Court rules government has no ‘duty of care’ to protect young people from climate change — RenewEconomy

Federal court supports environment minister’s appeal against ruling that government had duty of care to protect young people from climate change. The post Court rules government has no ‘duty of care’ to protect young people from climate change appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Court rules government has no ‘duty of care’ to protect young people from climate change — RenewEconomy

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

AEMO defends rapid coal closure timelines, as Morrison “fine” with new coal generators — RenewEconomy

AEMO defends modelling of rapid coal closures, saying previous efforts had failed to keep up with the pace of the energy transition. The post AEMO defends rapid coal closure timelines, as Morrison “fine” with new coal generators appeared first on RenewEconomy.

AEMO defends rapid coal closure timelines, as Morrison “fine” with new coal generators — RenewEconomy

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fluence wins auto-bidding contract with grid-supporting battery in Victoria — RenewEconomy

Fluence auto bidding system to be used at battery contracted to support the Ausnet grid at times of high wind and solar congestion. The post Fluence wins auto-bidding contract with grid-supporting battery in Victoria appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Fluence wins auto-bidding contract with grid-supporting battery in Victoria — RenewEconomy

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Electric Power Restored to Ukraine’s Chernobyl Plant

Power Restored to Ukraine’s Chernobyl Plant, Seized by Russian Forces: Kyiv,   Moscow Times, 14 Mar 22, Electricity supply has been restored at Ukraine’s retired Chernobyl nuclear power plant that was seized by Russian forces in the first days of the invasion, energy officials in Kyiv said Sunday……….

Power had been cut to the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, though the UN’s atomic watchdog said there was “no critical impact to safety.”…………..

Ukraine said on Wednesday power had been cut to the plant, but the UN’s atomic watchdog said there was “no critical impact on safety.”

Russian forces also shelled and captured the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europea’s biggest atomic power plant, on March 4, causing a fire that raised alarm in Europe over a possible nuclear catastrophe.

Russian engineers arrived at Zaporizhzhia earlier this week to check radiation levels. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/03/13/bermuda-suspends-licenses-for-hundreds-of-russian-aircraft-a76907

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fossil and nuclear energy regimes threaten global security

Opinion: The deadly power of the troika of oil, gas and nuclear energy is unfolding before our eyes

New Brunswick Media Co-Op, by Janice Harvey, March 14, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s terror campaign against Ukraine has pulled back the curtain on the tightly integrated, brittle, and destructive energy regime that fuels the industrialized world. This regime poses an immediate threat to the survival of the people of Ukraine, and the longer-term survival of civilization itself. The deadly power of the troika of oil, gas and nuclear energy is unfolding before our eyes as Ukraine pays the price for a path all our countries have forged.

Energy is a source of two kinds of power – the kind that turns on lights, heats homes, and turns engines and the kind that drives politics. While there are many options for providing the energy services we all need, only some create authoritarian petrostates, transnational corporations with budgets larger than many nations, and billionaire oligarchs. Only some finance wars and inflict gross injustices on those in the paths of rigs and pipelines. Only some emit pollutants that kills millions every year.  Only some create deadly wastes that will persist longer into the future than humans have walked on this Earth. Only some turn a conventional missile into a nuclear weapon. Only some destroy the climate that makes Earth liveable.

All these existential threats are associated with the global networks of political and economic power built by transnational energy corporations. Energy policy has long been dominated by ‘iron triangles’ of energy business interests, ‘client’-oriented energy bureaucrats, and captured politicians. Whether it is Putin’s transnational petrodollars, Western Europe’s energy tap line to Russia, or nuclear plants dotting the European landscape, governments and whole countries have become entangled in a dangerous, brittle system that now threatens global security.

The inevitable outcome is the world on a knife-edge.

In the midst of Russia’s oil-financed terror campaign, the international climate science body issued its latest report documenting our collective descent into climate hell. UN Secretary-General Guterres called the report ‘an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.’

Enter the nuclear industry. After languishing for decades in Western countries due to intractable liabilities, and a legitimacy crisis following narrow escapes and full-blown disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, opportunistic nuclear interests have seized on the climate emergency to promote itself as the ‘clean’ energy solution. This falsehood has now been exposed in Ukraine. Every nuclear reactor and nuclear waste storage site is a potential nuclear weapon, minus the blast and fireball. All Putin has to do to wreak radioactive havoc across Europe is target a nuclear facility or two with conventional missiles. Uncontrolled nuclear reactions and wind currents will do the rest.

Yet, the Liberal government’s climate action plan includes pouring hundreds of millions into an industry that would build modular nukes to export around the world, each one a target for a despot or a terrorist. This is all laid out in the federal “SMR Action Plan” that the nuclear industry helped to write, with funding disguised within the $8 billion “Net Zero Accelerator”.

New Brunswick is vying to become the hub for producing this deadly commodity. Nuclear experts from the United States have exposed the security threat inherent in the plutonium feedstock – the stuff of nuclear weapons – that one of the New Brunswick models requires. But even without diverting that fuel into a nuclear weapons program, the plant only needs to exist to be a nuclear target.

The Ukraine catastrophe should be enough to halt nuclear expansion in its tracks. Trading one existential threat (fossil fuel dependency) for another (an even wider network of nuclear targets) is a callous, willful betrayal of the public trust by those politicians enabling it…………..

Political leaders in Canada and abroad have two choices before them. They can deepen domestic and global energy and security vulnerabilities and hasten climate breakdown by building more pipelines, escalating oil and gas production, and enabling the expansion of the nuclear industry. Or they can work towards the elimination of energy as a geopolitical weapon and an existential threat to the civilization. It is up to us citizens to hold them accountable for the choice they make.

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

11 years on, Fukushima morass still poses danger

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hamid Karzai warns Ukraine against repeating Afghan tragedy — Anti-bellum

The HinduMarch 9, 2022 Ukraine should learn Afghanistan lessons, should not get involved in big power games, says Hamid Karzai Excerpt You’re drawing parallels between Ukraine and Afghanistan when it comes to the big power games. Many have warned that with its occupation or continuing invasion of Ukraine, Russia could face another version of what […]

Hamid Karzai warns Ukraine against repeating Afghan tragedy — Anti-bellum

The Hindu
March 9, 2022

Ukraine should learn Afghanistan lessons, should not get involved in big power games, says Hamid Karzai

Excerpt  You’re drawing parallels between Ukraine and Afghanistan when it comes to the big power games. Many have warned that with its occupation or continuing invasion of Ukraine, Russia could face another version of what it had attempted in Afghanistan in 1979. Would you agree?

Karzai: There is already talk of mercenaries and foreign fighters coming from the rest of the world to Ukraine. In Afghanistan, some mercenaries came to our country. And the consequence of those coming from abroad, just like al–Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and the rest of them, you saw the consequences of that for Afghanistan. If I were Ukrainian, if I were making decisions in Ukraine, I would by all means stop the arrival of foreign mercenaries to my country, keeping Afghanistan’s tragic experience in mind. We’re suffering from that till today.

The money that the United States seized from Afghanistan, the Afghan assets in the U.S. banks. One reason given was that. So that should be a lesson that the Ukrainians should learn from and walk away from these extremely dangerous games that others may play on their soil.

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

China continues to resist U.S. demand to join “global web to strangle Russia”

Global TimesMarch 15, 2022 US cannot expect China to cooperate under its suppression: Global Times editorial Edited On Monday, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi met with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Rome, Italy. They […]

China continues to resist U.S. demand to join “global web to strangle Russia” — Anti-bellum Global Times editorial  https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/113283937/posts/3888946559
Edited
On Monday, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi met with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Rome, Italy. They conducted candid, deep and constructive communication on China-US relations and international and regional issues of common concern. Yang said the implementation of the consensus between the two heads of state is the most important task for China-US relations. He stressed that the Taiwan question concerns China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and expounded on China’s solemn position on issues related to Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, pointing out that these issues concern China’s core interests and are China’s internal affairs that allow no foreign interference. In addition, Yang also expounded on China’s position on the Ukraine issue. Readouts of the White House before and after the talks both mentioned Ukraine issue and maintaining open lines of communication between the US and China.

Some analysts believe that it is more likely that the US has proposed the meeting, because judging from the posture, it is the US that needs to ask China for help in the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
…Washington has taken some petty actions a day before the meeting, all related to Ukraine issue. For example, US media quoted “anonymous senior US officials” as saying that Russia had asked China for “military aid,” including drones, after the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated. Moreover, Sullivan on the same day claimed that there will “absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them.” Washington’s intention to threaten Beijing is obvious. It is an old US diplomatic tactic to use disinformation and intimidation to secure a favorable position in negotiations. But China never buys it.

These actions from the US also show that Washington is quite anxious about the Ukraine issue. It wants China to dance to its tune. What the US hopes for is to weave a global web to strangle Russia, making all countries part of this web without any “loophole.” The US is the instigator of the Ukraine crisis; yet, it wants to exploit the whole world to expand its own strategic interests. This makes people wonder: Where does the US get its confidence from? Has it been dominating the world for so long that it thinks it even controls the lever of the Earth’s rotation? If Washington wants to forcibly tie China-US relations to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, it is on the wrong track and will definitely be disappointed.
The Russia-Ukraine crisis is worthy of talks, but not in this way. A Chinese saying goes, “Let he who tied the bell on the tiger’s neck take it off.” The problem that was created by the US cannot and should not be solved by China. Besides, China and the US should handle their relations well before they can better coordinate stances as the third parties. In other words, Washington should make practical moves to make China feel the US is a reliable major power.

Last year, US leaders and senior officials have stated that the US has no intention to seek a new Cold War or change China’s system, that the revitalization of US alliances is not anti-China, that the US does not support “Taiwan independence”, and that it is not looking for conflict or confrontation with China. But all these are still no more than empty words. The US Congress recently passed an act that is politically manipulating the map of the island of Taiwan, creating “two Chinas” and “one China, one Taiwan.” This was not only a blatant provocation of China’s territorial integrity but also another proof that Washington betrays its promises. There are many other examples. In this circumstance, why does the US think that China should “help” it out?

On the Ukraine issue, China has been independently making judgement in the spirit of objectivity and fairness and based on the merits of the matter itself. It has been playing a constructive role in facilitating peace talks. China has repeatedly called international community to jointly support Russia-Ukraine peace talks, achieve substantive results as soon as possible, and promote de-escalation of the situation. Such a responsible attitude will not budge, even slightly, under US pressure….

In terms of diplomacy, the US appears to be rather inconsistent now. The profound reason is Washington’s shortsightedness. This has led the US into a quagmire when dealing with foreign relations. It can only solve the problems superficially, and it arrogantly believes the world should be at its service. As a result, it always fails to handle relations with other major powers and leaves a mess in regional issues. If the policy elites in Washington cannot change their minds, it will never find the keys to solve these problems.

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

March 14 Energy News — geoharvey

Opinion:  ¶ “Why Putin Is Hell-Bent On Capturing Ukraine’s Nuclear Reactors” • “Turning off the power nationwide, as [Russian force] have done on a smaller scale in Mariupol, in the middle of winter creates mass hardship and suffering for the Ukrainian people, and that is apparently a weapon Putin feels free to utilize,” one expert […]

March 14 Energy News — geoharvey

March 15, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear Politics – theme for March 2022

Homo Sapiens (and I do mean Homo, not Femina) has always solved his relational problems by fighting, by war and the threat of war.

And it sorta worked, in a sorta way. (The meek, the ”weak” men had some success, setting up co-operative arrangements, like the United Nations). It’s turning out that the ”weak” ”sissy” men might just have a broader, more considered, intelligence that just might be essential for the survival of the species. Heck they might even welcome Femina in – likely to be a lot more sapiens.

In the current crisis – one thing is for sure – if it develops into a third world war – it will be a nuclear war. Probably now, only Russia accepts that it’s just fine to send thousands of men to their deaths, and even Russians might be getting sick of this old idea.

The new way is – press a button, from far away, and incinerate millions. Trouble is that might cause millions on your side also to be incinerated – heck – even the ones pressing the buttons.

A new politics must be found. Otherwise, at best, the species might be lucky enough to survive, and evolve into a bee or ant-like species, with males as just a tiny minority.

March 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hypocritical cries of grief from weapons and other corporate businesses, as Western governments and media ramp up war fever.

[Ed.  Here is the later part of this long article, which first details the history of other criminal wars, and the background to Russia’s understandable fear of Western aggression.  I urge you to read the entire article, – while this bit examines only the current Ukraine situation]

Supporting this God-given path are not only big-biz executives, financiers, and military brass, but also a subservient media, obedient politicians aiming at highly-paid jobs when they leave politics, a number of labor leaders, and power holders in academia. They all form the Establishment, one quite similar in all so-called free and free market democracies, except that for over 80 years the U.S, sector has asserted its role in the pack as alpha wolf.

A Criminal War Ushers in the Worst of Times in Ukraine, Russia, and Europe

My overriding hope is that current talks may lead to peace, to an end of death and destruction, and to the repair and renewal of all efforts to build a world without exploitation, without aggrandizement, without aggression, without war.

Portside, March 12, 2022 Victor Grossman ”…………………………………………….Every single wartime death or wound is terrible; every missile, every bullet is unnatural. There are too many similar tragedies now in Ukraine. Yet, while writing this, I find myself thinking: Despite each and every tragedy—thank goodness that Ukraine has not been hit like Iraq in 2003, with the death of hundreds of thousands. Yet alas, while I see the Brandenburg Gate lit up with Ukrainian blue and yellow, I recall no Iraqi colors there in 2003, nor those of Palestinians in 2014 after the death of 547 children during the bombing of Gaza.

In the years that followed, as military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere mired down or lost, symbols, slogans, and catchwords about terror wore thin, the fearfulness of words like Islamism, communism, and socialism eroded, like Bolshevism and anarchism in earlier eras. The gargoyle faces, the grayed grimaces of Reagan’s Evil Empire warnings in 1983 needed replacement, for the pressures remained. Putin’s angular face and physique often have to suffice—or is the yellow peril back in play? And what are those pressures, refurbished but still very real?

Some are easy to call by name: Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, friendly German rivals like Rheinmetall, Krupp, Maffei—and a further limited list. They earn their billions by producing and selling their products, which must constantly be multiplied, replaced—or used.

Thus, while military actions by Putin or any others may be treated by such folk with loud cries of condemnation or sympathy for the victims, behind their dampened Kleenex hankies we can sense their jubilation as military budgets soar, now nearly $780 billion a year in Washington, and the German government, previously tugged one way by traders with Russia or China, now being overwhelmed by the military monopolies, ambitious expansionists, and devoted Pentagon friends who, since the march into Ukraine, have gained the upper hand.

The military budget in Berlin now aims at topping the 50-billion-euro level, with ever more spending for jets, frigates, armed drones, and more personal armor as well; after all, those patriotic lads or lasses in uniform must not be neglected, but always sent well-armored to their deaths.

And how many have the courage to disapprove of all of this? To vote against it, in the Capitol or the Bundestag? Only a very, very few, now angrily disqualified or ignored.

Not only manufacturers of armaments are waving blue-yellow flags with one hand and concealing profit calculations with the other. If their real hopes come true, if Putin’s move goes awry and ends up with a regime change in Red Square, as in Maidan Square in 2014 but far bigger, what new opportunities would be opened up!

….…….   Many are surely dreaming of wide new Eurasian monoculture, of unlimited raw materials, new markets, skilled proletarians. Tyson and Cargill, Bayer and BASF, GM and Daimler, Nestlé and Unilever, Murdock and Springer, Facebook and Amazon must certainly be checking electronic atlases for maps reaching from Smolensk to Vladivostok—and across the Amur River, too, where great multitudes could then be reached so much more easily.

What this all adds up to is a continuing hope for world hegemony—always with God’s help of course.  Sen. Mitt Romney, once a candidate for the presidency, put it clearly:

“God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will. Without American leadership, without clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place, and liberty and prosperity would surely be among the first casualties.”

Supporting this God-given path are not only big-biz executives, financiers, and military brass, but also a subservient media, obedient politicians aiming at highly-paid jobs when they leave politics, a number of labor leaders, and power holders in academia. They all form the Establishment, one quite similar in all so-called free and free market democracies, except that for over 80 years the U.S, sector has asserted its role in the pack as alpha wolf.

Countries to be “taken out”

In a broadcast with Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 one vector of a world-wide program was revealed by Gen. Wesley Clark: a memo by then-Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz which described “how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran.”

The timetable didn’t work out exactly—timetables often don’t—but was close enough. And if Iran could really be tamed once again, as in 1952, Georgia would then be close. And Russia as well.

Another vector was even more crucial. When East German annexation was agreed upon in 1990, Soviet army withdrawal was matched by the American and West German verbal promise to a very trustful Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never expand past the Elbe River into East Germany or beyond.

The promise was soon broken. The Pentagon-based NATO moved with its military technology into East Germany and on to Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, the Baltic countries, thus surrounding all but the southern flank of European Russia with an increasingly tight, hostile ring, featuring broadened, strengthened highways and rail lines pointing eastwards, potential missile launchers in Poland, swift jet planes, fueled and polished, in German and Belgian hangars, with nuclear bombs waiting nearby, and annual aggressive military maneuvers along Russian borders. NATO was spending $111 billion on armaments, Russia $62 billion.

And then north and south were linked. In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, no angel, faced a choice between the unsteady but undeniable advantages of economic cooperation with Russia, his country’s main energy supplier, or biting at the bait of promised Western prosperity, with all the luxuries it symbolized for many Ukrainians, especially in its western regions.

The American leadership, thinking no doubt of fat dividends but far more about closing that tight ring, or noose, around Russia and gaining control of Sevastopol, the big naval base on the Black Sea, Russian till then, by contract, decided to move ahead. After spending $5 billion or more on propaganda and organizing anti-Russian groups and parties, it re-animated its earlier “Orange Revolution.” Joining with openly pro-fascist groups—complete with swastikas, “Heil Hitler!” salutes, and all—it managed the ouster of the elected president, who had to flee to safety. In a famous decision, revealed in a hacked telephone call between the U.S. ambassador in Kiev and Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State, the American puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk, referred to endearingly as “Yats” by Nuland, was installed by her as prime minister.

Leadership positions in Ukraine have changed several times since then, as the influence of varying oligarchs altered. Some things remained constant. Russian speakers were discriminated against and suppressed, resulting in the vote of a great majority in Crimea to become part of Russia once again—as they had been until 1954. Two Russian-speaking eastern provinces defied the anti-Russian pressures and broke away, with Moscow support. Armed Ukrainian militia units, some with openly pro-fascist symbols on their uniforms or skins, kept battering against them

Perhaps it was their strength which prevented the Kiev government from abiding by the peace agreements of Minsk, in which Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Kiev had agreed on seeking solutions, with partial autonomy for the Russian-speaking provinces, or was it pressure from Washington and local oligarchs which moved the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at first seemingly in favor of negotiations, to back out?

Since that goal of world hegemony in many wealthy American brains, Republican and Democratic alike, was never abandoned, and only Russia and China stood in the way, Ukraine was clearly being built up as a counterforce against one such barrier, indeed as a ramp for further action. Which leads us to 2022.

Putin clearly disapproved of any ramps close to his borders. He hardly needed to leaf in the history books for the years 1812, or 1918-21, or 1941-45 to strengthen his resolve. With the increasing threat from an enlarged, aggressive NATO, he could not possibly ignore a Ukraine eagerly pushing to join up as soon as possible, after it had already joined in NATO wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. All the offers Russia made to negotiate the issues—above all a bar to Ukraine officially joining NATO—were rejected in the West as “non-starters” and accompanied by further waves of recriminations and new sanctions.

Was this extreme hostility by media and politicians, with its implied threats (and its actual incidents, as in Syria), the reason for Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine? Despite TV hours and piles of paper and ink expounding about it, I see absolutely no basis for warnings that Putin has plans to “expand his empire.” I have not seen a single word threatening Finland, Poland, Romania, or the Baltic trio, which are often loudest in exhortations. And Germany? The idea of Russia attacking Germany is fully unthinkable—though not enough to hinder big armament expansion plans in Berlin.

In the past, Russia was systematically threatened and also attacked—and is surrounded by a world with over 750 American military bases, with an American military budget bigger than the next ten countries combined, and with four times as many NATO soldiers as Russians in uniform. Even when Russia deployed troops outside its borders, bitter as these occasions were, they were only in countries which were on its borders, and hence—if under unfriendly control—were viewed as potential threats as much as Russian or Chinese deployments in Mexico or Canada would be viewed in the U.S. Ukraine definitely borders Russia—its heartland. Militarily, the USSR and Russia were always basically on the defensive, not on an offensive track.

And yet its soldiers, tanks, and planes have invaded Ukraine, with results just as horrible for those affected, even if not on the same scale, as American attacks in the Philippines and Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq—or in two of the worst crimes ever committed by humankind—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We cannot look into Putin’s mind, nor know of possible threats he seems to have considered immediate. We must strictly reject any nonsense disputing the will of most Ukrainians to remain independent and sovereign—though not to become part of a NATO-led threat.

Why this war now?……………….

The invasion, for whatever reason, has not only caused great misery in Ukraine, but also given an immense steroid push to the forces on the political right, the traditional Russia-haters, those thinking constantly of protecting and increasing their fortunes and those who want no peace, but only victory, any victory, over Russia. They want to demolish not only the reign of Putin but Russia in general as a barrier to capitalist expansion, to a hegemony ruled from Washington, Wall Street, and the Pentagon.

It is these people who are demanding no-fly zones. Some 27 former Pentagon and State Department officials and a former top NATO military commander joined Zelensky in calling for a no-fly zone, although they know full well what that means. As even Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said of the demand: “It means starting World War III.”

On the other hand, the march into Ukraine has caused saddening collateral damage, another likely season with the splintering and weakening of progressive forces who work for peace and whose growth is becoming almost desperately necessary in the face of a growing fascistic menace around the world…………   https://portside.org/2022-03-12/criminal-war-ushers-worst-times-ukraine-russia-and-europe

March 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ukrainians will pay the price in suffering for long drawn-out USA’s proxy war on behalf of wealthy corporations

Zelensky hasn’t abandoned his pre-invasion intransigence. He has entrenched, calling for Ukraine to be armed with nuclear missiles and for NATO to either impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or give Ukraine the planes to enforce such a zone itself.

That Zelensky wants NATO to bail him out, especially after NATO was responsible for enticing him into the current confrontation with Russia, is hardly surprising. But the degree to which the Western media have pushed Zelensky’s line means a strong majority of the U.S. public now favor Kiev’s course of action, even though it would likely trigger a World War III between nuclear powers.

 The West’s Hands in Ukraine as Bloody as Putin’s,   Consortium News, By Jonathan Cook, March 11, 2022  ”…………………………………………. NATO Insurance Policy

Even a cursory glance shows that the West’s hands are not clean in Ukraine. Not at all. The meddling – and hypocrisy – have occurred in two stages, first from politicians and then from the media.

It was the choices made by Western politicians that provoked the invasion. (What’s coming next is an explanation, not a justification, of those developments, for those who need such things spelled out clearly).

Russian troops are in Ukraine not because Putin is “Hitler,” “mad,” or a “megalomaniac” – though, again, the invasion makes him a war criminal in the same mold as Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Russian troops are there because he and his officials judged the West to be acting malevolently and in bad faith in their dealings with Ukraine.

The Putin as “madman” or “Hitler” script deflects attention away from the very obvious fact that Western leaders willfully played fast and loose with the security of Ukraine and the safety of its population.

The West encouraged Ukrainians to believe that they would soon fall under NATO’s security umbrella, when in fact the West had no intention of protecting them, as is now only too evident. Ukrainians were led to believe that the more Russia’s posture turned belligerent towards Ukraine the more likely NATO would be to come to Ukraine’s rescue and act as its savior.

Which, of course, incentivized the Ukrainian government to keep poking the Russian bear in the expectation that Kiev would have a NATO insurance policy up its sleeve. It didn’t. It never did, as current events show

The reason Boris Johnson lost no time in rebuffing the emotional pressure levied by a Ukrainian journalist at a recent press conference to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine is that even he understands that such a policy would be suicidal against a nuclear power like Russia. Shooting down Russian jets would likely plunge us into a rerun of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

But on the back of NATO’s deception, recent Ukrainian leaders confidently fomented ethnic nationalism at home and thereby themselves played a dangerous game of chicken with their superpower neighbor.

That included coddling anti-Russian fascists at home and stoking a related civil war in the Donbass region by its ultra-nationalist allies against the Russian ethnic community living there as a way to drag NATO directly into the conflict.

For those who accuse anyone who points out the long-running influence of ultra-nationalist groups in Ukraine of being Putin trolls, this 2017 video from The Guardian – a newspaper now reflexively dismissive of all criticism of Ukraine – showing a neo-Nazi summer camp for Ukrainian children, may make for uncomfortable viewing. The Azov Brigade fascists running it, as well as other like-minded groups, have been effortlessly incorporated into the Ukrainian military the West is arming.

Zelensky hasn’t abandoned his pre-invasion intransigence. He has entrenched, calling for Ukraine to be armed with nuclear missiles and for NATO to either impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or give Ukraine the planes to enforce such a zone itself.

That Zelensky wants NATO to bail him out, especially after NATO was responsible for enticing him into the current confrontation with Russia, is hardly surprising. But the degree to which the Western media have pushed Zelensky’s line means a strong majority of the U.S. public now favor Kiev’s course of action, even though it would likely trigger a World War III between nuclear powers.

Suicidal Narrative

How in thrall Westerners are to this media-confected, suicidal narrative can be gauged by the number of armchair warriors in the West accusing anyone taking a more cautious approach of not only being Putin apologists but of denying the Ukrainian people their “sovereign right” to join NATO and come under its protection.

But NATO membership isn’t a sovereign right. And it shouldn’t be viewed as some kind of glorified neighborhood-watch scheme. NATO is a military club. States qualify to join if the other members agree they want to commit to protecting that state.

Russia would have had no grounds – or pretexts, depending on how you wish to look at it – to invade. The media’s “madman” and “Hitler” scripts are needed now to turn reality on its head, suggesting that Putin would have invaded whatever actions NATO and Ukraine took.

But if that is not true – and there is no evidence it is – then the blood of the victims of this war is most certainly on the West’s hands, just as it is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and elsewhere.

Media Hypocrisy

The second hypocrisy is the current one being peddled by the Western media. They want to flaunt a bogus moral concern about the suffering of Ukrainians under attack from Russia that they never show towards the victims of Western bombs and missiles.

Terrible as the suffering of Ukrainians is, two weeks into the invasion, it is still a pale shadow of the decades of suffering of Palestinians in Gaza or of Yemenis under Saudi planes and bombs supplied by the West. The prioritization of one over the other needs explaining.

Social media warriors – much less sophisticated than the corporate media – readily rationalize this lack of interest in the West’s victims by dismissing them as “terrorists” or by blaming them for living under “terrorist regimes,” or by simply insisting that they are further removed from us, as though Britons and Americans somehow feel more of a natural affinity with Ukrainians than with Syrians or Palestinians, or with Russians. (We don’t unless the corporate media keeps insisting such a bond exists.)

If that tactic fails, it is on to the next one, arguing that any effort to point out the utter hypocrisy of the Western media and its entirely hollow concern for Ukrainians – rather than for Ukraine, as a pawn on the West’s colonial chessboard – is so-called “whataboutery.”

It is bad enough that such reasoning is rooted in a profound racism that counts white Europeans as worthy victims and brown or Black victims as “collateral damage” of supposed Western peace-making.

But actually, the rot runs far deeper. It is not just racism at work in the special treatment of Ukraine’s suffering over that of Iraqis or Yemenis or Palestinians. That could be solved through education and awareness-raising.

No, the Western media’s identification with Ukraine – and consequently the public’s identification with its plight – is based on Ukraine’s usefulness to the Western imperial project. Which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

Vicious Musical Chairs

In truth, a straight line runs between the West’s treatment of Iraq and its treatment of Ukraine.

In Iraq, the U.S. and its allies sought to reorder the chessboard by intensifying their grip over oil as Western capitalism began running up against ever-depleting stores of cheap and easily accessible fossil fuels and the climate emergency made capitalism’s endless profit-making model ever more precarious.

But though the chess analogy for Western foreign policymaking dates back to at least the 19th century, it may now be inadequate to explain what we have seen taking place over the past couple of decades.

More accurately, Washington’s planners see the world largely in terms of a high-stakes version of the children’s party game, musical chairs. As the chairs disappear, it is ever more important to make sure you, rather than your enemies, grab the last seats.

The main enemies on the global stage – if you sit in Washington – are Russia and China. The tools you need at your disposal are not just wits, as in chess, but muscle, as in a very adult, survival-of-the-fittest version of musical chairs.

That has required the U.S. and its allies to ever more aggressively isolate Russia and China, trying to sow divisions, and make each feel threatened and isolated. Which, as Moscow and Beijing more clearly understand Washington’s strategy, has driven these two unlikely partners into each other’s arms.

The rest of us have to decide which of the biggest children we want to ally with as the chairs keep disappearing and the game gets ever more vicious.

Proxy War of Attrition

Back in Ukraine, meanwhile, the U.S. and its NATO allies appear to be doing what they can to drag out the war for as long as possible.

Russia appeared initially to want a relatively short war of attrition to pacify Ukraine, forcing its nationalist government to drop aspirations to become a launch-pad for NATO weapons and impose on it instead neutrality. (Now that Russia has committed treasure and lives to the war, it will likely get greedier and want more. Reports suggest it is already demanding independence rather than autonomy for the Donbass region.)

Of course, the conclusion even Westerners would draw, if we weren’t so propagandized by the media, is that neutrality for Ukraine is inevitable – unless we are willing to risk the alternative of a World War III. Any delay in achieving neutrality for Ukraine as an outcome simply causes unnecessary death and suffering.

The U.S., by contrast, wants a long, proxy war of attrition, openly and covertly supplying Ukrainian forces – indifferent as to whether they are “nice ones” or neo-Nazis – to bog Russia down in years of difficult guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency. The bloodshed will feed the hostility (and unthinking racism) of Western publics towards Russia and Russians, providing the pretext for Washington to sustain the West’s parallel economic war on Russia.

Ukrainians will pay the price as the U.S. tries to wear down Russia, just as Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, Yemenis, Venezuelans and Palestinians have paid the price as the U.S. has sought elsewhere to attain the goals of its globe-spanning imperial project.

Washington understands that a weakened Russia might not have been able to save Bashar Assad’s government from the takeover of Syria by the West’s Islamic State and Al-Qaeda allies there. And in the future, it is hoped, Moscow will be in no position to support others who resist Western hegemony, especially the “pariah” states of Venezuela, Iran and China.

It is a huge ambition for a tiny elite headquartered in the U.S. committed to the endless enrichment of itself by enforcing a binary thinking among Western publics that obscures the real reasons for the planet-wide crises we face.

If it succeeds, the West’s war machine will continue trundling over the bodies of the poor and marginalized as it drives us ever faster towards ecological collapse.

Jonathan Cook is a former Guardian journalist (1994-2001) and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/11/the-wests-hands-in-ukraine-as-bloody-as-putins/

March 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment