Which Companies Will Benefit Most From Modernization Of The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal?

Loren Thompson, Forbes, 2 Oct 23

The U.S. government has embarked upon the first comprehensive modernization of its strategic nuclear arsenal since the Cold War ended three decades ago. The Department of Defense is simultaneously developing a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.

Collectively, these three systems are referred to as the strategic “triad.” Every nuclear posture review conducted by the government since the Soviet Union collapsed—there have been five counting Biden’s—has endorsed the triad as the best approach to assuring nuclear deterrence.

During the Cold War, each leg of the triad was periodically modernized. However, with the waning of the Soviet threat, improvement slowed. As a result, the nuclear arsenal has aged markedly. With great-power competition now restored to prominence in the nation’s defense strategy, the deterrent is overdue for revitalization.

The most recent authoritative estimate of nuclear-weapons costs, produced by the Congressional Budget Office in July, projects that the Department of Defense and Department of Energy will spend $247 billion during the ten years ending in 2032 to modernize the nuclear force.

An even larger amount will be allocated in subsequent years, delivering revenues to hundreds of companies. For instance, industrial conglomerate TextronTXT -1.1% will provide reentry-vehicle technology for carrying nuclear warheads, and BoeingBA -2% hopes to build a successor to the E-4B flying command post (popularly known as the Doomsday plane).

However, four companies are poised to dominate modernization of the nuclear arsenal, each of them ultimately realizing tens of billions of dollars in sales.

Northrop Grumman NOC +0.5% is the big winner in this generation’s round of competitions to rebuild the nuclear force. ……………… The company thus finds itself firmly ensconced as a key contractor on all three legs of the triad for decades to come—an unprecedented achievement in the history of the nuclear program.

General Dynamics, a Virginia-based defense and aerospace conglomerate, will build the 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines destined to carry two-thirds of U.S. strategic warheads, just as it built the existing Ohio class of strategic subs……….. Today it is the world’s leading producer of undersea warships, supporting modernization of both the U.S. and United Kingdom nuclear deterrents.

Lockheed Martin LMT -0.3% is the world’s biggest military contractor, and will play a number of roles in nuclear modernization. The Maryland-based company has built every generation of submarine-launched ballistic missile from the early Polaris weapons to today’s Trident II D5……………………………………………………………………………………..

Like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin contributes to my think tank.

RTX will also provide the engines for the B-21 bomber through its Pratt & Whitney unit, and much of the onboard electronics for the bomber through its Collins Aerospace unit. All three business units of RTX are thus deeply involved in nuclear modernization. RTX too contributes to my think tank. 7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2023/10/02/which-companies-will-benefit-most-from-modernization-of-the-us-nuclear-arsenal/?sh=7d9aa3892003

October 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

CANADA WELCOMES HITLER’S TOP UKRAINIAN PROPAGANDISTS

SCHEERPOST, By Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone 1 Oct 23 “…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.

Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.

In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies. On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”

The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation, “This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”

FREELAND NURTURES MEDIA CAREER AS UNDERCOVER REGIME CHANGE AGENT IN SOVIET-ERA UKRAINE

Following his death in 1984, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.

A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below on original) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.

During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for her meteoric rise to journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.

“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.

Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”

In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.

She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.

CANADA TRAINS, PROTECTS NAZIS IN POST-MAIDAN UKRAINE

When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.

In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag. When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on February 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).

Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who  declared, “the historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

AS NAZI FAMILY HISTORY SURFACES, FREELAND LIES TO THE PUBLIC

Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.

The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.

Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.

For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”

When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”

By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”

“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.

After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.

Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.

Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.

October 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

“Never About NATO” | “Nothing to do with NATO” | UKRAINE WAR

October 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A “New Cold War” on an Ever-Hotter Planet

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War?

Tom Dispatch BY TOM ENGELHARDT, 1 Oct 23

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.

But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. ………………………………………

let’s stop and think about just what planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.

These days, despite an all too “hot” war in Ukraine in which the U.S. has, at least indirectly, faced off against the crew that replaced those Soviet cold warriors of yore, the new Cold War references are largely aimed at this country’s increasingly tense, ever more militarized relationship with China. 

Its focus is both the island of Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia. Worse yet, both countries seem driven to intensify that struggle.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Joe Biden made a symbolic and much-publicized stop in Vietnam (yes, Vietnam!) while returning from the September G20 summit meeting in India. There, he insisted that he didn’t “want to contain China” or halt its rise. He also demanded that it play by “the rules of the game” (and you know just whose rules and game that was). In the process, he functionally publicized his administration’s ongoing attempt to create an anti-China coalition extending from Japan and South Korea (only recently absorbed into a far deeper military relationship with this country), all the way to, yes, India itself.

And (yes, as well!) the Biden administration has upped military aid to Japan, Taiwan (including $85 million previously meant for Egypt), Australia (including a promise to supply it with its own nuclear attack submarines), and beyond. In the process, it’s also been reinforcing the American military position in the Pacific from Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines to — yes again — Australia. Meanwhile, one four-star American general has even quite publicly predicted that a war between the U.S. and China is likely to break out by 2025, while urging his commanders to prepare for “the China fight”! Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has called China the “leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security” and the Biden foreign policy team has been hard at work encircling — the Cold War phrase would have been “containing” — China, both diplomatically and militarily.

On the Chinese side, that country’s military has been similarly ramping up its air and naval activities around and ever closer to the island of Taiwan in an ominous fashion, even as it increases its military presence in places like the South China Sea (as has the U.S.). Oh, and just in case you hadn’t noticed, with a helping hand from Russia, Beijing is also putting more money and effort into expanding its already sizable nuclear arsenal.

Yes, this latest version of a Cold War is (to my mind at least) already a little too hot to handle. And yet, despite that reality, it couldn’t be more inappropriate to use the term “new Cold War” right now on a globe where a previously unimagined version of a hot war is staring us all, including most distinctly the United States and China, in the face.

As a start, keep in mind that the two great powers facing off so ominously against each other have long faced off no less ominously against the planet itself. After all, the United States remains the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, while China is the greatest of the present moment (with the U.S. still in second place and Americans individually responsible for significantly more emissions than their Chinese counterparts). The results have been telling in both countries.

In 2023, the United States has already experienced a record 23 billion-dollar weather disasters from Hawaii to Florida with the year still months from ending. Meanwhile, China has been clobbered by staggering heat waves and stunning flooding, the heaviest rains in 1,000 years, displacing 1.2 million people in areas around its capital, Beijing. Given the past summer, this planet and all its inhabitants are no longer in anything that could pass for a cold war state.

The Freedom to Fuel?

As it happens, industrializing countries first began to, in essence, make war on our world in the late eighteenth century, but had no idea they were doing so until deep into the twentieth century.  These days, however, it should be anything but a secret that humanity is all too knowingly at war — and there’s nothing “cold” about it — with and on our very own world. ……………………………………………………………….

 In 2022, those major G20 nations that met in India recently poured a record $1.4 trillion (yes, that is not a misprint!) into subsidizing fossil fuels in various ways, more than double the figure for 2019………………………………………………………

The results of such a — yes, warlike — approach to the planet have been painfully obvious this year. After all, the northern hemisphere just broiled through its hottest summer in recorded history and the southern hemisphere the hottest winter. Each summer month — June, July, and August — also broke its own previous global record for heat and 2023 is almost guaranteed to be the hottest year ever recorded.

In addition, in the last five months, the world’s ocean waters also broke temperature records, heating up if not literally to the boiling point, then at least to stunning levels……………………………………………………………………………….

it hardly matters where you look. Even Australia just experienced its hottest winter ever and already potentially “catastrophic” spring fire conditions are developing there. Evidence also suggests that, whatever the extremes of the present moment, the future holds far worse in store.

In that context, think about the fact that the planet’s two greatest carbon emitters, China and the United States, now fully knowledgeable about what they’re doing, can’t seem to imagine working together in any fashion to deal with a catastrophe that may prove, in the decades to come, the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war.

The New Hot War

So, a new Cold War? Don’t count on it. I mean honestly, how can anyone anywhere talk about a new cold war with a straight face on a planet where nature’s increasingly hot war is the order of the day — and where far too little is being done. Meanwhile, as of this moment, the distinctly hot war in Ukraine is only worsening, as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries emit ever more carbon, which, it turns out, is what militaries do. After all, the U.S. military is the largest institutional greenhouse emitter on the planet, larger than some countries.

………………………………………………………………………. On a planet burning up ahead of schedule — and where, no matter how you look at it, humanity is reaching beyond some of the boundaries set for life itself — isn’t it time to refocus in a major way on the new Hot War (and not the one in Ukraine) that has this planet in its grip? Isn’t it time for the American and Chinese leaderships to cut the war-like posturing and together face a world in desperate danger, for the sake, if nothing else, of all our children and grandchildren who don’t deserve the planet we’re heating up for them in such a devastatingly rapid fashion? https://tomdispatch.com/the-slow-motion-equivalent-of-a-nuclear-war/

October 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

We’re not doomed yet’: climate scientist Michael Mann on our last chance to save human civilisation.

 ‘We’re not doomed yet’: climate scientist Michael Mann on our last
chance to save human civilisation. The renowned US scientist’s new book
examines 4bn years of climate history to conclude we are in a ‘fragile
moment’ but there is still time to act.

“We haven’t yet exceeded the
bounds of viable human civilisation, but we’re getting close,” says
Prof Michael Mann. “If we keep going [with carbon emissions], then all
bets are off.”

The climate crisis, already bringing devastating extreme
weather around the world, has delivered a “fragile moment”, says the
eminent climate scientist and communicator in his latest book, titled Our
Fragile Moment. Taming the climate crisis still remains possible, but faces
huge political obstacles, he says. Mann, at Penn State university in the
US, has been among the most high-profile climate scientists since
publishing the famous hockey stick chart in 1999, showing how global
temperatures rocketed over the last century.

 Guardian 30th Sept 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/30/human-civilisation-climate-scientist-prof-michael-mann

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Mad Propaganda Push To Normalize War Profiteering In Ukraine

Just the other day CNN anchor Erin Burnett ………. pausing to explain to her audience that this funding is actually good for Americans, because it goes straight into the US arms industry.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, OCT 1, 2023

There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.

At an event in Kyiv which hosted 250 “defense” industry corporations from 30 different countries on Friday, President Zelensky gave a speech urging war profiteers to open factories in Ukraine to cut out the middleman of securing and delivering so many weapons from abroad. This is an investment that the arms industry would ostensibly have plenty of time to set up, given that western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.

Zelensky’s speech twice made use of the phrase “defense-industrial complex”, and used the phrase “arsenal of the free world” no fewer than three times.

“Ukraine is developing a special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex,” Zelensky said. “To give all the opportunities to realize their potential to every company that works for the sake of defense — in Ukraine and with Ukraine or that wants to come to Ukraine.”

“Right now, the most powerful military-industrial complexes are being determined, as are their priorities and the global standard of defense. All of this is being determined in Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted with photos from the event.

This move has been accompanied in recent weeks by some of the most appalling mass media headlines that I have ever seen, all geared toward normalizing the military industrial complex in the eyes of the public.

In an amazingly awful Wall Street Journal op-ed titled titled “In Defense of the Defense Industry” and subtitled “Populists of the right and left attack U.S. companies that make weapons. Who do they think protects us?”, Future of Capitalism’s Ira Stoll argues that the military industrial complex is actually a wonderful thing we should all love and support.

“The weapons industry protects America and its allies, keeping us safe from ruthless enemies who would otherwise exterminate or enslave us,” Stoll writes. “Raytheon helps make weapons systems that defend Israeli civilians against attacks from Iran-backed terrorist groups. These include the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles. Raytheon also produces the Javelin antitank missile that Ukraine has used against Russian armor and the early-warning radars that would detect incoming missiles aimed at the U.S.”

Stoll does not name the alternate universe he is describing in which the US military is used to keep Americans safe rather than to advance imperial interests abroad.

Another recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair” and subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield” glorifies the way war machinery is being field tested on human bodies to the benefit of war profiteers.

“The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald. “Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.”

A Reuters article from two weeks ago titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” gushes over how much money is being raked in by arms manufacturers as a result of this war, with one unnamed arms industry executive telling Reuters, “War is good for business.”

Just the other day CNN anchor Erin Burnett followed up some clips of “far right lawmakers” voicing their opposition to funding for the Ukraine proxy war by pausing to explain to her audience that this funding is actually good for Americans, because it goes straight into the US arms industry.

“It’s worthwhile with all of this gaining some steam in public perception to be clear on some facts,” Burnett said. “First and foremost, the vast majority of this money is going to American companies and jobs, right, because those are the people that are making the Abrams tanks, the ammo and everything else. And you take Lockheed Martin, which makes the HIMARS, that have been core to Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the company announced it’s going to increase its workforce in Camden, Arkansas, by 20 percent, just because of this new demand.”

“That money is going to America,” Burnett added. 

All this propaganda energy is going into normalizing the act of war profiteering because if you let the idea stand on its own, it would make people scream in horror. The fact that a deliberately-provoked war is being used as a giant field demo to show prospective buyers and investors how effective various weapons systems can be at ripping apart human bodies in order to profit from all this death and destruction is more nightmarish than anything any dystopian novelist has ever come up with.

Ukraine is a giant advertisement for weapons of mass slaughter, and the cost of that corporate ad is not money but human blood. If you look right at this thing it absolutely chills you to the bone. Which is why so much effort is being poured into making sure people don’t look at it.

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Monuments to Ukrainian Nazis in Canada

October 1, 2023 W.O. Munce,  https://www.thepostil.com/monuments-to-ukrainian-nazis-in-canada/

Given the fact that Ukraine and Nazis are again making news, it is important to point out that there are indeed commemorative monuments to Ukrainian Nazis in Canada, located where the Ukrainian populations are the greatest. The reasons for such monuments are known to the Ukrainian community alone, but so it is essential to make a record of them here, along with a hint at what those being commemorated did back in the days of World War Two.

“Ukrainian partisans and their allies burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. Churches full of worshipers were burned to the ground. Partisans displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies, to encourage remaining Poles to flee… It was this maimed OUN-Bandera, led by Mykola Lebed’ and then Roman Shukhevych, that cleansed the Polish population from Volhynia in 1943” (The Reconstruction of Nations).

The 14th Division of the Ukrainian SS surrounded the village Huta Pieniacka from three sides… The people were gathered in the church or shot in the houses. Those gathered in the church—men, women and children—were taken outside in groups, children killed in front of their parents. Some men and women were shot in the cemetery, others were gathered in barns where they were shot” (British archives).

“One of their major tasks as UPA partisans was the cleansing of the Polish presence from Volhynia. Poles tend to credit the UPA’s success in this operation to natural Ukrainian brutality; it was rather a result of recent experience. People learn to do what they are trained to do, and are good at doing what they have done many times. Ukrainian partisans who mass-murdered Poles in 1943 followed the tactics they learned as collaborators in the Holocaust in 1942: detailed advance planning and site selection; persuasive assurances to local populations prior to actions; sudden encirclements of settlements; and then physical elimination of human beings. Ukrainians learned the techniques of mass murder from Germans. This is why UPA ethnic cleansing was striking in its efficiency, and why Volhynian Poles in 1943 were nearly as helpless as Volhynian Jews in 1942. It is one reason why the campaign against Poles began in Volhynia rather than Galicia, since in Volhynia the Ukrainian police played a greater role in the Final Solution” (The Reconstruction of Nations).

“On that day, early in the morning, soldiers of this division, dressed in white, masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery. SS-men of the 14th Division of the SS ‘Galizien’ entered the village, shooting the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, mostly women and children, were divided and locked in barns that were set on fire. Those who tried to run away were killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head Commission described the morbid details of the act. The crime was committed against women, children, and newborn babies” (The Institute of National Remembrance. Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation).

Related Articles:

1. Justin Trudeau and the Banderites
2. Is Canada now a Nazi State?
3. Ukrainian Nationalism: Russian Special Operation— Denazification of Ukraine
4. O Canada!
5. After The Anti-Racist Struggle At Trinity College – The Wokeness Crown
6. Universities As Political Actors: The Case Of UBC

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Canada’s Honoring of Nazi Vet Exposes Ottawa’s Longstanding Ukraine Policy

Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.

By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans. Canada’s second most powerful official, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of one of Nazi Germany’s top Ukrainian propagandists.

SCHEERPOST, By Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone 1 Oct 23

In the Spring of 1943, Yaroslav Hunka was a fresh-faced soldier in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia when his division received a visit from the architect of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies, Heinrich Himmler. Having presided over the battalion’s formation, Himmler was visibly proud of the Ukrainians who had volunteered to support the Third Reich’s efforts.

80 years later, the Speaker of Canada’s parliament, Anthony Rota, also beamed with pride after inviting Hunka to a reception for Volodymyr Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president lobbied for more arms and financial assistance for his country’s war against Russia.

“We have in the chamber today Ukrainian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98,” Rota declared during the September 22 parliamentary event in Ottawa.

“His name is Yaroslav Hunka but I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota continued.

Gales of applause erupted through the crowd, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and leaders of all Canadian parties rose from their seats to applaud Hunka’s wartime service.

Since the exposure of Hunka’s record as a Nazi collaborator – which should have been obvious as soon as the Speaker announced him – Canadian leaders (with the notable exception of Eyre) have rushed to issue superficial, face-saving apologies as withering condemnations poured in from Canadian Jewish organizations.

The incident is now a major national scandal, occupying space on the cover of Canadian papers like the Toronto Sun, which quipped, “Did Nazi that coming.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.

The Liberal Party has attempted to downplay the affair as an accidental blunder, with one Liberal MP urging her colleagues to “avoid politicizing this incident.” Melanie Joly, Canada’s Foreign Minister, has forced Rota’s resignation, seeking to turn the the Speaker into a scapegoat for her party’s collective actions.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero.

To be sure, the incident was no gaffe. Before Canada’s government and military brass celebrated Hunka in parliament, they had provided diplomatic support to fascist hooligans fighting to install a nationalist government in Kiev, and oversaw the training of contemporary Ukrainian military formations openly committed to the furtherance of Nazi ideology.

Ottawa’s celebration of Hunka has also lifted the cover on the country’s post-World War Two policy of naturalizing known Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and weaponizing them as domestic anti-communist shock troops. The post-war immigration wave included the grandfather of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who functioned as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainain propagandists inside Nazi-occupied Poland.

Though Canadian officialdom has worked to suppress this sordid record, it has resurfaced in dramatic fashion through Hunka’s appearance in parliament and the unsettling contents of his online diaries.

“WE WELCOMED GERMAN SOLDIERS WITH JOY”

The March 2011 edition of the journal of the Association of Ukrainian Ex-Combatants in the US contains an unsettling diary entry which had gone unnoticed until recently.

Authored by Yaroslav Hunka, the journal consisted of proud reflections on volunteering for the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia. Hunka decribed the Nazi Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights” when they first arrived in his hometown of Berezhany, and recalled his own service in the Waffen-SS as the happiest time in his life.

“In my sixth grade,” he wrote, “out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.”

The Jewish Virtual Library details the extermination of Berezhany’s Jewish population at the hands of the “civilized” Germans: “In 1941 at the end of Soviet occupation 12,000 Jews were living in Berezhany, most of them refugees fleeing the horrors of the Nazi war machine in Europe. During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1, 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200, listed as poor by the Judenrat, were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur 1942 (Sept. 21), 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec and on June 12, 1943, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”

When Soviet forces held control of Berezhany, Hunka said he and his neighbors longed for the arrival of Nazi Germany. “Every day,” he recalled, “we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights, who give bullets to the hated Lyakhs are about to appear.” (Lyakh is a derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles).

In July 1941, when the Nazi German army entered Berezhany, Hunka breathed a sigh of relief. “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy,” he wrote. “People felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.”

Two years later, Hunka joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade – a unit formed under the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler inspected the Ukrainian volunteers in May 1943 (below), he was accompanied by Otto Von Wachter, the Nazi-appointed governor of Galicia who established the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.

“Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews…” Himmler reportedly told the Ukrainian troops. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”

“HITLER’S ELITE TORTURERS AND MURDERERS HAVE BEEN PASSED ON RMCP ORDERS”

Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.

The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, “some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.”

The journal described the unreformed Nazis as anticommunist shock troops whose “‘ideological leaders’ are already busy fomenting WWIII, propagating a new world holocaust in which Canada will perish.”

In 1997, the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the Canadian government with having admitted over 2000 veterans of the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.

That same year, 60 Minutes released a special, “Canada’s Dark Secret,” revealing that some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states had been granted citizenship by Canada after the war. Irving Abella, a Canadian historian, told 60 Minutes that the easiest way to get into the country “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”

Abella also alleged that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) explained to him that his government kept silent about the Nazi immigrants “because they were afraid of exacerbating relationships between Jews and Eastern European ethnic communities.”

Yaroslav Hunka was among the post-war wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans welcomed by Canada. According to the city council website of Berezhany, he arrived in Ontario in 1954 and promptly “became a member of the fraternity of soldiers of the 1st Division of the UNA, affiliated to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.”

Also among the new generation of Ukrainian Canadians was Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s second-most-powerful official, Chrystia Freeland. Throughout her career as a journalist and Canadian diplomat, Freeland has advanced her grandfather’s legacy of anti-Russian agitation, while repeatedly exalting wartime Nazi collaborators during public events.

CANADA WELCOMES HITLER’S TOP UKRAINIAN PROPAGANDISTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/canadas-honoring-of-nazi-vet-exposes-ottawas-longstanding-ukraine-policy/

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It’s Time to Admit the Truth About the War in Ukraine—and Course Correct

If it wasn’t clear to Washington before the offensive started that the fundamentals of combat operations and principles of war indicated Ukraine would likely fail, it should now be crystal clear.

DANIEL L. DAVIS , SENIOR FELLOW, DEFENSE PRIORITIES ON 9/18/23  https://www.newsweek.com/we-can-no-longer-hide-truth-about-russia-ukraine-war-opinion-1826532?amp=1

As leading American politicians, generals, and pundits continue advocating for open-ended support to Kyiv in their war against Russia, a sober, accurate analysis of Ukraine’s nearly completed summer offensive reveals that the heroic sacrifice Ukraine continues to make is producing little to no meaningful progress toward the objective of evicting Russia from Ukraine’s territory.

Washington should instead employ a necessary course correction and form a new policy, based on the harsh, ground-truth combat realities in Ukraine. Revising the objectives would give Washington and Kyiv a chance to preserve Ukrainian lives and American interests.

Washington’s current policies do neither.

Despite great hopes for a rapid success, Ukraine’s months-in-the-making offensive has sputtered from the outset. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone in the White House. On April 5, two months before the start of the offensive, I wrote that “Zelensky’s troops—with little to no air power and a dearth in artillery ammunition—could suffer egregious casualties while gaining little.”

Five days later, The Washington Post revealed the contents of a leaked Top Secret U.S. intelligence assessment which likewise predicted the Ukrainian offensive would probably fall “well short” of expectations, and that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive.” Total Ukrainian deaths in the war at that point were estimated to be as low as 17,500.

About a month before the start of the offensive, I again warned that the odds were stacked heavily against Kyiv. To succeed, I explained, Ukraine would “have to conduct the most difficult task in modern land warfare: a combined arms operation into the teeth of a dug-in enemy force that is prepared for an attack,” complicated by the shortage of artillery ammunition along with “limited airpower and minimal air defense.” Nevertheless, on the eve of battle, some Western analysts remained optimistic.

Once the offensive began on June 5, however, that optimism quickly evaporated. In the first two weeks of the fighting, Ukraine’s spearhead brigades suffered massive losses in armor and personnel while capturing virtually no territory. By the end of the third week, they had lost an estimated fifth of their strike force, requiring Ukraine to dramatically change tactics. Instead of leading with tanks and other armored vehicles (which were predictably getting chewed up in minefields and by Russian anti-tank missiles and artillery shells), Ukraine moved to an infantry-centric attack system.

While this change did result in producing incremental gains, the cost was exorbitant. On Aug. 29, the BBC reported that new leaked reports suggested Ukrainian battle deaths exploded since the offensive started. Whereas Ukraine was reported to have lost 17,500 troops in the first year of the war, it is presently assessed to have lost a breathtakingly high 50,000 additional deaths, for a total of 70,000 dead and 120,000 wounded.

If it wasn’t clear to Washington before the offensive started that the fundamentals of combat operations and principles of war indicated Ukraine would likely fail, it should now be crystal clear. Although Ukraine appears to have finally penetrated the first line of Russia’s main defense, the most difficult part of Russia’s defensive system has yet to be overcome: the hundreds of kilometers of dragon’s teeth, tank ditches, and yet more vast minefields.

It is unclear at this point whether Ukraine has enough striking power remaining in its offensive forces to reach, much less penetrate, Russia’s second main line—beyond which is a third main line followed by a fortress-defense at Tokmak, which is still 75 road kilometers from the Azov coast. Given these realities, the best Ukraine can likely do for the rest of the year is to hold what they have and prevent the possibility of losing more territory to a potential Russian counteroffensive this fall.

The United States, however, would be wise to adjust its policies to reflect the reality of Ukraine’s slim chances against Russia’s fortified lines. Washington has spent nearly $113 billion over the course of this war, provided Ukraine with an astounding volume of modern arms and ammunition, and delivered an impressive array of training and intelligence support. After almost a year of preparation, it hardly dented the Russian lines.

There is no realistic basis, therefore, to believe that Ukraine has the capacity to attain its stated strategic objective to reclaim all its territory, including Crimea. What is realistic is to continue providing Kyiv with the military wherewithal to defend itself from further Russian incursions. This goal should be combined with shifting an increasing percentage of the burden for additional arms and ammunition to our rich European friends. The U.S. should continue to ensure the war does not expand beyond the borders of Ukraine, and increase diplomatic efforts with all relevant parties to end the war on the best terms possible for Kyiv—all of which are beneficial to American interests.

Rather than repeating over the next year and a half what has already not worked—potentially costing Ukraine yet additional hundreds of thousands of losses—it’s time to try something that has a chance to succeed. In other words, it’s time to acknowledge objective reality and employ policies that can work.

Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America. Follow him @DanielLDavis1

September 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Microsoft May Go Nuclear to Support Its Energy-Hungry AI.

powering that AI is extraordinarily costly, even more so than its other cloud-based products. Microsoft’s latest sustainability report noted that the company’s water consumption has increased 30% year over year in order to keep its AI supercomputers cool.

Kyle Barr, September 28, 2023  https://gizmodo.com.au/2023/09/microsoft-may-go-nuclear-to-support-its-energy-hungry-ai/

Artificial intelligence has proved a costly endeavour—well, yes, in terms of money, but AI requires massive amounts of energy, and water consumption to operate at scale. That hasn’t stopped big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft from putting that energy-hungry AI into practically every single one of their user and enterprise end-products. Big daddy Microsoft has been trying to keep its (OpenAI-assisted) lead in the AI rat race, and it may need to grab the fuel rod by both hands if it wants to continue its big AI ambitions.

And when we say fuel rod, we mean it literally. Microsoft put out calls for a program manager on “Nuclear Technology” on Monday. As first reported by CNBC, The job specifically mentions that this new initiative would use “microreactors” and “Small Modular Reactors” to power the data centres used by Microsoft Cloud and AI. Whatever it is, the scope for Microsoft’s nuclear AI could be “global” as Microsoft has Azure data centres in all parts of the globe.

Microsoft declined to comment on any plans for future nuclear endeavours. The company instead linked to past blog posts on company sustainability initiatives. It’s unclear what plans Microsoft may have for nuclear-powered AI. The position references that the nuclear program manager would build a “roadmap for the technology’s integration,” which would also mean selecting partners for developing and implementing how the hell the tech giant would facilitate nuclear.

Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, are a proposed class of reactors that would be a purportedly smaller version of a full-on nuclear plant with a smaller power capacity. The idea is they can be built in one location and then moved to a separate site. There are only a few prototype SMRs implemented in Places like Russia and China, though the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy only approved its first SMR design in January this year.

Back in May, Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement with nuclear fusion startup Helion set to start in 2028. That’s different than an SMR, which still uses fission to generate power, and while there have been some recent successes with fusion this past year, we still could be a long way off from any kind of energy pivot.

Microsoft has spent the last year implementing generative AI into practically every one of its software products. Most recently, the Redmond, Washington company announced its AI copilot for Windows 11 to act as a kind of virtual assistant on a desktop. Court documents have shown that Microsoft has been looking for ways to implement more AI capabilities on its Azure cloud platform.

But powering that AI is extraordinarily costly, even more so than its other cloud-based products. Microsoft’s latest sustainability report noted that the company’s water consumption has increased 30% year over year in order to keep its AI supercomputers cool. Microsoft has put billions of dollars into a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and the Redmond company now being forced to power and cool its partner’s growing energy needs to train OpenAI’s latest models. Training GPT-3 consumed enough water to fill a full nuclear reactor’s cooling tower, according to one recent study.

Studies have shown AI is responsible for massive amounts of carbon emissions, and OpenAI’s GPT-3 model was responsible for CO2 emissions than most other large language models. The company’s GPT-4 model is purportedly 1,000 times more powerful than GPT-3.5 and was trained on nearly four times as much data. Running a larger AI model would require several times as much power as smaller models, and AI companies aren’t slowing down.

September 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment