The US military launched at least 251 interventions between 1991 and 2022, according to the Congressional Research Service. Washington’s meddling abroad drastically increased after the end of the first cold war.
When you become an ally to a bully it’s just a matter of time for the bully to turn against you. Bullies are selfish, they don’t have real friends. Bullies are supported by cowards who seek protection and want a share of the loot stolen from other bully victims. Wake up Germany.
Turn on a TV, open a web browser, or scroll social media and you will not be able to avoid headlines and hashtags about Queen Elizabeth II passing away. After news broke that she was under “medical supervision,” media crews have stationed themselves out front of Buckingham Palace and it’s a veritable red carpet event as royals from all over Europe arrive to pay their respects and offer support.
On Thursday, newly elected British PM Liz Truss said the “whole country” was “deeply concerned” over the news of The Queen’s deteriorating health.
“My thoughts – and the thoughts of people across our United Kingdom – are with Her Majesty The Queen and her family at this time,” Truss stated.
Hours later, and surrounded by her royal family, Queen Elizabeth II took her last breath. Now, all the constant reporting has turned to memorialize her.
But is the queen really someone to be hailed as this expounder of all that is good? Should her face be plastered on screens worldwide and a 24/7 memorial be rolled out in her honor? Maybe so, but not for the reasons corporate media will tell you.
On top of mothering a child predator and helping to cover up his crimes, Queen Elizabeth — during her time as a monarch — fleeced the taxpayers of England for hundreds of millions just to pay for her castle.
During this time, she hid her finances offshore — despite the fact that the Royal Family is tax exempt — and made countless billions off the backs of her subjects.
She also oversaw the horrific colonization of multiple territories in Africa and Asia in which people were savagely tortured, their land stolen, and their people slaughtered.
She was tortured with axes during Kenya's struggle for independence from British colonial rule.
As Britain celebrates the Platinum Jubilee of its monarch, this old fighter wants to send her a message: "Let Elizabeth bring what belongs to me." pic.twitter.com/EofKAOqFtW
Africa, asked to celebrate the life of #QueenElizabeth, you only celebrate it correctly by showing what exactly the British did to our ancestors! Subjugation. Torture. Murder. Slavery. Looting of our resources. Don't edit history. Don't use euphemism. Say it the way it is! pic.twitter.com/fz5kpMpW65
Though the Queen-friendly press has tried to downplay her role in the slaughter mentioned above, her racist roots were exposed in a document released last year by the Guardian. The papers revealed that the Queen’s courtiers banned “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from serving in clerical roles in the royal household until at least the late 1960s — when it was no longer considered “acceptable.”
It wasn’t just torture, racism, and covering up her son’s affinity for children either. In one of the most damning admissions to date by the Church of England, the head of the church admitted in 2017 that they “colluded” with and helped to hide the long-term sexual abuse of children and young men.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby apologized to the victims who spoke out and helped bring their attacker to justice in 2017. However, according to the report on how the church handled the case, as well as the slap on the wrist ex-bishop Peter Ball, received for decades of abuse, ‘justice’ is a loosely thrown around term.
According to the AP, Welby ordered the report after Ball was convicted and imprisoned in 2015 for misconduct in public office and indecent assaults against teenagers and young men over a period of 20 years.
Despite admitting to sexually abusing 18 people, this serial child rapist was let out of prison after only serving 16 months.
The roots of the Church of England go back to the time of the Roman Empire when Christianity entered the Roman province of Britain and is the official state church of Britain. And, the supreme governor of the church is the Queen herself.
When not covering for pedophiles or overseeing torture, the Queen was also sympathizing with Nazis. In 2015, the Queen was seen on video giving the Nazi salute, during Hitler’s rise to power.
As TFTP reported at the time, in the video the Queen and the Queen’s mum raise their Nazi salutes proudly for the camera.
According to the Sun:
The film shows the then Princess Elizabeth, just seven, larking about in 1933.
Egging on her sister Princess Margaret, three, is their uncle Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a sympathiser towards Hitler’s Nazi Germany and became King Edward VIII.
The stunning film footage of the Queen performing a Nazi salute is today revealed by The Sun.
The astonishing clip lay hidden for eight decades. The grainy home movie is thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, as Hitler rose to supreme power in Germany.
It is a matter of historical record that Edward VIII was, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer which makes the claims of childhood fun by the Queen to defend the video, all but irrelevant.
It gets worse, intelligence given to the FBI claimed the Nazis were using the Duke and Duchess to glean information that would scuttle the war effort of the allies and help the Nazis win.
When the Queen isn’t saluting the regime responsible for the horrid deaths of 6 million Jews, she exploits poor and mentally ill individuals.
As TFTP reported, the release of the Paradise Papers, a leak comprised of over 13.4 million documents, exposed the Queen’s insidious exploits of the mentally ill.
The documents included in the leak came from two offshore services providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, which were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The report from ICIJ claimed that according to records from the offshore law firm Appleby, Queen Elizabeth II’s private estate has invested millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund that has a history of taking advantage of poor families:
“Queen Elizabeth II has invested millions of dollars in medical and consumer loan companies, Appleby’s files show. While the Queen’s private estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, provides some details of its investments in U.K. property, such as commercial buildings scattered across southern England, it has never disclosed details of its offshore investments.
‘Yes, the Duchy was aware that the Jubilee Absolute Return Fund was run offshore,’ said Chris Addock, chief finance officer of the Duchy of Lancaster.
The records show that as of 2007, the queen’s private estate invested in a Cayman Islands fund that in turn invested in a private equity company that controlled BrightHouse, a U.K. rent-to-own firm criticized by consumer watchdogs and members of Parliament for selling household goods to cash-strapped Britons on payment plans with interest rates as high as 99.9 percent.”
According to a report from the Guardian, which partnered in sharing the revelations from the Paradise Papers, over the span of more than a decade at least, the Queen’s estate has made significant investments in businesses such as the off-license chain Threshers and the retailer BrightHouse.
In 2017, BrightHouse, which is Britain’s biggest rent-to-own retailer, was ordered to pay 14.8 million pounds to 249,000 customers after the watchdog Financial Conduct Authority found that the retailer was guilty of overcharging customers and intentionally taking advantage of people with mental health problems and learning disabilities.
So, to recap, the queen has overseen horrifying torture and occupation for decades, covered for pedophiles, exploited people with disabilities for personal gain, fleece her subjects for billions in tax revenue, and has a history of sympathetic intentions to the Nazis. And, this is by no means, a comprehensive list… there is still much more.
Her legacy is not kindness, altruism, and majesty — it is colonization, brutality, land disposition, mineral theft, and torture.
Africa, asked to celebrate the life of #QueenElizabeth, you only celebrate it correctly by showing what exactly the British did to our ancestors! Subjugation. Torture. Murder. Slavery. Looting of our resources. Don't edit history. Don't use euphemism. Say it the way it is! pic.twitter.com/fz5kpMpW65
After knowing all this, we have to ask ourselves why… why is her face plastered all over televisions, computers, and newspapers? Why are thousands going to weep in the streets for her? Why will corporate media make her out as a hero?
This is not normal. The queen was a monarch, an unaccountable, legally immune descendent of a long line of brutal dictators who continued that role — and no, it wasn’t merely “symbolic.” Society needs to stop celebrating people like this. If we continue to make role models out of abusive tyrants, don’t be surprised when society starts to resemble that very thing.
With Queen Elizabeth dying, you can expect the empire nostalgia to flow freely for the foreseeable future. Always good to keep this quote from John Newsinger’s ‘The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire’ close to hand.
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Published On 19 Dec 201819 Dec 2018
Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, ride in the state carriage towards the Viceregal lodge in New Delhi, on March 22, 1947 [File: AP]
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.
On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.
After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company’s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.
How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.
Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.
This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world – a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century – it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India’s exports wasappropriatedin its entirety by Britain.
Some point to this fictional “deficit” as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the “deficit” meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.
Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”
And that’s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.
Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.
These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.
All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped “develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.
This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.
Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear – India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article erroneously had the beginning of the British Raj as 1847. The correct year is 1858.
In late February, much of the American public had little understanding about Russia’s “special military operation” (smo) that focused on the “denazification” of Ukraine. Despite opinion polls confirming the media as a lying, scheming venture, Americans foolishly invest their myopic trust as it continues to build disinformation upon hogwash until an unsuspecting citizenry can no longer discern the most basic facts from fiction. The unacceptable expansion of NATO on Russia’s border as an instrument of US foreign policy has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the default of its 1990 promise to Gorbachev.
Even prior to Russia’s SMO, The West had been deliberately violating the international sovereignty of the Black Sea and Russia’s proximity as the HMS Defender recklessly sailed willy-nilly as if the entire world was its oyster. By February, 2022, Ukraine, NATO, the US and its EU coalition of western groupies had crossed Russia’s red line in their refusal to implement the 2014 Minsk Agreement as Russia reacted to protect its own sovereignty.
In denial, if not mystified, about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reference to denazification was that a significant number of bona fide German Nazis remained in what was not yet the independent country of Ukraine (1991) after WWII. It was with the 2014 coup that those Nazis organized into neo-nationalist militias like the Azov Battalion, the Right Sector and Svoboda to take over the Kiev government as they embedded within the Ukrainian National Guard and prepped for military action against Russia.
In other words, there has been no Great Awakening or an OMG moment that the US, NATO and EU have been fighting on the same side as descendants of the German Nazis whom they all foughtagainst during WW II. How could that not have been an obvious fact to any American with half a brain – we can debate whether the public school system is teaching critical analytical thinking. Given the awareness of the history between the Russians and the Nazis during The Great Patriotic War, you might expect some level of self-loathing for those Europeans who chose to align with today’s Ukraine Nazis, yet those same countries have proven they are missing a modicum of moral integrity as that repulsive fact gave not one moment of hesitation to join the effort to destroy Russian sovereignty. Today’s Ukraine Nazis are no better, with no more trace of humanity and no less evil or diabolical than the Nazis of the 1930’s and may have further descended into the pits of Hell.
As the Biden Administration and the American war machine ignore the cruel connection of that obscene war as a current sham of EU, NATO, US solidarity as a dishonor, if not a disgrace, to the memory of those 405,000 Americans who gave their lives fighting the Nazis and thousands more who served with honor while presumably defeating the Third Reich; that war which cost many American families, including my own the loss of my father’s twin brother, a paratrooper in Holland who stepped on a land mine days before the April 1945 armistice.
The current generation of Americans remains equally unaware that the Potsdam Conference of 1945 agreed to disarm and demilitarize German Nazism, repeal Nazi regime laws, remove Nazis from the German education and court systems, and arrest and try Germans who had committed war crimes. The belief that ‘The West’ won WW II became somewhat tarnished as the US, unbeknownst to the American public, undermined its own victory in 1947 by introducing over 2,000 scientists, engineers, and high-level Nazis into NASA, Plum Island, the US defense industry and other specialized departments.
Fast forward to 2022: soon after the coup, the United States spent unspecified millions of dollars training and arming Ukraine troops; not to mention $54 Billion allotted directly to Ukraine since February during which the US coordinated a phony proxy war with no formal declaration of war, as neither political party, one more duplicitous than the other, sought to demand a War Powers Act vote or cited Constitutional violations.
As Russia has continued in the eradication of Nazi neo-nationalists throughout the entire Donbass region and nailed down important key locations, Zelensky has dramatically flipped from his usual dismissal of the Russian Army to admitting that the Donbass had deteriorated to “indescribably difficult” for the Ukrainian Army. At the same time, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba was speaking at the World Economic Forum soiree in Davos and conceded that the “situation in Donbas is extremely bad” offering a rare glimpse into what Ukrainian troops described as staggering losses, mutiny in the ranks, and starvation in the trenches while also pleading for MLRS from anyone who would listen.
Also during the WEF meeting, the decrepit former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested a return to the status quo of ceding Donbass and Crimea land to Russia and that “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.” Kissinger’s warning fell on deaf ears as Kuleba confirmed that peace negotiations with Russia were going “nowhere”. Brash and inexperienced, Zelensky reiterated that Ukraine would only accept Russia giving up all its historic claims to Ukraine’s land and stage a total withdrawal adding that “It seems that Mr. Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022, but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos, but in Munich of that time.”
However, Kissinger understood better than his World Economic comrades that Russia’s imminent success was about to publicly display Ukraine’s utter military thrashing as well as discredit any credibility related to their precious Globalist New World Order (Conspiracy) Dream of Nirvana – all of which are imminently going down the tubes thanks to the arrogant incompetence of The West.
Meanwhile, as gas supplies have been cut off to the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland, and Poland for not opening a ruble account, it is now apparent that Russia has not crumpled under the economic sanctions levied by the West which foolishly believed its petrodollar and its SWIFT system (replaced by China’s CIPS) to both be sacrosanct as the Russian Army is now mopping the floor with the Nazi neo-nationalists in the Donbass section and Ukraine‘s geography east of the Dnieper River just as Putin promised.
Even as Putin offered a “significant contribution to overcome the food crisis with increased wheat and fertilizer shipments in exchange for reconsideration on some of the politically motivated sanctions, some of which have proven to be ineffective or have boomeranged back on its western perpetrators creating their own self-made crisis. Yet the know-nothings in the EU and the United States would rather see their citizens in dire straits, experience the truth of starvation and the deep anxiety that comes with a family and its children enduring the trauma of severe food insecurity than ever admit they failed to consider the full implications of their errant policy. Russian officials indicated that the ports of Mariupol and Berdynask have been cleared of Ukraine mines and were now free for the export of 20 million metric tons of Ukraine grain.
Yet Brit Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has suggested that western allies need to be ‘ready for the long haul’ with ‘no talk of ceasefires or appeasing Putin” while at the same time, taking no personal responsibility for a belligerent attitude with “it is completely appalling that Putin is trying to hold the world to ransom, and he is essentially weaponizing hunger.” In addition, EU President Ursula von der Leyen suggested “..Putin might be able to take the oil that he does not sell to the EU to the world market, where the prices will increase, and sell it for more – and that would fill his war chests.”
What is appalling is that the EU/US Globalist Club never considered the implications beyond their own narrow self-serving policies and would now rather fall on its sword than ever admit they goofed; that they have no understanding of the cause-and-effect of their own policies, that they did not bother to confirm what they thought they already knew from their own altar of self-superiority and that they made a serious miscalculation that will now cost their own citizens to suffer unnecessarily.
The truth of reality is that their self-aggrandizement sanctions were not the end-all as expected even prior to the utter shock that Russia is more of an economic and agricultural self-sufficient country than any of these weasels in the west would have ever considered. With a strong agricultural base “its exports exceed arms sales by more than a third. $28.8 billion from the agricultural sector, $15.6 billion from the defense industry,” while in 2015, Vladimir Putin openly opposed genetically modified food and announced Russia’s goal to become the world’s largest supplier of organic produce.
Meanwhile, the US removed evidence of bioweapon labs in Ukraine as the West continue to escalate their delivery of weapons to the Zelensky government.
*
Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at reneedove3@yahoo.com.
She is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com
These self-ordained power elites were typically, as is evidenced, not only less than intelligent but also prone toward malevolence and subject to any whims and hoaxes of the time. They embraced eugenics, crackpot economic theories and gravitated toward secret societies and the occult.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
The oligarchs that took control of the United States in the 1880s onward, almost all poorly educated, most mentally unfit, and all morally destitute built the mechanisms that made proxy war with Russia possible.
Today, we are going to learn the real roots of the CIA and the lie machine that threatens to set mankind on an evolutionary slide.
With shocking ease, academics, the press, and members of Western governments are falling into line with the NATO-driven propaganda war against Russia. The shock is not superficial, it is guttural.
As a historian specializing in US foreign policy in the 19th and 20th centuries, the issue seems to be more of a culmination of a disastrous trend, that of totally erasing reality and replacing it with what seems to be an alternative universe.
One with both training and experience in psychological warfare and chaos theory, one can see the hands of great talents with even greater power.
What is gone is the “baseline.”
By “baseline,” we mean that period when truth ruled over lies when newspapers reported “facts” and one could assume, generally, that when one formed an opinion, based on “information” that at least some of that information might actually be factual.
That ship has sailed.
What can be said, categorically, is this; the mechanisms that formed our world today hide in shadows, rewriting our history, presenting us with a “certified” reality of hoaxes, false flags, black propaganda and widespread distraction.
Assuring the success of this endeavor is decades, how many no one can guess, of shameful outright lying that has become the root of Western culture itself.
Let us take the clock back a few years, more than 50 in this case. The search is for some “solid ground.” For me, it would be long hours spent with university professors who held varying positions of authority between World War I and World War II. I begin with John Baugham Harrison.
Harrison co-authored the general education text on Western Civilization used at the time by most universities. He had been a “player” since the 1920s and was nearly at the end of his teaching career.
This is how he explained it to be, so very long ago while sitting in Berkey Hall at Michigan State University:
“You know, Gordon, putting together a survey of history after World War I, a history durable enough to explain the Cold War and Vietnam (I had only recently returned from that conflict, thus making me a curiosity) lead not only to a “duality” in approach but one likely to fall well outside the purview of general education as outlined by our “betters” as suitable for state funded institutions.
From the outset, the treaty negotiations, if one were to abuse the term, at Versailles made one thing clear, a dark financial cabal had begun World War I, had grown in power and stature and had gained an irrepressible hunger for more, more war, more death and more control.
Worse still, these self-ordained power elites were typically, as is evidenced, not only less than intelligent but also prone toward malevolence and subject to any whims and hoaxes of the time. They embraced eugenics, crackpot economic theories and gravitated toward secret societies and the occult.
Between the wars, their every effort was spent building the military capabilities that would assure the next world war would be wider in scope, longer in duration and leave a world in chaos and ruin to an extent that their power over man and government would be forever unchecked.”
There is a reason I turn to memory rather than to books and articles. None of this was written, certainly not in any college text for any class I could get into.
Moreover, those who had acted as witnesses and oft times accomplices to the efforts described by Harrison would only likely express, often with pangs of guilt, their real views in private.
Toward that end, I broadened my efforts, first to China specialist Dr. Paul Varg, and then Dr. David Mead, then on to Dr. Walter Gourlay, America’s then most prominent Russia Specialist. From there…the list got longer. I would speak with them openly as all had a powerful curiosity about Vietnam and many had been combat veterans in one or both World Wars.
It was Dr. James Hooker, alleged CIA recruiter, who set me on the path, initially, examining America’s love affair with Nazi Germany through the Committee of One Million, the America First Committee, and the roots of the OSS/CIA.
First of all, the primary goal of the Wall Street/London oligarchs was to build powerful warlike blocs and to do so in the middle of a worldwide depression.
Or we ask, was the depression itself part of that effort? That answer is a resounding “yes.”
Radicalizing Germany by throwing that nation into poverty and despair was not enough. A massive “pump and dump” engineered by the Rothschild owned Federal Reserve, followed by a strangulation of the US money supply was all that was needed to destroy the Western economies, or at least those sectors of the economies that were stupid enough to feed “the beast.”
Money bled from Wall Street through the London partnered brokerage houses, into European banks, and from there into the burgeoning German war economy but first Germany needed a new government.
Wall street supplied that was well, Dupont, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and brokerages like Merrill Lynch and the Rockefeller/Rothschild banks poured cash into the German war industry through direct investment or bonds.
As war approached, companies like Standard Oil and others turned to 100% German crews for their tanker fleets and set up partnerships with German concerns like IG Farben, transferring war technologies like synthetic oil and rubber to Germany while withdrawing their US patents.
Auschwitz was an IG Farben/Standard Oil facility with prisoners working in the massive synthetic oil and gas facilities nearby. Other plants, armor plates, and weapons, were owned by Silesia Mine and Coal, controlled through Bush-owned Union Bank but how were they managed?
This is where we get to the story of the OSS. CIA/OSS founder “Wild Bill” Donovan was a Rockefeller Foundation employee who regularly traveled to Berlin prior to the US entering World War I. After fighting in World War I (with distinction), he became a prominent New York attorney with a curious interest in “intelligence” which sent him to such places as Japan and often returned to Germany, meeting with Nazi leaders who became close confidants.
Simultaneously, the “other hand” of the CIA/OSS was the Dulles brothers, a New York law firm that represented Hitler’s Germany in sales of bonds, protecting patents, and in trade negotiations.
Allen Dulles would become the first director of the CIA and, reputedly, planned and executed the assassination of JFK and, of course, oversaw the investigation as well, though Kennedy had fired him from his CIA position earlier.
Allen Dulles spent much of World War II in Switzerland (Winston Churchill had requested he be kept out of Washington for the duration of the war as he was a suspected Nazi spy/ref; personal briefing/highest).
At the end of the war, Allen Dulles merged the new CIA with Germany’s Abwehr under Reinhard Gehlen, forming a curious partnership that would aid Nazis in escaping Europe (partnered with the Vatican) while engineering the environment that would lead to the Cold War.
Part of that “environment” was a genocidal crackdown in Korea making use of former collaborators with Japan that would lead to something more akin to a civil war than the “conflict” described universally through the fake history taught today.
Where did the brother go, John Foster Dulles? He became “handler” for weakling President Dwight David Eisenhower and served 8 years as Secretary of State.
What can this cabal be credited with? We can certainly start with the Cold War.
The watershed in Washington at the time was the collapse of Nationalist China under Chiang.
In response, the US turned the military equipment long in storage on Formosa/Taiwan over to France and aided that nation in its attempt to retake its colonial empire in Southeast Asia. Part of the rationale was to prevent a socialist takeover of France itself as became clear after the November 1946 French legislative election.
Only a Cold War such as the one being engineered in Europe today would push France into NATO, that and a promise of returned colonies.
As noted, for those familiar with the story of Dien Bien Phu, Dulles lost confidence in Frances’s communist government under Pierre Mendes, withdrew military support, and allowed General Giap to encircle and capture France’s army.
This, of course, allowed the US to take over, to an extent led by another confidant at Michigan State University, Professor Wesley Fischel, head of MSUG, the organization chosen by Dulles to Nazify Vietnam.
What is our lesson here? Simply put, there are no “sources” available to restore our history. Where simply emptying libraries once worked, and controlling all public education through the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, now Google can do it with an algorithm while social media giants exert even greater power of deception.
What is lost? This is only a glimpse of the 20th century as it really is.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
A striking example of the corruptness of the social ‘sciences’ is the results from web-searching the phrase “UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT” (just click onto it here — or else copy-and-paste that quotation into a search-box — to see the results from that web-search).
Virtually all of the sites that come up present political ‘scientists’ (and a few sociologists) offering their theories, no investigative historian presenting relevant and incontestable historical facts (which type of facts constitute the only empirical basis for actually understanding the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as a scientist would need to be the basis, in order for that person to be understanding it as a scientist — an authentic social scientist — would). Only if the public are presented truths — no lies — (and these truths are inevitably historical truths, not theoretical, at all) can democracy actually function. Democracy cannot function on the basis of lies (or any other type of falsehoods). If voters are voting on the basis of lies, then the public are being manipulated, and that can’t be a democracy.
Here are some examples of sites that prominently come up from this web-search:
One thing that I find quite striking is that in none of the web-pages that come up when web-searching “UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT” have I found any of them that use the word “coup” to refer to what incontestablywasthe coup that in February 2014 grabbed Ukraine for the U.S. (As those links show, that’s an empirical statement, no mere hypothesis.) Instead, all of them start with the false implicit assumption that it was instead a ‘revolution’ there, and that Russia was the aggressor against Ukraine during 2014 and seized Crimea from Ukraine, and that the Donbass (far eastern) part of “the Russia-Ukraine conflict” was (and was ONLY) a Russian invasion of that part of Ukraine, and that those two alleged ‘grabs’ by Russia had started this war between Ukraine and Russia. But NONE of that is true. Russia’s role in this matter was instead in reaction toAmerica’s immediately prior coup grabbing control of Ukraine, which nation has the longest of all European borders with Russia — it’s as-if Russia were to have couped Mexico, on America’s southern border (instead of America’s having couped Ukraine on Russia’s western border), and then social ‘scientists’ were blaming America instead of blaming Russia for its grab of Mexico via that coup. Rather than recognizing and acknowledging this fundamental and extremely relevant historical fact (and, as the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor admitted, what happened in Ukraine during February 2014 was “the most blatant coup in history”), they all start with the implicit and rabidly false assumption that Russia was the aggressor against Ukraine during 2014 and — without provocation — seized Crimea from Ukraine, and that the Donbass part of “the Russia-Ukraine conflict” was (and was likewise ONLY) a Russian invasion of that part of Ukraine. But NONE of that is actually true; it’s entirely false: Russia’s actions were self-defensively provoked by America’s seizure of Ukraine to use it against Russia. America was the aggressor there; and its installed stooge-regime promptly became the aggressor against the many Ukrainians who communicate with one-another in the Russian language — ethnically Russian Ukrainians (who now became “second-class citizens” and commonly called by the newly installed government, “terrorists”, or were even burned alive, if they criticized or rejected the new government). The U.S.-imposed regime was/is rabidly anti-Russian. But pre-coup Ukraine hadn’t been like that.
In fact: During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO (America’s anti-Russian military alliance) membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as their enemy, not their friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” Even Ukraine’s own national polling organization, Razumkov, found in 2016 exactly the same thing: “If a referendum on Ukraine’s accession to NATO were held, relative majority (44%) would vote for accession, and 26% would vote against. 31% of respondents remained undecided or would not take part in the vote. In 2007, 19% of respondents were willing to vote for accession to NATO, and 54% would have voted against. … With regard to the issue of support for Ukraine’s accession to NATO, the years 2014-2015 represented a turning point.” That 44% for joining NATO was down from the 53.4% in October 2014, but remained far higher than the 17% figure in 2010. Consequently, Obama’s coup succeeded in transforming Ukraine from having been America’s enemy before the coup, into being Russia’s enemy — on Russia’s very own border — after the coup.
In other words: social ‘scientists’ start by assuming theories that are based upon false ‘history’ that is implicitly taken to be authentic history: they start with lies, and ‘reason’ on that basis. It’s merely propaganda.
Obama’s successful grab of Ukraine installed a regime that was so extremely hostile toward Russia, so that Ukraine’s oligarchs, who own and control the ‘news’-media Ukrainians see and hear, were able very quickly to turn public opinion there, from the prior 17% wanting NATO membership, into 53.4% wanting NATO membership (and, subsequently, 44% for joining NATO, versus 26% against it). How can a fact like that be even so much as even merely discussed (not even to say explained) by today’s social ‘scientists’? It simply CAN’T (without disproving their ‘theories’). So, it ISN’T. And that’s NOT the way any authenticscience functions. No science can function by censoring-out reality (true history) — especially censoring-out the basic reality regarding its alleged topic.
So: this is how corrupt the social ‘sciences’ are: they are propagandists, who base their ‘theories’ on false assumptions. Rabidly false assumptions. And it’s not ONLY Ukrainians who have been fooled by this enormous systematic con about international relations. Ukrainians’ country was taken from them by this illegal coup, but publics in America’s other vassal-nations (or ‘allies’) have also been used as fools to believe the U.S. regime’s account, and to support nazis in Ukraine (about which, Ukraine can only lie, and lie repeatedly, to deny that Ukraine’s nazis have major power there), right up to and including Ukraine’s President Zelensky himself. Those are pretty big lies, and almost all social ‘scientists’ either explicitly endorse them, or else don’t point out that they are lies, at all.
What ‘scientists’ are today’s “social scientists”? None, at all. They have been prostituted, by their paymasters, to promote lies, instead of to expose them. The one thing that’s not tolerated, at all, in a democracy, is lies — especially lies in the news-media, and in the policy-sciences (the alleged “social sciences”). Although censorship cannot coexist with democracy (but is instead always a necessary servant to dictatorship), proven falsehood that is alleged to be fact is punished in a democracy, and punishing it serves actually to achieve the goals that censors merely (and insincerely) claim to be their goals in their censorship. This is why, in a dictatorship, both lying and censorship are rampant: all of the important truths are censored out, by the censors. And this is the way that the corrupt social ‘sciences’ are. They are built upon the lies that remain, after the key truths (such as these) have been ‘cleansed’ out.
By Evgeny Norin, aRussian historian focused on Russia’s wars and international politics
May 2, 2022
Clashes between opposing activists turned into mass murder. The perpetrators have never been punished
Eight years ago this Monday, something significant happened in Odessa, a historically important city in the southwest of Ukraine. Although the West didn’t see it as such, for Russia and the newly formed Donbass republics, what transpired there became a symbolic episode.
Provincial revolution
From late 2013 into early 2014, a conflict between the government of President Viktor Yanukovich and the pro-Western opposition was unfolding in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The series of events that would ensue were dubbed the ‘Euromaidan’. Meanwhile, Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, was of course affected by these events too, albeit to a lesser extent.
Occasional clashes with police and scuffles between supporters of Euromaidan and those aligned with the government, which became known as the ‘Anti-Maidan’ movement, were nothing compared to the bloodshed in Kiev, where people were being killed.
Many Ukrainians didn’t welcome the Euromaidan, and they had their reasons. Lots of Odessa residents had strong ties with Russia, and still do. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, a large number of ethnic Russians were living in Odessa and many had relatives in the old country. The city was built during the reign of Catherine the Great and has always been seen as an integral part of Russia’s history.
Thus, the aggressive nationalism of Euromaidan was largely unpopular there and plenty of locals were frightened by what seemed to be a passion for forming militant units. Euromaidan and Anti-Maidan in Odessa began to form parallel paramilitary organizations. Armed with a primitive array of sticks, biker helmets, and homemade weapons, these groups trained for street fighting. At first, nobody sought a fight to the death – the radicals hadn’t yet gained the leading role in either movement.
In Odessa, Anti-Maidan activists had begun gathering at Kulikovo Field, a square near Odessa’s House of Trade Unions in the city’s historical center. This became the site of an ongoing protest – it could also be described as a forum in the classical sense. People came to hang out, discuss the news, and even sing together. It was a very diverse crowd, from energetic youngsters to the elderly. Those who assembled there weren’t officially united by any specific ideology. One could run into Russian Orthodox activists, Cossacks, and a number of smaller groups.
The movement was led by local pro-Russian and leftist politicians, such as activist Anton Davidchenko and his brother Artyom. Their demands were very moderate – to protect the Russian language, grant the eastern regions economic autonomy, protect Russian and Soviet historical heritage, ensure monuments weren’t vandalized, let the East elect its own judges, etc. But Ukraine was in turmoil, and this program seemed extremely confrontational to the nationalists.
On the third of March 2014, after Yanukovich had already fled to Russia and Moscow had reabsorbed Crimea, Vladimir Nemirovsky, a nationalist politician, became head of the Odessa Region. He intended to harshly crack down on any form of protest. Dispersing the Kulikovo Field camp was a key point in his platform.
Tensions had been gradually rising throughout March and April. After an armed uprising broke out in Donetsk and Lugansk, Euromaidan activists set up checkpoints on all roads leading to Odessa. Nobody knew who or what they were guarding, but about 500 people, not all of whom were even from Odessa, manned these very strange checkpoints. At the end of April, Nemirovsky announced that ‘Territorial Defense’ units, which are essentially military reserves, had been bussed into Odessa:
“‘Territorial Defense’ buses were arriving in the region at that time. A lot of them. We tried to keep them away from Odessa whenever possible, but they went to Belgorod-Dnestrovsky and other places. They spread throughout the region. They were coming from the direction of Kiev. The police stayed away from them, the officers were demoralized.”
Even back then, these nationalist units were dangerous. They were arming themselves: we know of at least one case when a Euromaidan activist accidentally blew up a hand grenade. Molotov cocktails were also manufactured at these checkpoints.
Anti-Maidan found itself in a difficult situation. The initial excitement was winding down. There was a feeling that the struggle against the nationalists had been lost and nobody wanted to take a step toward violent conflict. In fact, the Kulikovo Field camp would have disappeared on its own in a few weeks. The Anti-Maidan leaders were already discussing the subject with the local authorities. They had even reached an agreement to shift it from the city center to the World War II memorial, which is in a less central location. The move was scheduled for May.
However, a less peaceful transition was also in the works. Though the police and governor didn’t want to get their hands dirty, there were enough ‘volunteers’ willing to take matters into their own hands. A football match against a team from Kharkov, a city in northeastern Ukraine, was scheduled for May 2, and Odessa was flooded with radical football fans. Rumors of potential violence began to circulate in April, and the Anti-Maidan activists had reason to be concerned about a possible raid on their camp. Some anticipated the future clashes with fear, others with excitement, but everybody knew that the Anti-Maidan camp would be destroyed. It was a perfect solution for everyone, except the activists themselves.
While rebels took over one city after another in the Donbass, and people in Crimea enthusiastically welcomed the Russian military, an easy victory for the nationalists in Odessa would give them the opportunity to demonstrate their strength. It would also allow the governor to show that he had the city under control. At this point, though, nobody was thinking that what was going to occur would take a lethal turn. A few Anti-Maidan activists wanted to remain in the central part of the city. Their idea was just to intimidate the nationalists.
On May 2, the football fans were to march through Odessa to the stadium under the slogan “for unity in Ukraine.” Euromaidan activists declared that this was to be a peaceful demonstration, but adherents of Anti-Maidan were convinced that the march would just be a cover for violent tactics.
Early in the morning of May 2, Sergey Dolzhenkov, the leader of the Anti-Maidan security group and a former police officer, contacted a member of the local parliament to request that the march be canceled:
“People saw what happened in Kharkov, Kherson, and Donetsk. The football fans were out of control. We need to make sure there is no bloodshed. No march – no bloodshed,” he said.
“I was on Kulikovo Field on May 1, and Artyom Davidchenko {the leader of Anti-Maidan in Odessa} announced from the stage that Right Sector {an ultra-nationalist Ukrainian organization whose name has become synonymous with all Ukrainian nationalists} was coming to town, and they would destroy the Kulikovo Field camp. We have to fight them off,” remembers Maxim Firsov, an activist from the left-wing Borotba movement.
Dolzhenkov and his Anti-Maidan group had limited forces. Officially, there were a lot of people at the camp, but the majority were women and elderly, who would not be able to fight. In fact, they themselves needed to be protected. That’s why Dolzhenkov decided to accompany the march with some of his men, while keeping a distance. Not everybody in the Anti-Maidan camp liked this plan, but Dolzhenkov was a man of action and thought it was better to meet the opponent head on and block them if they decided to walk toward the Kulikovo Field camp.
The police and Ukraine’s Security Service knew what was afoot but had no plans to interfere. On May 2, Artyom Davidchenko met with both agencies and was informed that detentions and arrests would start only when there were dead bodies, and there “would definitely be bodies.”
On May 1, activists from both groups were anticipating a fight, but nobody expected what actually happened.
Fighting on Grecheskaya Street
On the morning of May 2, an off-schedule train took around 500 Kharkov football fans to Odessa. Along with them, there arrived Pro-Euromaidan groups having nothing to do with football but who were armed with street fighting equipment, including personal armor and weapons. In the afternoon, they began to gather on Cathedral Square in the center of Odessa.
An Anti-Maidan group 150-to-300-strong departed from Kulikovo Field, which is about a 30-minute walk away. Although vastly outnumbered by the 2,000-3,000 Euromaidan fighters and fans, Dolzhenkov guided it in the direction of Cathedral Square anyway.
The Odessa police refused to intervene in the events. Its main forces of around 700 officers guarded the stadium, while around 80 followed the Anti-Maidan activists and 60 kept watch over Kulikovo Field. High-ranking police officers had been summoned for a meeting and were ordered to turn off their phones.
A small police unit tried to block Dolzhenkov’s group, but it simply circumvented the officers.
Meanwhile, an excited crowd had already gathered on Cathedral Square armed with clubs, shields, helmets, Molotov cocktails, and rubber-bullet handguns.
At around 3 pm, the Anti-Maidan activists from Kulikovo reached Cathedral Square via the adjacent Grecheskaya Street. Many accounts describe the arrival of Dolzhenkov’s group as an all-out assault resulting in a breakthrough. This is often referred to as an Anti-Maidan attack on the ultras. At first glance, a group of 300 charging a mob ten times its size would appear to be folly. But if you scratch the surface, new details emerge.
Some football fans saw the Anti-Maidan activists approaching and engaged them. The actual fight was initiated by two small groups of Dolzhenkov’s men and a crowd of Euromaidan activists. The main contingents did nothing at first, keeping their distance, but this was enough to spark the conflict.
With a thin line of police officers between them, at first the sides threw stones at each other. But the numerical advantage of Euromaidan was overwhelming and Anti-Maidan was quickly put on the defensive. Most of the officers were facing the Euromaidan side, which was throwing bricks, stones, and Molotov cocktails. The police began firing air and rubber-bullet guns almost from the beginning.
For Euromaidan, the altercation on Grecheskaya Street was amusing but accomplished nothing, so some activists went to the parallel Deribasovskaya Street on a flanking maneuver. This is where the first real blood was spilled.
The fight was already on when the Anti-Maidan supporters began shooting their firearms. A Euromaidan activist and nationalist named Igor Ivanov was killed by a bullet. He was likely killed by Kulikovo activist Vitaly Budko (Boatswain), who had arrived at the scene quite late – around 4 pm – with a civilian rifle, and opened fire as soon as he joined his companions. Neither he nor his weapon was ever found in the aftermath, and information on the bullet that killed Ivanov disappeared from the police database. However, several videos and photos show him having been firing his weapon before himself being shot. Another Maidan activist was shot dead with an air gun.
Anti-Maidan protesters soon came under fire too, and some were wounded. The subsequent investigation was conducted so poorly that none of the guns involved in the shootout were identified afterwards. There is footage of at least one injured protester.
The fighting went on for several hours. Reinforcements periodically came to bolster the Euromaidan activists, and they soon blocked all approaches to Grecheskaya Street. The Kulikovo group found itself surrounded at the Athena shopping mall, while well-coordinated Euromaidan teams were cutting off any reinforcements or avenues for retreat. Around 4 pm, the Euromaidan side captured a fire engine and drove it into a small barricade the defenders had built. Around 5:30 pm, a group went out onto the balcony of a nearby building and opened fire on their adversaries. Bullets and pellets extracted from the bodies revealed that at least three guns were involved. Four men died instantly, and several more were wounded, including a journalist, a police colonel, and a couple of officers. The defense crumbled. Some retreated to the shopping mall, barricaded themselves inside, and eventually surrendered to the police. Among them was Sergey Dolzhenkov, who had suffered a bullet wound. It seemed as if everything was over.
Death by fire
The Maidan activists had essentially already won the battle. The Kulikovo Field activists were defeated. By this time, people were simply roaming around aimlessly. Some sports fans from the stadium had joined the commotion after the game ended. But events were about to take a completely different turn.
Mark Gordienko, one of the leaders of Odessa’s Euromaidan movement, was one of those who began shouting, ‘Kulikovo!’ encouraging the crowd to go to the site where the Anti-Maidan protesters had put up their camp. In March of 2014, he was known to have said that he “would shoot down all separatists.” That day, he had an opportunity to fulfill his promise. Later, he seemed to have conveniently forgotten that he had spearheaded the violence.
Gordienko and a number of others managed to reignite the cooling crowd. Later, a recording of a conversation between Odessa Deputy Mayor Igor Bolyansky and one of the Euromaidan commanders was leaked, during which Bolyansky not only suggested that the commanders lead the crowd on the 30-minute walk from Grecheskaya Street to Kulikovo, but even discussed the logistics of how this should be done. In other words, this wasn’t a case of a crowd spontaneously moving in a certain direction but of one being steered there by leaders who made sure it arrived at the destination.
Meanwhile, the people at Kulikovo were confused and disoriented. Most were civilians with no military training whatsoever, and they weren’t particularly keen on participating in any battles. There were many women among them. Artyom Davidchenko had already briefly told them what had just transpired, while some people who had managed to escape Grecheskaya Street returned to give them a run-down of events. Many who had been on the square had already gone home, yet a number of them returned when they heard a crowd was on its way to attack their camp and fellow protesters.
That’s why a sizable number of the protesters who ended up at Kulikovo knew an attack was coming. Someone suggested taking cover in the massive Trade Unions building on the square, and people began to move their belongings from the camp into the building. They set up an improvised first aid station there, brought in supplies and built a small barricade in front of the building. They also had a couple of hunting rifles and a few Molotov cocktails. Davidchenko then left the square. Aleksey Albu, a low-level local politician, stayed in the building. At the time, he was not the kind who would be eager to participate in any fighting. In fact, he had learned about the clashes from the news.
The Trade Unions House had around 300 people inside that evening.
At 7:20 pm, the angry Euromaidan crowd entered the square. They moved through the abandoned camp and started throwing Molotov cocktails at the barricade in front of the Trade Unions building. Those inside responded by lobbing a few Molotov cocktails back at the attackers from the roof. It was then that a reporter who was filming everything said, “Now, they’ll definitely kill them.”
The attackers kept throwing rocks and improvised bombs at the barricade, which mostly consisted of wooden furniture and crates, and finally set it on fire. The protesters behind it retreated into the hall of the building. Later, many reports exaggerated the scope of the resistance put up by those in the Trade Unions building. Available footage shows that the attackers freely moved around the square, not needing to duck or take cover because there was no fire coming back at them.
The barricade was in flames and the attackers had set fire to the tents on the square. The whole square was full of smoke and flames. The attackers continued to hurl cocktail bombs filled with a home-made napalm mixture consisting of gasoline, acetone, and Styrofoam at the building. The holed-up protesters called the fire brigade, but no one came. The few policemen on the scene did nothing to interfere and just watched as the events unfolded.
The attackers made sure the fire didn’t die out, throwing more and more cocktail bombs into it. They even tossed in a burning car tire, while firing at the windows with anti-riot guns.
Then tragedy struck.
Independent expert Vladislav Balisnsky explained that the fire raging at the building’s entrance ignited the paint and varnish on the hall’s walls and ceiling. The burning entrance door collapsed, and the window panes were broken one by one by gunfire, creating a powerful draft. The resulting chimney effect turned the central staircase into a huge incinerator, with temperatures at the center rising to 600–700 degrees Celsius. The fire spread nearly instantly and everything that could burn was consumed in the fire. The people in the vicinity were essentially burnt alive. Others tried to save themselves by taking refuge in rooms further from the blaze. The draft continued to pull large clouds of smoke down the building’s corridors, killing more and more people on its way.
That’s when people began to jump out of the windows, which seemed a better alternative than being burnt alive or suffocating.
But for some leaping turned out not to be the lesser of two evils. Those who jumped ended up injuring themselves badly, sometimes fatally. But surviving the hazardous jump did not mean the end of the suffering. One activist was captured on camera running up to a person who had jumped out of a window, injured by the fall but still alive and moving, in order to beat the victim with a baton. Later, local journalist Sergey Dibrov spent some time studying footage and images from the incident and concluded that the victim ultimately received medical assistance and survived.
It was at this point that some people in the mob started to feel remorse and tried to help those caught in the burning building. Some threw a rope to those on the upper floors. Others dragged scaffolding to the building to help those trapped inside escape. These acts helped quite a number of people get out of the building alive, although some emerged only to be beaten on the ground. The last cocktail bomb was thrown into the building at 8:08 pm. The police reinforcements finally arrived and pushed the most belligerent attackers back. The fire squad arrived at 8:15 – despite being stationed just 400 meters away, it took them 30 minutes to arrive on the scene – and started to rescue the last survivors.
As it turned out, quite a lot of people survived the fire. The havoc subsided, and the fire squad and police restored order. Some people had been rescued from the roof, while others were found in rooms untouched by fire or smoke. The last survivors, who had been hiding in the attic, left the building in the early hours of May 3.
Elena was among those from the Kulikovo Field camp who had helped set up the first aid station before the attack. Later, she told reporters that she had been harassed by the people outside after escaping the fire. They shouted insults at her and even roughed her up, while the police paid no attention at all. During the fire in the building, those on the winning side displayed quite contradictory behavior. Some made genuine attempts to save people from the conflagration they had just started, and even risked their lives to do so, while others were happy to take advantage of the opportunity to continue to assault and humiliate the survivors.
A total of 48 people died: two Maidan activists and 46 Kulikovo Field Anti-Maidan protesters – two on Grecheskaya Street, and 42 at Kulikovo Field Square. Eight people jumped from the building to their deaths, while others suffocated or died from burns. All were citizens of Ukraine. A total of 247 people requested medical help following the incident, of whom 27 had been wounded by gunfire.
Albu, the local politician and one of the leaders of the group, was among those who had taken cover in the building but survived. He later joined the LPR’s Prizrak Brigade in Donbass. Another leader, local MP Vyacheslav Markin, died the next morning from injuries sustained after jumping from the building to escape the fire.
Ashes
In the following years, not a single person responsible for the killings in Odessa was punished in any way. Many of the murderers acted openly, wearing no masks or disguises, and were very straightforward about their intentions. Only a handful even faced criminal investigation. But ultimately, not a single one was brought before the courts to answer for the crimes committed. Whatever hearings did manage to be scheduled were derailed by the so-called ‘patriots’. A number of judges were forced to recuse themselves from the cases after receiving threats from militants.
Meanwhile, high-ranking Ukrainian politicians were quick to identify the ‘culprits’. Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchinov said that the disturbances in Odessa “were coordinated from a single center located in Russia.” Sergey Pashinsky, acting head of the presidential administration, said that it was “an FSB provocation to divert attention from the [so-called] anti-terrorist operation [in the Donbass]”. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry declared that “the tragedy was a pre-planned and well-financed operation by the Russian special services.”
From the very beginning, the authorities in Odessa seemed to deliberately obstruct the investigation. By the morning of May 3, the area around Grecheskaya Street had been cleared by municipal workers, who quickly disposed of all the physical evidence. The Trade Unions building remained open to the public for the following month. Citizens could watch live streams from the smoldering ruins, with one cameraman referring to the corpses of a young pair as “Romeo and Juliet.” No attempt was made to preserve the crime scene. The weapons used to kill people were never found. And these are just a few examples of the investigation’s dismissive and negligent attitude toward the case. In September 2015, UN Special Rapporteur Christof Heyns acknowledged that the bulk of the evidence relating to the May 2 events was destroyed immediately after the crime.
Euromaidan activist Sergei Khodiyak, who fired at people with a hunting rifle, was released from custody, and the judge recused himself from the case under pressure from a group of Maidan activists led by Igor Mosiychuk, an MP from the nationalist Radical Party. Vsevolod Goncharevsky, who used a club to beat and finish off Kulikovo activists who had jumped out of the windows of the burning building, was released due to a “lack of evidence.”
Dolzhenkov and a number of other Anti-Maidan activists remained in custody. In 2017, after many delays, the court acquitted Dolzhenkov in connection with the case. But he was immediately arrested again on the trumped-up charge of chanting illegal slogans at a political rally that had taken place a month before the tragedy. In December 2017, the last pro-Russian activists were released from custody as part of an exchange of detainees and prisoners from the Donbass conflict.
Ukrainian society reacted to the events in Odessa in a very peculiar way. Naturally, the majority of the population sympathized with the victims. Flowers would be brought to the Trade Unions building every year on May 2. The public realm and the media, however, were dominated by nationalists. For a few months after the events, social media platforms were overflowing with ‘jokes’ about the ‘Odessa barbecue’, the ‘burning of vatniks’ (a typical Soviet-era wool-padded jacket that became used to refer to Ukrainians espousing pro-Russian views and to Russians themselves), as well as slogans eerily reminiscent of those employed by Nazis about the Jews that they murdered in World War Two. The Ukrainian internet was flooded with pictures of burnt corpses accompanied by derisive comments. Many of the people who took part in the Odessa event soon thereafter ended up in the Donbass, fighting in the volunteer battalions of the Ukrainian army. “All it takes is to kill fifty ‘vatniks’ in every city, and then we shall have peace, then the war will end,” remarked Maksim Mazur, a member of the Aidar Battalion – a statement that was eagerly endorsed by many of those who had attacked people in Odessa.
In fact, Ukrainian social media did exactly what is commonly attributed to Russian propaganda. The piles of burnt corpses evoked feelings of horror, but also of rage. May 2014 was a breaking point: volunteers from Russia started to arrive in the breakaway republics en masse and even some men from Western Europe came to fight on their side. Slogans about autonomous status and the need to engage in talks with Kiev gave way to an unwavering resolve and determination to stand and fight to the bitter end. Just a few days after May 2, a Donbass rebel wrote on a destroyed and burned-out Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicle: “This is for Odessa, you bastards.”
The voice of those who were horrified by the events from the very beginning and understood what had really happened was simply not heard. But they were probably worth listening to. Two years later, Artem Sushchevsky, from the Donbass town of Makeevka, wrote:
“I can repeat all I want that not everyone is crazy and that most Ukrainians are still the good and sensible people they always have been. I’m convinced this is true, and I’m not contradicting myself by saying this. But there’s one ‘but’: these good and sensible people can live peacefully with the events that transpired on May 2 in Odessa, already two years ago. And they also somehow live with the shelling of Donetsk. And in general, they have to put up with this shameful war, consoling themselves with fairy tales about a Russian invasion. But I can’t live with those who can live with this. I don’t care how I live – as long as it’s not with you.”
Alexander Topilov, an Odessa musician and Euromaidan supporter, wrote a few days after the tragic events:
“…there were boys born in 1994. There were young girls, university professors, mechanics. I don’t know. Not all were quick enough to jump. Not all survived the landing. It’s not a victory, like hell it is! Don’t cheer us. I saw some exalted comments. Who the f*ck wants a victory like that? And who can even call it a victory? That’s a f*cking fiasco. It’s civil war. Odessa residents at each other’s throats. Who’s the winner here? I don’t need victories like that, the f*ck I do. Some people are like animals and some beasts are humane, that’s what I’m talking about. The line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I lost mine on May 2. I don’t know where to draw it. I see people. And I see animals. Animals on my side, people against me. So, what do I do next? Damned if I know, boyo, as they say on the other side… And there are not less real people there than animals here…”
That desperate cry fell on deaf ears. On the same day that the Trade Unions building was burning, there was intense fighting in Slaviansk in the Donbass. The Ukrainian army was trying to enter the city. Soon, the militias armed with a motley assortment of hunting rifles, handguns stolen from police officers and Molotov cocktails were replaced by battalions and brigades equipped with artillery and tanks. Eastern Ukraine quaked with the blasts of howitzers and the rumbling of tanks.
Today, 2 May, marks the eighth anniversary of the diabolical Nazi atrocities at Odessa. For those unfamiliar with how this war began I updated a News Junkie Post article about its aetiology for The Indicter in 2015. At least 46 people were killed and many more unaccounted for when pro-Russian sympathisers were locked in the trade-union building by Right Sector fascists before it was set on fire.
The fascists were chanting “Slava Ukraini”, that is “Glory to Ukraine”, as people burnt to death. The perpetrators walked free. These are the same Nazis fighting for Kiev.
A compiled video of what happened on 2 May 2014
Earlier this year, at the start of the Russian special operation, and in praise of the eight-year NATO-backed slaughter, Boris Johnson added his own cry of Slava Ukraini on behalf of the British People when he told the Zelensky regime that the UK stands with Ukraine and its people. This is not Johnson’s first cry of Glory to Ukraine.
On 24 August 2019 he saluted Ukraine’s “independence” together with John Whittingdale, Chair of the All-Parliamentary group on Ukraine, Robert Brinkley, British Ambassador to Ukraine (2002-2006), Michael Fallon, Member of the House of Commons, Baroness Alison Suttie, Member of the House of Lords, John Grogan, Member of the House of Commons, Julian Edward George Asquith, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Jonathan Djanogly, member of the House of Commons, Orysia Lutsevych, manager of the Ukrainian Forum, Chatham House, Andrew Foxall, Director of Research for the Henry Jackson Society and Pauline Latham, member of the House of Commons.
Together they repeated the words, line by line, of what is claimed to be the Ukrainian National Anthem since the coup-d’etat which removed the legitimately-elected president Viktor Yanukovich to install the West’s puppet regime.
Details are starting to emerge that NATO was actually planning to take control of the Donbas region against the will of the people. Even more disturbing is the speculation that NATO has a unit hidden deep in the bowels of the Azovstal factory. That would certainly mean that Johnson knew the intent from the start.
If they knew what was happening today my parents would blow up a dust storm. Their generation spent five-years fighting off the evils of Nazism. Now my government is gung ho in support of it. It is almost unbelievable.
*
This article was originally published on All the Goss.
Featured image is from All the Goss
The original source of this article is Global Research
2014 saw two pivotal events that led to the current conflict in Ukraine.
The first, familiar to all, was the coup in Ukraine in which a democratically elected government was overthrown at the direction of the United States and with the assistance of neo-Nazi elements which Ukraine has long harbored.
Shortly thereafter the first shots in the present war were fired on the Russian-sympathetic Donbass region by the newly installed Ukrainian government. The shelling of the Donbass which claimed 14,000 lives has continued for 8 years, despite attempts at a cease-fire under the Minsk accords which Russia, France and Germany agreed upon but Ukraine backed by the US refused to implement. On February 24, 2022, Russia finally responded to the slaughter in Donbass and the threat of NATO on its doorstep.
Russia Turns to the East – China Provides an Alternative Economic Powerhouse.
The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and in fact rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media. In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP). (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA. Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.) One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South. This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end. As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured.
Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable U.S. sanctions poured onto Russia. China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia. This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime.
The World Majority Refuses to Back U.S. Sanctions
But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime. And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India. India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up. India did not budge.
India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era. India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by U.S. threats. Now India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange. In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of U.S. diktat. Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly? Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction? What’s the world’s first most important relationship?
India is but one example of the shift in power. Out of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia. That means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the sanctions. Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s population. Most of Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil), East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of Taiwan) have refused. (India and China alone represent 35% of humanity.)
Add to that fact that 40 different countries are now the targets of US sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish economic tactics of the U.S.
Finally, at the recent G-20 Summit a walkout led by the US when the Russia delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20 countries, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join! Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting later in the year in Bali was rebuffed by Indonesia which currently holds the G-20 Presidency.
Nations Taking Russia’s side are no longer poor as in Cold War 1.0.
These dissenting countries of the Global South are no longer as poor as they were during the Cold War. Of the top 10 countries in PPP-GDP, 5 do not support the sanctions. And these include China (number one) and India (number 3). So the first and third most powerful economies stand against the US on this matter. (Russia is number 6 on that list about equal to Germany, number 5, the two being close to equal, belying the idea that Russia’s economy is negligible.)
These stands are vastly more significant than any UN vote. Such votes can be coerced by a great power and little attention is paid to them in the world. But the economic interests of a nation and its view of the main danger in the world are important determinants of how it reacts economically – for example to sanctions. A “no” to US sanctions is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.
We in the West hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of the crisis in Ukraine. If one is speaking about the Eurovassal states and the Anglosphere, that is true. But considering humanity as a whole and among the rising economies of the world, it is the US that stands isolated. And even in Europe, cracks are emerging. Hungary and Serbia have not joined the sanctions regime and of course most European countries will not and indeed cannot turn away from Russian energy imports crucial to their economies. It appears that the grand scheme of U.S. global hegemony to be brought about by the US move to WWII Redux, both Cold and Hot, has hit a mighty snag.
For those who look forward to a multipolar world, this is a welcome turn of events emerging out of the cruel tragedy of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. The possibility of a saner, more prosperous multipolar world lies ahead – if we can get there.
Natylie Baldwin interviews academic Olga Baysha about Ukraine’s president, a former TV actor who has become, since the start of the war, an A-list celebrity in the U.S.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 23, the eve of Russia’s invasion. At the time he was hosting the presidents of Lithuania and Poland in Kiev. (President of Ukraine, Flickr)
A comedic actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment theater.
But when Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, Zelensky was suddenly transformed to an A-list celebrity in U.S. media. American news consumers were bombarded with images of a man who appeared overcome by the tragic events, possibly in over his head, but ultimately sympathetic. It didn’t take long for that image to evolve into the khaki-clad, tireless hero governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the barbarians of autocracy from the east.
But beyond that carefully crafted Western media image is something much more complicated and less flattering. Zelensky was elected by 73 percent of the vote on a promise to pursue peace while the rest of his platform was vague. On the eve of the invasion, however, his approval rating had sunk to 31 percent due to the pursuit of deeply unpopular policies.
Ukrainian academic, Olga Baysha, author of Democracy, Populism, and Neoliberalism in Ukraine: On the Fringes of the Virtual and the Real, has studied Zelensky’s rise to power and how he has wielded that power since becoming president.
In the interview below, Baysha discusses Zelensky’s embrace of neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism, how his actions contributed to the current war; his counterproductive and self-absorbed leadership throughout the war, the complex cultural and political views and identities of Ukrainians, the partnership between neoliberals and the radical right during and after the Maidan uprising and whether a Russian takeover of the entire Donbass region might be less popular among the local population than it would have been in 2014.
Tell us a bit about your background. Where are you from and how did you become interested in your current area of study?
Olga Baysha. (Higher School of Economics, National Research University)
I am an ethnic Ukrainian born in Kharkov, a Ukrainian city on the borderline with Russia, where my dad and other relatives are still living. Before the current war, Kharkov was one of Ukraine’s leading educational and scientific centers. The city’s residents pride themselves on living in the “intellectual capital” of Ukraine.
In 1990, the first television company free from party control was established there; soon, its first news program went on air. By that time, I had already graduated from Kharkov University, and one day, I was invited to work as a journalist in this program by a university friend. Next day, without prior experience, I started reporting. In a couple of months, I was a news presenter. My meteoric career was not an exception.
New uncontrolled media, the number of which was increasing at a huge rate daily, demanded more and more media workers. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they were young ambitious people without any journalistic education or life experience. What united us was the desire to Westernize, a lack of understanding of societal contradictions characterizing the post-Soviet transition, and deafness to the concerns of working people who opposed reforms. In our eyes, the latter were “retrograde”: they did not understand what civilization was about.
We saw [our]selves as a revolutionary vanguard and chosen progressive reformers. It is we — media workers —who created a favorable environment for Ukraine’s neoliberalization, presented as Westernization and civilization, with all disastrous consequences for society they brought. Only years after, I realized this.
Later, while supervising the production of historical documentaries in a Kiev television company, I recognized that the mythology of unidirectional historical progress and inevitability of Westernization for “barbarians” provided an ideological ground for neoliberal experiments not only in the former Soviet states but around the globe. It is this interest in the global hegemony of the ideology of Westernization that led me first to the doctoral program in critical media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and then to the research I am doing now.
According to the academic work of some Ukrainian sociologists, polling showed in the recent past that most Ukrainians were not very interested in the issue of identity but were more concerned with issues like jobs, wages and prices. Your work focuses a lot on the neoliberal reforms that were enacted in Ukraine since 2019 – against the popular sentiment. Can you talk about what the view is on economic issues for most Ukrainians and why?
In the social milieus [in which] I lived — the east of Ukraine, Crimea and Kiev — there were very few people concerned with the issue of ethnic identity.
I do not in vain emphasize “my social milieus.” Ukraine is a complex and divided country with its far east and far west holding diametrically different views on all socially significant issues. Since the declaration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991, two ideas of national identity have been competing in Ukraine: “ethnic Ukrainian” versus “eastern Slavic.”
The ethnic Ukrainian national idea, based on the notion that Ukrainian culture, language, and ethnicity-centered history should be the dominant integrating forces in the Ukrainian nation-state, has been much more popular in the west of Ukraine. The eastern Slavic idea, which envisages the Ukrainian nation as founded on two primary ethnic groups, languages and cultures — Ukrainian and Russian — has been accepted as normal in the Ukrainian southeast. However, in general, I can agree that most Ukrainians are much more concerned with economic issues, which has always been the case.
Sunset at the train station in Kharkov, Ukraine, 2007. (Trey Ratcliff, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
As a matter of fact, Ukraine’s independence of 1991 was to a big extent also a matter of economic concerns. Many Ukrainians supported the idea of political divorce from Russia because of an expectation that Ukraine would be better off economically — this is what propagandistic leaflets promised us.
This economic hope was not realized. In many ways, the collapse of the Soviet Union radically changed people’s lives for the worse because of Ukraine’s neoliberalization — the marketization of the social sphere and ruination of the Soviet welfare state.
What about neoliberal reforms initiated by Zelensky? You can judge on their popularity by opinion polls – up to 72 percent of Ukrainians did not support his land reform, the flagship of Zelensky’s neoliberal program. After his party approved it despite people’s indignation, Zelensky’s rating fell from 73 percent in Spring 2019 to 23 percent in January 2022. The reason is simple: a deep sense of betrayal.
In his unofficial election platform — the show “Servant of the People” — Zelesnky-Holoborodko [Holoborodko was Zelensky’s character in the television show – NB] promised that if he could rule the country for just one week, he would “make the teacher live as the president, and the president live as the teacher.” To put it mildly, this promise was not fulfilled. People realized that they were duped once again — the reforms have been carried out in the interests of not Ukrainians but global capital.
To what extent do you think that prioritizing of economic security versus identity issues has changed with the Russian invasion? How do you think that will work out for the political fortunes of the nationalists/ultranationalists versus moderates or leftists?
That is an interesting question. On the one hand, people’s priority now is to survive, which makes security their primary concern. To save their lives, millions of Ukrainians, including my mom and my sister with children, have left Ukraine for Europe. Many of them are ready to stay there forever, to learn foreign languages, and to adopt to a foreign way of life — all these developments can hardly prioritize identity concerns.
On the other hand, however, the intensification of ethnic sentiments and the consolidation of the nation in the face of the invasion is also evident. I can judge on this from public discussions in social media — some Kharkovites whom I know personally even started making posts in Ukrainian [language], which they had never used before, to highlight their national identity and signal that they are against any foreign invasion.
This is another tragic aspect of this war. The Maidan revolution of 2014, which many people in the southeast did not support, transformed these people into “slaves,” “sovki” and “vatniki” — derogatory terms to denote their backwardness and barbarism.
This is how Maidan revolutionaries, who considered themselves the progressive force of history, saw anti-Maidan “others” because of their adherence to Russian language and culture. Never ever could this pro-Russian population imagine Russia shelling their cities and ruining their lives. The tragedy of these people is twofold: first, their world was ruined symbolically by the Maidan, now, it is being destroyed physically by Russia.
The outcomes of these developments are unclear so far as it is unclear how the war will end. If the southeastern regions remain in Ukraine, the ruination of everything resisting aggressive nationalism will most likely be completed.
” … first, their world was ruined symbolically by the Maidan, now, it is being destroyed physically by Russia.”
This will be probably the end of this unique borderline culture that has never wanted to be either completely Ukrainized or Russified. If Russia establishes control over these regions, as it boasts now, I can hardly predict how it will be dealing with mass resentment — at least, in the cities that are damaged significantly, as in Kharkov.
Moving to Zelensky specifically – one thing you point out in your book is how Zelensky served as this sort of Pied Piper figure in that he used his celebrity and acting skills to get people to support him on behalf of this vague, feel-good agenda (peace, democracy, progress, anticorruption) but that really obscured another agenda that would not have been popular, specifically a neoliberal economic agenda. Can you talk about how he did that – how did he run his campaign and what were his priorities after he got into office?
The basic argument presented in my recent book is that the astonishing victory of Zelensky and his party, later transformed into a parliamentary machine to churn out and rubber-stamp neoliberal reforms (in a “turbo regime,” as they called it), cannot be explained apart from the success of his television series, which, as many observers believe, served as Zelensky’s informal election platform.
Unlike his official platform, which ran only 1,601 words in length and contained few policy specifics, the 51 half-hour episodes of his show provided Ukrainians with a detailed vision of what should be done so that Ukraine could progress.
The message delivered by Zelensky to Ukrainians through his show is clearly populist. The people of Ukraine are portrayed in it as an unproblematic totality devoid of internal splits, from which only oligarchs and corrupted politicians/officials are excluded. The country becomes healthy only after getting rid of both oligarchs and their puppets. Some of them are imprisoned or flee the country; their property is confiscated without any regard to legality. Later, Zelensky-the-president will do the same towards his political rivals.
Interestingly, the show ignores the theme of the Donbass war, which erupted in 2014, a year before the series started being broadcast. As the Maidan and Russia-Ukraine relations are very divisive issues in Ukrainian society, Zelensky ignored them so as not to jeopardize the unity of his virtual nation, his viewers and ultimately his voters.
Volodymyr Zelensky in 2016, in an episode of Ukrainian TV comedy “Servant of the People.” (YouTube)
Zelensky’s election promises, made on the fringes of the virtual and the real, were predominantly about Ukraine’s “progress,” understood as “modernization,” “Westernization,” “civilization” and “normalization.”
It is this progressive modernizing discourse that allowed Zelensky to camouflage his plans for neoliberal reforms, launched just three days after the new government came to power. Throughout the campaign, the idea of “progress” highlighted by Zelensky was never linked to privatization, land sales, budget cuts, etc.
Only after Zelensky had consolidated his presidential power by establishing full control over the legislative and executive branches of power did he make it clear that the “normalization” and “civilization” of Ukraine meant the privatization of land and state/public property, the deregulation of labor relations, a reduction of power for trade unions an increase in utility tariffs, and so on.
You’ve pointed out that many foreigners were appointed to important economic and social posts after the 2014 coup and before Zelensky’s term. Similarly, many of Zelensky’s officials have close ties to global neoliberal institutions and you’ve suggested there is evidence that they manipulate Zelensky who has an unsophisticated understanding of economics/finance. Can you discuss that aspect of the ramifications of the pro-Western change of government in 2014? What are the larger interests at play here and do they have the interests of the general Ukrainian population in mind at all?
Yes, the Maidan change of power in 2014 marked the beginning of a completely new era in the history of Ukraine in terms of Western influence on its sovereign decisions.
To be sure, since Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, this influence has always existed. The American Chamber of Commerce, Center for US-Ukraine relations, US-Ukraine Business Council, European Business Association, IMF, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, WTO, the EU — all these lobbying and regulating institutions have been significantly affect[ing] Ukrainian political decisions.
However, never in the pre-Maidan history of Ukraine had the country appointed foreign citizens to top ministerial posts — this became possible only after the Maidan.
In 2014, Natalie Jaresko, a citizen of the U.S., was appointed Ukraine’s minister of finance; Aivaras Abromavicius, a citizen of Lithuania, became Ukraine’s minister of economy and trade; Alexander Kvitashvili, a citizen of Georgia, the minister of healthcare. In 2016, Ulana Suprun, a citizen of the U.S., was appointed the acting minister of healthcare.
Other foreigners assumed offices of lower ranks. Needless to say, all these appointments resulted not from the will of Ukrainians but from the recommendations of the global neoliberal institutions, which is not surprising given that the Maidan itself was not supported by half of Ukraine’s population.
As already mentioned, the majority of these anti-Maidan “others” reside in the southeastern regions. The farther east one looked, the stronger and more unified a rejection of the Maidan with its European agenda one would find. More than 75 percent of those living in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (two eastern regions of Ukraine predominantly populated by Russian-speakers) did not support the Maidan, while only 20 percent of people living in Crimea supported it.
These statistical figures, provided by Kiev Institute of Sociology in April 2014, did not prevent Western institutions of power from arguing that the Maidan was the uprising of “Ukrainian people” presented as an unproblematic totality — a very powerful ideological trick. When visiting the Maidan Square and encouraging its revolutionaries to protest, members of the “international community” disrespected millions of Ukrainians who held anti-Maidan views, thus contributing to the escalation of the civil conflict, which at the end of the day led to the disaster that we are helplessly observing today.
“… members of the ‘international community’ … contributed to the escalation of the civil conflict.”
What about foreign interests invested in Ukraine’s neoliberalization, carried out in the name of the Ukrainian people? [T]hey are diverse, but behind the land reform, which I have been analyzing carefully, there were financial lobbies in the West. Western pension funds and investment funds wanted to invest money that was depreciating. Looking for assets to invest in, they enlisted support of the IMF, the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and various lobbying groups to promote their interests and lay out all necessary groundwork. This has nothing to do with the interests of Ukrainians, of course.
How has Zelensky’s record been on democracy – freedom of speech and press, political pluralism and treatment of different political parties? How does it compare to past presidents of post-Soviet Ukraine?
I agree with Jodi Dean who argues that democracy is a neoliberal fantasy in a sense that it cannot exist in neoliberal systems of government controlled not by people but by supranational institutions. As mentioned earlier, this became especially evident after the Maidan when foreign ministers were appointed by these institutions to present their interests in Ukraine.
However, in his reforming zeal, Zelensky went further. In early February 2021, first three oppositional television channels — NewsOne, Zik and 112 Ukraine — were shut down. Another oppositional channel Nash was banned in the beginning of 2022, before the beginning of the war.
After the war broke out, in March, dozens of independent journalists, bloggers and analysts were arrested; most of them are of leftist views. In April, television channels of right-wing leaning — Channel 5 and Pryamiy — were shut down as well. Moreover, Zelensky signed a decree obliging all Ukrainian channels to broadcast a single telethon, presenting only one pro-governmental view on the war.
All these developments are unprecedented for the history of independent Ukraine. Zelensky’s proponents argue that all the arrests and media bans should be written off for military expediency, ignoring the fact that the first media closures happened one year before the Russian invasion. As for me, Zelensky only uses this war to strengthen dictatorial tendencies within his regime of government, which started being formed right after Zelensky came to power — when he created a party machine to control the parliament and rubber-stamp neoliberal reforms without regard to public mood.
The National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) was used by Zelensky in 2021 to sanction certain people – mostly political rivals. Can you explain what the NSDC is and why Zelensky was doing it and whether it was legal or not.
After his popular support plummeted in 2021, Zelensky launched the unconstitutional process of extrajudicial sanctions against his political opponents, imposed by the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC).
These sanctions involved the extrajudicial seizure of property without any evidence of illegal activities of the relevant individuals and legal entities. Among the first to be sanctioned by the NSDC were two parliamentary deputies from the Opposition Platform — For Life (OPZZh) — Victor Medvedchuk (later arrested and shown on TV with his face beaten up after interrogation) and Taras Kozak (who managed to escape from Ukraine), as well as members of their families. This happened in February 2021; in March 2022, 11 oppositional parties were banned. The decisions to ban oppositional parties and sanction oppositional leaders were taken by NSDC; they were put into effect by presidential decrees.
The Constitution of Ukraine states that The Council of National Security and Defense is a coordinating body: it “co-ordinates and controls the activity of bodies of executive power in the sphere of national security and defense.”
This has nothing to do with prosecuting political opponents and confiscating their property — something the NSDC has been doing since 2021. It goes without saying that this know-how of Zelensky’s regime is unconstitutional — only courts may decide on who is guilty or not and confiscate property.
But the problem is that Ukrainian courts turned out to be unprepared to serve as Zelensky’s puppets. After the head of Ukraine’s Constitutional Court, Oleksandr Tupytskyi, called Zelensky’s unconstitutional reforms a “coup,” Zelensky had nothing to do but to rely on NSDC to push forward his unpopular policies. What about the “dissident” Tupytskyi? On March 27, 2021 — also in violation of the Ukrainian Constitution — Zelensky signed a decree canceling his appointment as a judge of the court.
Under Joseph Stalin’s rule, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) created “troikas” to issue sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public and fair trial. What we observe in the case of NSDC is a very similar development, only NSDC unconstitutional trials have a bigger number of participants — all the key figures of the state, including the president, the prime minister, the head of Ukrainian security service, prosecutor general of Ukraine, etc.
One NSDC meeting can decide destinies of hundreds of people. In June 2021 alone, Zelensky put into effect an NSDC decision to impose sanctions against 538 individuals and 540 companies.
I’d like to ask you about the “Peacemaker” (Myrotvorets) list that is reportedly affiliated with the Ukrainian government and SBU intelligence service. My understanding is that this is a list of “enemies of the state” and publishes said enemies’ personal information. Several of those who appeared on it have been subsequently murdered. Can you talk about this list, how do people end up on it, and how does it fit into a government that we’ve been told is democratic?
The nationalistic Myrotvorets website was launched in 2015 “by a people’s deputy holding a position of adviser to the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine” — this is how the U.N. report describes this. The name of this people’s deputy is Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to the former Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov. It is under Avakov’s patronage in 2014 [that] nationalistic punitive battalions were created to be sent to Donbass for suppressing people’s resistance against the Maidan.
Myrotvorets has been part of the general strategy of intimidating the opponents of the coup. Any “enemy of the people” — anybody who dares to express publicly anti-Maidan views or challenge Ukraine’s nationalistic agenda — may occur on this website.
Oles Buzina. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The addresses of Oles Buzina, a famous publicist [journalist], shot dead by nationalists near his apartment building in Kiev, and Oleg Kalashnikov, an oppositional deputy killed by nationalists in his house, were also on Myrotvorets, which helped the killers to find their victims. The names of the murderers are well known; however, they are not imprisoned because in contemporary Ukraine, whose political life is controlled by radicals, they are considered heroes.
The site was not shut down even after an international scandal when Myrotvorets published the personal data of well-known foreign politicians, including the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But, in contrast to Mr. Schröder residing in Germany, thousands of Ukrainians whose data are on Myrotvorets, cannot feel safe. All those arrested in March 2022 had been on Myrotvorets as well. Some of them I know personally — Yuri Tkachev, the editor of Odessa newspaper Timer and Dmitry Dzhangirov, the editor of Capital, a YouTube channel.
Many of those whose names are on Myrotvorets, managed to flee Ukraine after the Maidan; some were able to do it after mass arrests this March. One of them is Tarik Nezalezhko, Dzhangirov’s colleague. On April 12, 2022, already being safe outside of Ukraine, he made a post on YouTube, calling Ukraine’s Security Service “Gestapo” and giving advice to his viewers on how to avoid being captured by its agents.
That said, Ukraine is not a democratic country. The more I observe what is going on there, the more I think about the modernization path of Augusto Pinochet, who, as a matter of fact, is admired by our neoliberals. For a long period of time, the crimes of Pinochet’s regime had not been investigated. But in the end, humanity discovered the truth. I only hope that in Ukraine this will happen earlier.
Ukrainian academic Volodymyr Ishchenko said in a recent interview with New Left Review that, unlike in Western Europe, there is more of a partnership between nationalism and neoliberalism in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. This was even observed in the Donbass among the more affluent. Do you agree with that? If so, can you explain how that combination evolved?
I agree with Volodymyr. What we observe in Ukraine is an alliance of nationalists and liberals based on their common intolerance to Russia and, respectively, to all who advocate for cooperation with it.
In the light of the current war, this unity of liberals and nationalists may appear as justified. However, the alliance was created long before this war — in 2013, during the formation of the Maidan movement. By liberals, the Association Agreement with the European Union, advocated by the Maidan, was seen predominantly in terms of democratization, modernization and civilization — it was imagined as a means of bringing Ukraine up to European standards of government.
In contrast, the Eurasian Economic Union, led by Russia, was associated with civilizational regression to Soviet statism and Asian despotism. It is here that the positions of liberals and nationalists converged: The latter actively supported the Maidan not because of democratization, but due to its clear anti-Russia stance.
From the first days of the protests, radical nationalists were the most active Maidan fighters. The unity between liberals associating the Euromaidan with progress, modernization, human rights, etc., and radicals co-opting the movement for their nationalistic agenda was an important prerequisite for the transformation of the civic protest into an armed struggle resulting in an unconstitutional overturning of power.
Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)
The decisive role of radicals in the revolution also became a crucial factor in the formation of a mass anti-Maidan movement in the east of Ukraine against the “coup d’etat,” as the hegemonic anti-Maidan discourse dubbed the change of power in Kiev. At least partly, what we observe today, is a tragic outcome of this shortsighted and unfortunate alliance, formed during the Maidan.
Can you explain what Zelensky’s relationship has been with the far-right in Ukraine?
Zelensky himself has never expressed far-right views. In his series “Servant of the People,” which was used as an unofficial election platform, Ukrainian nationalists are portrayed negatively: they appear as nothing else but stupid oligarchs’ marionettes.
As a presidential candidate, Zelensky criticized the language law signed by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, which made the knowledge of Ukrainian language a mandatory requirement for civil servants, soldiers, doctors and teachers. “We must initiate and adopt laws and decisions that consolidate society, and not vice versa,” Zelensky-the-candidate claimed in 2019.
However, after assuming the presidential office, Zelensky turned to the nationalistic agenda of his predecessor. On May 19, 2021, his government approved an action plan for the promotion of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of public life strictly in line with Poroshenko’s language law, to the delight of nationalists and dismay of Russophones.
Zelensky has done nothing to prosecute radicals for all their crimes against political opponents and the people of Donbass. The symbol of Zelensky’s right-wing transformation was his endorsement by nationalist Medvedko — one of those accused of murdering Buzina —who publicly approved Zelensky’s ban of Russian-language oppositional channels in 2021.
“After assuming the presidential office, Zelensky turned to the nationalistic agenda of his predecessor.”
The question is why? Why did Zelensky make a U-turn to nationalism despite people’s hopes that he would pursue the politics of reconciliation?
As many analysts believe, this is because radicals, although representing the minority of the Ukrainian population, do not hesitate to use force against politicians, courts, law enforcement agencies, media workers, and so forth—in other words, they are simply good at intimidating society, including all the branches of power.
Propagandists may repeat the mantra “Zelensky is a Jew, so he cannot be a Nazi” as often as they want, but the truth is that radicals control the political process in Ukraine through violence against those who dare confront their nationalistic and supremacist agendas.
The case of Anatoliy Shariy — one of the most popular bloggers in Ukraine living in exile — is a good example to illustrate this point. Not only does he, along with his family members, permanently receive death threats, radicals constantly intimidate the activists of his party (banned by Zelensky in March 2022), beating and humiliating them. This is what Ukrainian radicals call “political safari.”
Right now, Zelensky is the most influential figure on the world stage with respect to a conflict that has grave implications if it escalates. I’m concerned that he’s using those same manipulative show biz skills to rally support behind this image of some personal incarnation of democracy and righteousness against the forces of evil and autocracy. It’s like a movie based on a Marvel comic book world. It’s precisely the kind of framing that seems antithetical to diplomacy. Do you think Zelensky is playing a constructive role as the wartime leader of Ukraine or not?
I follow Zelensky’s war speeches on a regular basis, and I can confidently say that the way he frames the conflict can hardly lead to any diplomatic resolution as he permanently repeats that the forces of good are attacked by the forces of evil. Clearly, there can be no political solution for such an Armageddon.
What falls out of this mythical frame of reference for the war is the broader context of the situation: the fact that for years Ukraine has been refusing to implement the Minsk peace agreements, which were signed in 2015 after the defeat of the Ukrainian army in the Donbass war.
According to these agreements, Donbass had to receive a political autonomy within Ukraine — a point inconceivable and unacceptable for radicals. Instead of implementing the document, which was ratified by the U.N., Kiev has been fighting with Donbass along the line of demarcation for eight long years. The life of Ukrainians living in these territories has been transformed into a nightmare. For radicals, whose battalions have been fighting there, Donbass people — imagined as sovki and vatniki—do not deserve mercy and indulgence.
The current war is a prolongation of the war of 2014, which started when Kiev sent troops to Donbass to suppress anti-Maidan rebellion under the premise of the so-called “anti-terrorist operation.” The acknowledgement of this broader context does not presuppose the approval of Russia’s “military operation,” but it implies the acknowledgement that Ukraine is also responsible for what is going on.
Framing the issue of the current war in terms of a fight of civilization against barbarism or democracy against autocracy is nothing else but manipulation, and this is essential for understanding the situation. Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s formula “you are either with us or with terrorists,” propagated by Zelensky in his appeals to the “civilized world,” has turned out to be very convenient in terms of avoiding personal responsibility for the ongoing disaster.
In terms of selling this one-dimensional story to the world, Zelensky’s artistic skills appear invaluable. He is finally on the global stage, and the world is applauding. The former comedian does not even try to hide his satisfaction. Answering the question of a French reporter on March 5, 2022 — the 10th day of the Russian invasion — on how his life had changed with the beginning of the war, Zelensky replied with a smile of delight: “Today, my life is beautiful. I believe that I am needed. I feel it is the most important meaning in life – to be needed. To feel that you are not just an emptiness that is just breathing, walking, and eating something. You live.”
For me, this construction is alarming: it implies that Zelensky enjoys the unique opportunity to perform on a global stage provided by the war. It made his life beautiful; he lives. In contrast to millions of Ukrainians whose life is not nice at all and thousands of those who are not alive any longer.
Alexander Gabuev has suggested that the Russian leadership has a lack of expertise about the country that was a contributing factor to this conflict. I have also heard Russian commentators suggest that Ukraine has a superior attitude with regard to being pro-Western versus pro-Russian. Do you think this is a significant contributing factor for either side?
I am inclined to agree with the claim regarding the lack of an adequate understanding on the part of Russian leadership of social processes that have been going on in Ukraine since the Maidan. Indeed, half of Ukraine’s population did not welcome it, and millions living in the southeast wanted Russia to intervene. I know this for sure as all my relatives and old friends reside in these territories.
However, what was true in 2014 may not be necessarily the case now. Eight years have passed; a new generation of young people, raised within a new social environment, has grown; and many people simply accustomed themselves to new realities. Finally, even if most of them despise radicals and the politics of Ukrainization, they hate the war even more. The reality on the ground has turned out to be more complex than decision-makers expected.
What about the sense of superiority among those Ukrainians who identify themselves with Westerners rather than with Russians?
This is true, and, as for me, this is the most tragic part of the whole post-Maidan story, because it is exactly this sense of superiority that prevented the “progressive” pro-Maidan forces from finding common language with their “backward” pro-Russian compatriots. This led to the Donbass uprising, the “anti-terrorist operation” of the Ukrainian army against Donbass, Russia’s intervention, Minsk peace agreements, their non-fulfillment, and, finally, the current war.
Natylie Baldwin is a writer on Russian and U.S. foreign policy and the author of The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia & US-Russia Relations.
Zhao said that NATO expanded eastwards in Europe for decades, in violation of promises made to the Soviet leadership. This pushed Russia “into a corner step by step,” so ultimately, NATO was “the initiator and biggest promoter of the Ukraine crisis” on behalf of the US
China believes NATO should have been dissolved after the USSR, which it was created to contain, no longer existed, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said. Instead, it expanded and cornered Russia, triggering bloodshed in Ukraine, Zhao said.
“As a product of the Cold War, NATO should have become history when the Soviet Union disintegrated,” he said during a daily press conference on Friday when asked about remarks on NATO’s role as a US geopolitical tool made by his Russian counterpart, Maria Zakharova.
Zhao said that NATO expanded eastwards in Europe for decades, in violation of promises made to the Soviet leadership. This pushed Russia “into a corner step by step,” so ultimately, NATO was “the initiator and biggest promoter of the Ukraine crisis” on behalf of the US, he stated, adding that the organization should reflect on its contribution to European security is.
Moscow cited the threat posed by NATO’s creeping expansion into Ukraine as a key reason why it attacked the country in late February. Beijing agreed with the justification, even as it criticized the use of military force as the method of resolving the situation.
China has repeatedly accused Western nations of escalating tensions with Russia, saying their refusal to address Moscow’s legitimate security concerns was the cause of the crisis. It refused to join in with the sanctions on Russia, calling them illegal and incapable of resolving problems.
The US and its allies accused China of being on the “wrong side of history” in Ukraine, threatening Beijing with punishment should it support the Russian military campaign.
Moscow attacked the neighboring state following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to regularize the status of the regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
In 1895, a 32-year old entrepreneur in New York City bought a failing newspaper and hatched a bold plan to turn it around.
The newspaper industry was cutthroat, especially in New York. There were at least 16 other daily newspapers in circulation, and there was fierce competition for readers’ attention.
But the young entrepreneur had an idea: thrill readers with tales of death, destruction, and brutality in the Cuban War for Independence against Spain.
Cuba was a Spanish colony at the time, but revolutionary forces had been fighting for independence for several years. Few people in the US really cared about Cuba. But the new publisher vowed to make them care.
His name was William Randolph Hearst. And his paper, the New York Morning Journal, constantly thrust Cuba in his readers’ faces.
Their stories were full-blown sensationalism. By early 1898, Hearst’s Journal was printing outright fabrications of atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, in an effort to whip up public support for the United States to join the war.
The government played along. While ‘war crimes’ did not yet exist, US President William McKinley escalated tensions by accusing Spain of atrocities, saying in a speech that “the civilized code of warfare has been disregarded.”
Then, on February 15, 1898, a US naval vessel known as the Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor off the coast of Cuba. 268 sailors died.
Several investigations were conducted, and to this day there is still nothing conclusive explaining how the explosion took place. It’s entirely possible that the explosion was caused by the Maine’s on-board fuel.
But Hearst (along with many other papers) jumped to publish stories claiming the Maine was sunk by a Spanish torpedo, and they continued agitating for the US to join the war.
Thanks to the effective media propaganda, most Americans were in favor of war. The newspapers had cast Spain as the evil aggressor, and its commanding general, Valeriano Weyler, was routinely called a “butcher”.
The newspapers told Americans that the fight against Spain was a necessary one… that it was a matter of moral righteousness— a crusade of good against evil.
They finally got their wish in April 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out.
There are a lot of similarities with the media today.
The level of trust in the media is already laughably low. There was the obvious Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which most mainstream media refused to even mention during the US Presidential election in 2020.
Then there were the outright lies in the Russia collusion hoax, for which the New York Times was even awarded the ‘esteemed’ Pulitzer Prize.
(Coincidentally, the Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who also fabricated lies in the late 1800s and agitated for war against Spain.)
Then there’s the case of Biden appointee Tracy Stone-Manning, who was nominated last year to head up the federal government’s Bureau of Land Management.
Stone-Manning is a former eco-terrorist who participated in violent campaigns against forestry workers in her youth.
This isn’t some wild conspiracy theory; Stone-Manning has admitted to wrongdoing, including sending violent threats to the US federal Forestry Service. She ultimately avoided prosecution and saved herself by ratting out her associates.
But a recent Freedom of Information Act request revealed that NBC News colluded with the Biden Administration to go easy on Tracy Stone-Manning during her confirmation hearing and whitewash her terrorist history.
This is pretty incredible…
Think about the media circus a few years ago when US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting someone when he was a teenager.
There was no promise from NBC News (and other mainstream propagandists) to go easy on the allegations against Justice Kavanaugh that went back 30+ years.
Instead, they smeared his name and deemed him guilty.
It’s also noteworthy that, during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, several protestors stormed the Capital and physically accosted United States Senators in order to prevent the Constitutional voting process from occurring.
Yet NBC News declined to label those protestors ‘domestic terrorists’, or to claim that democracy was ‘under attack’ because they had criminally trespassed into the Capitol.
This is the same media which acted as the government mouthpiece during COVID, justifying the public health dictatorship that took over the world.
This is the same media that watched cities burn in 2020 and said the protests were “mostly peaceful”.
And, yes, this is the same media that has routinely pushed America into war. It wasn’t just Spain in 1898.
The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact.
Then there were those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, which the media dutifully reported without question and helped push the US into war back in 2003.
Today many in the media are calling for an escalation against Russia. They want a no-fly zone. They cheer the President’s dementia-ridden foreign policy and praise him for impromptu comments that only escalate tensions.
Most of all, they force-feed the war in Ukraine, 24/7, as if that’s supposed to be our #1 priority.
Forget about the economy, rising prices, and supply chain dysfunction… and forget about conflict anywhere else in the world. We’re only allowed to care about Ukraine and Putin.
Historically speaking, it is not far-fetched to think the media could help push the world into a major war… and one with potential nuclear ramifications.
It’s not inevitable, but we are closer today than any other time since at least 1962— and certainly closer than even a week ago.
That’s why it is more important than ever to be prepared for whatever the world has in store for us.
And that means crafting a rock-solid Plan B to make sure you can respond from a position of strength, whatever crisis comes next.
The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.
The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.
Speaking after Russia’s Security Council meeting, Patrushev mentioned the threat stemming from biological weapons laboratories that operate on the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
“There are also other problems, such as the production of military-oriented biological weapons and the very large funding allocated to this,” Patrushev said. “This is tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, the number of laboratories under US jurisdiction or control has increased 20 times.”
What is more worrying is that some of such laboratories “operated and operate” on CIS soil, said Patrushev.
“This is why the problem is real,” he said.
The head of the Security Council has also mentioned the chemical weapons issue, saying that Russia will dispose of its remaining arsenal by 2020 – eight years earlier than the US.
“We are putting into practice a program to get rid of chemical weapons. Russia will dispose of these weapons by 2020. It was expected that the US will also destroy these weapons by that time, but according to today’s plans, it will carry out the disposal by 2028,” Patrushev told journalists.
In June, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the US of encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, as well as obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons.
One of Russia’s particular concerns is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public and Animal Health Research, a research facility for high-level biohazard agents, located near Tbilisi, Georgia, a CIS member, and Russia’s neighbor.
“American and Georgian authorities are trying to cover up the real nature of this US military unit, which studies highly dangerous infectious diseases. The Pentagon is trying to establish similar covert medico-biological facilities in other countries [in Russia’s neighborhood],” the Russian ministry said in June.
At the time, Moscow also blamed the US for derailing “decades of international effort to strengthen” the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), a 1972 international treaty aimed at eradicating bioweapons worldwide.
The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.
The following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published more than 16 years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007.
The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.
Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies.
We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”.
Michel Chossudovsky, January 2020
World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945-)
by Prof. Eric Waddell
The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect “regime change”. The cloaks of “human rights” and of “democracy” were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts.
The aim of the United States is to protect and reinforce national interests rather than to create a better world for all humankind. It is an “imperial grand strategy” of global dimensions designed to ensure unlimited and uninhibited access, notably to strategic resources, notably energy, and to markets. Rather than to establish a direct colonial presence, the preferred strategy is to create satellite states, and this requires constant, and often repeated, military interventions in countries around the world, irrespective of their political regime.
Democratically elected governments are as much at risk as dictatorships. In recent years, the tendency has been for such direct interference to increase since less of these countries are prepared to act as willing allies. Indeed, events of 2003 would suggest that the number of unconditional and powerful U.S. allies is now reduced to three: Great Britain, Australia and Israel. The US strategy is characterised, wherever possible, by invasion and the setting up of friendly (puppet) governments. Attention is focussed, by preference, on relatively small and weak countries, the aim being to achieve rapid victory.
Historically, this process of US domination of the World has been characterized by:
(i) direct military intervention with nuclear or conventional bombs and missiles,
(ii) direct military intervention with naval or ground forces,
(iii) indirect military intervention through command operations and
(iv) the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons.
Broadly speaking, three historical phases can be identified:
– 1945-49: The U.S.-Soviet struggle for European domination, terminating with the stabilisation of the frontier between the two blocs and the creation of NATO;
– 1950-89: The Cold War proper and, in the context of it, the emergence of the non-aligned group of nations;
The first period was characterized by a significant degree of US military intervention in Europe, the second by a concern to confine the Communist bloc within its frontiers and to prevent the emergence of pro-communist regimes elsewhere in the world, and the third, focused on gaining control over the former Soviet republics and in the oil-rich Middle East. The Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean/Central America reveal themselves to be Regional Theaters of concern throughout the post-2nd World War period.
click image to enlarge
The non-negotiable defense and promotion of “the American way of life” through global military interventions took form in the closing months of the 2nd World War and it came at great cost to much of the rest of the World’s population. Although Germany capitulated in May 1945 and the United Nations was created in the following month, the U.S. nevertheless chose to use nuclear weapons to bring Japan to its feet.
The dropping of two atomic bombs, respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year resulted in some 150,000 immediate deaths and tens of thousands of wounded. Such nuclear terrorism was quickly denounced by the international scientific community and no other nation has resorted to the use of such weapons of mass destruction. However, the U.S.A. regularly brandishes the threat of recourse to them, while under Bush they have been reinstated as an integral part of national discourse. But the story does not end with nuclear weapons, for the U.S.A. has also, over the past half-century, used chemical and biological weapons in its quest for global domination with, for example, recourse to Agent Orange in Viet Nam and blue mold, cane smut, African swine fever, etc. in Cuba. All such weapons of mass destruction are an integral part of the country’s arsenal.
In this context, the map of U.S. Military Interventions since 1945 only tells a part of the story. While the country’s global reach is apparent, the scale of military violence is not fully revealed. Up to 1,000,000 people were killed in the CIA command operation in Indonesia in1967, in what was, according to the New York Times, “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history”. Another 100,000 were killed in Guatemala, in the CIA-organized coup. And the map makes no mention of military interventions where the U.S. played a support (e.g. Rwanda and the Congo in the 1990s) as distinct from a lead role, or where U.S. arms were used by national military forces, as in East Timor where, in the hands of the Indonesian military, they were responsible for the death of some 200,000 people from 1967 on.
Interestingly, with regards to the international arms trade, it was President Reagan who announced, in 1981, that “The U.S. views the transfer of conventional weapons… as an essential element of its global defense posture and an indispensable component of its foreign policy.”
The U.S. Empire knows no limits. Its aim is political and military domination of the world. Under the US system of global capitalism, the demand for energy and other vital resources is unlimited.
America’s “Road Map to Empire” was not formulated by the Bush administration as some critics are suggesting. In fact, there is little that is “new” about the “Project for a New American Century”. It is just that the post-war rhetoric of human rights and social and economic development has diminished, to be replaced by the primary concern with global supremacy through military force. The imperial project was outlined in the immediate wake of the 2nd World War. It was part of the “Truman Doctrine” formulated in 1948 by George Kennan, Director of Policy and Planning at the U.S. State Department:
“We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity. We should cease to talk about the raising of living standards, human rights and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
Postscript 2007
In one sense little has changed since 2003. The next target for military intervention has already been clearly identified. It is Iran which so happens, according to the most recent US Government official energy statistics, to rank third among the world’s oil-rich nations, and to be the one with the largest increase in proven oil reserve estimates over the period 2005-2006.
In another sense however a new portrait is beginning to emerge, where a war-weary and increasingly vulnerable United States is moving to the creation of a Fortress North America which embraces its northern neighbour. Once again the logic is clear. Canada now ranks second, ahead of Iran and Iraq but behind Saudi Arabia, in terms of world oil reserves, thanks notably to the tar sands of Alberta. A minority government in Ottawa, dominated by Albertan interests, is consciously taking Canada into both the US energy and the military and strategic fold. In so doing, the country is joining the ranks of the United Kingdom and Australia as an unflinching US ally.
If global reach is becoming a too costly and hazardous endeavour then fortress North America becomes an increasingly attractive alternative, particularly when the minor partner is consenting and docile.
Eric Waddell is a distinguished author and professor of Geography based in Quebec City
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
