory from across the U.S.-Mexican border in order to influence the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election.
The United States would view it as an act of war and respond accordingly.
Manifest Danger of Nuclear Conflagration
The Biden administration is overseeing a Ukrainian policy that is rapidly collapsing around it.
America’s NATO allies, concerned by the lack of leadership from the Biden administration when it comes to Ukraine, are threatening to dispatch troops to Ukraine to bolster a flagging Ukrainian military. The Russian government has warned that any such move would be construed as an attack on Russia, and potentially create the conditions for a general nuclear war between Russia and the collective West.
Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.
Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.
That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people seems like a distant dream. In its stead the future of America appears to be in the hands of a rogue intelligence agency that long ago abandoned any pretense of accountability and operating under the rule of law.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“The truth of the matter is that we are in a heavy militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit and wars are being created just to fuel that.”
Words of truth such as these which are discomforting need to be heard precisely because the present day extremely high costs (in terms of human lives) and high risks (in terms of possibility of sudden and steep escalation) of huge disruptions created by US security and foreign policy should be questioned and questioned repeatedly.
These words are from Dennis Kucinich, a former Presidential candidate who was also elected eight times to the House of Representatives.
He has been involved in many acts of great courage in his long and eventful political career, acts which others would not dare to touch, ranging from opposing the Iraq invasion with solid research-based facts and even stronger passion, even trying to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to repeatedly investigating/opposing Pentagon budgets and irregularities.
The quote from him with which this article started is taken from his recent conversation with eminent journalist Chris Hedges in a program at The Real News Network titled ‘Democrats and the War Machine’ (mid-December 2022).
This program raised an important issue—while several important leaders of the Democratic Party including J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel and of course Dennis Kucinich used to take anti-war positions earlier and counter the arms industry lobby, the scope for this has reduced considerably so that both the leading political parties are increasingly similar in being supportive of war efforts and the powerful arms industry. This is deeply worrying for peace efforts.
Asked how this happened, Kucinich replied that this tendency started about three or four decades back with the Democratic Party also becoming more dependent on corporate funding.
It is important to note that in the understanding of someone who has seen the inner workings of the political system, the impact of corporate funding, in this particular context the funding by the powerful arms industry but in other contexts also by the oil industry, the medical industry etc., can be so serious as to change in basic ways the policy and internal democracy of a leading political party. In fact the enormously constructive political career of Kucinich was itself disrupted by sources within the Democratic Party. Further, Kucinich has pointed out that widespread financial irregularities are a part of the war-mongering. He has stated that while he was working on a government oversight committee, an inspector general testified that there are over one trillion dollar worth of accounts in the Pentagon that could not be reconciled and they have over 1100 accounting systems, probably deliberately to use for obfuscation.
Kucinich has stated that when he was in Congress, he tried to introduce legislation to forbid the USA to go into any war that NATO was operating because he felt that this was a subversion of the constitutional provision in Article 1 Section 8, which is that Congress of the US has the power to take the country from a condition of peace to war.
Kucinich was extremely critical of the way the USA has influenced the course of events in Ukraine starting with the coup there in 2014, the imposed distressing policy of hostility against the Russian speaking people of Eastern Ukraine resulting in the tragic loss of 14,000 lives among them. In his words,
“Suddenly Ukraine becomes a bloodbath for a chessboard where innocent people are just being used as pawns in a game of nations.”
Kucinich says that with NATO becoming “a cat’s paw for war”, people in many NATO member states are going to start asking –who in NATO making decisions for me?
Similarly people in their capacity as EU member countries are going to increasingly ask why very high energy costs are being imposed on them when this can be avoided easily? Hence both NATO and EU face a very uncertain future due to increasing opposition of people of member states, relating to highly distressing mishandling of Ukraine policy. Regarding the existing situation Kucinich says with great feeling, as someone who has represented the Ukrainian people in his constituency as well,
“I resent this on behalf of every decent person in Ukraine who is trying to keep his family together in Ukraine and who doesn’t want to be dominated by anybody—US, Russia, anybody.”
Regarding the role of media in all this, Kucinich is supportive of those who have referred to media as the spear-carriers of the government. At crucial times the drumbeat of the media has been ‘war, war, war’ echoing the war cry emanating from the White House.
What is most important is to heed this warning of Kucinich regarding the drift towards the possibility of a third World War:
“Our country—I love this country—is being done a disservice by people in power who have made book with interest groups who are going forward just to cash in on war. And I think it is horrific. And in this case we are playing with the flash of World War III…I am also concerned things could spin out of control, even now with respect to Russia, with respect to China, North Korea.”
Kucinich quotes President Kennedy who said that we should learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or else we will perish as fools. Then he says,
“If there ever was a country that was in need of a process of truth and reconciliation, it is America. We really need to have people come forward and admit they were wrong, whatever their motives, so that we can heal this country.”
Gerry Condon, former President of Veterans of Peace, a USA-based global organization of Military Veterans and allies with 140 chapters worldwide whose collective efforts are to build a culture for peace and end all wars, wrote a letter to President Biden in late 2022 which needs to be widely read by all those who are devoted to peace and deeply worried about the prolonged Ukraine war.
A very important feature if this letter is that it has been by a veteran who understands war and peace, who has followed US strategic thinking and actions for a long time and so is able to have a very good understanding of the wider context in which the recent Ukraine events should be seen.
“I am writing you as a proud member of Veterans For Peace and its former president. We have been following the war in Ukraine closely, since well before the Russian invasion on February 24 of this year. We were alarmed when you and President Obama supported the regime-change coup in Ukraine in 2014, which was openly cheered on by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, and spearheaded by self-described Nazis.
“We watched in horror as those same self-described Nazis set fire to an Odessa union building full of Ukrainians who were protesting a new law outlawing the Russian language as an official language of Ukraine. 50 people were burned alive or shot and beaten to death. This in a country with a long history with Russia and millions of Russian speakers.”
It is important for more people to know this background as these aspects have been brushed aside by US media generally and only Russian aggression has been highlighted.
Condon continues his letter,
“Appalled at the aforementioned atrocities, the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass in Eastern Ukraine declared their independence from Ukraine, and were soon attacked by Nazi militias. These self-described Nazi militias were then incorporated into the Ukrainian army, and the attacks continued. By the time that Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 of this year (2022), 14,000 Ukrainians had already been killed in that terrible civil war.”
“Russian president Putin repeatedly warned and almost begged the US and NATO: Do not push your hostile military forces any further onto Russia’s borders. Taking Ukraine into NATO would cross a serious ‘red line’. Russian troops then massed along the border with Ukraine, in a clear show of force.”
This is the real sequence of events which has not been told to most of US people and to most of the world as well. For the sake of brevity, Condon has not gone into some important pre-2014 events, which would have further confirmed his analysis and made his case stronger.
After having briefly provided this background, Condon comes to the real point of writing this letter to President Biden. He writes,
“Mr. President, you might have stopped this war from happening merely by announcing that Ukraine would not become part of NATO and that you would end the militarization of Ukraine. You could have accepted President Putin’s offer to negotiate a new security arrangement in Europe. We looked on in disbelief as you rather cavalierly brushed aside Russia’s legitimate concerns. It looked like you were saying, ‘Bring it on’! Well, Russia brought it on. We were horrified by the Russian invasion as well as by your response. You armed Ukraine to the teeth and fanned the flames of war.”
So this is what has actually happened. It is the highly provocative actions of the USA which caused the invasion. The USA could also have stopped the invasion at a very late stage but it chose not to.
What has been the result? Condon writes,
“Ukraine (and the Black market in Europe) is now awash with high-tech US weaponry. A full-on war has killed many thousands of civilians, made millions homeless, and destabilized much of the world. We are now facing economic disasters and fearing the all-too-real possibility of nuclear war.”
So clearly very big mistakes have been made. The question is—will these mistakes continue, leading to even more harm, or will the USA government take action to reverse its mistaken policies and take real steps in the direction of peace, which in turn can pave the way for Russia to end its invasion? Condon is very clear that he and other Veterans of Peace want the USA to correct its mistaken policies.
He writes,
“As veterans who have experienced the carnage of war, we are concerned about the young soldiers on both sides who are being killed and injured in the tens of thousands. We know all too well that the survivors will be traumatized and scarred for life. These are additional reasons why the Ukraine war must end now.
“We ask you to listen to veterans who say “Enough is Enough – War is Not the Answer.” We want urgent, good faith diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, not more US weapons, advisors, and endless war. And certainly not a nuclear war.”
Emphasizing how serious the situation is and how much is at stake this senior veteran for peace writes to President Biden,
“Show us a Profile of Courage and save the world from World War III, a war that could literally destroy human civilization as we know it. You must distance yourself from the neo-cons and weapons manufacturers who are giving you terrible advice. You must reverse course now. Drop the weapons and embrace diplomacy. For the sake of Ukraine. For the sake of Russia, Europe and the United States. For the sake of the all the people of the world. Negotiate, Don’t Escalate!”
This letter is extremely important, as it has been written by a veteran of armed forces who has fought for his country, whose commitment to his own country cannot be doubted and who at the same time, having seen the horrors of war, has a very deep commitment to peace. This also has the great virtue of being completely honest and telling the truth in very simple words. This letter should be widely read and circulated both to understand the Ukraine crisis from a perspective of peace and to find the path ahead, again from a perspective of peace
In recent debates over the Ukraine crisis, one aspect which should have received more attention is that many senior US and western experts, including those who have held senior official positions, have also been very critical of the USA’s uncalled for hostile policies towards Russia and more particularly of the eastward expansion of NATO close to Russia. The voices of these senior US experts need to be known more widely. Branko Marcetic has done well to fill in this gap by citing several of these senior US experts and their arguments in his recent essay titled ‘The Orwellian Attack on Critics of NATO Policy Must Stop’ ( Jacobin, March 7 2022). The review here is based substantially on this essay.
Jack Matlock served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush after a decades-long career as one of the top Soviet experts in the US Foreign Service. He wrote recently
“there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War,” and that “the policies pursued by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all contributed to bringing us to this point.” Matlock had called for a diplomatic solution (before the invasion started) to prevent war saying that “what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable.”
A senior expert Prof John Mearsheimer told the New Yorker he believed “all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008,” when Bush made his infamous announcement on Ukraine and Georgia, despite Moscow making it clear that “they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand.” Mearsheimer dismissed the idea Putin is bent on conquering a broader swath of Europe to restore the Russian Empire or Soviet Union as an argument “invented” by “the foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more generally.”
International relations professor Rajan Menon and former George W. Bush national security staffer Thomas Graham urged US officials in Politico in January to stave off war by “accommodating some of Russia’s principal security concerns,” and formalizing “a declared moratorium on the accession of Ukraine, or any other former Soviet state” into NATO for about 25 years.
Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote “NATO now largely exists to manage the risks created by its existence”. Eminent academic Prof Jeffrey Sachs gave repeated warnings of the grave harm likely to be caused by very aggressive policy on Ukraine. Kings College Ukraine expert Anatol Lieven, has repeatedly called for solutions like a neutral Ukraine and a moratorium on its entry into the NATO, first to prevent war and now to end it.
George Kennan, widely regarded as the father of the Cold War containment policy, warned as early as 1997 that expanding NATO eastward would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” “have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy,” and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” 18 former diplomats said the present policy risked “significantly exacerbating the instability that now exists in the zone that lies between Germany and Russia, and convincing most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them.”
As many as 50 prominent foreign-policy experts, including retired military officers, diplomats, and former senators, signed a letter calling NATO expansion “a policy error of historic proportions” that was “opposed across the entire political spectrum,” and would “strengthen the non-democratic opposition, undercut those who favour reform and cooperation with the West, [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.”
Even Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, wrote from Moscow as a senior diplomat in 1995 that
“hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here,” and that the move was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” 13 years later, in 2008, Burns informed the Bush administration that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” and that “in more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players,” he had “yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” As late as 2020, Burns wrote of how “Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage” and how “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled.”
Thus it is clear from even a quick review that some of the topmost US experts have also been very supportive of ideas built around a more friendly policy towards Russia, accommodating its legitimate security interests and avoiding provocative actions including eastward expansion of NATO. Why was such sane advice rejected in favour of needlessly provocative, hostile and aggressive policies towards Russia, against the advice of the topmost experts and even serving intelligence officials? This is a question that needs to be explored further to find out the real movers of US foreign policy and their real motives.
If so many top US experts have been warning against NATO expansion eastward and close to Russia and indicating that this will lead to war, and as it was clear that the USA will not get involved directly in the conflict, does not the USA policy amount to unjustly exposing Ukraine to more threats and danger from Russia, exactly what has happened now? Clearly in the interests of world peace it is important not just to stop the war and violence immediately but in addition it is also important for the USA to end uncalled for hostility and aggression towards Russia as well its provocation of expanding NATO close to Russian borders.
In the middle of the rapid building up of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, several important voices have spoken for de-escalation and peace. As reviewing all such voices of peace would be difficult here, we are here confining ourselves only to the voices of peace first heard in very early days of the Gaza conflict in the USA. In the USA as many as 50 democrat legislators wrote to Present Biden that the mass evacuation in Gaza and other related actions should not result in serious violation of international humanitarian law. This communication, apart from making a strong statement on its own, also reminded the President and the Secretary of State of the USA that both the European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and the UN High Commission on Human Rights had said that imposing a complete seize on Gaza and depriving 2.3 million Palestinian civilians who have nowhere else to go—half of whom are children—of food, water and electricity would be a violation of international humanitarian law. The legislators stated that these people should not be deprived of basic necessities like food, water, fuel and electricity.
Jewish Voice for Peace, a US based human rights organization, released an important statement on October 11 2023, giving a call for ending the air strikes in Gaza. This statement further said,
“The US must work to immediately de-escalate to prevent the further loss of life, and not fuel and exacerbate the violence by sending more weapons to Israel. That is the only way to end violence: to address its root cause, 75 years of Israeli military occupation and apartheid. We must end US complicity in this systemic oppression.”
Human Rights Watch, USA, warned on October 12 against the use of very dangerous weapons, after its investigations revealed that white phosphorus had already been used by Israel in border area rural settlements of Lebanon and in densely inhabited parts of Gaza. As this organization has explained, “upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh.’ These burns can result in multi-organ failure and in death.
Prominent US legislator Bernie Sanders said on October 11 that Israel’s total siege of Gaza is a breach of international law and called upon the US government to mobilize the support of the global community to de-escalate violence.
More recently some of the top foreign policy experts of the USA such as Prof john Mearsheimer have repeatedly used strong words to critique the USA policy in Ukraine as well as Gaza, and have in particular expressed shock at the loss of life in Gaza, including the death of a very large number of children, and the responsibility of the USA policy makers in not stopping this loss of life.
So what is clear is that saner voices speaking on the basis of facts and evidence to plead urgently for policies of peace and non-aggression have been certainly present in recent times. These include very respectable names but despite this, these have been persistently side-lined, neglected, overruled while policies of aggression have become more and more the norm for the US foreign policy establishment. This is extremely unfortunate and dangerous for the USA, its allies as well as perceived enemies and also for the entire world. The peace movement in the USA and the entire world should strongly oppose these policies of aggression so that these can be soon given up in favour of the alternative policies of non-aggression, compromise and peace that have been advocated by so many rational, respected, well-meaning experts such as those quoted here.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save the Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Man over Machine, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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