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By Arjun Banerjee

India now counts among the most right-wing countries in the world, with all the classic markers of fascism emblazoned with a leering smugness across the faces of its elite and so-called ‘middle-class’. The ongoing charade of the Anant Ambani pre-wedding brings to light several of its interconnected rightwing maladies.

The first is the mindless worship of money and the power it confers as a birthright upon the wealthy. India has gone into a neoliberal overdrive and has been hawking public resources and infrastructure for capitalist looting, naming this unconscionable theft as ‘monetization pipeline’, ‘business development’, ‘improving services’, and whatnot. Everything from education to healthcare to natural resources has been privatized at breakneck speed in service of private profits.

Those who have amassed their obscene mounds of ill-gotten wealth are praised as job creators and hard workers for supposedly throwing some scraps under the table by way of unstable and highly exploitative private jobs. India is the picture of an average failed banana republic in the way that it is dancing to the egotism and gaudy flashiness of an oligarch who wants to give his son the biggest, fattest Indian wedding anywhere ever.

And so, the resources of the Indian government itself have been pressed into service to convert the Jamnagar Airport into an international airport for 10 days, just to facilitate the supposed ‘dignitaries’ coming in to ‘celebrate’ the wedding, when it is plain as day that this is the hobnobbing of an extremely rich and powerful international class of oligarchs and a coterie of plastic entertainers who are made gods unto themselves in the name of being ‘celebrities’: a hobnobbing whose bill is to be footed by us the peasants leering at awe at the luxuries of the aristocrats, wiping away tears of gratitude to all that Ambani and other corporate overlords have done for the country. (Consider the seething defence of Narayan Murthy’s 70-hour workweek comments)

If doing something for the country brought the same rewards to everyone as it does to Ambani, then we would not see Vakil Hassan’s house demolished and his wife and children assaulted and thrown in the street. We would not see medal-winning sportspersons reduced to penury or face daily public humiliation to secure justice against sexual assault. We would not be putting professors in jail without trial and would not be smearing and shaming a BSF jawan who exposed corruption and neglect of rank-and-file soldiers.

The Indian oligarchy is credited with banishing the darkness of ‘socialism’ (a horrible misnomer for what actually existed in pre-liberalization India) and bringing in the sweet fruits of the paradise of the free market. In reality, the so-called ‘success’ and ‘public good’ attributed to, say, Reliance Jio is built off the back of massive public investment and support. The story of private telecom players piggybacking on public infrastructure to produce private profits is just a drop in this ocean. Don’t believe me, ask ChatGPT, the darling of today’s techies.

There isn’t even a semblance of the republican spirit or even lip service to Constitutional values of equality among citizens and checks on money as a pathway to unlimited power. It is simply the regime of ‘might makes right’. When you have this much money to throw, the system will bend to your will too: that is what the regime’s internet propagandists say to shut down criticisms of the obscenity that is underway right now. I would like to know what is the procedure by which I can apply to have an airport repurposed or reserved for family functions in the way Ambani can. The Noida Metro (NMRC) announced a facility to book railway coaches for gatherings and parties in 2020, and while I still consider it cringeworthy, it was, at the very least, open to all. But Adani’s privilege seems to be a regal prerogative which commoners like us can only dream of. And dream we do. At the end of a heated argument with a friend over this, he said paisa ho toh aisa (if I am to have money, let me have it like this).

Will we ever see a detailed and audited bill of reimbursement that Ambani or Reliance has paid out to the government for all the expenses and manpower wasted to facilitate this entirely private event? Or are we at the stage of explicitly admitting what Marxists like me take as a fundamental truth, that the government is quite literally owned and run by the ruling class of upper castes and capitalists?

The other right-wing aspect of this gaudy wedding celebration is the feudal mindset and rampant casteism of Indian society. Looking at the propaganda blitz, one may easily conclude that we are witnessing the royal wedding of a prince of India and not just another citizen. What was the point of abolishing royal privileges like the privy purse or creating hype about the integration of princely states post-independence when we are perfectly fine with glorifying petty rulers and monarchs of the past and treating the oligarchs of the present like modern-day royalty?

To put it more accurately, this spectacle represents the feudal and casteist structures of Indian society which are not only intact but are growing ever stronger under the present regime.  The intense PR campaign of the various rituals and public appearances that the family is engaging in puts them on a pedestal, in sync with the patronizing superiority that upper castes display to the lower caste masses. The institution of ‘traditional’ marriage is also a mechanism of ensuring that social and economic capital stays within families and communities through the patriarchal exchange of women’s bodies from father to husband. The fact that the Indian State is endorsing this shows its ideological commitment to the institutionalization of marriages, which are overwhelmingly ‘arranged’ between families and do not consider the aspect of love, romance, intimacy, or compatibility between two consenting adults. The State has repeatedly come out in favour of legalized raping of wives and against live-in relationships and homosexual marriage, which shows that it has stakes in maintaining the patriarchal and casteist nature of marriage as an institution.

This Twitter thread about the pampering and privileges afforded to Anant Ambani when he was growing up may be unverified anecdotes, but by themselves, its claims do not seem that hard to believe. We live in a culture where social displays of wealth, connections, and religiosity are paramount. Such flashy displays of wealth and power pay off, at least when it comes to the so-called middle class who would rather foster delusions of becoming the next Ambani than own up to the fact that their personal values, and those of society at large, need to change urgently.

Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Juan Cole

In the midst of Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion across the region. It’s a story that needs to be told.

“Hit Iran now. Hit them hard” was typical advice offered by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a drone flown by an Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia killed three American servicemen in northern Jordan on January 28th. The well-heeled Iran War Lobby in Washington has, in fact, been stridently calling for nothing short of a U.S. invasion of that country, accusing Tehran of complicity in Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.

No matter that the official Iranian press has vehemently denied the allegation, while American intelligence officials swiftly concluded that the attack on Israel had taken top Iranian leaders by surprise. In mid-November, Reuters reported that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei informed a key Hamas figure, Ismail Haniya, that his country wouldn’t intervene directly in the Gaza war, since Tehran hadn’t been warned about the October 7th attack before it was launched. He actually seemed annoyed that the leadership of the Hamas paramilitary group, the Qassam Brigades, thought they could draw Tehran and its allies willy-nilly into a major conflict without the slightest consultation. Although initially caught off-guard, as the Israeli counterattack grew increasingly brutal and disproportionate, Iran’s leaders clearly began to see ways they could turn the war to their regional benefit — and they’ve done so skillfully, even as the Biden administration in its full-scale embrace of the most extreme government in Israeli history tossed democracy and international law under the bus.

The gut-wrenching Hamas attacks on civilians at a music festival and those living in left-wing, peacenik Kibbutzim near the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7th initially left Iran in an uncomfortable position. It had allegedly been slipping some $70 million a year to Hamas — though Egypt and Qatar had provided major funding to Gaza at Israel’s request through sanctioned Israeli government bank accounts. And after decades of championing the Palestinian cause, Tehran could hardly stand by and do nothing as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. On the other hand, the ayatollahs couldn’t afford to gain a reputation for being played like a fiddle by the region’s young radicals and so drawn into conventional wars their country can ill afford.

The Adults in the Room?

Despite their fiery rhetoric, their undeniable backing of fundamentalist militias in the region, and their depiction by inside-the-Beltway war hawks as the root of all evil in the Middle East, Iran’s leaders have long acted more like a status quo power than a force for genuine change. They have shored up the rule of the autocratic al-Assad family in Syria, while helping the Iraqi government that emerged after President George W. Bush’s invasion of that country fight off the terrorist threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In truth, not Iran but the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have most strikingly tried to use their power to reshape the region in a Napoleonic manner. The disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Israel’s wars on Egypt (1956, 1967), Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006), and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014, 2024), along with its steady encouragement of large-scale squatting on the Palestinian West Bank, were clearly intended to alter the geopolitics of the region permanently through the use of military force on a massive scale.

Only recently, Ayatollah Khamenei bitterly asked, “Why don’t the leaders of Islamic countries publicly cut off their relationship with the murderous Zionist regime and stop helping this regime?” Pointing to the staggering death toll in Israel’s present campaign against Gaza, he was focusing on the Arab countries — Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates — that, as part of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” had officially recognized Israel and established relations with it. (Egypt and Jordan had, of course, recognized Israel long before that.)

Given the anti-Israel sentiment in the region, had it, in fact, been rife with democracies, Iran’s position might have been widely implemented. Still, it was a distinct sign of terminal tone deafness on the part of Biden administration officials that they hoped to use the Gaza crisis to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, while sidelining the Palestinians and creating a joint Israeli-Arab front against Iran.

The region had already been moving in a somewhat different direction. Last March, after all, Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun forging a new relationship by restoring the diplomatic relations that had been suspended in 2016 and working to expand trade between their countries. And that relationship has only continued to improve as the nightmare in Israel and Gaza developed. In fact, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi first visited the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November and, since the Gaza conflict began, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has met twice with his Saudi counterpart. Frustrated by a markedly polarizing American policy in the region, de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resorted to the good offices of Beijing to sidestep Washington and strengthen their relations further.

Although Iran is far more hostile to Israel than Saudi Arabia, their leaderships do agree that the days of marginalizing the Palestinians are over. In a remarkably unambiguous statement issued in early February, the Saudis offered the following: “The Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all the Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” Significantly, the Saudis even refused to join a U.S.-led naval task force created to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthis of Yemen (no friends of theirs) in support of the Palestinians. Its leaders are clearly all too aware that the carnage still being wreaked on Gaza has infuriated most Saudis.

In late January, President Raisi also surprised regional diplomats by traveling to Ankara for talks on trade and geopolitics with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, another sign of his country’s changing role in the region. At the end of the visit, while signing various agreements to increase trade and cooperation, he announced: “We agreed to support the Palestinian cause, the axis of resistance, and to give the Palestinian people their rightful rights.” That’s no small thing. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member and considered a close ally of the United States. To have Erdoğan suddenly cozy up to Iran, while denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza as a Hitlerian-style genocide, was an unmistakable slap in Washington’s face.

Meanwhile, Iran, Turkey, and Russia recently issued a joint communiqué that “expressed deep concern over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stressed the need to end the Israeli brutal onslaught against the Palestinians, [while] sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.” From the Biden administration’s point of view, Moscow’s bombing of civilian sites in Ukraine and Iran’s role in crushing Sunni Arab rebels in Syria had been the atrocities that needed attention until Netanyahu suddenly pulled the rug out from under them by upping the ante from mere atrocities to what the International Court of Justice has ruled can plausibly be labeled a genocide. One thing was clear: Washington’s long struggle to exclude Iran from regional influence has now visibly failed.

Iran’s Rising Popularity

At the Gulf International Forum (GIF) last November, Abdullah Baaboud, a prominent Omani academic, said that there had been a “very strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey, embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language. My worry is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among the Arab public.” GIF’s executive director, Dania Thafer, concurred. Of that public, she said, “Grief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,” and added, “with each photo out of Gaza, Iran gains more influence across the region.” In short, at remarkably little cost, Iran is unexpectedly winning the battle for regional public opinion and its standing in the Arab world has risen strikingly. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has been indelibly tarnished by Washington’s full-throated support for what most in the region do indeed see as a merciless slaughter of thousands of children and other innocent civilians.

A recent opinion poll of Arabs in 16 countries, conducted jointly by the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, found that 94% of them considered the American position on Israel’s war “bad.” In contrast, a surprising 48% of them considered the Iranian position positive. To grasp just how remarkable such a finding was, consider that a Gallup poll conducted in 2022 found that Shiite Iran’s name was mud in most Sunni Arab countries and approval of its leadership fell somewhere between 10% and 20%.

In recent months, Iran has made striking use of the weakness of Washington’s case in the region. While the State Department likes to contrast Iran’s “dictatorship” with Israel’s “democratic character,” only recently foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani observed, “The disaster in Gaza removed the mask from the face of the so-called advocates of human rights and showed the extent of vileness, brutality, and lies hidden within the nature of the Israeli regime, whose supporters used to refer to [it] as a symbol of democracy.” Although Iran has among the world’s worst human-rights records, Netanyahu has even managed to take the focus off of that.

Losing the Middle East, Washington-Style

Iran’s allies in the region include Iraqi Shiite militias like the Party of God Brigades (Kata’ib Hizbullah), which first gained prominence in the struggle against the ISIL terrorist group from 2014 to 2018. Those were years when the regular Iraqi army had essentially collapsed and was only gradually being rebuilt. Washington was also focused on destroying ISIL then and so developed a wary de facto alliance with them in its campaign to crush that “caliphate.” In January 2020, however, President Trump was responsible for the drone assassination of the group’s leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, along with Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, just after their arrival by plane at Baghdad International Airport in what was evidently an attempt to prevent them, through the Iraqis, from forging an agreement with Saudi Arabia to reduce tensions with Iran.

That assassination led to a long-running, low-intensity conflict between the Shiite militias of Iraq and the 2,500 remaining American troops stationed there. With the onset of the Gaza conflict last October, the Party of God Brigades began launching mortars and drones against Iraqi military bases hosting American soldiers, as well as against small forward operating bases in southeast Syria where some 900 U.S. military personnel are stationed, ostensibly to support the Syrian Kurds in mopping up operations against ISIL. After more than 150 such attacks, on January 28th one of their drones hit Tower 22, a support base where U.S. troops were stationed in northern Jordan, killing three American soldiers, while wounding dozens more.

Iran’s leaders generally back those Shiite militias, but whether they had anything to do with the attack on Tower 22 remains unknown. Officials in Tehran did, however, immediately recognize the danger of escalation once American troops had actually been killed. And indeed, the Biden administration responded with dozens of air strikes on bases and facilities of the Party of God Brigades in Iraq and Syria. Washington Post reporters were told by Iraqi and Lebanese officials that Iran had actually urged caution on the militias with clear effect. Their attacks on bases hosting U.S. troops ceased. At the same time, the Iraqi parliament and government complained bitterly about Washington’s violation of the country’s sovereignty, while heightening preparations to force the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from their land. In other words, President Biden’s fierce backing of Israel’s war, his decision to increase weapons shipments to that country, and his bombing of pro-Palestinian militias may have led to the achievement of a longstanding Iranian aim: seeing American troops finally leave Iraq.

Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, where the militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging occasional fire with Israeli forces in support of Gaza, according to the Post reporters, one Hezbollah figure told them that Iran’s message was: “We are not keen on giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any reason to launch a wider war on Lebanon or anywhere else.” Wars are unpredictable, and the Lebanon-Israeli border could still erupt dramatically. Moreover, Iranian pleas for restraint appear to have had far less effect on the Houthi leadership in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, leading to an ongoing American and British bombing campaign on that city and elsewhere in that country that has so far done little to stop Houthi missile and drone attacks against ships in the Red Sea.

So far, however, despite the Republican urge to devastate Iran, that country’s leaders have taken deft advantage of the butchery in Gaza (in which the Israeli military has killed more civilian noncombatants each day than belligerents have in any other conflict in this century). The ayatollahs have significantly increased their popularity even among Arab and Muslim publics that had not previously shown them much favor. They have strengthened their relationship with the Shiites of Iraq and may be on the verge of finally achieving their goal of ending the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Syria.

They have also achieved closer ties with Turkey, while improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab oil states. In doing so, they have distinctly blunted the Biden administration’s aim of isolating Iran while tying the wealthier Arab states ever more firmly to Israel through arms and high-tech deals.

In addition, through its backing of and weaponizing of Israel in these last grim months, Washington has made a mockery of the human rights talking points that the U.S. has long deployed against Iran. In the process, Joe Biden has done more than any recent president to undermine both international humanitarian law and democratic principles globally. With 94% of Arab poll respondents viewing American policy in the region as “bad,” one thing is clear: for the moment at least, Iran has won the Middle East.

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jake Johnson

The U.S. military on Saturday executed the first of what’s expected to be a series of humanitarian aid airdrops into the Gaza Strip, parachuting packages containing 38,000 meals to the besieged enclave’s coastline as the territory’s entire population—roughly 2.2 million people—faces the imminent threat of starvation due to Israel’s ongoing assault and blockade.

The airdrop, coordinated with the Jordanian military, came days after Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of desperate Gazans near a convoy of aid trucks in the northern part of the territory, which Israel has almost completely cut off from humanitarian assistance.

The incident, dubbed the “flour massacre,” was just one of more than a dozen documented cases this year of the U.S.-armed Israeli military attacking Gazans gathering to receive food aid and other assistance, according to the United Nations.

Biden administration officials said Saturday that “the aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere near enough and nowhere near fast enough,” but the White House has done nothing to force the Israeli government to stop obstructing ground-based deliveries, which have fallen in recent weeks and become virtually impossible in much of the territory because of Israel’s restrictions and repeated attacks on aid workers.

Administration officials have dismissed calls to attach conditions to U.S. military assistance to Israel, which has used American weaponry to commit atrocities in the Gaza Strip. The administration is currently preparing to send Israel additional bombs and other weaponry.

“Biden is airdropping food (expensive, inefficient, potentially dangerous) because he won’t condition massive U.S. military aid and arms sales on Israel ending its obstruction of most ground aid deliveries,” said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch.

On Sunday, following the U.S. airdrop, Israeli forces were accused of striking an aid vehicle in central Gaza, reportedly killing eight people.

At least 15 children in Gaza have died from starvation or dehydration in recent days, according to the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights.

A top World Food Program official warned last week that “food aid is required by almost the entire population of 2.2 million people” and that Gaza is “seeing the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world.” The U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, said Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s population, a blatant war crime.

In the face of such a large-scale emergency, critics said the Biden administration’s airdrops are nowhere near sufficient.

“Instead of dropping packages from the sky—some of which end up in the sea or outside of Gaza and which the most vulnerable cannot reach in any case—the U.S., the U.K., and others should ensure that Israel immediately opens all crossings into Gaza for aid and aid workers to assist those in need,” said Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians.

“This includes the Karni and Erez crossings, which give direct access to the north of Gaza,” Ward continued. “Only safe and unfettered access for aid and aid workers, the lifting of the siege, and an immediate cease-fire can end starvation in Gaza.”

Dave Harden, a former assistant administrator at the United States Agency for International Development, said in an interview Saturday that airdrops are “inefficient, expensive, and risky.”

“Airdropping from 30,000 feet is simply not the solution,” said Harden. “And, by the way, it’s a little offensive to the United States, too. I mean, Israel is our ally and we’re supporting them in a very substantial and meaningful way. And for us not to be able to get aid in to innocent civilians in Gaza is really an indictment both on the Biden administration and the Bibi Netanyahu administration.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Professor Geoffrey Sachs says Israel is literally starving the Palestinian people of Gaza and for that it is in a non-stop war crime of genocidal status. See his full commentary. 

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved. I am not using an exaggeration. I am talking literally, starving a population,” says Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is the current director of the Center of Sustainable Development in Columbia University.

“Israel is criminal”

“Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop war crime status. Now. I believe in genocidal status, and it is without shame, without remorse, without truth, without insight into what it’s doing,” he recently told the Judging Freedom Podcast run by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

“But what it is doing is endangering Israel’s fundamental security because it is deriving the world to believe that the Israeli state is not legitimate,” the world’s top economist and an advisor to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns.

It will stop being a danger to itself “when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel,” he firmly points out.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4EFzPyvm80/?igsh=cHlhYmY1cGUzb2Ew

Messianic

Israel has no “self-control” and “there is none in this government” Dr Sachs adding in reference to the Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, saying “there is a murderous gang in government right now”.

“These are zealots, they have some messianic vision of controlling all of today’s Palestinian lands” and “are not going to stop. They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse, depending on whatever is needed.”

What is worse he points out that “it is the United States that is their sole support. And it’s our mumbling, bumbling president and the others that are not stopping this slaughter,” he ends with great dismay.

Professor Sachs is ranked by the Economist as among the three most influential living economists in the world. He is a great intellectual, a best-selling author and a global leader in sustainable development.

Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer specializing on Middle East Affairs

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Salim Nazzal

Gaza has a tumultuous history, having endured several Zionist aggressive wars in the past. However, the current conflict surpasses all levels of brutality witnessed before. It is unfortunate that Gaza’s strategic location, serving as a gateway to Palestine from Africa, has made it bear the brunt of its geographical significance. History has taught us that a country’s location often shapes its destiny.

A Yugoslav historian, in his book “A House on the Side of the Road,” highlighted how Yugoslavia’s position as a bridge between Europe and Asia influenced its historical trajectory. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great embarked on his journey towards the east. Gaza resisted his advances, leading to a siege and subsequent massacre of its inhabitants upon its fall. Similar events unfolded in 1802 when Napoleon Bonaparte, claiming to uphold the values of the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, pursued an imperialist agenda.

He was among the first to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In Gaza, Napoleon executed all surrendered soldiers, citing a lack of provisions as justification. The late Moroccan thinker was correct in asserting that the slogans of the French Revolution, such as Liberté, égalité, fraternité, were intended solely for the French and Europeans, rather than encompassing all of humanity.

The ongoing Zionist aggression in Gaza has exposed the hollowness of human rights rhetoric in the West, revealing the existence of double standards. The Zionists’ current actions bear no resemblance to the culture of the Middle East. Instead, they have imported a culture of violence and crime from the Eastern European ghettos they originated from. The Palestinians have suffered immeasurable pain as a result. This barbaric behavior has left an indelible mark on the collective memory of Palestinians and Arabs, undoubtedly fueling future conflicts. Regrettably most Western nations have aligned themselves with this genocidal war.

The nations that opposed the genocide war, including   Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, and Bolivia, will always hold a significant position in the hearts of the Palestinians and the global community.

The Zionist fascists will ultimately be defeated, and I will have the opportunity to visit a liberated Gaza and a free Palestine.

Salim Nazzal  is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college.

These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way. The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods.

A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act. Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe. With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs.

In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.”

Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North. What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire.

Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist.

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

29 Feb 2024 – The world recently lost two principled opponents of war, but under drastically different circumstances. Johan Galtung died on 17 Feb at the age of 93. The Norwegian sociologist was known as the father of peace studies, and spent his life researching conflicts and fostering dialog in pursuit of peace.

By Chris Hedges

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation was ultimately a religious act, one that radically delineates good and evil and calls us to resist.

29 Feb 2024 – Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ongoing genocide in Gaza, no less morally culpable than the German soldiers, technocrats, engineers, scientists and bureaucrats who oiled the apparatus of the Nazi Holocaust. This was a role he could no longer accept. He died for our sins.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said calmly in his video as he walked to the gate of the embassy. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Young men and women sign up for the military for many reasons, but starving, bombing and killing women and children is usually not amongst them. Shouldn’t, in a just world, the U.S. fleet break the Israeli blockade of Gaza to provide food, shelter and medicine? Shouldn’t U.S. warplanes impose a no fly zone over Gaza to halt the saturation bombing? Shouldn’t Israel be issued an ultimatum to withdraw its forces from Gaza? Shouldn’t the weapons shipments, billions in military aid and intelligence provided to Israel, be halted? Shouldn’t those who commit genocide, as well as those who support genocide, be held accountable?

These simple questions are the ones Bushnell’s death forces us to confront.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves,” he posted shortly before his suicide, “‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

The coalition forces intervened in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds following the first Gulf War. The suffering of the Kurds was extensive, but dwarfed by the genocide in Gaza. A no-fly zone for the Iraqi air force was imposed. The Iraqi military was pushed out of the northern Kurdish areas. Humanitarian aid saved Kurds from starvation, infectious diseases and death from exposure.

But that was another time, another war. Genocide is evil when it is carried out by our enemies. It is defended and sustained when carried out by our allies.

Walter Benjamin — whose friends Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson committed suicide in 1914 to protest German militarism and the First World War — in his essay “Critique of Violence,” examines acts of violence undertaken by individuals who confront radical evil. Any act that defies radical evil breaks the law in the name of justice. It affirms the sovereignty and dignity of the individual. It condemns the coercive violence of the state. It entails a willingness to die. Benjamin called these extreme acts of resistance “divine violence.”

“Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope,” Benjamin writes.

Bushnell’s self-immolation — one most social media posts and news organizations have heavily censored — is the point. It is meant to be seen. Bushnell extinguished his life in the same way thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been extinguished. We could watch him burn to death. This is what it looks like. This is what happens to Palestinians because of us.

The image of Bushnell’s self-immolation, like that of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Vietnam in 1963 or Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit seller in Tunisia, in 2010, is a potent political message. It jolts the viewer out of somnolence. It forces the viewer to question assumptions. It begs the viewer to act. It is political theater, or perhaps religious ritual, in its most potent form. Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh said of self-immolation: “To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.”

If Bushnell was willing to die, repeatedly shouting out “Free Palestine!” as he burned, then something must be terribly, terribly wrong.

These individual self-sacrifices often become rallying points for mass opposition. They can ignite, as they did in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, revolutionary upheavals. Bouazizi, who was incensed that local authorities had confiscated his scales and produce, did not intend to start a revolution. But the petty and humiliating injustices he endured under the corrupt Ben Ali regime resonated with an abused public. If he could die, they could take to the streets.

These acts are sacrificial births. They presage something new. They are the complete rejection, in its most dramatic form, of conventions and reigning systems of power. They are designed to be horrific. They are meant to shock. Burning to death is one of the most dreaded ways to die.

Self-immolation comes from the Latin stem immolāre, to sprinkle with salted flour when offering up a consecrated victim for sacrifice. Self-immolations, like Bushnell’s, link the sacred and the profane through the medium of sacrificial death.

But to go to this extreme requires what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness in the soul.” He notes that “nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places.” This madness is dangerous, but it is necessary when confronting radical evil because without it “truth is obscured.” Liberalism, Niebuhr warns, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

This extreme protest, this “sublime madness,” has been a potent weapon in the hands of the oppressed throughout history.

The some 160 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 to protest Chinese occupation are perceived as religious rites, acts that declare the independence of the victims from the control of the state. Self-immolation calls us to a different way of being. These sacrificial victims become martyrs.

Communities of resistance, even if they are secular, are bound together by the sacrifices of martyrs. Only apostates betray their memory. The martyr, through his or her example of self-sacrifice, weakens and severs the bonds and the coercive power of the state. The martyr represents a total rejection of the status quo. This is why all states seek to discredit the martyr or turn the martyr into a nonperson. They know and fear the power of the martyr, even in death.

Daniel Ellsberg in 1965 witnessed a 22-year-old anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, douse himself with kerosene and light himself on fire — the flames shot 10 feet into the air — outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at The Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War. Ellsberg cited the self-immolation, along with the nationwide anti-war protests, as one of the factors that led him to release the Pentagon Papers.

The radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, after traveling to North Vietnam with a peace delegation during the war, visited the hospital room of Ronald Brazee. Brazee was a high school student who had drenched himself with kerosene and immolated himself outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse, New York to protest the war.

“He was still living a month later,” Berrigan writes. “I was able to gain access to him. I smelled the odor of burning flesh and I understood anew what I had seen in North Vietnam. The boy was dying in torment, his body like a great piece of meat cast upon a grill. He died shortly thereafter. I felt that my senses had been invaded in a new way. I had understood the power of death in the modern world. I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold in the Land of Burning Children. So I went to Catonsville because I had gone to Hanoi.”

In Catonsville, Maryland Berrigan and eight other activists, known as the Catonsville Nine, broke into a draft board on May 17, 1968. They took 378 draft files and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in a federal prison.

I was in Prague in 1989 for the Velvet Revolution. I attended the commemoration of the self-immolation of a 20-year-old university student named Jan Palach. Palach had stood on the steps outside the National Theater in Wenceslas Square in 1969, poured petrol over himself and lit himself on fire. He died of his wounds three days later. He left behind a note saying that this act was the only way to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had taken place five months earlier. His funeral procession was broken up by police. When frequent candlelit vigils were held at his grave at Olsany cemetery, the communist authorities, determined to stamp out his memory, disinterred his body, cremated it and handed the ashes to his mother.

During the winter of 1989, posters with Palach’s face covered the walls of Prague. His death, two decades earlier, was lionized as the supreme act of resistance against the Soviets and pro-Soviet regime installed after the overthrow of Alexander Dubček. Thousands of people marched to the Square of Red Army Soldiers and renamed it Jan Palach Square. He won.

One day, if the corporate state and apartheid state of Israel are dismantled, the street where Bushnell lit himself on fire will bear his name. He will, like Palach, be honored for his moral courage. Palestinians, betrayed by most of the world, already look to him as a hero. Because of him, it will be impossible to demonize all of us.

Divine violence terrifies a corrupt and discredited ruling class. It exposes their depravity. It illustrates that not everyone is paralyzed by fear. It is a siren call to battle radical evil. That is what Bushnell intended. His sacrifice speaks to our better selves.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

4 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Alfred de Zayas

27 Feb 2024 – The live-streaming and subsequent videos of US active duty airman Aaron Bushnell’s extreme sacrifice in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday 25 February 2024 should make us reflect on the complicity of our governments in the on-going genocide being perpetrated by Israel on the hapless Palestinian people.  30,000 dead – overwhelmingly civilians, women and children.

The self-immolation brings back memories of the Vietnamese monks who self-immolated in the 1960s in protest against the oppressive Saigon government and the US aggression of their country. Further self-immolations took place in the United States, including on 16 March 1965, Alice Herz, an 82-year old peace activist, in front of the Federal Department Store in Detroit, Norman Morrison, a 31-year old Quaker pacifist, who poured kerosene over himself and set himself alight outside the Pentagon, and Robert LaPorte in front of the United Nations.

It reminds us of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who in 2010 self-immolated in protest against the police brutality of the Tunisian government, and whose sacrifice was the occasion that triggered what came to be known as the “Arab spring”, and which I consider more like a neo-colonial effort on the part of the US and Europe to cement their control in the MENA region. Of course, there were real home-grown grievances against authoritarian and corrupt governments, but the US-driven “colour revolutions” made a chill come over the region, an Arab winter with perpetual wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.

Aaron Bushnell, a young man of 25 with all of his life before him, performed the ultimate protest to make the point against the indifference of the world in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a continuing tragedy which Professor Norman Finkelstein has documented in his comprehensive book GAZA[1] and in his numerous articles and television appearances.

On the video, minutes before setting himself ablaze, Bushnell said with a quiet, measured, resolute voice:  “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”  Bushnell was a respected and loved cyber defence operations specialist with the 531st intelligence support squadron at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

In an interview with Newsweek Senator Bernie Sanders said “It’s obviously a terrible tragedy, but I think it speaks to the depths of despair that so many people are feeling now about the horrific humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza, and I share those deep concerns…. The United States has got to stand up to Netanyahu and make sure this does not continue.”[2]

Yes, a genocide is unfolding before our eyes.  Articles 2 and 3 of the Genocide Convention are clearly engaged, and the issue of “intent” is overwhelmingly established in pages 57-69 of the legal brief submitted by South Africa to the ICJ.  On television and the internet we watch the bombardments of hospitals, schools, UN shelters.

While the entire world is clamouring for a cease-fire, the U.S. government abused the veto power in the Security Council three times to block the three draft resolutions on a cease-fire.  The United States and other countries that continue delivering lethal weapons to Israel, weapons that have been used and are being used to perpetrate the genocide, are complicit in genocide under article III e of the Convention.  Any state party to the Convention can refer the matter directly to the ICJ pursuant to article 9 of the Convention.  Accordingly, not only Israel, but also the US, UK, France and Germany should be on the dock[3].

On 26 January 2024 the International Court of Justice issued a comprehensive order of “provisional measures”[4] of protection, an injunction, which is legally binding under article 41 of the Statute of the ICJ, and which Israel has systematically violated, as it violated the ICJ’s earlier Advisory Opinion on the Wall, dated 9 July 2004[5].

On 16 February the ICJ published a decision on the South African second request for additional measures of protection:

“The Court notes that the most recent developments in the Gaza Strip, and in Rafah in particular, ‘would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’, as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General (Remarks to the General Assembly on priorities for 2024 (7 Feb. 2024)). This perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures. The Court emphasizes that the State of Israel remains bound to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention and with the said Order, including by ensuring the safety and security of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”[6]

Notwithstanding the ICJ proceedings and the proceedings before the International Criminal Court, Israel’s onslaught on 2.3 million Palestinians continues.

While I understand Aaron Bushnell’s motivation and his noble hope that his self-immolation would make an impact on our politicians, I fear that the deep-seated cynicism in the US and Israeli governments and the cavalier attitude of the mainstream media will effectively give carte blanche to Biden and Netanyahu, who will continue ignoring all calls for a cease-fire and will very soon “cancel” the memory of Bushnell’s sacrifice.

In our modern world, Aaron Bushnell’s extreme protest appears to be anachronistic, from a distant bygone era.  We read about it, and it almost sounds like fiction.  It may not accomplish anything, because our politicians are committed to war – in Gaza as in Ukraine — no matter what the majority of the world thinks, no matter what the International Court of Justice will rule on the 1948 Genocide Convention and its concrete application in the case of the Gaza genocide.

It is rare to see someone today actually following his principles and going through to the ultimate (and excruciatingly painful) sacrifice.  In my opinion, and in that of many peace activists, it would have been more sensible to live for the cause of peace and not to die in protest against a criminal war.  Peace-making is work-in-progress, a daily commitment.

The deconstruction and desacralization of Western society have made gestures as Aaron Bushnell’s harder to relate to than in the past, because our society has lost its moral compass, its capacity for empathy. Indeed, Western society is impregnated with cynicism to such a degree that a sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself seems incomprehensible, a far harder concept to grasp intellectually — let alone feel — for modern rootless materialists.

Ms. Lupe Barboza of the Care Collective in Texas said that Bushnell had developed deep friendships with people living in encampments and would regularly purchase blankets, sweaters and snacks from a store on base to give out. In the days before his death, Bushnell wrote his will detailing his final wishes that he shared with close friends. “He took all the steps he needed to make sure that everything he had would be cared for, like his cat, he designated that to his neighbour. … So yeah, that to me is all the sense of someone who was measured and knew what he was doing.”[7]

I urge fellow Americans and the US military, especially Bushnell’s Air Force comrades,  to demand that the US government stop supplying arms to Israel immediately and that the US cease blocking the Security Council when a resolution is tabled by Algeria or any other country.

We know that the world stood and watched when Pol Pot massacred his own people in Cambodia in the 1970s, the world did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide of 1994.  Today it is up to us to demand accountability.  We must all stand together against the genocide in Gaza.

And if we really mean it, we should also pray for the victims of this senseless slaughter in Gaza, we should pray for the soul of Senior Airman Bushnell.  I would like to see a bronze monument erected to him, exactly where he self-immolated himself.  His extreme sacrifice must not be forgotten.

As a practising Catholic, I will have Masses read for his soul.  I also extend my deepest sympathies to his family and friends.  God bless his soul.  Requiescat in pace.

Notes.

[1] https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/books/gaza-an-inquest-into-its-martyrdom/

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/bernie-sanders-breaks-silence-on-aaron-bushnell-self-immolation/ar-BB1iWaYf

[3] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf?ref=readthemaple.com

[4] https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-sum-01-00-en.pdf

[5] https://www.icj-cij.org/case/131

[6] https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240216-pre-01-00-en.pdf

[7] https://www.npr.org/2024/02/25/1233810136/fire-man-israeli-embassy-washington

Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18.

4 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Patrick Martin

26 Feb 2024 – For the past two years, nearly every reference in the US media to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been preceded by an obligatory word—“unprovoked.”

The public was told that this was a war without cause, that Ukraine was blameless, and that the invasion was to be explained entirely in terms of the intentions and psychology of one man, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

However, on the weekend of the second anniversary of the war, the New York Times published a lengthy article revealing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was instigated by a systematic and widespread campaign of military-intelligence aggression on the part of the United States.

The article details longstanding Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations in Ukraine, in which the agency sponsored and built up the Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR, using it as a weapon of spying, assassination and provocation directed against Russia for more than a decade.

The Times writes:

Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

The Times report demonstrates that this Russian intelligence assessment was absolutely true. For more than a decade, dating back to 2014, the CIA was building up, training and arming Ukrainian intelligence and paramilitary forces that were engaging in assassinations and other provocations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, against Russian forces in Crimea and across the border into Russia itself.

In a critical passage, the Times writes:

As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.

In other words, Ukrainian paramilitary forces that were armed, funded and led by the United States and NATO were systematically assassinating forces supporting closer relations with Russia.

The newspaper’s account begins with the Maidan Coup of February 2014, when right-wing and neo-Nazi forces backed by the US and the European Union overthrew the elected pro-Russian president and installed a pro-imperialist regime headed by the billionaire Petro Poroshenko.

This coup was the culmination of two decades of imperialist inroads into the former Soviet bloc, including the expansion of NATO to include virtually all of Eastern Europe in violation of pledges made to the leaders of the former Soviet Union. The Times is silent on this earlier history, as well as on the role of the CIA in the Maidan events.

Maidan set the stage for a massive escalation of the CIA intervention, as detailed in the Times report. The intelligence agency played a central role in fueling conflict between Ukraine and Russia, first as a low-level war against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, then as a full-scale war after the Russian invasion in February 2022. Three US administrations were involved: first Obama, then Trump and now Biden.

According to the Times account, CIA operations included not only widespread spying, but also assisting direct provocations such as the assassination of pro-Russian politicians in eastern Ukraine and paramilitary attacks on Russian forces in Crimea.

The Times reports that a Ukrainian unit, the Fifth Directorate, was tasked with conducting assassinations, including one in 2016. The Times writes:

[A] mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.

The C.I.A. soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word “Lift,” the British term for an elevator.

The report describes another such operation:

A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

Since the outbreak of full-scale war, the Ukrainian HUR has extended these assassination operations to the whole territory of Russia, including the killing of Darya Dugina, a leading pro-Putin polemicist in the Russian media, and Russian government and military officials.

The CIA found its Ukrainian allies very useful in collecting vast amounts of data on Russian military and intelligence activity, so much that the HUR itself could not process it and had to forward the raw data to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia for analysis. An earlier, less detailed report on this intelligence collaboration, in the Washington Post, cited a Ukrainian intelligence official’s estimate that “250,000 to 300,000” Russian military/intelligence messages were being collected each day. This data was not just related to Ukraine, but concerned Russian intelligence activity all over the world.

Long before the Russian invasion, the CIA was seeking to broaden its attack on Moscow. The Times reports:

The relationship [with the Ukrainian HUR] was so successful that the C.I.A. wanted to replicate it with other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia.

The head of Russia House, the C.I.A. department overseeing operations against Russia, organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain’s MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia.

The result was a secret coalition against Russia—and the Ukrainians were vital members of it.

All these activities occurred well before the Russian invasion of February 2022. The outbreak of full-scale war led to even more direct CIA engagement in Ukraine. CIA agents were the only Americans not covered by the initial evacuation of US government personnel from Ukraine, removing only to western Ukraine. They continually briefed the Ukrainians on Russian military plans, including precise details of operations as they were unfolding.

According to the Times:

Within weeks, the C.I.A. had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior U.S. official said of the C.I.A.’s sizable presence, “Are they pulling triggers? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.”

Some of the C.I.A. officers were deployed to Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with U.S. intelligence to ensure that it was accurate.

In other words, the CIA was helping direct the war, making the US government a full participant, a co-belligerent in a war with nuclear-armed Russia, despite Biden’s claim that the United States was only aiding Ukraine from afar. And all this without the American people having the slightest say in the matter.

The Times account also provides an inadvertent indictment of the American media. The newspaper writes:

The details of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by the New York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.

This admission means that these secrets were “closely guarded” by the Times itself. As former Editor Bill Keller once observed, freedom of the press means freedom not to publish, and “that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity.” Particularly, we might add, when it comes to the crimes of US imperialism.

The Times article is not so much an exposure as a controlled release of information. The US “newspaper of record” reports that the two authors of the piece, Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, conducted “more than 200 interviews” with “current and former officials in Ukraine, elsewhere in Europe, and in the United States.” This activity could hardly have taken place without the knowledge, permission, even encouragement of the CIA, as well as the Zelensky regime and Ukrainian intelligence.

In the meantime, a real journalist, Julian Assange, is awaiting the decision on his final appeal against extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison or even a death sentence. The crime of Assange and WikiLeaks, which Assange founded, is that they did not obey the rules of bourgeois journalism and did not seek the permission of the military-intelligence authorities before publishing revelations about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the efforts of the US State Department to subvert and manipulate governments, and the spying activities of the CIA and National Security Agency.

The exposure of a decade of CIA operations in Ukraine—clearly at the request of the agency itself—appears to be linked to the ongoing conflict within the US ruling elite over what policy to adopt in that war, in the wake of the debacle suffered by the Zelensky regime in last year’s offensive, which gained little and suffered colossal casualties. Congressional Republicans have blocked further military and financial aid to Ukraine, effectively declaring that the US must cut its losses there and concentrate on the main enemy, China.

By reporting the virtual control of the Ukrainian regime by the US military-intelligence apparatus, the Times is seeking to pressure the Republicans to support the war funding. It is arguing that this money is not going to a foreign government, in a foreign war, thousands of miles from US borders, but to a subcontractor of American imperialism, waging an American war in which US personnel are deeply and directly engaged.

In so doing, the Times has revealed its own coverage of the Ukraine war over the past two years to have been nothing more than war propaganda, aimed at using a fraudulent narrative to dragoon the American public to support a predatory imperialist war of aggression aimed at subjugating and dismantling Russia.

4 March 2024

Source: transcend.org