In a new article titled “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” the New York Times reports that the Biden administration now believes Kyiv may need to launch an offensive on the territory that Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since 2014, “even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”
Citing unnamed US officials, The New York Times says “the Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily,” but that “Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.”
It’s hard to imagine a full-scale assault on geostrategically crucial territory long considered a part of the Russian homeland not causing a major escalation. And as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes, smaller attacks on Crimea have indeed seen significant escalations from Moscow, contrary to claims laid out in the NYT article:
The New York Times report quoted Dara Massicot, a researcher from the RAND Corporation, who claimed that “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.” But Massicot’s claim is false as Russia began launching missile strikes on vital Ukrainian infrastructure in response to the October truck bombing of the Crimean Bridge.
Before the bridge bombing, Russia didn’t launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure in Ukraine, but now such bombardments have become routine, and millions of Ukrainians are struggling to power and heat their homes.
It’s been widely accepted among foreign policy analysts that Crimea is among the reddest of all of Russia’s red lines in this standoff. Back in October, Responsible Statecraft’s Anatol Lieven discussed the difference in Russia’s perspective between Crimea and every other territory that Ukraine lays claim to in an assessment of the possibility of this conflict leading to nuclear war:
If Ukraine wins more victories and recovers the territories that Russia has occupied since February, Putin will in my view probably be forced to resign, but Russia would likely not use nuclear weapons. If however Ukraine goes on to try to reconquer Crimea, which the overwhelming majority of Russians regard as simply Russian territory, the chances of an escalation to nuclear war become extremely high.
Decamp writes that “The lessening concern about Putin resorting to nukes appears to be based only on the fact that he hasn’t used any up to this point.” But this is as logical as believing that it is safe and wise to jump even harder on the sleeping bear you’ve been jumping on just because the bear hasn’t woken up yet.
The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely, is just being a fucking idiot. It’s like Wile E Coyote jumping up and down on the land mine until it explodes because it didn’t explode when the Roadrunner ran over it.
Insanely reckless from the Biden administration, and yet more signs we're barrelling into something disastrous. Numerous experts have said putting Russian control of Crimea in danger may be the most likely scenario for nuclear escalation. https://t.co/LoSV3esuLE
Moscow considers Crimea to be Russian. A year after Russia’s 2014 annexation, western sources acknowledged that Crimeans feel the same way. But it’s actually immaterial whether you agree with Moscow or with the Crimeans over the issue of whether Crimea should be a hot red line which could spark an insanely dangerous escalation, because your opinions about this issue will not prevent a nuclear war. Your disagreements with the Kremlin about Crimea will not protect you from nuclear fallout, and they will not protect anyone else.
Nuclear warheads don’t care about your feelings.
Any assertion that Russia will not use nukes under such-and-such a circumstance must squarely address this question: “Are you willing to gamble the life of every terrestrial organism on that claim being true?” If you can’t answer this question, your claim isn’t serious or valid.
Are US officials willing to bet the life of every terrestrial organism that the course of action they’re considering won’t trigger a chain of events leading to the end of the world? This needs to be addressed fully, head-on, with all the weight it entails, because otherwise they’re just not weighing the risks responsibly.
And something tells me that they are not.
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caitlin Johnstoneis a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • endless wars • ingrained racism & social injustice • worker exploitation • incurable via reforms
Edward J. Curtin
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been TheTimes’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of a historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S.-engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO was “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of a historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S.-engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocent parties, according to the Times.(Note also, that nowhere in this four-page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone-deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.
This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.
The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:
Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
“Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”
This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.
It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.
Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.
Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
On this day in 2005, Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his plays which “uncover the precipice under everyday prattle and force entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” Two months later, recovering from esophageal cancer, he gave his acceptance speech by video in Stockholm—where he did just what the Nobel committee had lauded him for.
His acceptance speech, entitled “Art, Truth, and Politics,” took the United States to task for its imperialist policies. Pinter framed his speech in relation to the search for truth in both art and life. “A thing is not necessarily true or false but can be either true or false,” Pinter said. “As a writer, I stand by [this] but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? . . . The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power.”
In the blistering lecture, Pinter indicts U.S. foreign policy since WWII; talks at length about lies used to justify the Iraq War; does an impression of a typical President Bush speech; reads a poem of his own called “Death”; and, yes, discusses his approach to playwriting.
It’s worth watching, or reading: you can read the transcript here, or watch the video below.
Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video on 7 December 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
ABOUT EDWARD CURTIN / IN HIS OWN WORDS
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, I teach sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. My writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding.
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Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读
AT LAST! THE NEOCON PROJECT IS IN COLLAPSE – FROM BAKHMUT TO RAMSTEIN AIR BASE
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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • endless wars • ingrained racism & social injustice • worker exploitation • incurable via reforms
Garland Nixon PREFATORY NOTE BY THE EDITOR
PREFATORY NOTE
An engrossing chat by Garland Nixon, this time on the Neocon project, a malignant cabal of deeply-embedded US policy hijackers which might—at last—begin to experience setbacks in their sordid machinations.
The cause, notes Garland, is that reality cannot be denied with impunity. At the end of the day, artillery rounds are always more persuasive than mere tweets; propaganda eventually cannot win wars, it can't assure victories in the battleground against a disciplined, highly capable and extremely well-armed and motivated enemy. As defeats that cannot be easily hidden or excused accumulate, the Neocons' ability to penetrate all key spheres of Anglo-American power may shrink, although this does not signify that these characters will actually suffer any kind of penalty, especially banishment from such precincts.
The key to their resilience lies in the congruency of Neocon goals with the broader US imperialist agendas, objectives widely shared among the US ruling class. This simple fact has permitted them to benefit from easy access to the establishment's media, funding sources, think-tanks and academia, as well as the US open and secret "security" industry, both inside and outside the government (which in the US is really a continuum), not to mention the political class (where they have influential representation). So like "uber exceptionalists" the Neocons have pushed their deranged warmongering and Russophobia to the fullest, usually avoiding personal consequences.
Yet, by doing this, by riding America's immense hubris and deeply embedded exceptionalism, the Neocons, with plenty of encouragement from the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex), have acted as historical "accelerants" to the policy of "reality denialism" —a form of national blindness—that is finally catching up with the US after this country offshored most of its industrial power, and degraded its onetime solid military base, both errors flowing from America's virulent capitalist culture ("The business of America is business"). As history records it, this myopic posture always privileges profits and greed over human or even national strategic needs. It is also the road to massive criminality in foreign policy.
That's why the anglos had no compunction in blowing up the NordStream pipelines. Decoupling Germany permanently from Eurasia is a prime American goal. But guess what, folks, as Garland warns, even in the rotten, pusillanimous German leadership personified by Herr Scholtz, there's a glimmer of hope. Some nationalist forces, finally seeing where America is going with the de-industrialisation of Germany and evisceration of her sovereignty, are apparently pushing back. So, just for the time being, and to the chagrin of the sociopathic Neocons, Herr Scholtz is saying "No". Stay tuned. History is accelerating. But it also can pack more disagreeable surprises. —PG
Garland Nixon is a progressive radio and television talk show host. He is a regular broadcast journalist at Radio Sputnik in Washington DC (The Critical Hour). Garland's work centres on foreign policy with a predominant focus on anti-imperialist movements worldwide. He spent over 20 years in law enforcement and retired holding the rank of Major. Garland is also an outspoken civil libertarian and 1st amendment advocate and currently serves on the National Board of Directors for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He spends his fun time reading, boating, and working out.
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In part 1 of this series Fact Checking the Fact Checkers, the question was posed “why does Ukraine seem to have so many Nazis nowadays?” In that paper we were led to the further question “is the United States and possibly NATO involved in the funding, training and political support of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and if so, for what purpose?” It was concluded that in order to answer such questions fully, we would have to look at the historical root of Ukrainian nationalism and its relationship with U.S. Intelligence and NATO post-WWII. It is here that we will resume.
The Historical Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism
The birth of Ukrainian Nationalism as it is celebrated today has its origins in the 20th century. However, there are a few important historical highlights that should be known beforehand.
Kievan Rus’ was a federation in Eastern-Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century and was made up of a variety of peoples including East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic, and was ruled by the Rurik dynasty.
Above image: The principalities of the later Kievan Rus’ (after the death of Yaroslav I in 1054). Source Wikipedia.
Today’s Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all recognize the people of Kievan Rus’ as their cultural ancestors.
Kievan Rus’ would fall during the Mongol invasion of the 1240s, however, different branches of the Rurik dynasty would continue to rule parts of Rus’ under the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia (modern-day Ukraine and Belarus), the Novgorod Republic (overlapping with modern-day Finland and Russia) and Vladimir-Suzdal (regarded as the cradle of the Great Russian language and nationality which evolved into the Grand Duchy of Moscow).
The Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia was under the vassalage of the Golden Horde during the 14th century, which was originally a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate originating as the northwestern section of the Mongol Empire.
After the poisoning of Yuri II Boleslav, King of Galicia-Volhynia in 1340, civil war ensued along with a power struggle for control over the region between Lithuania, Poland and its ally Hungary. Several wars would be fought from 1340-1392 known as the Galicia-Volhynia wars.
In 1349, the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia was conquered and incorporated into Poland.
In 1569 the Union of Lublin took place, joining the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which ruled as a large and major power for over 200 years.
From 1648-1657 the Khmelnytsky Uprising, also known as the Cossack-Polish War took place in the eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which led to the creation of a Cossack Hetmanate in Ukraine.
Under the command of Khmelnytsky, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, allied with the Crimean Tatars and local Ukrainian peasantry, fought against Polish domination and against the Commonwealth forces; which was followed by the massacre of Polish-Lithuanian townsfolk, the Roman Catholic clergy and the Jews.
Khmelnytsky to this day is a major heroic figure in the Ukrainian nationalist history.
By 1772, the once-powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had too far declined to further govern itself and went through three partitions, conducted by the Habsburg Monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire.
From the first partition of Poland in 1772, the name “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” was granted to the Habsburg Monarchy (Austrian Empire, which later became the Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1867). Most of Volhynia would go to the Russian Empire in 1795.
Above image: Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (often referred to just as Poland) in 1772, 1793 and 1795.
By 1914, Europe would be dragged into WWI. In March 1918, after two months of negotiations with the Central Powers (the German, Austria-Hungary, Bulgarian, and Ottoman Empire), the new Bolshevik government of Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceding claims on Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as the condition for peace (Note: the Bolshevik Revolution began in March 1917). WWI would officially end on November 11th, 1918.
As a result of the treaty, eleven nations became “independent” in eastern Europe and western Asia, Ukraine was among these nations. In reality, what this meant was that they were to become vassal states to Germany with political and economic dependencies. However, when Germany lost the war, the treaty was annulled.
With Germany out of the picture and the dissolution of both the Austria-Hungary and Russian Empire; Poland and Ukraine found themselves in a position to establish their independence.
During the Habsburg’s rule, due to their leniency toward national minorities, both Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements developed, and both were interested in claiming the territory of Galicia for their own. Western Galicia at that point, with the ancient capital of Kraków had a majority Polish population, whereas eastern Galicia made up the heartland of the ancient Galicia-Volhynia and had a majority Ukrainian population.
The Polish-Ukrainian war was fought from November 1918 to July 1919 between the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian forces (consisting of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Ukrainian People’s Republic). Poland won and re-occupied Galicia.
The Polish-Soviet war would be fought between February 1919 and March 1921. This coincided with a series of conflicts known as the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921) which fought to form a Ukrainian republic.
By 1922, Ukraine was divided between the Bolshevik Ukrainian SSR, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The Second Polish Republic reclaimed Lviv, along with Galicia and most of Volhynia, the rest of Volhynia became part of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929 in East Galicia (located in Poland at the time) and called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine.
From the beginning, the OUN had tensions between the young radical Galician students and the older military veteran leadership (who grew up in the more lenient Austria-Hungary Empire). The younger generation had only known oppression under the new Polish rule and underground warfare. As a result, the younger faction tended to be more impulsive, violent and ruthless.
During this period, Polish persecution of Ukrainians increased and many Ukrainians, especially the youth (who felt they had no future) lost faith in traditional legal approaches, in their elders and in western democracies who were seen as turning their backs on Ukraine.
The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried and convicted in 1936 for Pieracki’s murder, were OUN’s Stefan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Both escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.
Support for the OUN increased as Polish persecution of Ukrainians continued. By the beginning of WWII, the OUN was estimated to have 20,000 active members and many times that number in sympathizers in Galicia.
In 1940 the OUN would split into the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnyk, and OUN-B headed by Stefan Bandera which made up most of the membership in Galicia and consisted mainly of youth.
In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Poland. Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were reunified with Ukraine, under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded western Ukraine, there were many western Ukrainians who welcomed the invading Nazis as their “liberators.” It should be noted here that this was not a sentiment predominantly shared by the rest of Ukraine, who fought in or alongside the Russian Red Army against the invading Nazis.
Both the OUN-M and OUN-B would spend much of the war collaborating closely with the Germans. They had no issues with the Nazi ideology for they too believed that a solution was found in returning to a “pure race.” In the case of Ukraine, this pure race consisted of a somewhat romanticised concept of “ethnic Ukrainian,” based on the golden age of Kievan Rus’.
The OUN believed that the “pure ethnic Ukrainian race” were the only true descendants of the royal bloodline of the Rurik dynasty that ruled Kievan Rus’. And rather than looking at Belarusians and the Russians as their brothers and sisters who shared the same ancestry, the OUN viewed them more so as “ethnic impostors” so to speak of this pure bloodline.
This can be seen today with Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups attacking Ukrainian ethnic Russians for the past 8 years in Ukraine. An issue that is almost entirely ignored in the West. See part 1 of this series.
It was believed that if the purity of the bloodline were returned, greatness would once again be bestowed on Ukraine (which had never really existed as a fully independent region).
It was for this reason that the OUN and the SS Galician division believed that exterminating tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and any other non-ethnic Ukrainian was justified. The SS Galician division (which had an overlapping membership with the OUN) were notorious for their extreme cruelty, including acts of torture and mutilation on par with Japan’s Unit 731.
To give an idea of the level of support in western Ukraine at the time for a “pure Ukrainian race,” the SS Galician division recruited 80,000 Galician volunteers in one and a half months.
The trident symbol, known also as tryzub, is an important symbol for Ukrainians, since it comes from the days of Kievan Rus’ and its earliest use was during the rule of Vladimir/Volodmyr the Great, about 1,000 years ago.
However, it is also most unfortunately why the OUN chose the tryzub for both their emblems and flag, to signify their desire to return to those glory days, which was thought could only be achieved through ethnic cleansing.
The above OUN-B flag (also used by their paramilitary unit UPA) is known as the “Blood and Soil” flag. The “Blood and Soil” nationalist slogan originated in Nazi Germany to express its ideal of a racially defined national body (blood) united with a settlement area (soil).
It is also why Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups that formed from 1991 onward (after Ukraine’s independence from the USSR), more often than not, also use the tryzub.
Image above shows flags of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today. In the Azov flag shown above, there is a combination of the Wolfsangel and Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS.
In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what becamethe largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
A research group was put together to compile and organise key elements of this massive newly declassified database, the result was the publication of “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” in 2005, and “Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War” in 2011, both published by the National Archives, and which will be used as a key reference for the rest of this paper.
Richard Breitman writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (1):
“What must be the earliest history (or mini-history) of the extermination of the Jews in Lvov [Lviv] was prepared on June 5, 1945. The ten-page document pointed out that, as soon as German troops took Lvov, Ukrainians in the city denounced Jews who had cooperated with Soviet authorities during the period of Soviet occupation, 1939-1941. Those Jews were arrested, gathered near the municipal building, and beaten by the Germans and local inhabitants. Later, local inhabitants, especially from the villages nearby, ravaged the Jewish quarter and beat Jews who stood in the way of their robbery. Starting on July 1, a pogrom was organized; German police, soldiers, and local Ukrainians all took part. Many of those arrested were tortured and killed… More than twelve thousand Jews were killed in the first weeks of the German occupation of Lvov.” [emphasis added]
Norman J.W. Goda writes in “U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis” (2):
“In its work to destabilize the Polish state, the OUN’s ties with Germany extended back to 1921. These ties intensified under the Nazi regime as war with Poland drew near. Galicia was allotted to the Soviets under the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and the Germans welcomed anti-Polish Ukrainian activists into the German-occupied General Government. In 1940 and 1941, in preparation for what would become the eastern campaign, the Germans began to recruit Ukrainians, particularly from Bandera’s wing, as saboteurs, interpreters, and police, and trained them at a camp at Zakopane near Cracow [Kraków]. In the spring of 1941, the Wehrmacht also developed two Ukrainian battalions with the approval of the Banderists, one code-named ‘Nightingale’ (Nachtigall) and the other code-named ‘Roland’.”
What showcases the youth, and unfortunately ignorance, of the OUN-B, is that the “blood and soil” slogan originating with the Nazis, which they chose for their own OUN-B flag, was also tied to the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and enslaving the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost. Thus, these Ukrainian nationalists were never considered worthy of sharing in this vision of Nazi Germany but had been regarded as the ultimate slaves for the new German empire from the very beginning.
The OUN-B would learn this lesson the hard way. Eight days after Germany’s invasion of the USSR, on June 30th, 1941, OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State in the name of Bandera in Lviv and pledged loyalty to Hitler. In response, the OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned or killed outright by the Gestapo (approx. 1500 persons). The Germans had no intention of even allowing a semi-independent Ukraine to form. Stefan Bandera and his closest deputy Jaroslav Stetsko were initially kept under house arrest and then sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp (a comparatively comfortable confinement to the other concentration camps).
Mykola Lebed was able to slip through the German police net and became the de facto leader of the OUN-B leadership, also known as the Banderists.
On July 16th, 1941, the Germans absorbed Galicia into the General Government. In October 1941, the German Security Police issued a wanted poster with Lebed’s photograph.
The Germans transferred administrative and senior auxiliary police positions in western Ukraine to Melnyk’s group, OUN-M. (3) German security police formations were ordered to arrest and kill Bandera loyalists in western Ukraine for fear that they would rise against German rule, though this order was eventually revoked.
The following year Lebed would become the leader of the underground terror wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which continued in function until 1956.
Image to the left: Stefan Bandera. Image to the right: Mykola Lebed
Eastern Ukrainians later claimed that Mykola Lebed as leader of the OUN-B, took over the UPA by assassinating the original Ukrainian leaders. (4)
The OUN counted among its enemies those that had denied Ukrainian independence (including Poles and Soviets), those in the Ukraine who had failed to assimilate (Jews) and at times when it suited them the Germans. They also regarded the Jews as the primary support and “spreaders” of Bolshevism.
Breitman and Goda write (5):
“When the war turned against the Germans in early 1943, leaders of Bandera’s group believed that the Soviets and Germans would exhaust each other, leaving an independent Ukraine as in 1918. Lebed proposed in April to ‘cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918. Ukrainians serving as auxiliary policemen for the Germans now joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)… On a single day, July 11th, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities killing… 10,000 Poles…The Banderists and UPA also resumed cooperation with the Germans.” [emphasis added]
This was all done under the command of Mykola Lebed.
By 1943, aware that their situation was becoming increasingly insecure, the OUN tried to re-centralise their forces. However, infighting occurred between the OUN-B against the OUN-M and the UPA unit of Taras Bulba-Borovets (of the exiled Ukrainian People’s Republic) who in a letter accused the OUN-B of among other things: banditry, of wanting to establish a one-party state, and of fighting not for the people but in order to rule the people.
In their struggle for dominance in Volhynia, the Banderists (OUN-B) would kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians for any link to the networks of Bulba-Borovets or Melnyk (OUN-M). (6)
By September 1944 German Army officers in northern Ukraine told their superiors in Foreign Armies East that the UPA was a “natural ally of Germany” and “a valuable aid for the German High Command,” and Himmler himself authorized intensified contacts with UPA. (7)
Norman J.W. Goda writes (8):
“Though UPA propaganda emphasized that organization’s independence from the Germans, the UPA also ordered some young Ukrainians to volunteer for the Ukrainian SS Division “Galicia,” and the rest to fight by guerilla methods. Lebed still hoped for recognition from the Germans.” [emphasis added]
The SS Galicia Division existed from April 1943 to April 15th, 1945. Germany surrendered on May 7th, 1945.
In September 1944, the Germans released Bandera and Stetsko from Sachsenhausen.
The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement Post-WWII: Bought and Paid for by the CIA and served à la Lebed
“[Lebed] is a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans” (9)
– 1947 Report by The U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC)
In July 1944 Mykola Lebed helped form the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR), which would claim to represent the Ukrainian nation and served as an underground government in the Carpathian mountains, in opposition to the Ukrainian SSR. The dominant political party in UHVR was the Bandera group and the UPA, which from that point on served as the army of UHVR and continued to fight the Soviets until 1956.
A feud erupted in 1947 between Bandera and Stetsko on one side for an independent Ukraine under a single party led by Bandera himself vs. Lebed and Father Ivan Hrynioch (chief of the UHVR Political Section) who were against Bandera being head of state.
At an August 1948 Congress of the OUN Foreign Section, Bandera (who still controlled 80% of the UHVR) expelled the Hrynioch-Lebed group. He claimed exclusive authority on the Ukrainian national movement and continued terror tactics against anti-Banderist Ukrainian leaders in Western Europe and maneuvered for control of Ukrainian émigré organizations. (10) However, Lebed who had become close with the Americans at that point was recognized, along with Hrynioch as the official UHVR representation abroad.
With the war lost, Lebed adopted a strategy similar to that of Reinhard Gehlen – he contacted the Allies after escaping Rome in 1945 with a trove of names and contacts of anti-Soviets located in western Ukraine and in displaced persons camps in Germany. This made him attractive to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) despite their above admission in their 1947 report.
In late 1947, Lebed who it was feared would be assassinated by the Soviets in Rome, was smuggled along with his family by the CIC to Munich, Germany in December 1947 for his safety.
Norman J.W. Goda writes (11):
“By late 1947, Lebed had thoroughly sanitized his prewar and wartime activities for American consumption. In his own rendition, he had been a victim of the Poles, the Soviets, and the Germans – he would carry the Gestapo “wanted” poster for the rest of his life to prove his anti-Nazi credentials…He also published a 126-page booklet on the UPA, which chronicled the heroic struggle of Ukrainians against both Nazis and Bolsheviks, while calling for an independent, greater Ukraine that would represent the human ideals of free speech and free faith. The UPA, according to the booklet, never collaborated with the Nazis, nor is there any mention of the slaughter of Galician Jews or Poles in the book. The CIC considered the booklet to be the ‘complete background on the subject.’ The CIC overlooked the fact that under its own watch an OUN Congress held in September 1947 had split, thanks to Lebed’s criticism of the creeping democratization of the OUN. This was overlooked by the CIA which began using Lebed extensively in 1948…In June 1949…the CIA smuggled him [Lebed] into the United States with his wife and daughter under the legal cover of the Displaced Persons Act.” [emphasis added]
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began investigating Lebed and in March 1950 reported to Washington that numerous Ukrainian informants spoke of Lebed’s leading role among the “Bandera terrorists” and that during the war the Bandersists were trained and armed by the Gestapo and responsible for “wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [sic]…In all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important leaders.” (12)
In 1951, top INS officials informed the CIA of its findings along with the comment that Lebed would likely face deportation. The CIA responded on October 3, 1951, that all of the charges were false and that the Gestapo “wanted” poster of Lebed proved that he “fought with equal zeal against the Nazis and Bolsheviks.” (13)
INS officials as a result suspended the investigation on Lebed.
In February 1952, the CIA pressed the INS to grant Lebed re-entry papers so that he could leave and re-enter the United States at will. Argyle Mackey, Commissioner of the INS, refused to grant this.
On May 5, 1952, Allen Dulles, then Assistant Director of the CIA wrote a letter to Mackey stating (14):
“In connection with future Agency operations of the first importance, it is urgently necessary that subject [Lebed] be able to travel in Western Europe. Before [he] undertakes such travel, however, this Agency must…assure his re-entry into the United States without investigation or incident which would attract undue attention to his activities.”
Above image is the original document of the Dulles letter to Mackey on behalf of Mykola Lebed.
What was in West Germany? General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence, who had been conveniently allowed to re-enter West Germany to establish his Gehlen Organisation which would later form the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany) in 1956 .
Dulles also wanted Lebed’s legal status changed to that of “permanent resident,” under Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949. The INS never investigated further after Dulles’ letter and Lebed became a naturalized U.S. citizen in March 1957.
Bandera would also be stationed in West Germany with his family after the war, where he remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations as well as with British Intelligence. (15) At this point Bandera had become too much of a liability and there were multiple attempts, by both the Americans and British starting in 1953, to get Bandera to step down and for Lebed to represent “the entire Ukrainian liberation movement in the homeland.” Bandera refused and went rogue.
It is said that Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by a KGB agent in Munich, however, one cannot help but note that it was excellent timing and extremely beneficial for the Americans that Bandera was taken out when he was, considering what they had planned for Ukraine’s future…
Among the declassified records are that of Hoover’s FBI, who had a small trove of captured German General Staff documents from 1943 and 1944, which revealed German appreciation of the UPA’s work while mentioning Lebed by name. (16) It appears this was never shared with any agency or institution, other than the CIA, despite requests from the INS during their investigation of Lebed.
Interestingly, Goda writes (17):
“The full extent of his [Lebed’s] activities as ‘Foreign Minister’ [of the UHVR] may never become known, but FBI surveillance of him gives some idea. Partly, Lebed lectured at prestigious universities such as Yale on such topics as biological warfare used by the Soviet government (sic) in the Ukraine.” [emphasis added]
The following is an indication as to what Dulles may have been referring to as the urgent need for Lebed’s re-entry into Western Europe.
Breitman and Goda write (18):
“By 1947 some 250,000 Ukrainians were living…in Germany, Austria, and Italy, many of them OUN activists or sympathizers. After 1947 UPA fighters began crossing into the U.S. zone, having reached the border on foot through Czechoslovakia.”
However, Lebed was not only urgently needed in Europe, but also within the United States. Once in the United States, Lebed was selected as the CIA’s chief contact/advisor for AERODYNAMIC.
Breitman and Goda write (19):
“AERODYNAMIC’s first phase involved infiltration into Ukraine and then exfiltration of CIA-trained Ukrainian agents. By January 1950 the CIA’s arm for the collection of secret intelligence (Office of Special Operations, OSO) and its arm for covert operations (Office of Policy Coordination, OPC) participated [author’s note: the Allen Dulles rogue faction of the CIA]…Washington was especially pleased with the high level of UPA training in the Ukraine and its potential for further guerilla actions, and with ‘the extraordinary news that…active resistance to the Soviet regime was spreading steadily eastward, out of the former Polish, Greek Catholic provinces… [However] By 1954 Lebed’s group lost all contact with UHVR. By that time the Soviets subdued both the UHVR and UPA, and the CIA ended the aggressive phase of AERODYNAMIC.
Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian study group under Lebed’s leadership in New York under CIA auspices, which collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints. To avoid nosey New York State authorities, the CIA turned Prolog into a for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch [Hrynioch], Prolog maintained a Munich office named the Ukrainische Geseelschaft fur Auslandsstudein, EV. Most publications were created here.
Prolog recruited and paid Ukrainian émigré writers who were generally unaware that they worked in a CIA-controlled operation. Only the six top members of the ZP/UHVR were witting agents. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over Ukraine by air[,] and radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for Ukrainian consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing campaigns to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré contacts in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere. The newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine. These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism…” [emphasis added]
The CIA bought and paid for a brand of Ukrainian Nationalism à la Lebed. One of the most horrifying butchers of OUN/UPA was given reign to shape the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people around their nationalist identity, an identity as defined by the OUN. It also shaped historical and cultural interpretation such as to further romanticise the concept of the great Ukrainian race of Volodomyr the Great, encouraging a further sense of superiority and further divide between themselves and Belarussians and Russians.
One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and…there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” (20)
Breitman and Goda continue:
“…Prolog [also] influenced [the next] Ukrainian generation…Prolog had become in the words of one senior CIA official, the sole ‘vehicle for CIA’s operations directed at the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and [its] forty million Ukrainian citizens.’
Lebed overtly distanced himself and the Ukrainian nationalist movement from the overt anti-Semitism of his Banderist days…More to protect the name of Ukrainian nationalism, he publicly condemned the ‘provocative libel’ and ‘slanderous statements’ against Jews, adding in a particularly forgetful note that, ‘the Ukrainian people…are opposed to all and any preaching of hatred for other people.’…Former Banderists…now attacked the Soviets for anti-Semitism rather than with it.
Lebed retired in 1975 but remained an adviser and consultant to Prolog and the ZP/UHVR…In the 1980s AERODYNAMIC’s name was changed to QRDYNAMIC and in the 1980s PDDYNAMIC and then QRPLUMB. In 1977 President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the program owing to what he called its ‘impressive dividends’ and the ‘impact on specific audiences in the target area.’ In the 1980s Prolog expanded its operation to reach other Soviet nationalities,and in a supreme irony, these included dissident Soviet Jews. With the USSR teetering on the brink of collapse in 1990, QRPLUMB was terminated with a final payout of $1.75 million. Prolog would continue its activities, but it was on its own financially.
In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed’s name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed.” [emphasis added]
Mykola Lebed died in 1998 under the protection of the CIA in New Jersey at the age of 89. His papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
And there you have it, the true story of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in its form today, bought and paid for by the CIA. Thus, it is no coincidence that the OUN ideology is inextricable from the western Ukrainian nationalist identity today, nor that several neo-Nazi groups have formed since 1991 (since Ukraine’s independence from the USSR) who all view the OUN and Stepan Bandera as the Father of their movement.
[Shortly to follow, Part 3 will discuss NATO and the Gehlen Organization and how this ties into the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and neo-Nazism in Ukraine today.]
(1) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 65 (2) Ibid. pg. 249 (3) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 74 (4) Ibid. pg. 74 (5) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 75-76 (6) Timothy Snyder. (2004) The Reconstruction of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press: pg. 164 (7) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 250 (8) Ibid pg. 250 (9) Ibid pg. 251 (10) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 78 (11) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 251 (12) Ibid. pg. 252 (13) Ibid. pg. 252 (14) Ibid. pg. 253 (15) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 81 (16) Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda et al. (2005) U.S. Intelligence and The Nazis. National Archives & Cambridge University Press: pg. 254 (17) Ibid. pg 254 (18) Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda. (2011) Hitler’s Shadow Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives: pg. 76 (19) Ibid. pg 87 (20) Ibid. pg. 8
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What is the Rules-Based Order?
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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM ecological murder • endless wars • ingrained racism & social injustice • worker exploitation • incurable via reforms
by Kim Petersen
Vassal meeting fellow vassal: Pedro Sanchez, Spain's PM, shakes hands with Canada's Justin Trudeau. Their nations are no longer sovereign, but submission to the US-enforced "Rules-Based Order" does not seem to bother them.
In fits of, what might well be termed, masochism, some of us now-and-then tune in to the legacy media. When doing so, one is likely to hear western-aligned politicians rhetorize ad nauseam about the linguistically vogue rules-based order. Now and then, the word “international” is also inserted: the rules-based international order.
But what exactly is this rules-based order?
The way that the wording rules-based order is bandied about makes it sound like it has worldwide acceptance and that it has been around for a long time. Yet it comes across as a word-of-the-moment, both idealistic and disingenuous. Didn’t people just use to say international law or refer to the International Court of Justice, Nuremberg Law, the UN Security Council, or the newer institution — the International Criminal Court? Moreover, the word rules is contentious. Some will skirt the rules, perhaps chortling the aphorism that rules are meant to be broken. Rules can be unjust, and shouldn’t these unjust rules be broken, or better yet, disposed of? Wouldn’t a more preferable wording refer to justice? And yes, granted that justice can be upset by miscarriages. Or how about a morality-based order?
Nonetheless, it seems this wording of a rules-based order has jumped to the fore. And the word order makes it sound a lot like there is a ranking involved. Since China and Russia are advocating multipolarity, it has become clearer that the rules-based order, which is commonspeak among US and US-aligned politicians, is pointing at unipolarity, wherein the US rules a unipolar, US-dominated world.
An Australian think tank, the Lowy Institute, has pointed to a need “to work towards a definition” for a rules-based order. It asks, “… what does America think the rules-based order is for?
Among the reasons cited are “… to entrench and even sanctify an American-led international system,” or “that the rules-based order is a fig leaf, a polite fiction that masks the harsh realities of power,” and that “… the rules-based order can protect US interests as its power wanes relative to China…”
The Hillwrote, “The much-vaunted liberal international order – recently re-branded as the rules-based international order or RBIO – is disintegrating before our very eyes.” As to what would replace the disintegrated order, The Hill posited, “The new order, reflecting a more multipolar and multicivilizational distribution of power, will not be built by Washington for Washington.”
The Asia Timesacknowledged that it has been a “West-led rules-based order” and argued that a “collective change is needed to keep the peace.”
It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon. To rule is America’s self-admitted intention. It has variously declared itself to be the leader of the free world, the beacon on the hill, exceptional, the indispensable nation (in making this latter distinction, a logical corollary is drawn that there must be dispensable nations — or in the ineloquent parlance of former president Donald Trump: “shithole” nations).
Thus, the US has placed itself at the apex of the international order. It seeks ultimate control through full-spectrum dominance. It situates its military throughout the world; it surrounds countries with bases and weapons that it is inimically disposed toward — for example, China and Russia. It refuses to reject the first use of nuclear weapons. It does not reject the use of landmines. It still has a chemical-weapons inventory, and it allegedly carries out bioweapons research, as alluded to by Russia, which uncovered several clandestine biowarfare labs in Ukraine. This news flummoxed Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Dominance is not about following rules, it is about imposing rules. That is the nature of dominating. Ergo, the US rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and went so far as to sanction the ICC and declare ICC officials persona non grata when its interests were threatened.
*****
Having placed itself at the forefront, the US empire needs to keep its aligned nations in line.
It is a commonly heard truism that actions speak louder than words. But an examination of Trudeau’s words compared to his actions speaks to a contradiction when it comes to Canada and the rule of law.
It seems Canada is just a lackey for the leader of the so-called free world.
One of the freedoms the US abuses is the freedom not to sign or ratify treaties. Even the right-wing thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations lamented, “In lists of state parties to globally significant treaties, the United States is often notably absent. Ratification hesitancy is a chronic impairment to international U.S. credibility and influence.”
The CFR added, “In fact, the United States has one of the worst records of any country in ratifying human rights and environmental treaties.”
It is a matter of record that the US places itself above the law. As stated, the US does not recognize the ICC; as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the US has serially abused its veto power to protect the racist, scofflaw nation of Israel; it ignored a World Court ruling that found the US guilty of de facto terrorism for mining the waters around Nicaragua.
The historical record reveals that the US, and its Anglo-European-Japanese-South Korean acolytes, are guilty of numerous violations of international law (i.e., the rules-based, international order).
When it comes to the US, the contraventions of the rules-based order are myriad. To mention a few:
Currently, the US is occupying Syria and stealing the oil of the Syrian people;
The US funded the Maidan coup that overthrew the elected president of Ukraine, leading to today’s special military operation devastating Ukraine, which continues to fight a US-NATO proxy war.
Then, there is the undeniable fact that the US exists because of a genocide wreaked by its colonizers, which has been perpetuated ever since.
Even the accommodations that the US imposed on the peoples it dispossessed are ignored, revealed by a slew of broken treaties. [3]
The history of US actions (as opposed to its words) and its complicit tributaries needs to be kept firmly in mind when the legacy media unquestioningly reports the pablum about adhering to a rules-based order.
Read Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality, 2018.
Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, 1985. This governmental infidelity to treaties is also true in the Canadian context.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.
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^3000US citizens have no real political representation.
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What about you? Time to push back against the corporate oligarchy.
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