The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 24, 2023 2:20 pm

In Moscow, Xi and Putin Bury Pax Americana
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 23, 2023
Pepe Escobar

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a reception in honor of the Chinese leader’s visit to Moscow at the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia. © Sputnik / Pavel Byrkin

In Moscow this week, the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has ‘not been seen in 100 years.’


What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta, which, incidentally, is in Crimea. But unlike the momentous meeting of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in USSR-run Crimea in 1945, this is the first time in arguably five centuries that no political leader from the west is setting the global agenda.

It’s Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are now running the multilateral, multipolar show. Western exceptionalists may deploy their crybaby routines as much as they want: nothing will change the spectacular optics, and the underlying substance of this developing world order, especially for the Global South.

What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.

Right from the start of the summit, the speeches by both Xi and Putin drove the NATO crowd into a hysterical frenzy of anger and envy: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova perfectly captured the mood when she remarked that the west was “foaming at the mouth.”

The front page of the Russian Gazette on Monday was iconic: Putin touring Nazi-free Mariupol, chatting with residents, side by side with Xi’s Op-Ed. That was, in a nutshell, Moscow’s terse response to Washington’s MQ-9 Reaper stunt and the International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo court shenanigans. “Foam at the mouth” as much as you like; NATO is in the process of being thoroughly humiliated in Ukraine.

During their first “informal” meeting, Xi and Putin talked for no less than four and a half hours. At the end, Putin personally escorted Xi to his limo. This conversation was the real deal: mapping out the lineaments of multipolarity – which starts with a solution for Ukraine.

Predictably, there were very few leaks from the sherpas, but there was quite a significant one on their “in-depth exchange” on Ukraine. Putin politely stressed he respects China’s position – expressed in Beijing’s 12-point conflict resolution plan, which has been completely rejected by Washington. But the Russian position remains ironclad: demilitarization, Ukrainian neutrality, and enshrining the new facts on the ground.

In parallel, the Russian Foreign Ministry completely ruled out a role for the US, UK, France, and Germany in future Ukraine negotiations: they are not considered neutral mediators.

A multipolar patchwork quilt

The next day was all about business: everything from energy and “military-technical” cooperation to improving the efficacy of trade and economic corridors running through Eurasia.

Russia already ranks first as a natural gas supplier to China – surpassing Turkmenistan and Qatar – most of it via the 3,000 km Power of Siberia pipeline that runs from Siberia to China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province, launched in December 2019. Negotiations on the Power of Siberia II pipeline via Mongolia are advancing fast.

Sino-Russian cooperation in high-tech will go through the roof: 79 projects at over $165 billion. Everything from liquified natural gas (LNG) to aircraft construction, machine tool construction, space research, agro-industry, and upgraded economic corridors.

The Chinese president explicitly said he wants to link the New Silk Road projects to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). This BRI-EAEU interpolation is a natural evolution. China has already signed an economic cooperation deal with the EAEU. Russian macroeconomic uber-strategist Sergey Glazyev’s ideas are finally bearing fruit.

And last but not least, there will be a new drive towards mutual settlements in national currencies – and between Asia and Africa, and Latin America. For all practical purposes, Putin endorsed the role of the Chinese yuan as the new trade currency of choice while the complex discussions on a new reserve currency backed by gold and/or commodities proceed.

This joint economic/business offensive ties in with the concerted Russia-China diplomatic offensive to remake vast swathes of West Asia and Africa.

Chinese diplomacy works like the matryoshka (Russian stacking dolls) in terms of delivering subtle messages. It’s far from coincidental that Xi’s trip to Moscow exactly coincides with the 20th anniversary of American ‘Shock and Awe’ and the illegal invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq.

In parallel, over 40 delegations from Africa arrived in Moscow a day before Xi to take part in a “Russia-Africa in the Multipolar World” parliamentary conference – a run-up to the second Russia-Africa summit next July.

The area surrounding the Duma looked just like the old Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) days when most of Africa kept very close anti-imperialist relations with the USSR.

Putin chose this exact moment to write off more than $20 billion in African debt.

In West Asia, Russia-China are acting totally in synch. West Asia. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement was actually jump-started by Russia in Baghdad and Oman: it was these negotiations that led to the signing of the deal in Beijing. Moscow is also coordinating the Syria-Turkiye rapprochement discussions. Russian diplomacy with Iran – now under strategic partnership status – is kept on a separate track.

Diplomatic sources confirm that Chinese intelligence, via its own investigations, is now fully assured of Putin’s vast popularity across Russia, and even within the country’s political elites. That means conspiracies of the regime-change variety are out of the question. This was fundamental for Xi and the Zhongnanhai’s (China’s central HQ for party and state officials) decision to “bet” on Putin as a trusted partner in the coming years, considering he may run and win the next presidential elections. China is always about continuity.

So the Xi-Putin summit definitively sealed China-Russia as comprehensive strategic partners for the long haul, committed to developing serious geopolitical and geoeconomic competition with declining western hegemons.

This is the new world born in Moscow this week. Putin previously defined it as a new anti-colonial policy. It’s now laid out as a multipolar patchwork quilt. There’s no turning back on the demolition of the remnants of Pax Americana.

‘Changes that haven’t happened in 100 years’

In Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Janet Abu-Lughod built a carefully constructed narrative showing the prevailing multipolar order when the West “lagged behind the ‘Orient.’” Later, the West only “pulled ahead because the ‘Orient’ was temporarily in disarray.”

We may be witnessing a similarly historic shift in the making, trespassed by a revival of Confucianism (respect for authority, emphasis on social harmony), the equilibrium inherent to the Tao, and the spiritual power of Eastern Orthodoxy. This is, indeed, a civilizational fight.

Moscow, finally welcoming the first sunny days of Spring, provided this week a larger-than-life illustration of “weeks where decades happen” compared to “decades where nothing happens.”

The two presidents bid farewell in a poignant manner.

Xi: “Now, there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”

Putin: “I agree.”

Xi: “Take care, dear friend.”

Putin: “Have a safe trip.”

Here’s to a new day dawning, from the lands of the Rising Sun to the Eurasian steppes.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/03/ ... americana/

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US Officials Really, REALLY Want You To Know The US Is The World’s “Leader”

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In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.

Here are excerpts from his comments:

“The two countries have grown closer. But they are both countries that chafe and bristle at U.S. leadership around the world.”
“And in China’s case in particular, they certainly would like to challenge U.S. leadership around the world.“
“But these are not two countries that have, you know, decades-long experience working together and full trust and confidence. It’s a burgeoning of late based on America’s increasing leadership around the world and trying to check that.”
“Peter, these are two countries that have long chafed, as I said to Jeff — long chafed at U.S. leadership around the world and the network of alliances and partnerships that we have.”
“And we work on those relationships one at a time, because every country on the continent is different, has different needs and different expectations of American leadership.”
“That’s the power of American convening leadership. And you don’t see that power out of either Russia or China.”
“But one of the reasons why you’re seeing that tightening relationship is because they recognize that they don’t have that strong foundation of international support for what they’re trying to do, which is basically challenge American leadership around the world.”

The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.

We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.

US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.

The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”


Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.

I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.

The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.

It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no valid reason why the US needs to remain in charge of the world and can’t just let different people in different regions sort out their own affairs like they always did before. There’s no valid reason why governments need to be brandishing armageddon weapons at each other instead of collaborating peacefully in the interest of all humankind. We’re being pushed toward disaster to preserve “American leadership around the world,” and I for one do not consent to this.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/23 ... ds-leader/

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Seymour Hersh: I am very used to the stupidity of my government
By Zhao Manfeng | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-03-24 09:52

(Video at link.)

In an interview with China Daily, Seymour Hersh, a US investigative journalist who revealed that the US government is the mastermind behind the Nord Stream pipelines explosion, said that he would not be surprised at the stupidity of what the US government does when he first heard the news and confirmed by a source that the Nord Stream pipelines was bombed at order from US President Joe Biden.

Hersh also said that it was no secret that Biden wanted to bring an end to the Nord Stream, but Western media have turned a blind eye to it.

In an article published on February 8, Hersh – citing an anonymous source with direct knowledge of the operation – claimed that during the BALTOPS 22 maritime exercise, US Navy divers, operating under cover, planted remotely triggered explosives that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.

As an investigative journalist and political writer, Seymour Hersh gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret US bombing of Cambodia and the CIA's program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the US military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... b6512.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:48 pm

Biden’s Second ‘Democracy Summit’
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 28, 2023
Atilio A. Boron

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We Latin Americans know very well that if there is a government in the world that cannot give lessons on democracy, it is precisely the government of the United States

History and the present show that an imperial republic like the United States needs vassals, not partners, especially in current times in which the empire is going through its irreversible decline.


Between March 28 and 30, the Second Summit on Democracy will take place in Washington DC. Wednesday, March 29, will be the day of the plenary meeting. The event is convened by the United States government through the State Department but, as usual, it will have some “associated governments” that will also summon the meeting and whose mission is to disguise that the Summit is entirely a Washington project. The goal is crystal clear: to recover ground in the dwindling international prestige of American democracy, heavily damaged by the increasing levels of popular dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (over fifty percent of the surveyed population), as revealed by a host of public opinion polls; and by the unprecedented incidents surrounding the storming of the Capitol, the seat of the U.S. Congress, in Washington on January 6, 2021.

As announced, the Summit for Democracy has ”five co-hosts: the United States, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Zambia and representatives of their governments will officially kick off the Summit, with each co-host leader hosting a live, fully virtual, thematic.” The day before, the Department of State will host a panel session, chaired by Secretary Antony Blinken, about the need for a “Just and Lasting Peace in Ukraine” featuring President Volodymyr Zelensky as its main speaker. Supposedly, Zelensky and Secretary Blinken will discuss, alongside Foreign Ministers from a regionally diverse group of countries, the steps to be taken to reach a ceasefire and a “lasting peace” in Ukraine, although all the policies promoted by the Biden Administration run exactly in the opposite direction. Apparently, gone are the days when the European, and partly American, press characterized Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe and Zelensky himself as a despotic and equally corrupt leader. In 2015, the British newspaper The Guardian described it as such. Almost a year after the start of the war in Ukraine other press reports said that “the war with Russia hasn’t changed that.”

Unfortunately, at the time of writing these lines, the complete list of the countries invited to the Summit was unknown. However, an indication may be offered by the fact that the day after the plenary session, dedicated to digital technologies for the advancement of democracies and the dangers of digital authoritarianism, the keynote speaker will be no other than the Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, Audrey Tang. This is a frontal attack on China because the guests at the Summit are supposed to be representatives of independent countries, and Taiwan certainly is not. It is not even recognized as such by the US government itself, but the intention is clear: to promote Taiwanese separatism, harass China, and provoke it into having a military response that would then justify US aggression.

We Latin Americans know very well that if there is a government in the world that cannot give lessons on democracy, it is precisely the government of the United States. Since the beginning of the American imperial expansion the U.S., has been renowned for its permanent attacks against the establishment of any democratic government in the region. When Cuba and Puerto Rico were leading a liberation struggle against Spanish oppression, during the so-called “Spanish-American” war, the United States captured Cuba in 1898 after the Treaty of Paris and spoiled the Cuban victory. If we make a list of coups sponsored or directly carried out by the United States in our countries, we would run the risk of turning this note into a voluminous essay. We are just going to mention a few cases.

In Argentina, the bloody military coups of 1966 and 1976 were sponsored and protected by Washington. In Chile, the brutal coup and subsequent assassination of Salvador Allende, perpetrated on September 11, 1973, was directly orchestrated from Washington by President Richard Nixon himself and his National Security adviser, and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The coup d’état that took place in Brazil in 1964, and which lasted until 1985, had the enthusiastic support of Washington, as did the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, which also lasted until 1985 when Washington realized that its undisguised support for the ferocious Latin American dictatorships was damaging its international image and that the time had come to bet on democracy, but taking due precautions. We should not forget that Washington prepared an armed confrontation that lasted ten years (1979-1989) against the Sandinista government and used all the means at its disposal to destabilize the government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, in recent years

The worn-out democratic rhetoric of the United States is not enough to disguise the wicked intentions of its new strategy based on the possibilities opened by the use of “soft power” and the new devices to put pressure on progressive or left-wing governments: from the World Bank and IMF “conditionalities” to the oligopolistic control of the media and the indoctrination of judges and prosecutors to put into practice “lawfare” ploys to eliminate undesirable leaders for the empire from the field of the electoral politics, such as Lula in Brazil, Correa in Ecuador, Cristina in Argentina, Lugo in Paraguay, Zelaya in Honduras, Evo in Bolivia and just a few months ago Pedro Castillo in Peru.

History and the present show that an imperial republic like the United States needs vassals, not partners, especially in current times in which the empire is going through its irreversible decline. At times like these, democracies, as an expression of popular sovereignty and self-determination of nations, could not be more dysfunctional for the empire. That is why the Summit for Democracy will be one more farce, a propaganda montage whose real objective is to consolidate a “new cold war” divide between the friends and allies of the United States, who will be considered as democratic, and the adversaries of Washington, demonized as perverse autocracies that will be necessary to fight against by all available means.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/03/ ... cy-summit/

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The ICC Is A US-Controlled Kangaroo Court
Jacqueline Luqman 29 Mar 2023

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(Image: Bruce Petty)

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has no legitimacy. It has always acted on behalf of the U.S. and its allies.

Originally published in Hood Communist .

The Washington Post, or the Pentagon Post, as Eugene Puryear aptly named the paper this Saturday, printed a bizarre “key update ” on the official visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The update reads: “Chinese President Xi Jinping claims to have come to Moscow as a peacemaker, but talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about China’s 12-point proposal for peace on Monday appear to have yielded no progress so far.

The update goes on to say, “Beijing’s summary of discussions did not mention any progress — or whether Xi offered to act as a mediator — underscoring analysts’ view that the talks are more about deepening China-Russia ties and cementing economic deals at a moment when Beijing has massive economic and political leverage over Moscow.”

It’s almost comical how the US media frames this barely two-day-old meeting, or it would be if I didn’t know that so many millions of Americans are misled and misinformed daily by this rag.

The idea that Xi Jinping would go to Russia and tell President Putin, “Forget all the treaty violations and NATO aggression and threats to Russian sovereignty and eight years of attacks against ethnic Russian people in Donbas Vlad, be the bigger man here leave Ukraine to NATO and those Russian people to the Kyiv army.” is insultingly comical. Or comically insulting.

Because that is the inference being made here, that because Xi hasn’t convinced Putin to concede – the only conditions under which the US and NATO will accept negotiations with Russia – then the meeting between the two leaders must not only be a failure on the first day, but even worse it’s a sneaky underhanded sleight of hand trick that Xi is playing on the rest of the world to really make a bunch of slick back room economic and trade deals with Putin instead. He’s not really there for peace, the Pentagon Post claims, he’s really there to make money, and worse Xi is colluding with Putin – as another Washington Post key update claims, to position themselves as the leaders of a new global order opposed to US power.

Why it’s like these two think they’re allowed to act in the interests of their own countries without the oversight and approval of the United States…the nerve of them!

The Xi/Putin visit comes on the heels of the ridiculous arrest warrant issued by the International Kangaroo Court…I mean International Criminal Court last week. I’m sorry to insult kangaroos like that, they’re noble creatures. A Kremlin envoy to the United Nations told reporters Monday that Russia will brief the U.N. Security Council on “the real situation” about “Ukrainian children in Russia” in early April.

Ukraine says the Kremlin has abducted more than 16,000 children and taken them to Russia. But Nebenzia said Moscow has taken the children to Russia because it “wanted to spare them of the danger that military activities may bring.” He added that Russia would return the children “when conditions are safe.”

We’ve talked frequently on this show (By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik) about the 8 years that the Kyiv army bombed the eastern Ukrainian region, and during that time Kyiv has never once moved civilians in that region out of harm’s way, because the purpose was to kill as many of those people who voted to secede from Ukraine as possible, children included. So when Russian officials relocated children from that region – most of whom were orphans – and you should be asking yourself why there are so many orphaned kids, and the answer is because of the Kyiv army’s war against their own people for 8 years – they were doing what Ukraine refused to do. And the ICC is merely doing the bidding of its handlers, the US government, in issuing this spurious arrest warrant.

Meanwhile, no arrest warrant has ever been issued by the ICC for George W. Bush, not for Dick Cheney, not for Donald Rumsfeld, not Colin Powell, not Condoleeza Rice, not for a single, solitary US official or for Tony Blair, or any UK official responsible for perpetrating the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, nor for the ongoing crime committed against the Iraqi people since the 2003 invasion. Over 1 million Iraqis dead – including an estimated 500,000 children who died because of sanctions the US imposed on the country, whose deaths the late Madeleine Albright said were worth it for the US to get whatever it is they got out of that invasion, which of course was control of Iraqi oil.

And the US making a big deal about this arrest warrant is yet another example of American Hypocrisy because the US has a hate/hate relationship with the ICC. Even before the Trump administration sanctioned members of the ICC and their families to block ICC investigations into US war crimes and torture in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes in Palestine in 2020, the George W. Bush administration passed legislation prohibiting any U.S. support to the ICC and authorized the US government to use “any means necessary” to return any American citizen detained by the court, and the Bush administration strong-armed countries into signing bilateral immunity agreements, vowing that they would never surrender U.S. citizens to the ICC.

Consequently, the US government does not recognize the jurisdiction or authority of the ICC…when it is investigating the US for its crimes. But suddenly when the same entity that the US says is illegitimate claims that Russia has committed war crimes, then the US government celebrates the ironclad authority of the court. Except Russia also does not recognize the jurisdiction or authority of the ICC, and neither does China by the way, probably because they both see how it is used as a political tool by the US whenever this government feels like it.

I’m not at all saying that there were no crimes committed by Russian forces in this war. I know that Ukraine has committed crimes because bombing your own people is indeed a war crime. But the fact that the ICC hasn’t said anything about that causes me not to trust them to be a truly politically independent and unbiased adjudicating body.

And after all, the ICC refused to investigate police killings outlined in the damning 2021 Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States.

Why should I take seriously their arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin when our bodies lying in US streets from police killings don’t rise to the level of a response from them?

https://www.blackagendareport.com/icc-u ... aroo-court

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Full text: The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-03-28 13:46

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A homeless man sleeps on a sidewalk near the City Hall during heavy rain in San Francisco as atmospheric river storms hit California, the United States, on Jan 11, 2023. [Photo/VCG]

BEIJING - China on Tuesday issued "The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022."

Following is the full text of the report:

The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022

The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China

March 2023

Contents

Foreword

I. Dysfunctional Civil Rights Protection System

II. Hollowed-out American-style Electoral Democracy

III. Growing Racial Discrimination and Inequality

IV. Worsening Subsistence Crisis among U.S. Underclass

V. Historic Retrogression in Women's and Children's Rights

VI. Wanton Violation of Other Countries' Human Rights and Trampling on Justice

Foreword

The year 2022 witnessed a landmark setback for U.S. human rights. In the United States, a country labeling itself a "human rights defender," "chronic diseases" such as money politics, racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarization are rampant. Human rights legislation and justice have seen an extreme retrogression, further undermining the basic rights and freedoms of the American people.

The U.S. government has greatly relaxed gun control, resulting in high death toll from gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Bruen case in 2022 became a landmark regression in the field of gun control in the United States. Nearly half of U.S. states have relaxed gun restrictions. The United States leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide and mass shootings, with more than 80,000 people killed or injured by gun violence in 2022, the third consecutive year on record that the United States experiences more than 600 mass shootings. Gun violence has become an "American disease."

Midterm elections have become the most expensive ones in the United States, and American-style democracy has lost its popular support. The cost of elections in the United States has soared again, with cumulative spending of the 2022 midterm elections exceeding more than 16.7 billion U.S. dollars. Political donations from billionaires accounted for 15 percent of the federal total, up from 11 percent in the 2020 election cycle. "Dark money" donations manipulate U.S. elections furtively, and political polarization and social fragmentation make it difficult for the country to reach a democratic consensus. With 69 percent of Americans believing their democracy is at "risk of collapse" and 86 percent of American voters saying it faces "very serious threats," there is a general public disillusionment of American-style democracy.

Racism is on the rise and ethnic minorities suffer widespread discrimination. Hate crimes based on racial bias in the United States increased dramatically between 2020 and 2022. The racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, with 10 African-Americans killed, has shocked the world. A total of 81 percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging. African Americans are 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The sufferings caused by genocide and cultural assimilation taken by the U.S. government against Indians and other aborigines in history still persist today.

Life expectancy has plummeted, and deaths from drug abuse continue to climb. According to a report released in August 2022 by the National Center for Health Statistics under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 2.7 years to 76.1 years from 2019 to 2021, the lowest since 1996. Interest groups and politicians trade power for money, allowing drug and substance abuse to flourish. The number of Americans dying from drug and substance abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, to more than 100,000 per year. Substance abuse has become one of America's most devastating public health crises.

Women have lost constitutional protections for abortion, and children's living environment is worrying. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has ended women's right to abortion protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 50 years, which lands a huge blow to women's human rights and gender equality. In 2022, more than 5,800 children under the age of 18 got injured or killed by shooting in the United States, and the number of school shootings amounted to 302, the highest since 1970. The child poverty rate in the United States increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 16.6 percent in May 2022, with 3.3 million more children living in poverty. The United States had seen a nearly 70 percent increase in child labor violations since 2018, and registered a 26 percent increase in minors employed in hazardous occupations in fiscal year 2022.

U.S. abuse of force and unilateral sanctions has created humanitarian disasters. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has carried out military operations in 85 countries in the name of "anti-terrorism," which directly claimed at least 929,000 civilian lives and displaced 38 million people. The United States has imposed more unilateral sanctions than any other country in the world, and it still has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, resulting in the inability of those targeted to provide basic food and medicine for their people. Immigration issue has become a tool of partisan fight, and immigration farces have been staged on a large scale, making immigrants face extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. There were a record high of nearly 2.4 million migrant arrests at the nation's border in 2022, and the death toll of immigrants at its southern border reached 856, the deadliest in a single year.

The United States, founded on colonialism, racist slavery and inequality in labor, possession and distribution, has further fallen into a quagmire of system failure, governance deficits, racial divide and social unrest in recent years under the interaction of its polarized economic distribution pattern, racial conflict dominated social pattern and capital interest groups controlled political pattern.

American politicians, serving the interests of oligarchs, have gradually lost their subjective will and objective ability to respond to the basic demands of ordinary people and defend the basic rights of ordinary citizens, and failed to solve their own structural problems of human rights. Instead, they wantonly use human rights as a weapon to attack other countries, creating confrontation, division and chaos in the international community, and have thus become a spoiler and obstructor of global human rights development.

(As you might imagine there is much, much more...)

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202303/ ... b6fd3.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 02, 2023 10:07 pm

The simple reason why the US wants ‘full spectrum dominance’ of the Earth
The United States demands that the world bow down to its leadership. A failure to do so is met with the full force of the international military-industrial complex controlled by the US

March 31, 2023 by Roger McKenzie

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US troops on patrol in Iraq in 2006 (Photo: US Department of Defense)

Imagine the uproar if China or Russia—or any other country for that matter—said it aimed to exercise military control over land, sea, air, and space to protect its interests and investments.

This amazingly has been the stated United States policy since 1997.

Full spectrum dominance, as the doctrine is known, is the reason the United States behaves the way that it does on the international stage.

The United States demands that the world bow down to its leadership. A failure to do so is met with the full force of the international military-industrial complex controlled by the US government.

Enforcement has included everything from the funding of opposition forces in sovereign nations, the removal or even assassination of political leaders who refuse to toe the line, economic sanctions, and military intervention.

Of course, there are choices to be made by the United States about which approach—or combination of approaches—it might take. There are also decisions to be made about the degree of action within each approach.

But fundamentally the point is that Washington believes it has a right to inflict on the rest of the world its interpretation of democracy—which seems to essentially amount to agreeing with whatever course of action the United States wants to take.

So what is full spectrum dominance really for?

There’s a famous scene in the Oscar-winning film Reds where the great revolutionary journalist and activist John Reed, played by Warren Beatty, was asked at a dinner what the war in Mexico he had just returned from was all about. Before sitting down he said just one word: profits.

The United States is interested in safeguarding the profits of monopoly capital, which carries politicians in Washington around in its pockets like loose change.

The United States also will not tolerate others, such as China, muscling in on potential new markets or swaying people away from its sphere of influence.

China is seen as the biggest threat to the profits of the companies that currently decide pretty much what we will eat and even when we can eat it.

Anyone who expects the Chinese to simply sit back and take the provocations dealt out by the two-faced United States is living in cloud cuckoo land.

China’s State Council Information Office recently issued a report that accused the United States of being the world’s biggest offender of human rights.

In “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2022,” the Chinese government said the United States “has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, including Cuba since 1962, Iran since 1979, Syria since 2011 and Afghanistan in recent years.”

Calling the United States out as the most prolific enforcer of unilateral sanctions in the world, the report said Washington pursues power politics in the international community, frequently uses force, provokes proxy wars, and is a saboteur of world peace.

The report added that under the guise of anti-terrorism activities, the US has killed some 929,000 civilians and displaced some 38 million others in 85 countries.

Between 2017 and 2020, the United States launched 23 “proxy wars” in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region, the report stated.

The report said that violations of immigrant rights and the refusal of Washington to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp created “an ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations.”

The report slammed the United States for holding up to 780 people at Guantanamo, most of whom were held without trial for years, while subjecting them to cruel and inhumane treatment.

Essentially the United States will go to any lengths to enforce what it sees as its unipolar dominance of the world.

As far as it is concerned, “might is right,” and there are no consequences for its behavior.

There is no legal redress as the United States is not part of the International Criminal Court—which it lauds for threatening to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though Russia is also not a signatory.

It has a veto at the United Nations and much of the world relies on its military shield as well as the mighty dollar with which to trade.

Given the cards stacked against those of us who oppose US full spectrum dominance and the seemingly invincible power of the biggest bully on the planet, the question is: What can we do?

The answer to full spectrum dominance is full spectrum resistance and organizing.

It is necessary to gear our efforts away from piecemeal change and toward revolutionary transformation.

This will mean bringing together unions, climate activism, equality organizing, and a range of other social and economic movements in a serious change away from liberal posturing.

The guardians of capital are highly organized and put the resources where they need to go to protect and expand what they have. Activists generally just pretend that we are organized and fall out with each other at the first available opportunity.

I am not arrogant enough to believe I have all the answers. But what I do know is that we have to gaze beyond the Global North for what radical transformation might look like.

It really is time to shift the paradigm and bring movements together to work out how to pool our resources for real results—full spectrum resistance and organizing.

Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the Morning Star newspaper. Follow Roger on Twitter at @RogerAMck.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/03/31/ ... the-earth/

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THE "DEMOCRACY SUMMIT" DIGS ITS OWN HOLE IN THE US.
30 Mar 2023 , 2:31 p.m.

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Joe Biden during the virtual summit on democracy (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / AFP)

From March 29-30, the United States hosted the 2023 Democracy Summit, an international event co-sponsored by the Netherlands, Costa Rica, South Korea, and Zambia. On the eve of this meeting, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, offered his impressions of the event, which seeks to project itself as a "democratic renewal of the world."

When asked what he thought about the collection of American vassals, he said that it is taking place in the framework of the presidential race in the United States and that it is another opportunity to continue playing a leading role in geopolitics. What about countries that don't fold to the US agenda?

Patrushev predictively draws the panorama of the event agenda. He points out that the logic is that States assume themselves as defenders of international law and see their way of understanding the world as a rule. This is enough for them to be used as role models and with the authority to launch deliberately false accusations of war crimes and corruption against those who are not on their geopolitical footing.

As usual, he argues, the United States will also turn a blind eye to actual acts of genocide and financial fraud committed with White House approval. Promises will be made to make efforts to feed the hungry and release the wrongfully convicted, even knowing that in that country there are death sentences and many sentenced to life in prison.

He also said that it was predictable that they would defend the rights of sexual minorities and impose a "green agenda" throughout the world, which would further worsen the energy crisis in satellite countries.

THE MAIN DICTATOR OF THE WORLD
Contrary to the democratic image they want to promote, the United States is the main dictator in the world. His behavior does not admit criticism, so it is likely that in the audience there will be no one who opposes him.

The first to fall for the deception are the Americans, who like robots do not realize that what they know as democracy is nothing more than a facade of the state system to hide the contempt for the rights of ordinary citizens. Freedom of expression and self-determination are illusions within the legal and sociopolitical system of the United States, a country where not even the former president is allowed to speak on social networks and the press.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council affirms that the authorities of that country have made its economy dependent on corruption and lobbying ties that extend to the White House and the Capitol. They are not the politicians but the strategic pieces that the corporations position in the government.

How do you extend this dynamic beyond your borders? Well, making great efforts to maintain international dominance through the creation of sources of tension throughout the world. It claims to be democratic and respectful, but it has taken war to other countries, even violating sovereignties to hunt down and imprison its enemies.

He also announced that the central theme of the summit will be how kyiv survives the Russian attack and the way in which NATO helps it while turning the country into a military camp. "They send weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian troops, provide them with intelligence, including with the help of a constellation of satellites and a significant number of UAVs," he detailed.

FRAGMENT RUSSIA
He refers that his main objective is the defeat of Russia and the dismemberment of the nation since since 1945 the country has constituted a blocking stone for the imperial interests of the United States. At present, China also fulfills the same role.

"The Russian Federation not only pursues an independent policy of strengthening the multipolar world, but in many ways surpasses the United States in spiritual, moral and military terms. China is the main economic competitor of the United States. After attempts to 'repress' Russia Russia, Washington will face the PRC," says Patrushev.

Asked if he lost his fear of Russia after the nuclear practice carried out in St. Petersburg by a US strategic bomber, he said that its politicians are captives of their own propaganda. They are confident that the United States can launch a preemptive missile strike without a Russian response. "This is short-sighted stupidity, and very dangerous," she says.

He noted that his country is patient and does not intimidate anyone with its military advantage. But he has modern unique weapons capable of destroying any enemy. He referred to the advantage of not being scientifically or technologically dependent on anyone, as is the case of European countries, a situation that has made Russia refloat even with the blockade.

Regarding this criminal maneuver, he said that the economy has returned to a growth trajectory, while the country is not going to close its economy to the world. As? Integrating with sovereign countries concerned with their own prosperity, including through cooperation with Russia.

The official took a historical balance of all attempts to undermine Russian integrity by the United States and its allies: "Whether under the banners of the Poles and Sweden, or with Napoleonic eagles, under the British flag or under the Nazi swastika The result is the same: All attempts to crush Russia are futile."

A NEW FOCUS
Stability and strength in Asia is not something the United States likes very much. That is why the Indo-Pacific strategy is an attempt to create an Asian NATO. The new alliance will be another aggressive bloc directed against China and Russia, and at the same time to pacify the now independent states.

The rearmament of the Australian Navy under the new AUKUS alliance, reviving the spirit of Japanese militarism, and military support for Taiwan and South Korea are all aimed at establishing US-NATO dominance over Eurasia from its eastern flank, argues Nikolai. Patrushev.

PROPAGANDA AS A METHOD
The United States accuses Russia of causing a global famine as a result of the military operation. The Russian official is again predictive and points out that he has no doubts that this issue will be exaggerated again during the summit for democracy. Double standards are exposed when Westerners themselves block the supply of Russian grain and fertilizer abroad.

"Sometimes it seems that the West is digging itself a hole with its actions. Looking at what is happening in the European Union there is a strong feeling that a very vague future awaits it," he says.

As in other historical events, the United States is willing to sacrifice others to achieve its goals. To fight against Russia, he is ready to put not only every last Ukrainian but also every last European at the forefront.

"The paradox lies in the fact that Washington is directly interested in the collapse of the European Union to eliminate its economic competitor, to prevent Europe from flourishing through cooperation with Russia," he points out, which can be confirmed by the attack. to the Nord Stream pipelines.

Finally, Patrushev refers to internal contradictions in the United States that make it impossible to consolidate his objectives. He said there is no unity even within the US elite itself and their agendas seek the spiritual degradation of the population, which is already in a state of apathy. The individualism and consumerism nurtured in Americans will play a cruel joke on your country. To this must be added the looming economic and financial crisis.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... ro-en-eeuu

Google Translator

*********

US Democracy Summit Fans the Flame of Ideological Confrontation

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Washington, D.C., U.S. March 30, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @digiphile

Published 30 March 2023 (23 hours 16 minutes ago)

"The idea that we are going to spread democracy is just silly, because we don't have democracy to spread," said Daniel Kovalik, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

By convening the second so-called "Summit for Democracy", U.S. President Joe Biden could further split the world into opposing camps, fanning the flame of ideological confrontation that will only bring more tumult.

Unlike the inaugural summit two years ago where Washington was the lone organizer, four more co-hosts, namely Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia were handpicked by Washington for the second gathering, which weaves the rhetoric of democracy into matters of politics, the economy, social equity and technology.

CONFUSING STANDARD
While the fact that the world's four major continents have each been allocated a co-host is a deliberate arrangement designed to showcase U.S. efforts to convince nations worldwide of the merits of "democratic value" as well as the viability and reliability of "democratic institutions," the world at large may hardly buy into the ostentation, and the pageantry may well prove useless.

The announced substance of the summit put aside, the list of invitees alone has drawn a considerable amount of criticism from experts, who point to some U.S. allies being excluded while countries where democracy is "backsliding" are included.

"One problem is that the hosts may end up paying a political price for excluding some states from what is little more than a glorified talking shop," wrote Daniel Larison in an article carried by Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Larison and other experts have noticed that as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) -- hence allies of the United States, Türkiye and Hungary have for the second consecutive time been left off the list of invitees, signaling Washington's hypocritical recognition of them as allies.


Asked to explain why Ankara and Budapest were excluded, John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communication at the U.S. National Security Council, failed to provide a reason, only telling reporters at a virtual press briefing Tuesday that the United States is "very committed to furthering and strengthening our relationships with Türkiye and Hungary."

"If the hosts refuse to draw any lines about which states can participate, they open themselves up to criticism that the summit has no substance," Larison said, adding that the United States and its fellow host countries making arbitrary decisions on the selection of participants will open them up to "charges of hypocrisy and favoritism."

FORCED TO TAKE SIDES
Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov said that the ongoing summit, just like the preceding one in 2021, will yield no results of democratic advancement for the participants. He mentioned that Moscow established three flaws in the first summit based on conversations with those who participated.

"It turned out that many of them, firstly, had no idea of what the essence of Washington's undertaking was. Secondly, they were driven the importance of being in a group of 'leading democracies' of the world. Thirdly, as some diplomats put it, the path of least resistance was taken," Antonov pointed out.

"Nothing was requested, and the establishment of another forum for discussions on democratic transformations entailed no consequences for their countries.The situation with the second 'Summit' is actually the same."

William Jones, Washington bureau chief of U.S. publication Executive Intelligence Review, in an article echoed the Russian ambassador's view that participants were forced to side with the United States.

"When the United States extends an invitation, it behooves one to accept, since a refusal would result in retribution from a country that has proven it can be quite harsh in dealing with recalcitrants," Jones said.


FAILING MODEL TO FOLLOW
As regards the substance of the summit, Kirby at a press call on Monday briefed reporters on a number of deliverables that will be announced at the summit.

"The whole idea of a summit for democracy is to stand up for this very idea of democracy, to acknowledge that maintaining democratic institutions requires a whole heck of a lot of work and effort, honesty, transparency and accountability," he said.

However, transparency and accountability are exactly what is missing now in U.S. political institutions.

"We need a government that is more transparent and accountable to the people," Larison said. "Our leaders preach democracy to the rest of the world while neglecting or weakening it at home."

For Antonov, the U.S. democracy is deeply flawed. Questions arose "in principle, about the ability and largely the moral right of Washington -- dealing with many political and socio-economic controversies at home -- to impose its canons and way of life on others," he has said.

"Doesn't America have problems with racism, gun violence, corruption and social inequality? Why are approximately 40 million people living below the poverty line in the richest country in the world? Yet, the 50 wealthiest Americans are richer than half the U.S. population," the Russian envoy said.

"There is also a clear problem with the freedom of speech, evidenced eloquently by the 'cancel culture' -- cutting out people from the public sphere for dissenting views," he said.

"The idea that we are going to spread democracy is just silly, because we don't have democracy to spread," said Daniel Kovalik, an American lawyer who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

"The people in America don't think that they're being represented by their government, and they're not," he said. "We neglect our infrastructure. We neglect our people's health. Our banking system is falling apart... We have the most prisoners in the world of any country in absolute numbers and proportion of the population.".

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0010.html
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 04, 2023 3:11 pm

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| Authoritarian right wing leaders invited to the US governments 2023 Summit for Democracy | MR OnlineAuthoritarian right-wing leaders invited to the US government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy”
U.S. invites authoritarian far-right regimes to ‘Summit for Democracy’
By Ben Norton (Posted Apr 03, 2023)

Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on April 1, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |

The U.S. government organized a conference of its allies which it misleadingly called a “Summit for Democracy”, but which actually featured numerous anti-democratic, far-right regimes.

The State Department invited 120 global leaders to participate in the summit on March 29 and 30. They did so virtually, via video calls.

Several of the heads of state who spoke represent governments that even Western officials, corporate media outlets, and mainstream human rights organizations have admitted are authoritarian, including Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Andrzej Duda of Poland, and Narendra Modi of India.

The Joe Biden administration also invited Pakistan’s unelected coup regime, which came to power following a U.S.-backed regime-change operation against democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022. (Islamabad, however, decided not to attend, as it faces mass protests and instability at home.)

Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni participated in the summit as well. Meloni is a defender of former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She started her political career as the leader of the youth wing of a fascist political party founded by war criminals from Mussolini’s regime.

Meloni’s far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) still uses the same symbols and colors of Mussolini’s fascist movement. An important leader of her party has a bust of the late dictator in his house, and was investigated for doing Nazi salutes.

The Biden administration organized the first so-called “Summit for Democracy” in 2021, in attempt to unify U.S. allies in a bloc to wage a new cold war on China and Russia, which were not invited to either summit.

These intentions were made obvious when the U.S. pressured all invitees to sign a joint statement denouncing Russia over the proxy war in Ukraine. The left-wing governments in Brazil and Mexico refused to support Washington’s denunciation of Moscow.

For its part, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the summit as an attempt to “draw lines between countries in the world according to U.S. criteria and interfere in their affairs based on U.S. interests”, in a way that “reflects how arrogant, intolerant, selfish and domineering the U.S. has always been, and how it contravenes and tramples on democracy as part of the common values of humanity”.

The U.S. government exposed its cynical political designs by inviting Ukraine and Taiwan to participate in the summit, despite the fact that Taiwan island is not a country, but rather a province of the People’s Republic of China.

When the U.S. government normalized relations with China in 1972, it signed the first of three communiqués, in which it legally recognized that Taiwan is part of China.

Violating its formal diplomatic commitments, the Biden administration publicly illustrated Washington’s support for separatists in China’s Taiwan province by inviting them to both of the so-called “Summits for Democracy”.

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Ukraine’s leader Volodymy Zelensky spoke at the conference as well, in spite of his brutal attack on democracy at home. Zelensky’s regime has banned all communist and socialist parties, while imposing some of the most aggressive anti-worker legislation in the world, suspending collective bargaining rights and essentially making it illegal to form a union.

Even the New York Times reluctantly acknowledged that Zelensky’s regime has imposed authoritarian control over the media. Meanwhile, Ukrainian opposition politicians and critics have been arbitrarily arrested.

Two NATO members were not invited to the so-called “Summit for Democracy”: Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey) and Hungary. This was clearly a politically motivated sign of disapproval by the Biden administration, because the two countries have tried to balance the West against Russia, maintaining good relations with both sides.

The democratically elected socialist governments in Venezuela and Nicaragua were not invited either. Instead, Washington invited right-wing U.S.-sponsored opposition activists from both Latin American countries, including Lesther Alemán, who played a major role in a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

Also participating in the summit was the notorious CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington has used to meddle in foreign countries all across the planet, organizing regime-change operations and funding “color revolutions”.

As a key foreign-policy strategy, the Biden administration has weaponized rhetoric about “democracy” to advance U.S. geopolitical interests.

In his first State of the Union address in 2022, Biden claimed that Washington’s new cold war on China and Russia was a “battle between democracy and autocracies”.

But European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said otherwise in a speech in October, criticizing the deceptive “democracies vs. authoritarians” framing.

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1586383032411267072[/youtube]

“On our side, there are a lot of authoritarian regimes”, Borrell admitted.

“We cannot say we are the democracies, and the ones which follow us are also democracies. That is not true”, added the top EU diplomat.

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Israel’s authoritarian far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at the U.S. government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy”

One of the first speakers at Biden’s 2023 Summit for Democracy, as it opened on March 29, was the far-right leader of the Israeli apartheid regime, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has served as prime minister for more than 15 of the 27 years since 1996. Today, his far-right coalition government includes members of literal fascist parties.

All major mainstream Western media outlets have acknowledged that Netanyahu’s regime is authoritarian, including the BBC, Washington Post, New York Times, AP, Guardian, andForeign Affairs.

In fact, Netanyahu spoke at Biden’s summit while mass protests were going on in Israel against his authoritarian regime.

Israel’s most influential newspaper Haaretz—which is essentially the country’s equivalent of the New York Times, promoting a centrist liberal perspective—published an article warning, “‘Israel’s Government Has neo-Nazi Ministers. It Really Does Recall Germany in 1933′: Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman says he is astounded at how quickly Israel is hurtling toward fascism”.

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Poland’s authoritarian far-right President Andrzej Duda speaking at the U.S. government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy”

Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” also featured the far-right president of Poland, Andrzej Duda.

Many Western mainstream media outlets have admitted that Poland is run by an authoritarian regime.

Even former U.S. President Barack Obama stated in an interview on CNN in 2021 that NATO and EU members Poland and Hungary “now essentially have become authoritarian“.

However, while Poland’s far-right authoritarian regime was invited to Biden’s “Summit for Democracy”, Hungary was not. The reason why is clear: Poland is virulently anti-Russia, so it was welcomed; whereas Hungary has tried to balance good relations with both the West and Russia, so it was the only EU member that was not invited.

Mainstream NGOs that are routinely cited in the Western media to attack NATO’s adversaries have admitted that far-right authoritarianism is growing closer to home.

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe—a major civil society organization that is similar to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the United States—warned that Poland and Hungary are increasingly authoritarian. Both are “seizing further control of the justice system, civil society and media, while cutting basic human rights and fuelling divisions by scapegoating migrants and other minority groups”.

The Western government-funded International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has warned that the Polish regime is violently cracking down on protesters and arbitrarily detaining anti-fascist activists, while allowing fascist extremists to use Nazi symbols.

Duda’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party reportedly tapped the phones of opposition politicians and journalists to illegally spy on them.

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India’s authoritarian far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking at the U.S. government’s 2023 “Summit for Democracy”

Joining Netanyahu on the opening panel of Biden’s 2023 Summit for Democracy was India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Modi is a longtime member of a fascist paramilitary group, the RSS, whose early leaders were inspired by Nazi Germany, praising Adolf Hitler’s “purging the country of Semitic races” as a “good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”.

Before he became prime minister, Modi governed the state of Gujarat, where high school textbooks honored “Hitler, the Supremo” and the “Internal Achievements of Nazism”.

As governor of Gujarat in 2002, Modi oversaw a massive pogrom, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed. (As prime minister, Modi censored a documentary exposing his role in the massacre.)

India’s far-right ruling party, BJP, promotes an extreme Hindu-nationalist ideology that sees Muslims and other religious minorities as inferior, second- or third-class citizens, and heavily discriminates against them.

Some of Modi’s political allies have openly called for overturning India’s secular constitution and turning the state into a “Hindu rashtra“: a theocratic regime.

In fact, just a few days before Modi spoke at the so-called “Summit for Democracy”, his government launched an authoritarian attack on the leader of India’s political opposition, Rahul Gandhi.

On March 23, Gandhi was expelled from India’s parliament and sentenced to two years in prison over fraudulent charges of defamation, due to a comment Gandhi made in 2019 in which he referred to Prime Minister Modi and his wealthy oligarch allies as “thieves”.

The politically motivated charges seek to bar Gandhi from office, effectively paving the way for BJP and far-right Hindu nationalists to hand themselves victory in the upcoming 2024 election, without significant opposition.

Many mainstream media outlets have acknowledged that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, including the New York Times, the BBC, NBC News, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, and The Diplomat.

But Modi was eagerly welcomed at Biden’s “Summit for Democracy”, because the United States is desperate to recruit India for its new cold war on China, and hopes to weaken New Delhi’s positive relations with Russia.

India is a member of the BRICS system, but it joined before Modi, under the previous government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of the Indian National Congress party. When Modi rose to power (along with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil), former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed that Washington tried to use these two far-right leaders to disrupt and divide the BRICS system.


Former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar has cautioned that India is the weakest link in the BRICS system, because its government supports Washington’s “so-called ‘rules-based order’, which is a metaphor for the political ideology of the U.S. as the dominant state and “lone superpower” in the 1990s”.

BRICS faces a paradox that, while it grows, it also fails internal conflicts, “and the main reason for this is India’s unwillingness to work with China as leaders of economic growth”, Bhadrakumar wrote.

Modi’s “India feels uneasy that the centre of gravity in BRICS is poised to shift further to the left of centre”, he said, and,

Being an acolyte of the U.S.-led ‘rules-based order’, India faces the spectre of isolation.

The United States sees these contradictions, and hopes to exploit them to its advantage. That explains why India was invited to the so-called “Summit for Democracy”, despite being overtly anti-democratic.

The presence of so many authoritarian, far-right leaders clearly demonstrated the cynical political goals behind Washington’s Summit for Hypocrisy.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/03/u-s-inv ... democracy/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 14, 2023 2:35 pm

If the U.S. Can’t Boss the World, It Will Spitefully Destroy It
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 13, 2023 0

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[Source: Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader, Cartoonists Rights Network International; tunnelwall.blogspot.com]

Unable to accept the reality of a growing multipolar world order, U.S. elites are willing to risk nuclear war.
In May 2022, Henry Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where he urged the Biden administration to seek a peace agreement in Ukraine that satisfies the Russians because “pursuing the war beyond this point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.”

Kissinger in his speech further reflected back on his experience negotiating détente with Beijing in the 1970s, noting that the potentially adversarial aspect of the U.S.-China relationship should be mitigated and common interests should be pursued and upheld. “The U.S.,” he says, “must realize that China’s strategic and technical competence has evolved. Diplomatic negotiations must be sensitive, informed and unilaterally strive for peace.”

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Henry Kissinger speaking at the World Economic Forum in May 2022 as Klaus Schwab looks on. A lifelong hawk, Kissinger has changed his tune and is promoting a message of peace. [Source: weforum.org]

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[Source: pristineauction.com]

Kissinger was a hawk throughout his career, supporting escalation of the Korean and Vietnam Wars and, in 1957, publishing a book sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations advocating for the utility of what he called “restricted nuclear war.”

Fashioning himself as a modern-day Metternich (Austrian practitioner of realpolitik), Kissinger raised the question in that book of whether the USSR “did not have more to lose from an all-out war than we did.” Be that as it may, he said, “our announced reluctance to engage in all out war gave the Soviet bloc a psychological advantage.”[1]

Kissinger’s change of face has unfortunately come too late to alter U.S. foreign policy.

At 99, he no longer has influence in Washington, which is dominated by neo-conservative and liberal war hawks who have grown ever more aggressive and reckless in provoking conflicts with two nuclear armed powers at the same time.

The country’s growing rapacious intent for war was apparent during the May 15, 2022, segment of NBC’s Meet the Press, which simulated a U.S. war against China over Taiwan.

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[Source: mronline.org]

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by Vijay Prashad, John Bellamy Foster, John Ross and Deborah Veneziale[Source: nyupress.org]

Like a Cornered Dog with Sharp Teeth
Monthly Review has published an important new book, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective, that helps place Washington’s increasingly dangerous and reckless foreign policies in historical context.

A key theme is that Washington is behaving like a wounded and cornered dog with sharp teeth.

With its economy reeling, the country’s oligarchic elite is increasingly nervous and jealous about a rising China and its alliance with Russia.

Growing Eurasian integration further threatens to undercut American influence and power in a region that imperial planners believe the U.S. needs to control to achieve global domination.

Following the end of the Cold War, defense intellectual Paul Wolfowitz drafted an influential policy blueprint (“Defense Policy Guidance”) that considered expanding U.S. military power into the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and saw weakening Russia as key to establishing a unipolar world order led by the U.S.

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[Source: shoestring911.blogspot.com]

The integration of Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Western sphere was to be the culmination of this project, which has been thwarted to a large extent by Vladimir Putin and his nationalistic policies.

Regime-Change Russia, Target China
John Ross, a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, emphasizes in his essay in Washington’s New Cold War that the U.S. lured Russia into a conflict in Ukraine by launching a coup d’état in February 2014 against a democratically elected pro-Russian leader and then building up Ukraine’s military as it attacked the people of eastern Ukraine who were more oriented toward Russia and strove for autonomy.

The Ukrainians have been used as cannon fodder by the U.S., whose overarching aim is to weaken Putin’s regime by a) bogging him down in a quagmire; b) ratcheting up sanctions that ruin Russia’s economy; and c) sustaining an information war directed against him.

Ideally, as the Russian people rise up, the U.S. could help “install a government in Moscow which no longer defends Russia’s national interests [like that led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin]—and one which is hostile to China and subordinate to the U.S.”[2]

“If that were achieved,” Ross writes, “not only would China face a greatly increased military threat from the U.S., but its long northern border with Russia would become a strategic threat.”

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John Ross [Source: theguardian.com]

Following this up, Ross quotes Sergei Glazyev, a Russian commissioner on the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union, who said: “After failing to weaken China head-on through a trade war, the Americans shifted the main blow to Russia, which they see as a weak link in the global geopolitics and economy. The Anglo-Saxons are trying to implement their eternal Russophobic ideas to destroy our country, and at the same time to weaken China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and the PRC is too tough for the United States.”

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Sergei Glazyev [Source: spisok-putina.org]

Old Cold War Versus New
Ross interestingly compares the economic and military positions of the U.S. during what he calls the “old Cold War,” lasting roughly from 1946 to 1991, to the “new Cold War” in the present.

In 1950, the U.S. accounted for 27.3% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) compared to 9.6% for the Soviet Union. Today, the figure is between 15 and 25%. China’s economic growth has for some time been much faster than that of the U.S. and its economy is already 18% larger than the U.S. and projected to be 35% larger by 2026.

China is now the world’s largest manufacturing power with a share of global manufacturing 70% larger than the U.S. In 2021, China’s trade in goods outpaced the U.S. by 31% and its exports were 91% higher.

Image
[Source: eoi.es]

The U.S. is now far in the lead in only one area—military spending.

And U.S. leaders appear increasingly willing to unleash the military because they cannot accept a new multipolar world order in which the U.S. is not the pre-eminent economic power.

The sabotage of the Nord Stream II pipeline is an example of the terrorist tactics adopted by the Biden administration to try to sustain U.S. economic pre-eminence. With Russia’s economy cut off from Germany, Ross points out that, by 2026, the U.S. is expected to become Germany’s top liquefied natural gas supplier.

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Sign condemning the Biden administration’s role in blowing up the Nord Stream II pipeline, which has helped benefit U.S. liquefied natural gas suppliers. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
Who Is Leading the United States to War?
Deborah Veneziale’s essay, “Who is leading the United States to war,” includes an interesting discussion of the class interests driving aggressive U.S. policies in the new Cold War.

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A Venice-based journalist, Veneziale suggests that the majority of America’s business elite seeks the overthrow of the Chinese communist government and its replacement with a neo-liberal one that would allow for greater U.S. economic penetration of China.

U.S. tech giants such as Google, Amazon, IBM and Facebook are particularly hostile to China where they have virtually no market, but would like to obtain one under a new regime.

Veneziale writes that “Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and Executive Chairman of Google, led the establishment of the U.S. government’s Defense Innovation Unit in 2016 and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018. His fervent promotion of the ‘China threat’ theory reflects the prevailing opinion of the U.S. tech community, which also shapes public discourse.”

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Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, is a China hawk. [Source: researchsnipers.com]

According to Veneziale, many of the Big Tech companies have formed close bonds with the U.S. military, signing thousands of contracts worth tens of billions of dollars in recent decades while also collecting data in the vast U.S. intelligence empire. Consequently, they are keen to embrace gargantuan military and intelligence agency budgets that are justified under the guise of the New Cold War.

The weakening of domestic resistance to U.S. militarism has resulted from the abolition of the draft and distancing of war from the public because of the reliance on private military contractors and sophisticated military technologies like drones. Of the more than 241,000 people killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, only one percent were U.S. military personnel.

Trump and other Republicans have effectively directed the lower-middle class’s resentment of the deteriorating economic and political situation toward China, whereas Obama, Clinton and Biden and the Democrats have done the same with the upper-middle class and Russia. The political climate in the U.S. increasingly resembles the McCarthyist period of the 1950s consequently, and in certain ways that of Germany in the early 1930s.

Notes on Exterminism
The final essay in Washington’s New Cold War is by Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, who warns of the twin threats of climate catastrophe and nuclear armaggedon that 21st century capitalism has produced.

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John Bellamy Foster [Source: greattransition.org]

Foster reminds readers of the prognosis by scientists in the early 1980s that, if nuclear weapons were again unleashed, they could reduce the Earth’s temperature considerably by causing mega-fires in cities that would release soot and smoke into the atmosphere, which would block solar radiation in a process known as nuclear winter.[3]

The fear of this coming to pass had helped to ignite a strong movement to dismantle nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s that is urgently needed today—as the U.S. government embarks on a massive expansion of its nuclear weapons program and tears up nuclear arms control agreements, like the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that Donald Trump abrogated in 2019.

The Biden administration, like its predecessors, is committed to nuclear dominance over Russia and China and threatens nuclear first-use to decapitate its rivals’ arsenals.

This has prompted Russia and China to push ahead of the U.S. in the development of hypersonic missiles that can maneuver aerodynamically, and anti-satellite counterspace weapons designed to remove the U.S. advantage of high precision nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.

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[Source: theclever.com]

According to Foster, the search for nuclear primacy is leading to an insane arms race that threatens global omnicide—a threat magnified by U.S. interference in Ukraine and Taiwan.

The only solution that he sees is a socialist revolution that would establish a government not beholden to a tiny elite intent on sustaining its enormous wealth and privilege no matter what the human cost.


1.Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, foreword by Gordon Dean, published for the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957), 43, 47, 49. ↑

2.Alexei Navalny has been fingered as Putin’s hoped-for replacement, though he has very limited popular support within Russia and is a crook, so they had to concoct a fake story of him being poisoned and turn him into a martyr by having him sent to jail as a “political prisoner.” ↑

3.Foster discusses how the power elite in the U.S. saw warnings about a nuclear winter as a direct attack on the nuclear armaments industry and Pentagon, and efforts of the Reagan administration to create a space-based nuclear defense shield known as Star Wars. They responded by engaging in a campaign of denialism similar to the later campaign denying the existence of global warming. ↑

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The United States Is Waging a New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective
SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

Contents
Introduction by Vijay Prashad
What Is Propelling the United States into Increasing International Military Aggression? by John Ross (Luo Siyi)
Who Is Leading the United States to War? by Deborah Veneziale
“Notes on Exterminism” for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements by John Bellamy Foster


Tricontinental Institute, Monthly Review Press and NoColdWar logos

Introduction
Vijay Prashad

At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos (Switzerland) on May 23, 2022, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made some remarks about Ukraine that struck a nerve. Rather than be caught up “in the mood of the moment,” Kissinger said, the West—led by the United States—needs to enable a peace agreement that satisfies the Russians. “Pursuing the war beyond [this] point,” Kissinger said, “would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.” Most of the commentary from the Western foreign policy establishment rolled their eyes and dismissed Kissinger’s comments. Kissinger, no peacenik, nonetheless indicated the great danger of escalation towards not only the establishment of a new iron curtain around Asia but perhaps open—and lethal—warfare between the West and Russia as well as China. This sort of unthinkable outcome was too much, even for Henry Kissinger, whose boss, former President Richard Nixon, spoke frequently of the Madman Theory of international relations; Nixon told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman that he had his “hand on the nuclear button” to terrify Ho Chi Minh into capitulation.

During the lead-up to the U.S.’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, I spoke to a senior member of the U.S. State Department who told me that the prevailing theory in Washington amounts to a simple slogan: short-term pain for long-term gain. He explained that the general view is that the nation’s elites are willing to tolerate short-term pain for other countries—and perhaps for working people in the United States, who could experience economic difficulties due to the disruptions and carnage created by war. However, if all goes well, this price will result in long-term gain as the United States would be able to maintain what it has sought to maintain since the end of the Second World War, which is primacy. If all goes well is the premise that sent shivers down my back as he spoke, but what rattled me just as much was the callousness about who must face the pain and who would enjoy the gain. It was quite cynically said in Washington that it was worth the price that Iraqis and working-class U.S. soldiers be negatively impacted (and die), so long as large oil and financial companies could enjoy the fruits of a conquered Iraq. This attitude—short term pain, long-term gain—is the defining hallucination of the elites in the United States, who are unwilling to tolerate the project of building human dignity and the longevity of nature.

Short term pain, long-term gain defines the dangerous escalation by the United States and its Western allies against Russia and China. What is striking about the posture of the United States is that it seeks to prevent a historical process that seems inevitable, which is the process of Eurasian integration. After the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the major credit crisis in the Western banking sector, the Chinese government, alongside other Global South countries, pivoted to build platforms that were not dependent upon the markets of North America and Europe. These platforms included the creation of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in 2009 and the announcement of One Belt, One Road (later the Belt and Road Initiative or BRI) in 2013. Russia’s energy supply and its massive metal and mineral holdings, as well as China’s industrial and technological capacity, drew many countries into association with the BRI despite their political orientation, with Russia’s export of energy undergirding this association. These countries included Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, and Portugal, while Germany is now China’s largest trading partner in goods.

The historical fact of Eurasian integration threatened the primacy of the United States and of the Atlantic elites. It is this threat that drives the dangerous attempt by the United States to use any means to “weaken” both Russia and China. Old habits continue to dominate in Washington, which has long sought nuclear primacy to negate the theory of détente. The United States has developed a nuclear capacity and posture that would allow it to destroy the planet to maintain its hegemony. The strategies to weaken Russia and China include an attempt to isolate these countries through the escalation of the U.S.-imposed hybrid war (such as sanctions and the information war) and a desire to dismember these countries and then dominate them in perpetuity.

The three essays in this volume closely and rationally analyze the longer-term trends that have now manifested in Ukraine.

John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, catalogued the “escalation domination” theory of the U.S. establishment, which has been willing to risk nuclear winter—which means annihilation—to hold onto primacy. Despite the actual numbers of nuclear weapons held by Russia and the United States, the latter has developed an entire counterforce architecture that it believes can destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons and then pulverize these countries into submission. This fantasy emerges not only in the turgid documents of U.S. policy makers, but it also appears occasionally in the popular press, where arguments are made about the importance of a nuclear attack against Russia.

Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, excavates the social world of militarism in the United States, looking at how the various factions of the U.S. political elite have come together to support this strategy of confrontation against Russia and China. The intimate world of think tanks and arms production companies, of politicians and their scribes, has negated the constitutional protections of checks and balances. There is a rush to conflict so that the U.S. elites can protect their extraordinary control over global social wealth (the combined net worth of the richest 400 U.S. citizens is now close to $3.5 trillion, while the global elites, many of them from the United States, have hoarded nearly $40 trillion in illicit tax havens).

John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective, writes that the United States has qualitatively escalated its military assault on the planet through the conflict in Ukraine. This war is dangerous because it shows that the United States is willing to directly confront Russia, a major power, and that it is willing to escalate its conflict with China by “Ukrainizing” Taiwan. What can constrain the United States, Ross argues, is China’s resilience and its commitment to defending its sovereignty and its project, as well as the growing annoyance in the Global South against the U.S.’s imposition of its foreign policy objectives. Most countries in the world do not see the Ukraine War as their conflict since they are gripped with the need to address broader dilemmas of humanity. It is telling that the head of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, said on May 25, 2022 that Africa has become “the collateral victim of a distant conflict, that between Russia and Ukraine.” The conflict is distant not only in terms of space, but also in terms of the political objectives of countries in Africa, as well as in Asia and Latin America.

This study is jointly produced by Monthly Review, No Cold War, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. We invite you to read it, share it with friends, and discuss it wherever you get the opportunity. Precious human life and the longevity of the planet are at stake. It is impossible to ignore these facts. Most of the people of the world would like to get along with our real problems. We do not want to be dragooned into a conflict that is driven by a parochial desire by the Western elite to maintain their preponderant power. We affirm life.




What Is Propelling the United States into Increasing International Military Aggression?
John Ross


Introduction
The events leading to the Ukraine War represent a qualitative acceleration of a more than two-decade-long trend in which the United States has escalated its military aggression on an international level. Before the Ukraine War, the United States carried out military confrontations only against developing countries, which had far weaker armed forces and did not possess nuclear weapons: the bombing of Serbia in 1999, the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, and the bombing of Libya in 2011. However, the U.S. threat to extend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into Ukraine, which is the main cause of the war, represents something fundamentally different. The United States was aware that extending NATO into Ukraine would directly confront the national interests of Russia, a country with large military forces and an enormous nuclear arsenal. Though it would cross Russia’s red lines, the United States was ready to take this risk.

The United States has not (yet) committed its own soldiers to the war in Ukraine, stating that this would threaten a world war and risk nuclear catastrophe. But it is, in fact, engaging in a proxy war against Russia. Not only has it insisted on leaving open the possibility that Ukraine could join NATO, but it trained Ukraine’s army in the lead up to the war and has now supplied massive amounts of military weapons and passed satellite and other intelligence information to the country. So far, U.S. aid to Ukraine has amounted to some $50 billion.



How the United States Pushed Ukraine into the War
The United States and its allies have been preparing Ukraine for war since at least 2014, such as by sending hundreds of instructors to train Ukraine’s military. This is similar to its approach during the Gulf War in Iraq in 1990, reflecting a model that Washington appears to be using to achieve its geopolitical goals. Russia was purposefully lured into the situation in Ukraine beginning with the 2014 coup, when anti-Russian forces took power in Kiev, backed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis as well as by the United States. At that time, the Ukrainian army was not a powerful military force, having suffered considerably following the “reforms” launched in 1991, after the collapse of the United Socialist Soviet Republic (U.S.S.R.). Decades of neglect and underfunding led to decaying military infrastructure and equipment, along with the depletion of morale among officers and soldiers. As Vyacheslav Tetekin, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (K.P.R.F.), puts it, “The Ukrainian army did not want [to] and could not fight.”

After the 2014 coup, state spending was diverted away from improving social welfare and redeployed toward building up the military. From 2015–2019, Ukraine’s military budget increased from $1.7 billion to $8.9 billion, constituting 6% of the country’s GDP in 2019. Measured as a percentage of its GDP, Ukraine spent three times more on its military than most developed countries in the West. Extensive funds were poured into restoring and modernizing the country’s military hardware, and ultimately re-establishing the military’s combat capability.

During the 2014–15 war against Donbass (the Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine), Ukraine had little air combat support, as nearly all combat aircraft were in need of repair. However, by February 2022, the Air Force was equipped with approximately 150 fighters, bombers, and attack aircraft. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces also expanded dramatically. It is important to note that, at the end of 2021, remuneration for soldiers increased three-fold, according to Tetekin’s data. This strengthening of military power alongside powerful fortifications erected near Donbass indicates the U.S. intention to initiate conflict in the region.

However, despite these preparations for war, the Ukrainian army was unable to seriously contest with Russia. The balance of forces was clearly not in favor of Kiev. This did not matter to the United States, which sought to use Ukraine as cannon fodder against Russia. According to Tetekin, “the United States planned two options for the new, militarized Ukraine… The first one was to conquer Donbass and invade Crimea. The second option was to provoke Russia’s armed intervention.”

In December 2021, aware of the growing danger it faced from Ukraine under U.S. influence, Russia sought a set of security guarantees from NATO to defuse the crisis. In particular, Russia demanded that NATO end its eastward expansion, including membership of Ukraine. “The West… ignored these demands,” Tetekin writes, “knowing that preparations for the invasion of Donbass [were] in full swing. Most combat-ready units of the Ukrainian Army, numbering up to 150 thousand people, were concentrated close to Donbass. They could break the resistance of local troops within days, with the complete destruction of Donetsk and Lugansk and [the] death of thousands.”1



Ukraine Is a Qualitative Escalation of Military Aggression by the United States
It is therefore clear from both the fundamental political facts—the U.S.’s insistence on Ukraine’s “right” to enter NATO—and the military facts—the U.S. build-up of Ukraine’s armed forces—that the United States was preparing a confrontation in Ukraine, even though this would inevitably involve a direct clash with Russia. Consequently, in assessing the Ukraine crisis, it is important to note that the United States was prepared to escalate its military threats from simply those against developing countries—always unjust but not directly risking military conflicts with great powers or world wars­—to aggression against very strong states such as Russia, which do risk global military conflict. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze what creates this escalating U.S. military aggression. Is it temporary, after which the United States will resume a more conciliatory course, or is increasing military escalation a long-term trend in U.S. policy?

This is, of course, of utmost importance for all countries, but particularly for China, itself a powerful state. To take only one key example, in parallel with escalating U.S. aggression against Russia, the United States has not merely imposed tariffs against China’s economy and carried out a systematic international campaign to exploit the situation in Xinjiang for its own foreign policy agenda; it has also attempted to undermine the One China policy regarding Taiwan Province.

Among the United States’ actions regarding Taiwan Province:

For the first time since the commencement of United States-China diplomatic relations, President Biden invited a representative of Taipei to the inauguration of a U.S. president.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi—the third-highest ranking U.S. official in order of presidential succession—visited Taipei on August 2, 2022.
The United States has called for Taipei’s participation in the UN.
The United States has intensified sales of military armaments and equipment to the island.
U.S. delegations visiting Taipei have increased.
The United States has increased its military deployment in the South China Sea and has regularly sent U.S. warships through the Taiwan Strait.
U.S. Special Operations Forces have trained Taiwanese ground troops as well as Taiwanese Navy sailors.
As is the case with Ukraine and Russia, the United States is fully conscious that the One China policy affects China’s most fundamental national interests, and it has been the basis of U.S.-China relations for the fifty years since Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing. To abandon it crosses China’s red lines. It is therefore crystal clear that the United States is attempting in a confrontational way to undermine the One China policy in the same way that it deliberately decided to cross Russia’s red lines in Ukraine.

Regarding the question of whether these U.S. provocations against both China and Russia are temporary, long term, or even permanent, the clear conclusion of this author is that the trend of U.S. military escalation will continue. However, given that such an issue, potentially involving wars, is of utmost seriousness and has extremely major practical consequences, exaggeration and mere propaganda are unacceptable. The aim here is therefore to present in a factual, objective, and calm way the reasons why the United States will attempt to further escalate its military aggression over the coming period. In addition, I will ascertain which trends may serve to counteract this dangerous U.S. policy and which may exacerbate it.



The Economic and Military Position of the United States during the “Old Cold War” and the “New Cold War”
Reduced to the most essential facts, the key forces that have driven this escalating U.S. policy of military aggression, which has now lasted more than two decades, are clear. They are, first, the permanent loss of the overwhelming weight of the U.S. economy in global production, and, second, the preponderance of U.S. military power and spending. This asymmetry creates a very dangerous period for humanity, one in which the U.S. may attempt to compensate for its relative economic decline through its use of military force. This helps explain U.S. military attacks on developing countries, as well as its escalating confrontation with Russia in Ukraine. An important question is whether this U.S. military aggression will increase further to include a growing confrontation with China, even to the point of a willingness to consider a world war. To answer this question, it is necessary to make an accurate analysis of the United States’ economic and military situation.

To start with the economy, in 1950, near the commencement of the first Cold War, the United States accounted for 27.3 percent of the world GDP. In comparison, the U.S.S.R., the largest socialist economy of that period, accounted for 9.6 percent of world GDP. In other words, the U.S. economy was nearly three times larger than the Soviet economy.2 During the entire post-Second World War period (the first Cold War), the U.S.S.R. never came close to the U.S.’s GDP, equaling only 44.4 percent of it in 1975. That is, even at the peak of the U.S.S.R.’s relative economic achievement, the U.S. economy was still more than twice the size of the Soviet economy. Throughout the “Old Cold War,” the United States enjoyed a significant economic lead over the U.S.S.R., at least in terms of conventional measures of output.

Turning to the present situation, the United States accounts for considerably less of the global GDP than it did in 1950, ranging from roughly 15 to 25 percent depending on how it is measured. China, the main economic rival of the United States today, has gotten much closer to parity with the U.S. economy. Even at market exchange rates, which oscillate somewhat independently of actual outputs with currency fluctuations, China’s GDP is already 74 percent that of the United States’, a far higher level than the U.S.S.R. ever achieved. Furthermore, China’s economic growth rate has for some time been much faster than that of the United States, meaning that it will continue to close in on the latter.

Calculated in purchasing power parities (PPPs, which account for countries’ different price levels), the measure used by Angus Maddison and the IMF, by 2021, the United States accounted for only 16 percent of the world economy—that is, 84 percent of the world economy is outside of the United States. By the same measure, China’s economy is already 18 percent larger than that of the United States. By 2026, according to International Monetary Fund PPP projections, China’s economy will be at least 35 percent larger than that of the United States. The economic gap between China and the United States is far closer than anything the U.S.S.R. ever achieved.

Taking into account other factors, no matter how they are measured, China has become by far the world’s largest manufacturing power. In 2019, the latest available data point, China accounted for 28.7 percent of world manufacturing production, compared to 16.8 percent for the United States. In other words, China’s global share of manufacturing production was more than 70 percent higher than that of the United States. The U.S.S.R., on the other hand, never came close to overtaking the United States in manufacturing production.

Turning to trade in goods, the defeat of the United States by China in the trade war launched by Trump is even somewhat humiliating for him and the country. In 2018, China already traded more goods than any other country, though its trade in goods was only around 10 percent larger than that of the United States at that time. By 2021, China’s trade in goods outpaced the U.S. by 31 percent. The situation was even worse for the United States in terms of the export of goods: in 2018, China’s exports were 58 percent higher than those of the U.S., and, by 2021, China’s exports were 91 percent higher. In summary, not only has China become by far the world’s largest goods-trading nation, but the United States has suffered a clear defeat in the trade war launched by the Trump and Biden administrations.

Even more fundamental from a macroeconomic viewpoint is China’s lead in savings (household, business, and state), the source of real capital investment and the driving force of economic growth. According to the latest available data in 2019, China’s gross capital savings were, in absolute terms, 56 percent higher than those of the United States—the equivalent of $6.3 trillion, compared to $4.03 trillion. However, this figure greatly understates China’s lead: once depreciation is taken into account, China’s net annual capital creation was 635 percent higher than that of the United States—the equivalent of $3.9 trillion, compared to $0.6 trillion. In summary, China is greatly adding to its capital stock each year, while the United States, in comparative terms, is adding little.

The net result of these trends is that China has overwhelmingly outperformed the United States in terms of economic growth, not merely in the entire four-decade period since 1978, as is well known, but continuing into the recent period. In inflation adjusted prices, since 2007 (the year before the international financial crisis), the U.S. economy has grown by 24 percent, while China’s economy has grown by 177 percent—that is, China’s economy has grown more than seven times faster than the U.S. economy. On the terrain of relatively peaceful competition, China is winning.3

The U.S. lead in productivity, technology, and company size means that, overall, its economy is still stronger than China’s, but the gap between the two countries is far narrower than was the case between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Furthermore, whatever one might say are the exact relative economic strengths of the two global giants, it clear that the United States has lost its global economic predominance. From a purely economic standpoint, we are already in a global era of multipolarity.



The U.S. Military in a Moment of Economic Decline
These economic setbacks for the United States have led some, particularly in a few circles in the West, to believe that the defeat of the United States is inevitable or has already occurred. A similar view has been expressed by a small number of people in China who take the view that China’s comprehensive strength has already overtaken that of the United States. These views are incorrect. They forget, in V.I. Lenin’s famous words, that “politics must take precedence over economics, that is the ABC of Marxism,” and, regarding politics, that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” in the famous dictum of Chairman Mao. The fact that the United States is losing its economic superiority does not mean that it will simply allow this economic trend to peacefully continue: to presume that this is the case would be to make the mistake of placing economics before politics. On the contrary, the fact that the United States is losing ground economically both to China and to other countries is pushing it toward military and military-related political means to overcome the consequences of its economic defeats.

More precisely, the danger to all countries is that the United States has not lost military supremacy. In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than that of the next nine countries combined. Only in one area, nuclear weapons, is U.S. strength roughly equaled by another country, Russia, which is due to Russia’s inheritance of nuclear weapons from the U.S.S.R. The exact numbers of nuclear weapons held by countries in general are state secrets, but, as of 2022, according to a leading Western estimate by the Federation of American Scientists, Russia possesses 5,977 nuclear weapons, while the United States has 5,428. Russia and the United States each have about 1,600 active deployed strategic nuclear warheads (though the United States has far more nuclear weapons than China).4 Meanwhile, in the field of conventional weapons, U.S. spending is far greater than that of any other country.

This divergence in the United States’ position in economic and military spheres underlies its aggressive policy and creates the distinction between its economic and military positions in the present “New Cold War” compared to the “Old Cold War” waged against the U.S.S.R. In the Old Cold War, U.S. and U.S.S.R. military strengths were approximately equal, but, as already noted, the U.S. economy was much larger. Therefore, in the Old Cold War, the U.S. strategy was to attempt to shift issues onto an economic terrain. Even Reagan’s military buildup in the 1980s was not intended to be used to wage war against the U.S.S.R., but rather to engage it in an arms race that would damage the Soviet economy. Consequently, despite tension, the Cold War never turned to a hot war. The U.S.’s present situation is the opposite: its relative economic position has weakened tremendously, but its military power is great. Therefore, it attempts to move issues to the military terrain, which explains its escalating military aggression and why this is a permanent trend.

This means that humanity has entered a very dangerous period. The United States might be losing in peaceful economic competition, but it still retains a military lead over China. The temptation is then for the United States to use “direct” and “indirect” military means to attempt to halt China’s development.



The Direct and Indirect Use of U.S. Military Strength
The U.S. employs both “direct” and “indirect” means to display its military strength, which are far more expansive than the most extreme “direct” possibility of a frontal war against China. Some of these approaches are already in use, while others are being discussed. The former includes, for example:

subordinating other countries to the U.S. military and attempting to pressure these countries to adopt more hostile economic policies towards China, as is the case in relation to Germany and the European Union.
attempting to overcome the multipolar economic character of the world, which has already been established, instead creating alliances dominated in a unilateral way by the United States. This is clearly the case with NATO, the Quad (United States, Japan, Australia, India), and in relation to some other nations.
attempting to force countries that have good economic relations with China to weaken these relations. This is particularly evident with Australia and is now being attempted elsewhere.
Meanwhile, approaches that are being discussed include the possibility of waging wars against allies of China and Russia and attempting to draw China into a “limited” war with the United States regarding Taiwan Province.

An example of the U.S.’s integrated use of both direct and indirect military pressure was given by Financial Times chief U.S. political commentator, Janan Ganesh, following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, who explained how “America will be the ultimate ‘winner’ of the Ukrainian crisis.” Within three days of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Ganesh writes, Germany expedited the construction of the country’s first two liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. By 2026, the U.S. will likely become Germany’s top LNG supplier, as it is closer both geographically and politically, thereby eliminating German dependence on Russian energy imports. Ganesh also argues that Germany’s pledge to increase its defense budget will also benefit the U.S. because Germany would in turn “share more of NATO’s financial and logistical burden” that is currently held by the U.S. Lastly, he points to what could be a massive advance for the U.S.:

A Europe that is more tethered to America and at the same time less of a drain on it: no Kissinger could have schemed what the Kremlin is poised to achieve through accident. Far from ending the US turn to Asia, the war in Ukraine might be the event that enables it.

As for that part of the world, if the Chinese aim is to exorcise at least the Pacific Rim of US influence, the past six weeks have been an education in the size of the task. Japan could hardly be doing more to side with Kyiv, and therefore with Washington.5

In short, the United States used its military pressure to increase the economic subordination of Germany and Japan. Though many other variants can be envisaged, their common feature is that the United States uses its military strength to attempt to compensate for its weakened economic position. Understood in this way, it is clear that the United States has already embarked on this fundamental policy of directly and indirectly using its military strength.

Since China is experiencing more rapid economic development than the United States, it is likely that its military strength will eventually become its equal. However, it would take years for China to build a nuclear arsenal equivalent to that of the United States, even if China decided to embark on such a policy. It would likely take even longer to create conventional armaments equivalent to those of the United States given the enormous technological development and training of personnel required for such advanced air and naval forces and much else. Therefore, the United States will have stronger armed forces than China for a very significant number of years, creating the permanent temptation for the United States to attempt to use military means to compensate for its declining economic position.



The Significance of the War in Ukraine
Two fundamental lessons can be drawn from the events leading to the war in Ukraine.

First, it confirms that it is pointless to ask the United States for compassion. After the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution in 1991, for seventeen years Russia pursued a policy of attempting to have friendly relations with the United States. Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia was humiliatingly subordinated to the United States. During the early period of Putin’s presidency, Russia gave direct assistance to the United States in its so-called war on terror and in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. response was to violate every promise it had made that NATO would not advance “by an inch” towards Russia, all while aggressively increasing military pressure on Russia.

Second, this dynamic makes it clear that the outcome of the war in Ukraine is crucial not only for Russia, but also for China and for the entire world. Russia is the only country which is the United States’ equal in terms of nuclear weapons, and the good relations between China and Russia are a major deterrent for the U.S. not to adopt any policy of a direct attack on China. The aim of the U.S. in Ukraine is precisely to attempt to bring about a fundamental change in Russia’s policy and install a government in Moscow which no longer defends Russia’s national interests—and one which is hostile to China and subordinate to the U.S. If that were achieved, not only would China face a greatly increased military threat from the U.S., but its long northern border with Russia would become a strategic threat; China would be surrounded from the north. In other words, both Russia and China’s national interests would be undermined. In the words of Sergei Glazyev, a Russian commissioner on the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union: “After failing to weaken China head-on through a trade war, the Americans shifted the main blow to Russia, which they see as a weak link in the global geopolitics and economy. The Anglo-Saxons are trying to implement their eternal Russophobic ideas to destroy our country, and at the same time to weaken China, because the strategic alliance of the Russian Federation and the PRC is too tough for the United States.”6



U.S. Military Actions and the Constraints They Face
As the United States is pushed both by its declining economic position and by its military strength, there is no limit on an “internal” (domestic) level to the scope of U.S. aggression. History clearly shows that the U.S. has been prepared to carry out the most extremely violent military aggression to the point of being willing to destroy entire countries. In one of many examples, in the Korean War, the U.S. destroyed nearly all of North Korea’s cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings.

The U.S. bombing in Indochina during the Vietnam War was even greater in scale, using both explosive devices and chemical weapons, such as the notorious Agent Orange, which produces horrifying deformities. From 1964 to August 15, 1973, the United States Air Force dropped over six million tons of bombs and other ordnance in Indochina, while U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aircraft expended another 1.5 million tons in Southeast Asia. As Micheal Clodfelter notes in The Limits of Air Power:

This tonnage far exceeded that expended in World War II and in the Korean War. The U.S. Air Force consumed 2,150,000 tons of munitions in World War II and in the Korean War—1,613,000 tons in the European theater and 537,000 tons in the Pacific theater—and 454,000 tons in the Korean War.7

Edward Miguel and Gerard Roland expand upon the same point in their study on the long-term impact of bombing in Vietnam, noting that:

Vietnam War bombing thus represented at least three times as much (by weight) as both European and Pacific theater World War II bombing combined, and about fifteen times the total tonnage in the Korean War. Given the prewar Vietnamese population of approximately 32 million, U.S. bombing translates into hundreds of kilograms of explosives per capita during the conflict. For another comparison, the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the power of roughly 15,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT. … U.S. bombing in Indochina represents 100 times the combined impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.8

In the invasion of Iraq, the United States was prepared to (and did) devastate the country, using horrific weapons such as depleted uranium, which is still producing terrible birth defects many years after the U.S. attack. In its bombing of Libya in 2011, the United States reduced what had been one of the richest income per capita countries in Africa, with a developed welfare state, to a society in which tribal conflicts exist and in which slaves are openly sold. The list goes on.

In short, the evidence shows that there is no level of crime or atrocity to which the United States is not prepared to descend. If the United States were to posit that it could eliminate the economic challenge from China by launching an atomic war, there is no evidence that it would not do so. Furthermore, while there are certainly anti-war movements in the United States, they are nowhere near strong enough to prevent the United States from using nuclear weapons if it were to decide to do so. There are no adequate internal constraints in the U.S. that could prevent it from launching a war against China.

But if there are no fundamental internal constraints on U.S. aggression, there are certainly great external constraints. The first is other countries’ possession of nuclear weapons. That is why the explosion of China’s first nuclear bomb in 1964 is rightly regarded as a great national achievement. China’s possession of nuclear weapons is a fundamental deterrent to a nuclear attack by the United States. Nevertheless, unlike its adversary, China has a No First Use nuclear weapons policy, showing its restraint and defensive military posture.

A full-scale nuclear war involving the United States, China, and Russia would be a military catastrophe without precedent in human history. In such a war, at a minimum hundreds of millions would die. It would be infinitely preferable to prevent the escalation of U.S. military aggression before it reached that point, but what are the chances of doing so?

The overall trend of United States policy since the Second World War shows a clear and logical pattern. When the United States feels that it is in a strong position, its policy is aggressive; when it feels weakened, it becomes more conciliatory. This was shown most dramatically before, during, and after the Vietnam War, but also in other periods.

Immediately after the Second World War, the United States considered itself to be—and was—in a strong position and was therefore prepared to carry out a war against Korea. Even after the U.S. failed to win the Korean War, it still felt confident enough to attempt to diplomatically isolate China during the 1950s and 1960s, depriving the country of a seat at the UN, blocking direct diplomatic relations, and so on. However, the United States suffered severe defeats due to the failure of its war on Vietnam, in which it sought to defeat the Vietnamese people’s national liberation struggle and the large-scale military support they received from China and the U.S.S.R. The weakening of the United States’ global position as a result of its defeat in Vietnam (beginning even before the official end of the war in 1975) led it to adopt a more conciliatory policy, symbolized by Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing and followed by the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China. Soon after 1972, the United States opened a policy of détente with the U.S.S.R. However, by the 1980s, having regrouped and recovered from defeat in Vietnam, the United States returned to a more aggressive policy towards the U.S.S.R. under then President Ronald Reagan.

This same pattern of U.S. aggression in moments of strength or a more conciliatory attitude in moments of weakness can also be seen around the international financial crisis that began in 2007/8. This crisis dealt a severe blow to the U.S. economy, as a result of which the United States began to emphasize international cooperation. Though the G20, which includes the world’s largest economies and two-thirds of its population, was established in 1999, it only began to hold yearly meetings after the 2007/8 economic crisis. In 2009, the G20 group pledged itself as the major force for international economic and financial cooperation, with the United States playing a major role. In particular, as it felt weakened, the United States displayed a more cooperative attitude toward China in these areas.

As the United States recovered from the international financial crisis, its posture with respect to China became increasingly aggressive, culminating in the launch of Trump’s trade war against the country. That is, as soon as the United States felt itself stronger, it became aggressive.



A Comparison of Today’s Reality and the Pre-Second World War Period
Turning to an historical comparison, we can juxtapose the present situation with the period leading up to the Second World War. The immediate path to that war began with the strengthening of Japanese militarism and the resulting invasion of Northeast China in 1931, followed by Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany in 1933. Yet, despite these ominous events, the war was not inevitable. The first victories of Japanese militarism and German fascism escalated to world war as a result of a series of the Allied powers’ defeats and capitulations between 1931 and 1939 as well as their failure to confront the Japanese militarists and German Nazis.

The ruling political party in China, the Kuomintang, concentrated its efforts for most of the 1930s not on repelling Japan but on fighting the communists. Meanwhile, the United States failed to intervene to stop Japan until it was itself attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941. In Europe, Britain and France failed to stop the remilitarization of Nazi Germany even when they had the right to do so under the Treaty of Versailles. Further, they did not support the legitimate government of Spain in 1936 against the fascist coup and civil war launched by Francisco Franco, who was supported by Hitler. Then, they directly capitulated to Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia under the notorious Munich Pact of 1938.

Today, we see a pattern similar to 1931, which marked the beginning of the lead up to the Second World War. Though support for an aggressive world war certainly does not have majority support in the United States, such support does exist among a small and, so far, fringe element within the U.S. foreign policy/military establishment. If the United States suffers political defeats, it will not move directly to frontal war with China or Russia. Nonetheless, the medium-term danger exists that—as was the case following Japan’s invasion of China in 1931 and Hitler’s coming to power in 1933—if the United States achieves victories in more limited struggles, it will likely be encouraged to move towards a major global military conflict. The decisive struggle must be to prevent such a global conflict. This means that it is of utmost importance that the United States does not win immediate struggles, such as the war it provoked in Ukraine, its attempt to undermine the One China policy with regard to Taiwan, and its economic wars against many other countries.



The Main Forces Opposing U.S. Military Aggression
There are two powerful forces that oppose U.S. military aggression. The first, and most powerful, is China, whose economic development is not merely crucial for improving the living standards of its population, but also for eventually allowing the country to put its military forces more on par with those of the United States. This will very likely be the ultimate deterrent to U.S. military aggression. The second powerful force is the opposition of a large number of countries to U.S. aggression—including many in the Global South, comprising the majority of the world’s people—not merely from a moral viewpoint but from direct self-interest. The U.S.’s attempt to overcome the consequences of its economic failures by military and political means inevitably leads it to take actions against numerous other countries’ interests.

One among many examples of the impacts of these actions is that the U.S. provocation of the war in Ukraine has helped create a massive increase in world food prices because Russia and Ukraine are the world’s largest international suppliers of wheat and fertilizer. Meanwhile, banning the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from participation in 5G telecommunications development means that the inhabitants of every country that agrees to the U.S. ban pays more for their telecommunications. U.S. pressure to force Germany to buy U.S. liquified natural gas, instead of Russian natural gas, raises energy prices in Germany. In Latin America, the United States attempts to prevent countries from pursuing policies of national independence. U.S. tariffs on China’s exports raises the cost of living for U.S. households. The fact that, in practice, other countries’ populations are being forced to finance aggressive U.S. militarism is bound to generate opposition to such policies and their outcomes.

These two mutually reinforcing forces—China’s own development and the fact that U.S. policy is against the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population—constitute the main obstacles to U.S. aggression. Integrating China’s development with the international forces that are opposed to the U.S.’s attacks against them is therefore the most crucial task for the majority of the global population. While those of us outside of the country cannot fully grasp the complexities facing China’s leaders, we can say that they shoulder a great responsibility not only to push the world toward peace and a sustainable planet, but also to make good on the promises of their revolution and to justify the great sacrifices of peasants and workers—the very sacrifices that made China’s current standing in the world possible.



The Choices Facing the United States
The U.S. turn to escalating military aggression alongside its loss of economic supremacy has already begun. In Ukraine, the United States is directly and forcefully challenging Russia, a state with powerful atomic weapons, thereby raising a potential risk of a nuclear war. Simultaneously, it is applying maximum pressure on its allies, such as Germany, to damage their own interests by subordinating themselves to U.S. policy.

However, the United States is still hesitant to utilize full military force, evidently weighing the gains and risks of escalating its military aggression. Though the United States provoked the Ukraine War by threatening to extend NATO into the country, thereby giving it access to ever more deadly weaponry and intelligence, it has not yet dared to directly commit its military forces to this war, showing that there is still considerable uncertainty at work at the highest levels of the U.S. state machinery.

All of this directly affects Russia and China’s relations with each other, and it makes the outcome of the war in Ukraine crucial for the entire world. Because friendly Sino-Russian relations pose a formidable economic and military obstacle to U.S. threats of war, the central strategic goal of U.S. policy is to separate Russia and China. If this can be achieved, then the United States will have a greater capacity to attack them individually, including through the use of its military strength.



Conclusion
The United States will increase its aggressive actions towards China, as well as towards other countries, not only in the economic field but in particular through the direct and indirect use of U.S. military power, hesitating only when it suffers defeats. Naturally, every opening to develop a conciliatory approach by the United States must be taken advantage of, but it is essential to be clear that U.S. policy during such periods, when it has suffered defeats, will attempt to regroup its forces to launch a new aggressive policy.

Defeating U.S. aggression depends in large part on the overall domestic development of China in the economic, military, and all other fields, which is also in the interests of other countries suffering from U.S. aggression. After China’s own domestic development, the most important force blocking U.S. aggression is the opposition of the majority of the world’s population and countries whose position is worsened by U.S. policy. The degree to which U.S. military-based aggression, both direct and indirect, will intensify depends on how much the United States is defeated in individual struggles. The more it is successful, the more aggressive it will become; the more it is weakened, the more conciliatory it will become.

In the short term, the outcome of the war in Ukraine will therefore be crucial for the broader geopolitical reality. While the details of U.S. aggressive foreign policy cannot be seen with a crystal ball, the overall escalation of U.S. aggression clearly follows from its combination of economic weakening and military strength unless it suffers significant defeats.



Notes
1 Vyacheslav Tetekin, “How the US Pushed Ukraine into the War,” Communist Party of the Russian Federation, April 4, 2022, https://cprf.ru/2022/04/how-the-us-push ... o-the-war/. The quotes and analysis in this section are from this source.

2 See Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Global Perspective (Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001). Note that other sources give the U.S. economy a much greater share of global GDP in 1950, with estimates in excess of 40 percent.

3 The data comparing the economic performance of the United states and China are taken from the IMF’s database published accompanying the April 2022 World Economic Outlook, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO ... 2022/April; U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, International Data, https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm? ... i=1&6210=4; Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/; World Bank, World Development Indicators, https://databank.worldbank.org/reports. ... indicators.

4 Federation of American Scientists, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” 2022, https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/ ... ar-forces/.

5 Janan Ganesh, “The US will be the ultimate winner of Ukraine’s crisis,” Financial Times, April 5, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/cd7270a6-f72 ... 796f748c23.

6 “Events like This Happen Once a Century”: Sergey Glazyev on the breakdown of epochs and changing ways of life, The Saker, 28 March 2022, https://thesaker.is/events-like-this-ha ... s-of-life/.

7 Micheal Clodfelter quoted in Edward Miguel and Gerard Roland, “The Long-run Impact of Bombing Vietnam,” Journal of Development Economics 96 (1), 2011: 1-15. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~groland/pubs/ ... 9oct05.pdf.

8 Edward Miguel and Gerard Roland, “The Long-run Impact of Bombing Vietnam,” Journal of Development Economics 96 (1), 2011: 1–15. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~groland/pubs/ ... 9oct05.pdf.

(Continued tomorrow.)

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu May 25, 2023 2:14 pm

The Group of Seven Should Finally Be Shut Down: The Twenty-First Newsletter (2023)

MAY 25, 2023

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Leon Golub (USA), Vietnam II, 1973.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held. Not doing so would have been an act of immense discourtesy. Despite many calls for an apology from the US for dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian population in 1945, US President Joe Biden has demurred. Instead, he wrote in the Peace Memorial guest book: ‘May the stories of this museum remind us all of our obligations to build a future of peace’.

Apologies, amplified by the tensions of our time, take on interesting sociological and political roles. An apology would suggest that the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong and that the US did not end their war against Japan by taking the moral high ground. An apology would also contradict the US’s decision, backed fully by other Western powers over 70 years later, to maintain a military presence along the Asian coastline of the Pacific Ocean (a presence built on the back of the 1945 atomic bombings) and to use that military force to threaten China with weapons of mass destruction amassed in bases and ships close to China’s territorial waters. It is impossible to imagine a ‘future of peace’ if the US continues to maintain its aggressive military structure that runs from Japan to Australia, with the express intent of disciplining China.

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Tadasu Takamine (Japan), Still frame from: ‘God Bless America’, 2002.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given the errand to warn China about its ‘economic coercion’ as he unveiled the G7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion to track Chinese commercial activities. ‘The platform will address the growing and pernicious use of coercive economic measures to interfere in the sovereign affairs of other states’, Sunak said. This bizarre language displayed neither self-awareness of the West’s long history of brutal colonialism nor an acknowledgement of neocolonial structures – including the permanent state of indebtedness enforced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – that are coercive by definition. Nonetheless, Sunak, Biden, and the others preened with self-righteous certainty that their moral standing remains intact and that they hold the right to attack China for its trade agreements. These leaders suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for the IMF – on behalf of the G7 states – to demand ‘conditionalities’ from debt-ridden countries while forbidding China from negotiating when it lends money.

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Kent Monkman (Canada), The Scream, 2017.

Interestingly, the final statement from the G7 did not mention China by name, but merely echoed the concern about ‘economic coercion’. The phrase ‘all countries’ and not China, specifically, signals a lack of unity within the group. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for instance, used her speech at the G7 to put the US on notice for its use of industrial subsidies: ‘We need to provide a clear, predictable business environment to our clean tech industries. The starting point is transparency among the G7 on how we support manufacturing’.

One complaint from Western governments and think tanks alike has been that Chinese development loans contain ‘no Paris Club’ clauses. The Paris Club is a body of official bilateral creditors that was set up in 1956 to provide financing to poor countries who have been vetted by IMF processes, stipulating that they must pledge to conduct a range of political and economic reforms in order to secure any funds. In recent years, the amount of loans given through the Paris Club has declined, although the body’s influence and the esteem its strict rules garner remain. Many Chinese loans – particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative – refuse to adopt Paris Club clauses, since, as Professor Huang Meibo and Niu Dongfang argue, it would sneak IMF-Paris Club conditionalities into loan agreements. ‘All countries’, they write, ‘should respect the right of other countries to make their own choices, instead of taking the rules of the Paris Club as universal norms that must be observed by all’. The allegation of ‘economic coercion’ does not hold if the evidence points to Chinese lenders refusing to impose Paris Club clauses.

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Francesco Clemente (Italy), Sixteen Amulets for the Road (XII), 2012–2013.

G7 leaders stand before the cameras pretending to be world representatives whose views are the views of all of humanity. Remarkably, G7 countries only contain 10 per cent of the world’s population while their combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is merely 27 per cent of global GDP. These are demographically and increasingly economically marginalised states that want to use their authority, partly derived from their military power, to control the world order. Such a small section of the human population should not be allowed to speak for all of us, since their experiences and interests are neither universal nor can they be trusted to set aside their own parochial goals in favour of humanity’s needs.

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Elisabeth Tomalin (UK), Head, ca. 1920

Indeed, the agenda of the G7 was plainly laid out at its origin, first as the Library Group in March 1973 and then at the first G7 summit in France in November 1975. The Library Group was created by US Treasury Secretary George Schultz, who brought together finance ministers from France (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), West Germany (Helmut Schmidt), and the UK (Anthony Barber) to hold private consultations among the Atlantic allies. At the Château de Rambouillet in 1975, the G7 met in the context of the ‘oil weapon’ wielded by the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the United Nations in 1974. Schmidt, who was appointed German chancellor a year after the Library Group’s formation, reflected on these developments: ‘It is desirable to explicitly state, for public opinion, that the present world recession is not a particularly favourable occasion to work out a new economic order along the lines of certain UN documents’. Schmidt wanted to end ‘international dirigisme’ and states’ ability to exercise their economic sovereignty.

The NIEO had to be stopped in its tracks, Schmidt said, because to leave decisions about the world economy ‘to officials somewhere in Africa or some Asian capital is not a good idea’. Rather than allow African and Asian leaders a say in important global matters, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson suggested that it would be better for serious decisions to be made by ‘the sort of people sitting around this table’.

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Louise Rösler (Germany), Street, 1951.

The private attitudes displayed by Schmidt and Wilson continue to this day, despite dramatic changes in the world order. In the first decade of the 2000s, the US – which had begun to see itself as an unrivalled world power – overreached militarily in its War on Terror and economically with its unregulated banking system. The war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crunch (2007) threatened the vitality of the US-managed world order. During the darkest days of the credit crisis, G8 states, which then included Russia, asked surplus-holding countries of the Global South (particularly, China, India, and Indonesia) to come to their aid. In January 2008, at a meeting in New Delhi (India), French President Nicolas Sarkozy told business leaders, ‘At the G8 summit, eight countries meet for two and a half days and on the third day invite five developing nations – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa – for discussions over lunch. This is [an] injustice to [the] 2.5 billion inhabitants of these nations. Why this third-grade treatment to them? I want that the next G8 summit be converted into a G13 summit’.

There was talk during this period of weakness in the West that the G7 would be shut down and that the G20, which held its first summit in 2008 in Washington, D.C., would become its successor. Sarkozy’s statements in Delhi made headlines, but not policy. In a more private – and truthful – assessment in October 2010, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard told US Ambassador to France Craig R. Stapleton, ‘We need a vehicle where we can find solutions for these challenges [the growth of China and India] together – so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able to deal with them’.

The ‘monsters’ are now at the gate, and the US has assembled its available economic, diplomatic, and military arsenals, including the G7, to suffocate them. The G7 is an undemocratic body that uses its historical power to impose its narrow interests on a world that is in the grip of a range of more pressing dilemmas. It is time to shut down the G7, or at least prevent it from enforcing its will on the international order.

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Fabienne Verdier (France), Branches et Bourgeons, ‘étude végétal’ (‘Branches and Buds, “Nature Study”’), 2010.

In his radio address on 9 August 1945, US President Harry Truman said: ‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians’. In reality, Hiroshima was not a ‘military base’: it was what US Secretary of War Henry Stimson called a ‘virgin target’, a place that had escaped the US firebombing of Japan so that it could be a worthwhile testing ground for the atomic bomb. In his diary, Stimson recorded a conversation with Truman in June about the reasoning behind targeting this city. When he told Truman that he was ‘a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength’, the president ‘laughed and said he understood’.

Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was one of 350,000 people living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombings. She died ten years later from cancers associated with radiation exposure from the bomb. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was moved by her story and wrote a poem against war and confrontation. Hikmet’s words should be a warning even now to Biden for laughing at the possibility of renewed military conflict against China:

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead.

I’m only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I’m seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead.

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.


Warmly,

Vijay

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed May 31, 2023 3:08 pm

U.S. Empire Named Most Murderous Killing Machine In History
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - May 30, 2023 1

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[Source: eddierockerz.com]
New study finds U.S. responsible for nearly 300 million deaths—and counting
In September, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—established by a bipartisan act of Congress in 1993—opened the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., which aims to spotlight the plight of the alleged 100 million victims of Communist ideology.

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Display from Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. [Source: victimsofcommunism.org]


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[Source: hup.harvard.edu]

The 100 million figure was derived from the 1997 book The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, which was replete with falsehoods. The book blamed communist governments for famines that occurred on a more regular basis in capitalist countries and which had resulted from environmental causes, like the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s (holodomor).

If the political culture in the U.S. changes, someone might open a museum dedicated to the victims of capitalism or the U.S. empire, whose death toll would be much greater than 100 million.

A new book by David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), estimated that the U.S. empire is responsible, or shares responsibility, for close to 300 million deaths.

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[Source: ebay.com]

Smith writes that “the almost inconceivable loss of life in these endless holocausts arguably makes this country [the United States] exceptional, though in a strikingly different way than its apologists intend.”

Exceptional in its violence and killing prowess, which is truly shameful.

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David Michael Smith [Source: galvenews.com]
The Indigenous Peoples’ Holocaust
Smith estimates that 13 million Indigenous people were killed in the holocaust that resulted from the European colonization of North America.

Quoting from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Smith notes that the Indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere had “built great civilizations” prior to the arrival of the white man whose “governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, philosophies and institutions were intricately developed,” and in which “human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe.”

The European lust for wealth and dominance, however, led to mass death and destruction.

Characteristic was the Pequot War in Massachusetts of 1636-1637 where, Smith notes, the Puritan settlers recruited Native allies and formed the first ranger forces to engage in “wilderness warfare,” where “colonial officials began paying bounties for the scalps of Native men, women and children.”

About 6,000 Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nipmuck were killed, and New England’s Indigenous population declined from at least 70,000 in 1600 to 12,000 by the end of the 1600s.

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Pequot War of 1636-1637, as depicted in a 19th century wood engraving. [Source: britannica.com]

African American Holocaust
The decline of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere forced the European colonizers of North America to begin importing captive people from Africa to labor for them.

Smith estimates that approximately 25 million Africans were originally captured, and 12.5 million of them died between capture and embarkation from the slave ships that brought them to North America. Twenty million more Africans are believed to have died in slave raids, raising the total that died because of the transatlantic slave trade to 32.5 million.

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Captured slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage after mounting an uprising on a ship. [Source: slaveryandremembrance.org]

Of those who survived the Middle Passage, many more died from diseases and from beatings by their slave masters or by suicide. According to Smith, almost 70% of those who survived the Middle Passage were no longer alive a decade and a half later. Overall, he believes that 41.5 million may have died because of slavery.

During Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War, freed slaves died from lynching, and in prison after the imposition of Black Codes. They were also killed by white mobs in race massacres—famously in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Black Wall Street was burned to the ground.

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[Source: history.com]

Smith estimates that, between the years 2000 and 2014, another one million excess deaths occurred among Blacks because of the racist police and criminal justice system and poor living conditions in the “ghetto.”

The Workers’ Holocaust

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[Source: pappaspost.com]

Besides Native and Black Americans, vast numbers of laborers from diverse national backgrounds—who have generated unprecedented wealth for the capitalist class—have experienced harsh and deadly forms of exploitation in the United States.

Approximately 35,000 workers died on the job annually between 1880 and 1900—700,000 for those two decades alone as Congress refused to pass basic regulations to protect workers’ rights.

The Cleveland Citizen wrote that, during the Gilded Age, the U.S. became “an industrial slaughterhouse.” When workers rose up to protest poor conditions in a Rockefeller-owned mine in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, National Guard troops killed 66 men, women and children who were supporting the strike.

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Frank Little was an IWW organizer who was lynched in Butte, Montana, after speaking out against U.S. intervention during the Great War. [Source: zinnedproject.org]

This was part of a large wave of anti-worker violence sanctioned by the U.S. government that extended to the torture and lynching of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizers who had the audacity to promote worker-controlled industry.

Overall, Smith believes that 13.5 million workers have died in the U.S. or outside working for U.S. corporations from disease, sickness or in anti-labor massacres.

From Colonial Wars to Global Holocausts
After securing its continental empire by the late 19th century, the U.S. government overthrew the native monarchy in Hawaii and began establishing overseas colonies, like in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines, which provided a beachhead into the Asia-Pacific.

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[Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]

Up to a million Filipinos were killed resisting U.S. imperial intervention in the Spanish-American-Philippines War, which analysts described as “America’s First Vietnam.”

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March 7, 1906, U.S. troops under the command of Major General Leonard Wood massacred as many as 1,000 Filipino Muslims, known as Moros, who were taking refuge at Bud Dajo, a volcanic crater on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines. [Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]
Second and third Vietnams occurred in Nicaragua and Haiti, where the U.S. Army slaughtered hundreds of natives resisting the takeover of their country by U.S. financial interests.

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U.S. troops marching in Haiti. They slaughtered thousands of Haitians who formed the Caco to resist the U.S. occupation of their country. [Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]

The U.S. shared responsibility for the unprecedented global Holocaust of World War I, supplying Britain and France with vital loans and sending U.S. troops into the fray in April 1917 in order to defeat a potential imperial challenger, Germany.

After the war was over, the Wilson administration deployed U.S. troops into Soviet Russia to try to stamp out the Bolshevik Revolution in alliance with counter-revolutionary forces.

When the Bolsheviks triumphed, the Wilson and Harding administrations provided substantial support to the invasion of Soviet Russia by Polish militarists.

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U.S. soldier manning machine gun in Siberia. [Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]

In the 1930s, the U.S. supported fascist dictatorships as a counterweight to communism, including that of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Adolf Hitler, whom the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Berlin, George Gordon, characterized in 1933 as the “leader of the moderate section of the Nazi party,” which “appealed to all civilized and reasonable people.”

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George Gordon [Source: wikipedia.org]
The U.S. support for the fascist international exemplified its contribution to the origins of World War II, which was even worse in its destruction than was World War I.

The U.S. provoked the war in the Pacific theater because it could not tolerate the prospect of an ascendant Japanese empire that would threaten U.S. hegemonic aspirations in Southeast Asia.

The Roosevelt administration responded to Japan’s rise through a massive naval build-up in the South China Sea and imposition of an oil embargo on Japan, which was designed to provoke the Pearl Harbor attacks because of Japan’s dependence on imported oil.

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[Source: francispike.org]

According to Smith, between 1775 and 1945, when it succeeded in replacing Great Britain as the dominant world power, the U.S. caused 127 million deaths. These included the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who were killed as a result of the Tokyo firebombing and dropping of the two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed well over 200,000 people in the span of a few days.

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Hiroshima after the detonation of the first atomic bomb on humankind. [Source: nbcnews.com]

The Holocausts of Pax Americana
Just five years after the end of World War II, the U.S. was again at war in Korea where it supported a government that slaughtered over one hundred thousand of its own people, and carried out a bombing campaign that led to the death of about one tenth of the North Korean population.

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A U.S. B-26 bomber drops a bomb on the North Korean city of Wonsan in 1951. [Source: vox.com]

Further, U.S. troops committed a multitude of massacres, including at No Gun Ri, where several hundred civilians were killed after orders had been given to shoot at North Korean refugees who represented potential “fifth columnists.”

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Painting depicting brutality of U.S. soldiers in Korean War in Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities near Pyongyang. [Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]

The Korean War was a prelude to further slaughter in Vietnam where the “mere gook rule” applied, by which civilians were mowed down under the justification that they “looked like they were Vietcong [euphemism for Vietnamese communists].”

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“Mere gooks” slaughtered at My Lai. [Source: vice.com]

In 1965, the CIA backed a coup in Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of millions of alleged communists who were identified by lists provided to the Indonesian military by the CIA. One person suspected of helping to identify names for the blacklist was Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, who worked as an anthropologist in East Java, a communist stronghold.

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Ann Dunham in Indonesia in the early 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

The CIA backed more massacres in defeating left-wing rebels (the Huks) in the Philippines, and supported the murderous Operation Condor in South America. The latter was modeled after the Phoenix program in Vietnam where the CIA prepared blacklists and worked with local police agents to arrest or kidnap dissidents and torture and often murder them.

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[Source: radiohc.cu]

The Killing Spree Continues
The killing spree of the Cold War years continued in “humanitarian interventions” of the 1990s, as in the Balkans, Iraq and Central Africa, and during the Global War on Terror, where the U.S. military perfected new killing techniques, like through the use of unmanned drones.

Millions of Muslims were killed in retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, whose perpetrators are to this day not entirely clear.

Even under a supposedly liberal president, Barack Obama, the U.S. bombed seven Muslim countries, escalated its troop presence in Afghanistan, established many new military bases in Africa, and engaged in regime-change operations in several Latin American countries.

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[Source: cagle.com]

In his final chapter, Smith details the blowback associated with imperial pursuits such as the epidemic of mass shootings that has gripped the U.S. over the last decade.

Smith emphasizes that the U.S. is among the most violent societies in history—with disturbingly high homicide, police murder and incarceration rates—and faces the threat of right-wing militias and terrorists.

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The U.S. government has long protected guns and not people, especially kids. [Source: deccanherald.com]

No End in Sight
With the exception of slavery and the genocide against Native Americans, the endless holocausts associated with the American empire are rarely discussed in high school or even college courses, and are not very well known by the public—despite a rich scholarly literature about them.

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Anti-Imperialist League cartoon. [Source: imbrie.weebly.com]

This is because the public has been fed a steady diet of propaganda and bad revisionist history—like that advanced by the Victims of Communism Museum—which demonize left-wing ideologies and try to validate the “American way.”

If more people knew the truth, a strong resistance movement to U.S. imperialism might develop that could draw on the precedent of the early 20th century Anti-Imperialist League—supported by such luminaries as Mark Twain.

Until that time, Smith predicts that the succession of catastrophes “will continue…and as its primacy erodes, the U.S. ruling class may act like a ‘wounded beast’ and commit heinous new crimes against the peoples of the world—including the people of this country—to maintain as much wealth and power as possible.”

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... n-history/

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MILITARY COMPANIES DOMINATE AMERICAN POLITICS
May 29, 2023 , 10:39 a.m.

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It is estimated that spending on education, green energy, health or infrastructure could produce between 40% and 100% more jobs than the Pentagon's spending in the United States (Photo: Getty Images )

The US military-industrial complex receives a significant portion of the US defense budget and determines policy for Washington and its partners, increasing government spending on expensive weapons purchases from defense companies.

Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are the companies called the Big Five of said complex.

The suggested 2023 budget for the Pentagon and Department of Energy's nuclear weapons efforts is $886 billion, according to scholars Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft .
More than half of the US Defense Department's annual spending goes to military contractors, including more than $150 billion received by the Big Five.
Companies in the military-industrial complex have donated more than $83 million to various election campaigns over the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the way with a $9.1 million contribution during that period.
OpenSecrets journalist Taylor Giorno found that "the 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, triple the average of $26,213 dollars that other representatives declared they had received during the same period".
The resort's lobbying spending is even higher: more than $247 million in the past two election cycles. Senior government officials trade jobs in the Pentagon or Congress for executive positions in military companies or become their lobbyists.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies , the average American taxpayer spends $1,087 a year on weapons contractors, compared with $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.
Meanwhile, it is estimated that spending on education, green energy, health or infrastructure could produce between 40% and 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending.

https://misionverdad.com/las-companias- ... dounidense

Google Translator

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The Grayzone Debates National Endowment for Democracy VP on Group’s CIA Ties
MAY 30, 2023

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Leslie Aun, Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement in National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Photo: The Grayzone.

By Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal · May 29, 2023

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) contacted The Grayzone to dispute our characterization of their organization as a CIA cutout. Listen to our highly revealing conversation with the NED’s communications director.



On April 4, 2023, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement Leslie Aun contacted me, Alex Rubinstein, to request a phone conversation about an article I published at The Grayzone a day before.

My report detailed the open justification of the terrorist bombing of a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia by a top staffer of Bellingcat, which receives significant sponsorship from the NED, which functions as the regime change arm of the US government. In the article, I described the NED as a “CIA cutout,” which clearly displeased Aun and prompted her appeal for a call.

On April 6, Aun joined me and Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal for a 40-minute-long phone conversation, during which we challenged her on the NED’s lengthy history of supporting violent insurrectionists in countries where the US seeks regime change, and on the role of the CIA in founding the NED to openly conduct the work it used to do covertly.

To explain why The Grayzone has referred to the NED as a “CIA cutout,” Blumenthal pointed Aun to a declassified document showing Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, proposing the creation of a US government-funded “National Endowment.” The National Endowment for Democracy was born just months after Casey circulated the document to cabinet level Reagan officials. A cutout, Blumenthal explained during the call, is “an organization spun out as an initiative of that entity and which performs the work or advances the agenda of that entity.”

Watch Max Blumenthal’s 2018 documentary on the NED, “Inside America’s Meddling Machine.”

Blumenthal and Rubinstein then provided Aun with a brief history of NED’s sponsorship of NGO’s, media organizations and politicians which have engaged in violent campaigns to topple democratically elected governments, and to undermine officially designated US enemies, from Nicaragua to Venezuela to Ukraine to Hong Kong. Rather than deny her employer’s record of regime change machinations, Aun said she was unaware of it and that she would need to learn more before responding.

We asked Aun to provide concrete evidence that NED had enacted provisions to prevent it from coordinating its activities with US intelligence. “I don’t know if it’s in the statute. I don’t know if it’s — I mean, I don’t — I don’t know. I’m going to sound like an idiot. I don’t mean to sound like an idiot,” Aun replied.

We also demanded to know whether NED had instituted guidelines which prevented it from funding anti-democratic and violent actors like the coup leaders and political arsonists we detailed. In one particularly revealing exchange on the topic, Blumenthal asked Aun, “How is it pro–democracy to support mobilizations that seek to remove elected leaders?”

“Isn’t that sort of what democracy is?” she fired back in a tacit admission that her organization views foreign meddling and support for violent putschists abroad as an intrinsically democratic act.

At a loss for answers, Aun resorted to a Red Scare-style insinuation: “I’m just curious, are you supporters of the Belarusian government, of [the] Ortega government, of the Chinese government?” she asked. “I mean, those are all governments that you are working, writing — you’re supportive of, like from an editorial perspective?”

After our call with Aun, we provided her with our questions in writing. Despite repeated promises over the phone and in follow-up emails to furnish the information we requested, the NED has not done so for over 50 days since we first engaged with Aun.

Between April 11 and May 5, Aun sent three emails promising a response. She then went cold, prompting our decision to publish a recording of our phone conversation.

We will update this article if Aun chooses to reply to our questions.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-grayzone ... -cia-ties/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 12, 2023 2:34 pm

The Hegemon Will Go Full Hybrid War Against BRICS+

Pepe Escobar

June 10, 2023

The Hybrid War 2.0 against the Global South has not even started. Swing states, you have all been warned.

U.S. Think Tank Land hacks are not exactly familiar with Montaigne: “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”

Hubris leads these specimens to presume their flaccid bottoms are placed high above anyone else’s. The result is that a trademark mix of arrogance and ignorance always ends up unmasking the predictability of their forecasts.

U.S. Think Tank Land – inebriated by their self-created aura of power – always telegraphs in advance what they’re up to. That was the case with Project 9/11 (“We need a new Pearl Harbor”). That was the case with the RAND report on over-extending and unbalancing Russia. And now that’s the case with the incoming

American War on BRICS as outlined by the chairman of the New York-based Eurasia Group.

It’s always painful to suffer through the intellectually shallow Think Thank Land wet dreams masquerading as “analyses” but in this particular case key Global South players need to be firmly aware of what awaits them.

Predictably, the whole “analysis” revolves around the imminent, devastating humiliation to the Hegemon and its vassals: what happens next in country 404, also known – for now – as Ukraine.

Brazil, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are dismissed as “four major fence-sitters” when it comes to the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia. It’s the same old “you’re with us or against us” trope.

But then we are presented with the six major Global South culprits: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey.

In yet another crude, parochial remix of a catch phrase referring to the American elections, these are qualified as the key swing states the Hegemon will need to seduce, cajole, intimidate and threaten to assure its dominance of the “rules-based international order”.

Saudi Arabia and South Africa are added to a previous report focused on the “four major fence sitters”.

The swing state manifesto notes that all of them are G-20 members and “active in both geopolitics and geoeconomics” (Oh really? Now that’s some breaking news). What it does not say is that three of them are BRICS members (Brazil, India, South Africa) and the other three are serious candidates to join BRICS+: deliberations will be turbo-charged in the upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa in August.

So it’s clear what the swing state manifesto is all about: a call to arms for the American war against the BRICS.

So BRICS packs no punch

The swing state manifesto harbors wet dreams of near-shoring and friend-shoring moving away from China. Nonsense: enhanced intra-BRICS+ trade will be the order of the day from now on, especially with the expanded practice of trade in national currencies (see Brazil-China or within ASEAN), the first step towards widespread de-dollarization.

The swing states are characterized as “not a new incarnation” of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), or “other groupings dominated by the Global South, such as the G-77 and BRICS.”

Talk about exponential nonsense. This is all about BRICS+ – which now has the tools (including the NDB, the BRICS bank) to do what NAM could never accomplish during the Cold War: establish the framework of a new system bypassing Bretton Woods and the interlocking coercion mechanisms of the Hegemon.

As for stating that BRICS has not “packed much punch” that only reveals U.S. Think Tank Land’s cosmic ignorance of what BRICS + is all about.

The position of India is only considered in terms of being a Quad member – defined as a “U.S.-led effort to balance China”. Correction: contain China.

As for the “choice” of swing states of choosing between the U.S. and China on semiconductors, AI, quantum technology, 5G and biotechnology, that’s not about “choice”, but to what level they are able to sustain Hegemon pressure to demonize Chinese technology.

Pressure on Brazil, for instance, is much heavier than on Saudi Arabia or Indonesia.

In the end though, it all comes back to the Straussian neocon obsession: Ukraine. The swing states, in varying degrees, are guilty of opposing and/or undermining the sanctions dementia. Turkey, for instance, is accused of channeling “dual-use” items to Russia. Not a word on the U.S. financial system viciously forcing Turkish banks to stop accepting Russian MIR payment cards.

On the wishful thinking front, this pearl stands out among many: “The Kremlin seems to believe it can make a living by turning its trade south and east.”

Well, Russia is already making excellent living all across Eurasia and a vast expanse of the Global South.

The economy has re-started (drivers are domestic tourism, machine building and the metals industry); inflation is at only 2.5% (lower than anywhere in the EU); unemployment is at only 3.5%; and head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina said that by 2024 growth will be back to pre-SMO levels.

U.S. Think Tankland is congenitally incapable of understanding that even if BRICS+ nations may still have some serious trade credit issues to iron out, Moscow has already shown how even an implied hard backing of a currency can turn out to be an instant game changer. Russia is at the same time backing not only the ruble but also the yuan.

Meanwhile, the Global South de-dollarization caravan moves on relentlessly – as much as the proxy war hyenas may keep howling in the dark. When the full – staggering – scale of NATO’s humiliation in Ukraine unfolds, arguably by mid-summer, the de-dollarization high-speed train will be fully booked, non-stop.

“Offer you can’t refuse” rides again

If all of the above was not already silly enough, the swing state manifesto doubles down on the nuclear front, accusing them of “future (nuclear) proliferation risks”: especially – who else – Iran.

By the way, Russia is defined as a “middle power, but one in decline”. And “hyper-revisionist” to boot. Oh dear: with “experts” like this, the Americans don’t even need enemies.

And yes, by now you may be excused to roar with laughter: China is accused of attempting to direct and co-opt BRICS. The “suggestion” – or “offer you can’t refuse”, Mafia-style – to the swing states is that you cannot join a “Chinese-directed, Russian-assisted body actively opposing the United States.”

The message is unmistakable: “The threat of a Sino-Russian co-optation of an expanded BRICS—and through it, of the global south—is real, and it needs to be addressed.”

And here are the recipes to address it. Invite most swing states to the G-7 (that was a miserable failure). “More high-level visits by key U.S. diplomats” (welcome to cookie distributor Vicky Nuland). And last but not least, Mafia tactics, as in a “nimbler trade strategy that begins to crack the nut of access to the U.S. market.”

The swing state manifesto could not but let the Top Cat out of the bag, predicting, rather praying that “U.S.-China tensions rise dramatically and turn into a Cold War-style confrontation.” That’s already happening – unleashed by the Hegemon.

So what would be the follow-up? The much sought after and spun-to-death “decoupling”, forcing the swing states to “align more closely with one side or the other”. It’s “you’re with us or against us” all over again.

So there you go. Raw, in the flesh – with inbuilt veiled threats. The Hybrid War 2.0 against the Global South has not even started. Swing states, you have all been warned.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... nst-brics/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 06, 2023 3:04 pm

Srebrenica: New Disclosures Further Undermine Bogus Genocide Narrative

Stephen Karganovic

July 6, 2023

The human cost of R2P genocide prevention activities ultimately originating with Srebrenica has been appalling, Stephen Karganovic writes.

This year, the annual July 11 Srebrenica remembrance ceremonies will be more subdued than usual. There are good reasons for that. The “Ukraine fatigue” which is spreading to many countries has now been augmented by Srebrenica fatigue. Both phenomena are a natural reaction to cynical deceit, in particular when the lies had been camouflaged with lofty ideals and high-sounding phrases. Once the truth becomes known, the game is up and then woe to the deceivers.

In the genealogy of major political hoaxes, Srebrenica slightly over a quarter of a century ago was a remote precursor to Bucha. But unlike Bucha, a fraudulent massacre that fairly quickly was deconstructed, Srebrenica long remained for the collective West a propaganda gift that keeps on giving.

Few people are aware of one of Srebrenica’s major benefits, if that is the appropriate word. It is the nefarious doctrine of R2P, or “right to protect.” NATO and subversive Western agencies have ruthlessly invoked it on numerous occasions to destroy disobedient countries and wreck their societies under the mendacious guise of preventing genocide. Srebrenica is the root of it all. A narrative was soon shaped and weaponised after whatever happened in Srebrenica in July of 1995 that the failure of the “good guys” (the West) to act decisively and on time to prevent the “bad guys” (the Serbs) from committing genocide (wantonly murdering the memeified “8000 men and boys”). It was touted as an object lesson and future policy directive. The alleged failure to protect the “8000 Srebrenica men and boys” subsequently morphed into a moral obligation to go on a world-wide humanitarian intervention rampage. It imposed on the “good guys” the duty to act whenever they judged that a similar genocidal event was about to occur. As they bombed away, they could use their military might for plunder and geopolitical advantage while self-righteously crying “never again.”

Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are some examples of how that alleged lesson was successfully absorbed and given practical effect in the form of unprovoked and illegal assaults on sovereign countries (in the case of Kosovo it was Yugoslavia). Whether the real goal of these interventions was to rescue populations allegedly threatened by genocide, or to take control of insubordinate states and plunder their natural resources might be debatable. But that was the official cover story, anyway.

As it turns out, the human cost of R2P genocide prevention activities ultimately originating with Srebrenica has been appalling. In Iraq alone authoritative estimates put it at around one million (and it was all “worth it,” in Madeleine Albright’s famous phrase), in Syria perhaps half as much, in Libya many thousands coupled with complete societal and governmental collapse, not to mention the reinstitution in some parts of the disintegrated country of slavery as an extra bonus. In Kosovo, currently occupied by NATO troops and pretending to be “independent,” following ferocious bombing raids in 1999, including the generous use of depleted uranium munitions (a replay of that is now in the works in the similarly rescued Ukraine) mortality from cancer is massive and without precedent compared to the situation which preceded NATO bombing. Hideously deformed human babies and animals are being given birth in large numbers. Last but not least, it is ironic that, like the “8000 Srebrenica men and boys” whose memory these NATO humanitarian wars have been conducted to enshrine, the overwhelming majority of victims in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere obviously are also Muslims.

Like the sleazy humanitarian rationale for the collective West’s plunderous R2P wars, the original 8000 Srebrenica victim figure is utterly fraudulent. As George Pumphrey has conclusively shown it was not based on an actual body count but on a deceptive amalgamation of two separate missing persons’ figures being circulated in mid-July 1995 in the chaos following the enclave’s fall to Serbian forces. Subsequently assembled evidence lends no support whatsoever to that mathematical improvisation.

Between 1996 and 2001 forensic teams hired by the Office of the Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal conducted exhumations of mass graves suspected to contain victims of Srebrenica executions. A careful analysis of the 3568 autopsy reports that the exhumations generated yielded findings incompatible with the initial assumptions. Contrary to the expectation that they would be more or less uniform, if the victims had been executed in a similar manner, the patterns of injury were very heterogeneous. Even more importantly, it was found that a statistically significant number of the victims did not succumb to bullets, as would be expected in executions, but to injuries caused by mines, artillery projectiles and high velocity munitions causing burst out wounds. Such injuries are compatible with combat but atypical of executions. It was also determined that cause and manner of death as recorded in the autopsy reports could support an execution scenario at most for about 800 to 900 of the cases. As it happens, that roughly corresponds to the number of civilians in Serb villages surrounding Srebrenica who were killed by Bosniak military formations in raids conducted from inside the enclave over the three years preceding its fall. Finally, when the Srebrenica victims’ paired femur bones were counted in order to fix with relative precision the number of exhumed individuals, it turned out that the mass graves contained about 1920 persons who died of diverse causes, only one of which was execution. That was far short of the target figure of 8000.

That probably explains why in 2001 abruptly and without any cogent reason forensic exhumations were terminated. Exhumations were thenceforth replaced by DNA matching, a method far more susceptible to fudging, and predictably it did produce the desired number of about 8000 Srebrenica victims.

The autopsy reports and the interpretation of their results have been published and are within easy reach of anyone who might be interested. They are available but ignored. In murder cases, such forensic proof directly from the crime scene is regarded as prime evidence. Nonetheless, the Prosecution of the Hague Tribunal never submitted Srebrenica autopsy reports, with their inconvenient implications, into the evidence. But fortunately they are available to independent forensic experts and scholars.

Besides the unfavourable forensic evidence, the other game-changing data which emerged in the aftermath of Srebrenica are contemporaneous statements by survivors from the enclave who managed to reach territory controlled by Sarajevo authorities after an armed breakout through Serb held territory. Upon their safe arrival in Tuzla in the second half of July 1995 the survivors were debriefed by the Red Cross, UN field personnel and representatives of the Sarajevo authorities, while impressions were still fresh in their minds. Their statements show that around July 11 1995 twelve to fifteen thousand Srebrenica males set out on a 60 kilometre trek out of the enclave once it became clear that it would fall to Serbian forces, that the column was mixed consisting of armed military personnel and civilians, and that in the ensuing fierce combat with Serbian forces the column sustained horrendous casualties. Since the column was mixed and contained armed elements which did engage in combat, from the standpoint of the laws and customs of war all the resulting casualties were legitimate. That is the reason why Serbian officers and soldiers who fired at the column and caused death in its ranks were never charged by the Hague Tribunal. The column’s enormous combat death toll also explains casualties caused by munitions other than bullets, such as mines and artillery projectiles, of which ample evidence was found in the side-lined autopsy reports.

A sufficient quantity of these survivor witness statements also are easily accessible, but like the autopsy reports were not made readily available to the general public, nor were they ever presented in court. Evidence that in July of 1995 most Srebrenica related deaths were combat and not execution related would have undermined gravely the coherence of the official Srebrenica narrative. It was therefore judged, perhaps rightly, that this evidence as well should discretely be kept out of the public arena.

And in March of this year a new detail emerged from the seemingly endless catalogue of Srebrenica prevarications. Former ICTY prosecutor Geoffrey Nice, who had been in charge of several Srebrenica cases and gained most of his fame from prosecuting Milošević, revealed to a Bosnian television journalist that State Department documents he has reviewed show that on 28 May 1995 the decision was taken by the US, Great Britain, and France, and presumably communicated to the Serbs, that in the event of a Serbian attack on Srebrenica those powers would not respond with military means.

In light of the humanitarian “never again” make believe by those very countries, this is extremely compromising information. Does the position taken by leading countries in the Western coalition and telegraphed to the Serbs six weeks before they began considering an attack on Srebrenica recall anything? Yes, it recalls a similar subterfuge once played successfully on Saddam Hussein, assuring him that Western powers had no stance should he decide to invade Kuwait. The situation described by Nice is strikingly analogical. In both cases, simulated expressions of restraint served to entrap their target. It would be a most logical interpretation that a virtual invitation was being sent out to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica and then hopefully proceed to take massive revenge for the killing of their own civilians over the preceding three years.

For the most part the Serbs did not take the bait, but some rogue elements within their ranks ultimately did act according to plan. The execution of several hundred prisoners, propagandistically inflated ten-fold, laid the groundwork for the Dayton peace agreement later that year, enabling a seemingly permanent Western protectorate over strategically important Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also provided propaganda cover for “Operation Storm” the following month, the Western backed and assisted Croat attack on the Serb held Krajina region. That resulted in the expulsion of a quarter million Serbs from their ancestral homeland but this egregious act of ethnic cleansing was conveniently overshadowed by Srebrenica. US ambassador in Zagreb Peter Galbright had a point when later he declared that “without Srebrenica, there would have been no Operation Storm.”

Nor could there have been the handy “humanitarian” R2P rationale for Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, or Libya or the destruction and mayhem that were unleashed there under the duplicitous slogan “never again Srebrenica”...

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... narrative/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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