A KINGLY PROPOSAL: LETTER FROM JULIAN ASSANGE TO KING CHARLES III

JULIAN ASSANGE, 5 MAY 2023  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/06/port-kembla-rally-to-demand-nsw-site-be-ruled-out-as-aukus-nuclear-submarine-base

To His Majesty King Charles III,

On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.

You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.

Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.

“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”

It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.

As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.

During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.

Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.

You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.

Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.

Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.

But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.

I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.

Your most devoted subject,

Julian Assange A9379AY

May 7, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

WWIII on the Installment Plan

One need only to look at the “Down Under” Australian press’ frightful China fear-mongering to know what we in the ‘Up Above’ can expect.  This has been well chronicled by Caitlin Johnstone, whose Substack posts are a must read.

Witness:  The U.S. has brought Australia, South Korea, Japan into an alliance against China and is pressuring the Philippines and Indonesia to join in as we ship arms to Taiwan. The intent is to bait China, to try to make Taiwan the next Ukraine, while coordinating submarine patrols amidst risible plans to send ships from the EU to patrol the Straits of Taiwan.  If China did something similar in our sphere, Congress would declare war.

The Invention of a Wartime Presidency to Save the Biden Administration

DENNIS KUCINICH, MAY 5, 2023  https://denniskucinich.substack.com/p/wwiii-on-the-installment-plan?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1441588&post_id=119326426&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Yesterday’s attempt to attack the Kremlin with a drone strike, supposedly to assassinate Vladimir Putin, is being pinned on Ukraine. But this is a proxy war of the U.S. versus Russia, and no one is fooled. Ukraine is a simply a U.S. pawn and can make no major moves without checking with Washington.

The U.S. has successfully muzzled its energy-starved allies in Europe from even objecting to, let alone investigating the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.  Europe is stuck with the skyrocketing cost of U.S. supplied replacement fuel.

The destruction of Nord Stream followed well-publicized mock U.S. nuclear strikes targeting Russia and the equally provocative shipment of depleted-uranium munitions transferred to the Ukraine battlefield through our “special relationship” with the British government. The Russian government has publicly warned that the use of such weapons, as were used by the U.S. in Iraq and Syria, will lead to escalation. 

The Biden Administration has done everything it could to incite a hot war directly between the U.S. and Russia, sacrificing Ukrainian youth and the majesty of Ukrainian cities.

The drone strike and the depleted uranium transfer are made to look like the West is somehow succeeding in the battle which, for all intents and purposes, will soon come to an end— with a phony declaration of victory of sorts (definitely not for Ukrainians). Then the infernal Enemy Engine will pivot its wrath and venom towards CHINA.

Get ready for a parceling out of some of the manufactured hate that has been reserved for Russia and President Putin — to hate China and President Xi, and to suffer a fully-machinated Red Peril. 

One need only to look at the “Down Under” Australian press’ frightful China fear-mongering to know what we in the ‘Up Above’ can expect.  This has been well chronicled by Caitlin Johnstone, whose Substack posts are a must read.

The Biden Administration, having unsuccessfully diminished the Russian economy with its broad sanctions, and having failed to defeat the Russian military, will soon lead us to believe that the same geniuses in Washington, London and Belgium who brought us the war in Ukraine, will somehow succeed in holding in check China, or perhaps even toppling President Xi, through military means. 

The depraved thinking that resulted in approximately $140 billion wasted for the war in Ukraine and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, countenances even greater opportunities in the East.

Witness:  The U.S. has brought Australia, South Korea, Japan into an alliance against China and is pressuring the Philippines and Indonesia to join in as we ship arms to Taiwan. The intent is to bait China, to try to make Taiwan the next Ukraine, while coordinating submarine patrols amidst risible plans to send ships from the EU to patrol the Straits of Taiwan.  If China did something similar in our sphere, Congress would declare war.

The geographically-confused North Atlantic Treaty Organization, (NATO) ever ready to be the U.S.’ wrecking ball, now considers China “a threat to global security.” Remember, China has brokered a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and attempted to do so in Ukraine. 

Remember, the U.S. has 800 military bases abroad and China has zero. 

Remember, China is holding almost a trillion dollars of US debt.

So, what is this all about?  The White House, which bet on the forbearance of a nuclear-armed Russia, in a conventional proxy war in Ukraine, is similarly counting on the forbearance of nuclear-armed China in a conventional war over Taiwan.  Thus is the horror of unfettered brinkmanship.

NBC News obtained a memo in January where a four-star general instructed his logistical command of nearly 50,000 to get ready for war with China by 2025.  His charges were told to further prepare by getting their “legal affairs” in order and to engage in the calisthenics of war, by firing an ammo clip often at a target and to aim for the head.  Is this just hysterical puffery?

The 2022 National Security Strategy of the United States identified China as the greatest military and economic threat to the United States. Forget that Mr. Biden voted for China trade, NAFTA and the WTO, all which sharply eroded America’s strategic industrial base of steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping and ultimately set the stage for China’s rise as a world power.  Forget that we have shipped high technology to military labs in China – and the Ukraine. 

While the US continues its military muscle-flexing globally, incurring rising resentment in its continual challenges to the very idea of national sovereignty, China has focused instead on economic expansion, assisting in economic development throughout the world and strengthening the capacities of nations to support their own interests.  China has played the long game, while US leaders have played the wrong game.

So, with only sanctions as a tool, the US has limited options to respond to China, except for war.

If the Biden Administration continues to ramp up for war against China, it could mean the end, not of China, but of the United States itself. 

China and Russia are not natural allies, to say the least.  However, with NATO encroachment, the placement of missiles on Russia’s border, the war in Ukraine, the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, the U.S. has pushed Russia into China’s waiting arms.

As a result of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, together with the saber rattling over Taiwan, we have forced a once unthinkable China-Russia alliance whose combined manufacturing, energy production and offensive capabilities exceed that of the US. 

A US war with China will not only bring in Russia on China’s side, but likely India, Brazil, and Iran.  That is, if such a war were “conventional,” meaning not nuclear.  However, the idea of containing such a war to conventional weapons is pure fantasy.

The Biden Administration’s cyclopean foreign policy will be the ruin of us all.

There is not a shred of diplomatic skill exhibited by the Sullivan-Blinken-Nuland troika.  They pull away from treaties.  Engage in continual provocations.  Recklessly spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on military adventures.  It’s escalate, escalate, escalate.   The defense contractors, the war profiteers as FDR rightfully called them, cash in and the rest of us lose.

The average American family has seen nearly $100,000 of its wealth spent on regime change adventures since 2001, with highly negative results for our country and the world.  The U.S. is viewed in many circles as the greatest threat to world peace. Alarmingly and poignantly, the national debt is close to $100,000 per person in America.

While the Biden Administration plans for a hot war with China in 2025, the White House will use cold war psychology now, for the 2024 election season, to scare the bejesus out of even the most pacific U.S. voter.  And, with the help of the American media, which has largely been reduced to a posse of electronic spear carriers, we will be afflicted with every ‘alarm of struggle and flight’ appropriate to cowing Americans into silence and compliance.  

President Biden, like President George W. Bush in the Iraq War, will seek to burnish his Commander in Chief status as a war-time president, beginning in the later part of 2023.  Going into 2024, the American people will be told not to change presidents in the middle of a manufactured war. 

Unless held in check by the voters, President Biden’s foreign policy handlers are merrily leading America and the world down the path of World War III.  New Hampshire, are you listening?

May 7, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Former CIA Officer Says Decision to Drone Attack Kremlin Was Made by the United States

Deadly escalation an effort to provoke major Russian response.

Summit News, 5 May, 2023, Paul Joseph Watson

Former CIA intelligence officer Larry Johnson says the decision to launch a drone attack on the Kremlin was made by the United States.

The Wednesday attack, which was likely to have been targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, was stopped by electronic warfare systems which disabled the drones before they could reach their target.

According to Johnson, the attack must have been spearheaded by the Biden administration and the US military-industrial complex because “decisions on such attacks are made not in Kiev, but in Washington.”

“Washington should understand clearly that we know this,” Johnson told reporters.

Although the attack, which Ukraine denied it was involved in, failed to accomplish its tactical goal, it was still highly “symbolic,” according to Johnson……………………………………….

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced the attempted drone attack as a dangerous escalation.  https://summit.news/2023/05/05/former-cia-officer-says-decision-to-drone-attack-kremlin-was-made-by-the-united-states/

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

As US-China Tensions Mount, We Must Resist the Push Toward Interimperialist War

What would it look like to build international solidarity against imperial rivalry from below?By Ashley Smith , TRUTHOUT, May 4, 2023

The daily news is filled with stories about the spiraling conflict between the U.S. and China over everything from trade to geopolitical squabbles and dueling military exercises. All of these converge over Taiwan — a small nation claimed by China as a renegade province, backed by the U.S., and home to the most advanced microchip manufacturing plants in the world.

These plants produce chips that power everything from iPhones to Washington’s F-35 fighter bomber, and other high-tech weaponry. That fact raises the stakes of a long-simmering dispute punctuated with periodic “Taiwan Strait Crises,” turning it into a volatile diplomatic, economic and military confrontation.

On Capitol Hill and in boardrooms, as Edward Luce notes, “the old Washington Consensus” of integrating of China has been replaced with a new one of “dis-integrating China.” Joe Biden has continued Donald Trump’s grand strategy of great power rivalry with Beijing………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and the rise of today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. The U.S. remains, of course, the most dominant imperialist state, but it now faces China as a rising rival, a revitalized Russia as an outsize regional power and a host of sub-imperialist states from Saudi Arabia to Israel and Brazil, which variously challenge and cooperate with the U.S.

The Rise of Chinese Imperialism

Washington views China as its biggest rival. Beijing has transformed itself from an autarchic, underdeveloped economy into a capitalist superpower. It is now the world’s second-largest economy, the number one manufacturer, the largest exporter, main trade partner with most of the world’s major economies, a leading exporter of capital, largest creditor and a top recipient of foreign direct investment……………………………………………………

Biden’s Imperialist Keynesianism

Of course, the U.S. remains the world’s largest economy, controls the dollar as the international reserve currency, boasts the largest network of military allies, spends nearly three times as much as China on defense and possesses over 750 bases around the world. To enforce its supremacy, it has taken an increasingly aggressive turn to contain Beijing……………………………………………………………………………….

“Democracies” Versus Autocracies

To complement this imperialist industrial policy, Biden has launched a geopolitical campaign to forge a front of democracies against autocracies. A lot of this is ideological posturing, as U.S. democracy is, to say the least, ridden with crisis (remember January 6?) and the allies it invited to its two “Democracy Summits” included states that Freedom House categorized as “partly free,” “not free at all” and “electoral autocracies.”……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Taiwan: Strategic Flashpoint of Imperial Rivalry

The conflict between the U.S. and China is coming to a head over Taiwan, with American Gen. Mike Minihan going so far as to predict war in 2025. Beijing claims the island as a renegade province it aims to reintegrate, while the U.S. holds a position of “strategic ambiguity,” upholding a One China policy that only officially recognizes Beijing, while remaining unclear whether it would militarily defend Taiwan in order to deter China from invading and Taiwan from declaring independence.

………………………………………………………………………….. The Taiwanese people are caught between China and the U.S., their right to self-determination threatened by Beijing and cynically supported by the U.S. for imperial motives.

Neither Washington, Nor Beijing

War between the U.S. and China is, however, unlikely at this point. Their economies remain deeply integrated, both possess enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and they are embedded in elaborate international geopolitical and economic institutions, all factors that mitigate the chances of war.

But, amid global capitalism’s multiple crises, both powers are whipping up nationalist hostility and implementing increasingly antagonistic geopolitical and economic policies. In such volatile conditions, it is essential for the international left to agitate against the drive toward imperialist war.

In the U.S., the left’s top priority must be to oppose Washington’s attempt to enforce its hegemony against China’s challenge. Washington remains, as Martin Luther King Jr. said decades ago, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a fact most recently confirmed by its destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time, we should not fall for the politics of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” and support Washington’s main imperial rival, China, nor lesser ones like Russia. They are no less predatory and avaricious imperialist states, as Beijing’s record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong attests, as does Moscow’s similarly brutal one in Syria and Ukraine.

Building International Solidarity From Below

Instead, the left must build international solidarity from below between oppressed nations like Palestine, Ukraine and Taiwan, as well as exploited workers in both countries and throughout the world. This project is not an abstraction, but a necessity and possibility…………………………………………

Finally, the U.S. left must collaborate with the Chinese left (and the Asian left more broadly), which despite repression and difficult conditions, have developed extensive networks and publications like Hong Kong’s Lausan, Taiwan’s New Bloom, and Chinese groups and publications like Gongchao, Chuang and Made in China Journal. Now is the time to build internationalist anti-imperialism that rejects the false choice between Washington and Beijing and organizes across borders in a fight for international socialism that puts people and the planet first. https://truthout.org/articles/as-us-china-tensions-mount-we-must-resist-the-push-toward-interimperialist-war/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=43fadf3893-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-43fadf3893-650192793&mc_cid=43fadf3893&mc_eid=73e1cd43d0

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Former Nuclear Leaders: Say ‘No’ to New Reactors

4 May 23 https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-to-new-reactors/?fbclid=IwAR2p2HtrPYKkWrNjfiZn6QDDg8wbo7FVIzW28k4Du7RVnH_HMuWSDQ4OgWk

The former heads of nuclear power regulation in the U.S., Germany, and France, along with the former secretary to the UK’s government radiation protection committee, have issued a joint statement that in part says, “Nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change.”

The statement issued Jan. 25 notes the importance of global action to combat climate issues, but the four leaders say nuclear power is too costly, and too risky an investment, to be a viable strategy against climate change.

The four leaders issuing the joint statement include:

• Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and founder of Maxean, an energy company.
• Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, a university professor and former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany.
• Dr. Bernard Laponche, a French engineer and author, and former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety.
• Dr. Paul Dorfman, an associate fellow and researcher at the University of Sussex, and former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters.

Here’s the text of the statement:

“The climate is running hot. Evolving knowledge of climate sensitivity and polar ice melt-rate makes clear that sea-level rise is ramping, along with destructive storm, storm surge, severe precipitation and flooding, not forgetting wildfire. With mounting concern and recognition  over the speed and pace of the low carbon energy transition that’s needed, nuclear has been reframed as a partial response to the threat of global heating. But at the heart of this are questions about whether nuclear could help with the climate crisis, whether nuclear is economically viable, what are the consequences of nuclear accidents, what to do with the waste, and whether there’s a place for nuclear within the swiftly expanding renewable energy evolution.

“As key experts who have worked on the front-line of the nuclear issue, we’ve all involved at the highest governmental nuclear regulatory and radiation protection levels in the US, Germany, France and UK. In this context, we consider it our collective responsibility to comment on the main issue: Whether nuclear could play a significant role as a strategy against climate change.

“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”

The statement includes a list of items (below) the leaders see as making an argument against nuclear power.

In short, nuclear as strategy against climate change is:

• Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production
• More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO₂ mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout.
• Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees.
• Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste.
• Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.
• Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of  nuclear weapons proliferation.
• Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts.
• Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
• Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation.
• Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation
• needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Record low Antarctic sea ice is another alarming sign the ocean’s role as climate regulator is changing

Craig Stevens

A changing climate is upon us, with more frequent land and marine heatwaves, forest fires, atmospheric rivers and floods. For some, it is the backdrop to day-to-day life, but for a growing number of people it is a life-changing reality.

. Record low Antarctic sea ice is another alarming sign the ocean’s role as climate regulator is changing

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Port Kembla rally to demand NSW site be ruled out as Aukus nuclear submarine base

March organisers say delaying a decision on the location – one of three flagged as possible – will deter renewable energy investment

Guardian, Daniel Hurst 6 May 23

Labor members are set to join unionists at a rally in Wollongong’s Port Kembla on Saturday to urge the Albanese government to rule out the location as a future base for the Aukus nuclear-powered submarines.

Rally organisers say the debate is “a proxy battle” for Australia’s future and warn the delay in making a decision will only deter renewable energy investment in Port Kembla.

The former Morrison government named it as well as Newcastle and Brisbane as three potential sites for a new east coast base, with reports earlier this year suggesting Port Kembla was favoured by defence planners.

But in the wake of the defence strategic review, the Labor government has delayed a decision on the location and has signalled it will not limit itself to the Morrison government-era shortlist. It also now talks about a “facility”, not necessarily a base.

A spokesperson for the defence minister, Richard Marles, said the government would “develop a process to consider all feasible options for an east coast facility to support Australia’s future submarine capability”.

A decision would be made “late in this decade”, the spokesperson said………………..

The South Coast Labour Council’s annual May Day march has been moved from Wollongong to Port Kembla to shine a spotlight on opposition to the proposed base………..

Rorris said locals had “grave fears” that the prospect of a submarine base would crowd out potential energy investors.

“That is why we are asking the federal government: rule it out, take it off the table and say that it will never be a nuclear base. Until that happens, economically and industrially, we have a major and unacceptable problem.”………….

Rorris said it was a “choice between the industries of the future to save the planet versus the war machines that may well destroy it”.

“We understand that unlike the Morrison government, this Albanese federal government is a bit more attuned to the feeling on this matter on the ground,” Rorris said………………………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/06/port-kembla-rally-to-demand-nsw-site-be-ruled-out-as-aukus-nuclear-submarine-base

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

May 5 Energy News — geoharvey

Science and Technology: ¶ “The People Living Ultra Low-Carbon Lifestyles” • Surveys show that many people want to participate in climate actions, but putting a very low-carbon life into practice can mean be tricky: it can mean changing several aspects of daily life, particularly for the richer parts of society. What do truly low-carbon lifestyles […]

May 5 Energy News — geoharvey

May 6, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The rise of fascism, Ukraine, America at war with the world – journalists must speak up.

JOHN PILGER: Danger of war exists if we don’t speak up now

Independent Australia, By John Pilger | 2 May 2023

“………………………………………………………………………………… The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism”, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American-bankrolled coup against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow”. The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “White supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real’. The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel”, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist”, regardless of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading KC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished………………………………………

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for the New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was at least 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’

At least one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. No one knows how many is the media refrain. Blair and George W Bush – and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al – were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality”.

……………………………………Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited; and Islamic State might not have existed.

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:

‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system…it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

…………………………………………………………. On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story:

‘The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.’

……………………………….Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th Century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

……………………… In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”. Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose”.

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to help “rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

…………………………………………………….. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid — three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.  https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/john-pilger-danger-of-war-exists-if-we-dont-speak-up-now,17470—

May 5, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment