From Benghazi to Boko Haram: Why I support the Benghazi Inquiry

Boko-Hram1

You can’t understand the threat posed to Nigeria by Boko Haram, or the ghastly destruction of Syria over the past three years, outside the context of “the vicious NATO obliteration of the state of Libya.” One huge crime begets many consequences, including the death of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi. The Left should be outraged at Obama policies – in North Africa, in Syria, and in backing neo-fascists in Ukraine.

by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka

“The destruction of Libya not only led to the strengthening of Boko Haram – it also led to arms being transferred out of Libya to Syria.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, Boko Haram burst into the awareness of people around the world as a shadowy group of Islamists with the ability to carry out audacious attacks that paralyzed the army of the most populous country in Africa. People now want to know the group’s origins, where they came from, why they are kidnapping girls and how they became such a powerful threat. All important questions – but questions that cannot be answered by just looking at the internal politics of Nigeria, as important as those are, because Boko Haram is incomprehensible when decontextualized from the destabilization, death and destruction unleashed across Africa from the Sahel into West Africa as a result of one historic event – the vicious NATO obliteration of the state of Libya.

African Union Commission chief Jean Ping warned NATO [10], during its bombing campaign and arming of so-called rebel forces in Libya, that the weapons they provided the “rebels” would end up in the hands of al Qaeda throughout Africa. He said, “Africa’s concern is that weapons that are delivered to one side or another … are already in the desert and will arm terrorists and fuel trafficking.”

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo expressed what many in Africa feared from the NATO attack on Libya [11]:

“We knew that at the end of the Libya operations, there would be fallouts. And the fallout would be where would all the weapons go? Where would be some of those who have been trained how to use weapons [and] how would they be accounted for? … Part of what is happening in Mali is part of the fallout from Libya, and we should not expect that Mali will be the last.”

Reports from the United Nations [12], the Guardian [13] newspaper and many other sources [14]reveal how Boko Haram benefited from the destabilization of various countries across the Sahel following the Libya conflict, receiving arms and training from an emboldened al Qaeda and its Saudi backers.

That is just one reason why the Benghazi hearing is important, especially for people concerned about the abduction of the school girls in Nigeria. The destruction of Libya not only led to the strengthening of Boko Haram – it also led to arms being transferred out of Libya to Syria, in violation of international law, to overthrow the sovereign government of Bashar al-Assad. This ended up increasing the military capacity of right-wing Salafi/Jihadi Islamists in a half dozen countries and setting the stage for the blowback on the anniversary of 9/11 that resulted in the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. citizens.

But of course there is significant opposition to the hearings.

“House Republicans appear poised to give the Obama Administration its Iran-contra affair.”

In what House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi [15] characterized as a “political stunt,” “subterfuge” and a “diversionary tactic,” House Republicans voted last week to form a 12-member committee to investigate the Obama Administration’s handling of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi.

Claiming that they now have a “smoking gun,” with the forced release of previously suppressed emails that suggest the Obama Administration deliberately misled the U.S. public about what it knew about events that led to the attack and death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, House Republicans appear poised to give the Obama Administration its Iran-contra affair – not with the objective to further weaken the Administration, but rather to destroy Hillary Clinton.

The response from the Democrats has been predictable. Democrats already lined-up behind a Clinton campaign understand that no matter what comes out this inquiry, Benghazi has the potential to become a permanent yoke that wears down the Clinton candidacy. But in another bizarre display of political and ideological subordination to the Democrat Party and its rightist elite, elements of the left have also expressed opposition to this inquiry.

One would think that those on the left would support this inquiry, as limited and partisan as it will be, on the democratic principle that the people have a right to know what occurred before, during and in the aftermath of the attack. But even more importantly, by demanding a more comprehensive examination of all the activity of the U.S. in Libya in the aftermath of the destruction of that state, including the mission of the CIA in Benghazi, the left can and should raise serious questions that expose the dangerous strategy of empowering anti-democratic, right-wing forces, from al Qaeda-connected jihadists in Syria to neo-fascists in Ukraine.

We understand that there will be an attempt to keep the focus narrow. Members of both parties and everyone in the higher echelons of the military/intelligence community knew that the U.S. had aligned with groups in Eastern Libya that were known to be jihadists. The fact that both parties supported the NATO intervention knowing that jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda played a major part in the overthrow of Gaddafi and that the largest CIA station in North Africa was established in Benghazi where it provided arms and was used as staging ground for inserting jihadist’s forces into Syria, means that both parties share an interests in avoiding the serious legal and moral implications of U.S. actions in Libya.

“The left can and should raise serious questions that expose the dangerous strategy of empowering anti-democratic, right-wing forces, from al Qaeda-connected jihadists in Syria to neo-fascists in Ukraine.”

I welcome the hearings and could not care less about the implications for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton or the reputation of Barack Obama. I am more interested in curbing the rightward militarist trajectory of U.S. policy. As an African American the plight of the more than 200 school girls captured by Boko Haram holds a special outrage for me. But I am also outraged by the murder of people defending their rights to self-determination at the hands of U.S.-supported thugs in Odessa Ukraine, outraged by the fact that people are daily terrorized by the constant buzz of U.S. drones that kill women and children in wedding parties and individuals who may “act” like they might be so-called terrorists, outraged that people can call themselves moral and even progressive and support the brutal Israeli occupation and de-humanization of Palestinians.

And I am outraged knowing that U.S. policy-makers don’t give a damn about the school girls in Nigeria because their real objective is to use the threat of Boko Haram in the Northern part of the country to justify the real goal of occupying the oil fields in the South and to block the Chinese [16] in Nigeria.

Exposing the whole sordid story of the destruction of Libya and the role of Al-Qaeda as the “boots on the ground” for U.S. geo-strategic objectives in North Africa and the Middle East represents the only strategy that an independent and principled left could pursue in wake of the fact that the hearings are going to occur. Anything other than that is capitulation, something that the left has routinely done over the last six years, and some of us still struggle against in the hope that one day the “responsible” left will eschew the privileges that stem from its objective collaboration with the interests and world-view of neo-liberal white power and re-ground itself in authentic radical principles and the world-wide struggle against Western domination.

Ajamu Baraka a long-time human rights activist and organizer is an editor and contributing columnist for Black Agenda Report. He is currently an Associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. 

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/benghazi-boko-haram-why-i-support-benghazi-inquiry

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Who Makes US Foreign Policy? – Lawrence Wilkerson On Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)

Reality asserts itself series, with Paul Jay

wilkersonjay-240Editor’s Note: This is an annotated post. That is, you will see some bracketed commentary throughout the text, wherever we disagree with the opinions expressed by the principals, in this case particularly Col. Wilkerson. Our interest in running this post, as probably was Paul Jay’s, is in

THE REAL NEWS NETWORK
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says US foreign policy is made by the oligarchs –   (Part 1) May 9, 2014

More at The Real News

Transcripts follows

About the interviewee

This is an annotated edition of this post. 

Transcript

Who Makes US Foreign Policy? - Lawrence Wilkerson On Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. 

This is another edition of Reality Asserts Itself. And the reality asserting itself these days is more than troubling. Geopolitical rivalry is intense and sharpening. Ukraine is just one recent symptom of the issue.

The climate is apparently already affecting the United States, according to the latest scientific reports, and the IPCC report is saying that we are facing severe crisis as we move further into this century. Yet public policy is nowhere near catching up to the extent of the crisis.

The underlying economic crisis has not been dealt with. The issues that led to the financial collapse in 2008 have not been addressed. The issues of too-big-to-fail, the issue of massive financial speculation and gambling that triggered the crisis have not been mitigated in any serious way by legislation. And most predictions are we’re heading into another global, deep recession sooner than later.

Now joining us in the studio to discuss a very serious situation is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Larry is a retired United States Army officer, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. He’s an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary, where he teaches courses on U.S. national security.

Thanks for joining us, Larry.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Paul.

JAY: So, in Reality Asserts Itself  we usually start with a personal back story, and then we get into the some of the issues. But we actually did all that with Larry prior to even having Reality Asserts Itself. In fact, you could say the format–Larry is, like, the first person for that format before there was that format. So we’re going to link this series of interviews of Larry to that. You’ll be able to find all the earlier ones, which has a lot to do with Larry’s back story. And we’re going to kind of dig into some of the issues.

So, Larry, you were right at the center of the State Department. Back when you were there, and then sort of extrapolating to today, who runs U.S. foreign policy? ‘Cause there’s this sort of feeling there’s this grand design and, you know, grand machinations and chessboard-playing and all of that. Where are the centers of power for making U.S. foreign policy? ‘Cause it seems to me it’s not just the president.

WILKERSON: I think you’re right. And part of what I teach–and I teach post-World War II policy more than anything else, but we have to go back into the past to understand that policy. Part of what I teach is how since World War II and the acquisition of this enormous power by what in essence is the new Rome in the world, the United States, part of the shift that takes place in manipulating and managing that new power is a centralization of foreign policy away from the old cabinet places where it used to take place, most prominently through the Foreign Service and through the Secretary of State, to the White House and to the creation of the 1947 National Security Act, the National Security Council. So if you ask me pro forma where does it exist today, it exists more in the National Security Council and its staff than it does anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in the cabinet.

So what I’m saying is it’s centralized in the White House. But what does that mean in terms of, I think, your real question, who’s behind the White House, and who’s therefore behind U.S. foreign policy, more or less? I think the answer today is the oligarchs, which would be the same answer, incidentally, ironically, if you will, for Putin in Russia, the people who own the wealth, the people who therefore have the power and who more or less (and I’m not being too facetious here, I don’t think) buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy. So that’s as succinct an answer as I can give you and touch on a few historical points.

JAY: There seems to also be centers or circles of power. For example, Lindsey Graham and John McCain seem to represent an alignment of forces. It seems that the fossil fuel industry, military-industrial complex–and certainly not that they are exclusively backing McCain and Graham. They have their hooks into both parties and to–you know, throughout–they’re kind of a hidden hand throughout much of American politics. But it seems to be a somewhat distinct center. And then Wall Street seems to have even–although it’s not monolithic, it’s a distinct center of power. What’s the actual dynamic? Like, how do they influence National Security Council decisions? How do these processes take place? Where do the discussions take place?

WILKERSON: I think it’s probably less fundamental and less precise, and therefore less in the interest, often, of the United States than you might think or that the American people might think. Because of what you’ve just suggested, that there are many poles in American foreign-policy, from the Congress to even the Supreme Court, to the White House, to the State Department, the Foreign Service, and so forth, it’s a very complex mix, and it’s rarely ever articulated in a way or manifests itself in a way that good leadership can control it, handle it, and manage it toward a real strategic objective. That’s part of our problem in the world today.

But I would submit to you that certain oligarchs, anyway–big food, big pharmacy, big energy, oil, real estate, things like that–they like it this way, because then they can flow into the void in the particular region or function or both that they want to control, that they want to manipulate, and do so effectively, whether it’s subsidies from the federal government for oil companies or whether it’s massive efforts by the government, clandestinely or otherwise, to influence someone like Monsanto being able to operate in Latin America and do the things that it does.

So it’s incredibly complex, difficult to analyze from a strictly governmental standpoint, but when you start probing and you start analyzing, you begin to discover that there are centers in this mess, if you will, that are getting what they want. And what they want is basically wealth and power. And they then turn that wealth and power back into political contributions, which now almost have no limits, no constraints on them, and they influence people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank when he was in there and so influential with the banking committee, and they get what they want in terms of legislation that oftentimes I’m convinced the legislatures do not even realize they’re doing. They don’t understand that they’re fulfilling this objective of a particular oligarch or conglomeration of oligarchs. And yet they’re doing it. And they’re doing it because they are well paid for doing it, in the sense that their PACs are flush and full and they get reelected.

Is John McCain motivated entirely by this? Is Bob Menendez motivated entirely by this? Of course not. They’re not intellectual giants, and they don’t spend lots of time analyzing this situation in the complex ways that we do. So they think they’re actually fulfilling their principles and bending over a little bit to accept the money and the cash necessary to do that. So that’s how the system works. That’s not even half the explanation, but that’s how the system works. And, incidentally, it has worked that way for a very long time, I would say probably since about Andrew Jackson coming into the White House after we’d really established ourselves.

JAY: I think it’s a really interesting point, because those of us that sit back doing this geopolitical analysis–and we look at what are the objective interests of the powers and what are the objective interests of the different parts of these powers, and then we kind of think there’s people making policy the same way, but they kind of just–.

WILKERSON: They think they are too.

JAY: But they’re not doing–they’re kind of, geez, what’s the crisis that I’m going to deal with today, how am I going to make money out of this tomorrow. It seems to me that with the odd exception of–you know, you have, you know, the Brezinskis and these type of people that seem to think in a broader way–most of it seems to be, you know, what is in it for me today, the hell with tomorrow, and not so conscious of the forces. I mean, one of the things that always hits me is when you look at the predictions of who would win World War II. Most of what I’ve seen is by 1940, ’41, it was pretty clear Hitler’s going to lose. Now, if you’re in the German monopoly capitalist class doing analysis, you’ll say, well, this is not leading to anything good for us; why aren’t we bailing? But the forces of refusing to accept the reality of it were far too strong.

WILKERSON: Well, that’s a good point. I would say–and I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theory normally, but I would say there were forces behind that shadow, if you will, who were doing quite well, Swiss, German, American, and others, who were more or less feeding off the conflict and got very wealthy feeding off the conflict, just as they did off World War I, even more dominantly with respect to the United States in particular, German reparations and so forth. We made a ton of money off of World War I, and we really didn’t contribute a whole lot, if you’ll remember. We were only really there substantially for a very short period of time, roughly April 1917 to Armistice Day. So there is a group that’s interested in this kind of thing–and this group alarms me probably more than any other in the world, and particularly my own country–that is interested in a constant state of war, or as near a constant state as possible, because they sit behind all the belligerents and make money.

JAY: And there seems to be sectors of the economy that profit from volatility, brinksmanship, geopolitically, which leads to massive arms sales. And I’ve mentioned before on air that I was at this dinner of this organization that does military advice and policymaking to Middle Eastern countries, mostly about arms purchases, and of course who backs the organization’s advice is Lockheed Martin and Boeing and, you know, all the military manufacturers. So the brinkmanship sells weapons. And then, of course, Wall Street also does great in volatility, ’cause–especially if you’re one step ahead, which the insiders are. But then there’s other parts of the economy, you know, if you’re trying to sell stuff to the American public, massive volatility is not particularly good for you.

WILKERSON: No, it’s not. The real economy in this country, though, has shrunken so dramatically since World War II–I show the stats to my students, and I usually use the CIA stats. I can’t remember them precisely right now, but I can give you general idea. In 1945, we were about, oh, 25 percent or so services and about 60 percent or so what was called heavy, medium, or light industry, manufacturing mostly. It’s completely the opposite today. It’s about 11 to 12 percent manufacturing, and the latest stat–and this is a precise number from the CIA–76 percent services. So you don’t have the same real economy, if you will, and you don’t have the same GDP reflected of that real economy. And that’s a very different economy to wage war under than the one we had when we entered World War II, for example. Very different. And you could say in some respects this shadow behind the power that makes money off war, period, no matter who’s the belligerent, makes money off that volatility now, especially with computers that are able to assist them in doing so, like currency manipulation, for example, or just general speculation. With computers you can do it at lightning speed and you can do it in a nanosecond, and you can make billions in that nanosecond, and you don’t care about what you’re doing to the real economy, because you’re raking in the dough.

JAY: Has the American elite, including that section which profits on near war and profits on actual war, but in general has there come to a conclusion now that war with Iran is not good for the overall interests of the Empire, but if you want a really good Cold War, a really good arms race, then Russia’s the right one to do it with?

WILKERSON: That’s an interesting speculation. I think–and this is a good development in my view, but for different reasons than I’m going to tell you. (I don’t want war. That’s the biggest reason.) I think what’s happening is people are beginning–people, these people in a talking about, who really understand the dynamics in the world–and some of those are in the White House, no question about it. Some of them are people bearing the burden of public policy. No question about it. I think they’re beginning to understand that this is not about nuclear weapons. This not about Iran’s nuclear power. It’s about power. It’s about who’s going to be the hegemon in the Gulf. Who’s the most stable country in western Asia? Iran. Who’s the country with the most cohesive population? Iran. Who’s the country with the most potential for the future? Iran. Not Israel. Not Afghanistan. Not Iraq. Iran.

JAY: Not Saudi Arabia.

WILKERSON: Not Saudi Arabia. Iran. So if you’re going to have a relationship with someone that’s going to last and endure and enhance your power and your interest over time, you need a rapprochement with Tehran regardless of what kind of government might be there. And it is not the best government in the world, but we’ve never had a problem with that in the past. So I think that’s taking over. And so you’re seeing that become a new objective. However it might be sold rhetorically, it nonetheless, I think, is a new objective of that NSC staff that’s really caring about American policy and so forth. We might disagree with it, but I think they do care.

And what’s happening on the other side, with Ukraine and with Russia, of course, is what you just said: hey, we long, we yearn for the solidity and the stability of the Cold War, and my God, Putin’s giving it back to us. Let’s accept the offer. [Actually not Putin, but ourselves, through manufactured events, including coups facilitated by our agents provocateurs in that region.—Eds]

JAY: Now, isn’t this what McCain ran on when he ran for president? It was all about the return of the evil Russian Empire.

WILKERSON: John never saw a Russian he liked.

JAY: I mean, it was all about Georgia, it was all about the coming fight with Russia. The current sort of American role in the Ukraine and, you know, what–I mean, I don’t think one can exaggerate the American role, in the sense there were plenty of internal factors in Ukraine that led to the overthrow of the president and so on. But the Americans are certainly up to their eyeballs.

WILKERSON: Yeah, we were there fomenting regime change, if you will, just as we were in Caracas, as we were in Damascus before. (Still are—Eds]

JAY: But can you–is there any sense–is this coming from the Obama administration? Or is it coming from–and this is where I get to who makes U.S. foreign-policy–how many lines of this kind of policy exist that kind of circumvent the White House and the National Security Council?

WILKERSON: I don’t think they necessarily circumvent it. I think they are at times intentioned within it, but I don’t think they necessarily circumvent it, like, for example, Dick Cheney did in the Bush administration. I think what you have is you have people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice who are right-to-protect-people. This is very traditional. This is messianic Christianity manifesting itself in a secular way. [No, it’s imperialist thinking manifested in two warmongering whores.—Eds) This is we have to bear the brown person’s burden, you know, we have to go fix these problems in the world. So this is not something new. It’s just that a more sophisticated manifestation in 2014.

And it makes a difference. It made a difference in Somalia when Madeleine Albright and Boutros Boutros-Ghali were pushing for state building in Somalia, when any anyone with a brain could have seen impossible task, you’re going to fail, and you’re going to have to leave ignominiously, which is exactly what Bill Clinton had to do. It manifested itself in the Balkans and in Kosovo. Two days of bombing and Milošević’ll cave. Seventy-eight days later and the threat of ground forces and Milošević finally caves.

So there’s that strain, a messianic strain that’s always been there.

Then there is a strain of real power, realpolitik. And that’s people who are actually trying to achieve American interests, whatever they may be, and the way they think they should be achieved. I would put President Obama in that category.

And then you’ve got people who are closet neoconservatives, who really do feel that America has to assert itself periodically at a minimum in order to teach the rest of the world that it can’t climb the hill on which America is the king.

JAY: But Ukraine is setting up we have to teach Putin a lesson, except you helped create the conditions where you have to teach Putin a lesson–

WILKERSON: Well, of course.

JAY: –and more or less play into Putin’s hands. I mean–.

WILKERSON: Well, this is a chess game, to a certain extent, played on multiple levels simultaneously. And when you have a person like Putin with the capabilities that Putin has–I would suggest to you that the KGB and the GRU or NKVD, whenever you want to talk about, were probably the best intelligence people in the world for a long time. When you’ve got those kind of capabilities, you can do things, and particularly when you’re operating on interior lines. I’ll take you into a military jargon here. Interior lines means I’ve got a border with you and I can move my tank 15 feet and kill you. But I am the person going to contest that tank, and I’m 10,000 miles away, and I’ve got to fly my tanks into your country before I can even take you on. The advantage of operating on those interior lines is really, really huge. It’d be like us doing something in Mexico and Russia trying to object or us doing something in Cuba and Russia trying to object. It’s really difficult. You can do it, but it’s really difficult.

So there are a lot of things operating with respect to Crimea, Ukraine, Odessa, and so forth, Georgia, right now that play into what some of these people, like, I think, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, would love to see happen, and that is the development of a new Cold War, a new Cold War with old antagonists.

JAY: Which I don’t think was Obama’s plan.

WILKERSON: No, I don’t either.

JAY: It was McCain’s plan, which is why it seems like Obama is getting cornered.

WILKERSON: He’s playing catch-up in certain respects.

JAY: Completely. I mean, his Asia pivot had nothing to do with this.

WILKERSON: Well, here’s the real–this sometimes drives me, you know, to drink. When Jim Baker and George H. W. Bush really accomplished what I think was one of the real diplomatic feats of the end of the 20th century, the reunification of Germany, whether we agree with that or not, they did it, and they did it without a shot being fired. It was wonderful to watch H. W. Bush do that and Jim Baker. But one of the reasons they could do it was because they assured Gorbachev, and later Yeltsin, that NATO would be quiescent, it wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t threaten Russia. In fact, I was there when we told the Russians that we were going to make them a member, we were–observer first and then a member and so forth. Well, that fell apart on the fact that they perceive right quickly that we weren’t really serious. And then we start, under pressure from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and others, to sell weapons to Poland and weapons to Georgia and weapons to Romania and everybody else we could bring into the fold. Under those pressures and others we started to expand NATO and stuck both our fingers in the Russian eye, so to speak, immediately.

It’s clear to me why Putin responded in Georgia and why he’s now responding to Crimea in Ukraine. This is what great powers do when they get concerned about their so-called near abroad. So we have as much fault here as anybody else in this situation, and I don’t think President Obama–I think he bought it when he came in. He did not realize–why should he? He didn’t have the experience in this regard. He didn’t realize what we we’re doing and what might come about from what we were doing, and he just went along with it.

JAY: Yeah. I mean, I think in the final analysis–I mean, to be frank, I don’t think it’s unique about President Obama, but President Obama does what’s good for President Obama.

WILKERSON: I think all presidents do that to certain extent.

JAY: And if the forces are arrayed in such a way that it’s too much to buck, he goes there. It’s not that he’s there to fight for principles.

WILKERSON: I’ve got to say, to this point I was losing faith in the man I voted for. I’m a Republican. I voted for President Obama twice. I was losing faith for so many reasons. But he has restored a modicum of that faith–

JAY: With Iran.

WILKERSON: –with Iran and with Russia, because he’s been very circumspect. His secretary of state has not. He’s been waiting forward in the foxhole. And John Kerry gets way too passionately emotional. He reminds me of the right-to-protect people. But President Obama has to this point been very subdued about how he’s dealing with sanctions and responses to Putin in general. And I think that’s right. That’s what–we should be talking. We should be talking and we should be tamping down the tensions and tamping down the pressures. They’re manifest significantly enough because of all of the different people in Ukraine who want power and have nothing to do with Russia and nothing to do with United States or Europe.

JAY: Okay. We’re going to continue this discussion in the next part of our series of interviews with Larry Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

SELECT COMMENTS—

Fullblad • 3 days ago

  • Avatar
    Reiner Wilhelms  Fullblad • 3 days ago

    It would explain something about Obama and some moderate senators who occasionally speak up against the beast they serve: They carry out the orders and put little spins and adaptations on them to ameliorate them and make them more palatable, while their motive is to not let the most extreme back office goons have to step into the light, so that the illusion of a democracy can be maintained. They probably have the very bad feeling or actual knowledge that the real power is in the hands of sociopaths, but they just don’t have the spine and can’t see what they could do about it.

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    Avatar
     Fullblad • 2 days ago

    Indeed.

    To enter politics is to become skilled at advocacy for the social status of backers. As was popularised in recent history, the 99% are the same land-bonded serfs, or outright slaves which have existed under the heel of those who trade in their services, since social hierarchy began to be prized, or rather, accepted.
    An ikon is a representation which contains the spirit of something, and a politician is a mere work of art, not having the reality of those who hire him. Presidents are merely effective chauffeurs, skilled in manipulation of law (notice how few have been impeached, always for partisan purposes) and image.
    This is not to excuse those who vote for and support Obamas or Reagans. It is MORE simpleminded to follow such cartoon characters, especially to the death. It would appear that large-scale societies are able to hijack human loyalty which evolved for the purpose of protecting offspring and relatives. I suppose it works, as the world human population is an egregious 7 thousand million plus, still engaging in violent threatening conflict, without space for relief or recognition of real life in a diverse, beautiful, natural world (this fast-disappearing).



    • “Global Society Destruction” and The Ukraine Crisis: Decoding its Deep Structural Meaning

    By Prof. John McMurty. Republished from the Center for Research on Globalization.
    SIMULPOST WITH CYRANO’S JOURNAL TODAY

    USGlobalEconomyThe “Ukraine crisis” repeats a script as old as the Cold War. The narrative features rising attacks by corporate states and media on the traditional whipping boy of Russia. As usual, “escalating the crisis” is US-led. As usual, alarm about “increasing lawless aggression” is projection of US policy itself. In fact, one more US-directed violent overthrow of an elected government has carved off the biggest country of Europe from next-door Russia.

    Yet Russia gets all the blame for “brute force” in reclaiming Crimea – although 96% of a voluntary turnout of 82% voted to rejoin its traditional mother country. While denounced as “violation of international law”, the Crimea referendum choice expresses the “self-determination” of a society guaranteed under Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Ukraine’s coup government, in contrast, has prohibited any referendum on its rule – especially the Eastern regions where popular uprisings with no mass deaths or beatings (as in the Kiev coup) call for self-determination against illegal rule from Kiev.

    The uprising cities of East Ukraine – beginning with Donetsk, then Kharkiv, Luhansk, Slavyansk (the Slav has been removed from the Westernized Sloviansk),  Kramatorsk and other centers and villages – all demand a democratic referendum for their future status as equal citizens in a Ukraine federation.

    Integration with Russia is not favoured by Russia, but the dominant popular feeling unreported in the media is peaceful and pragmatic. Ukraine’s government has been broken by the US-led coup and cannot provide what people need in jobs, healthcare, income security and pensions. Certainly “the Greek model” planned for Ukraine is not in its people’s common life interests. Under the coup government of prime minister Arseniuy Yatsenyuk, a banker who is already prescribing mass dispossession by austerity programs, what will happen to Ukraine is foretold by has happened in Greece.

    The EU’s financial rule by banker mechanisms has already been almost as great a failure as the oligarch-marketization of Russia after 1990. It is a complex system of one-way powers of life deprivation and social ruin which I define in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (1999, 2013). Elected governments lose all control to the new absolute and overriding imperative of European rule – to grow and multiply private transnational money sequences. In accord with the ruling formulae, the Greek economy has been slashed by 25 per cent, unemployment is an official 28 per cent excluding the unpaid, the public health system is dismantled to pay foreign banks, wages are cut by a quarter, the public sector is sacked and privatized, and jobless youth rises to 60 per cent even with mass emigration. These outcomes now await Ukraine.

    Those in Ukraine who are not under the spell of its father cult, oligarch riches, and post-1991 dispossession know better. Outside of Kiev they have had enough, and that is why the election and presidency of the Party of Regions and its allies whose popular support lies outside Kiev have been repeatedly overturned. It is also why their decentralized federal alternative has been removed from the table. The murderous insurrection in Kiev and violent coup of elected government reveals how far the Kiev oligarchy and plotters are prepared to go backed by the US. Yet this time Russia has drawn a red line. With near-unanimous support of the Crimean people and the uprising of the Eastern cities and villages as I write, Russia has stopped the US-led transnational corporate-machine and NATO from further expansion for the first time in 25 years.

    It is true that Ukraine – the biggest country and bread basket of Europe – has now been pried wide open for transnational Western banks, agribusiness, Big Oil and NATO to feed on. And it is true that all talk of “land grab” has been projected onto Russia even as US Greystone  and Blackwater mercenaries – now called “Academi” in the Big Lie lexicon – move on the ground in Ukraine as the US and NATO propagate ever more threats of force and embargo against “Russia’s aggression”.  Reverse blame is always the US geostrategic game. “Russia’s designs to take the whole of Ukraine” is again US projection of its own objective, as in the old days when “world rule plot” was attributed to the former USSR. Yet a line has been drawn at Crimea, and drawn again in Eastern Ukraine, and it is backed by a country that cannot be arm-twisted, propaganda invaded, or air-bombed with impunity. That is why the one-way threats never stop. It is the first line yet drawn by an historical power outside of China against the exponentially multiplying US-led private transnational money sequences devouring the world.

    People now have a chance to reflect on who is the aggressor and who stands for democratic choice as events unfold. They can observe the patterns of Orwellian distortion day to day. Never is the other side presented. The US and NATO alone continuously denounce, lie and threaten. Financial contracts and assets are violated by one side alone. Hate campaigns without evidence go one way. Uprisings have been mass murderous from the US-coup side and without harm from the resisting side. Russia is behind its own borders, and the US deploys threats, covert operations and mercenaries from thousands of miles away. But this time US-NATO-led corporate globalization cannot destroy nations at will. Sometimes history can happen as it should.

    The Mechanisms of Reverse Blame to Justify Destroying Societies

    Reversal of blame is always the US method of pretext and justification. This is why Russia is pervasively vilified in the mass media, and Canada’s big-oil regime joins in along with the UK.   As always, denunciation rules without reasoned understanding. As always, the US-led financial and military forces of private money-power expansion move behind the abomination of designated enemies. Any nation or leader not serving transnational corporate control of resources and markets across borders is always the villain. This is the ruling meta program.

    Thus too in Ukraine. When Europe tried to broker a peace deal between the opposition and elected government of Ukraine, the US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland continued to  court the neo-Nazi coup leaders to overthrow the state, instructing  “Yats” (appointed PM Yatsenyuk) to consult with the main putsch leader Oleh Tyahnybok “at least four times a week”.  When she is reminded of the EU peace talks and agreement to stop the bloodshed, her response is telling, “Fuck the EU”. The coup peaked after three days of murder by the neo-Nazi faction. When former “Orange revolutionary” and gas oligarch leader of the Fatherland Party, Yulia Tymoshenko, then got out of jail for criminal embezzlement of state property, she expressed the logic of power shared with the US regarding Russia. She says without denial of the words: “take up arms and go and wipe out these damn katsaps” [Russian minority] – – – so that not even scorched earth would be left of Russia.” Yet in every Western media of record, it is Russia who remains “the aggressor”, “the growing threat”, “the source of the rising crisis”, and “the out-of-control power that must be stopped”.

    There are exact thought governors at work throughout. I have analysed these structures of delusion in learned journals as ‘the ruling group-mind’ (collectively regulating assumptions that are false but taken for granted) and, sustaining it, the ‘argumentum ad adversarium’ (the diversion of all issues to a common adversary). The “escalating crisis in Ukraine” expresses these fallacious operations in paradigm form. So does the false claim of “Syrian use of chemical weapons” which almost led to US bombing of Syria’s civilian infrastructures a few months earlier. The mind mechanics at work form the inner logic of the lies which never stop. The grossest operations go back to the Reagan regime naming Nicaragua as “a clear and present danger to the United States” to justify US war crimes against it which in turn fed the ever- growing corporate-military complex and murderous covert operations. Always the mind-stopping mendacity and criminal aggressions are justified through the ruling group-mind and enemy-hate switch which form the deep grammar of this thought system.

    At the most general level, the “Russian threat to Ukraine” diverts public attention from the really fatal problems of the world and their global causal mechanism – transnational money sequencing – which is metastasising further in Ukraine. The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade from its transnational corporate looting and polluting. The climates and oceans destabilize from the same cause at the same time. Species too become extinct at a spasm rate, and the world’s forests, meadows and fisheries are cumulatively destroyed. The global food system produces more and more disabling junk as commodity diseases multiply. The vocational future of the next generations is eliminated for a growing majority of people. All these trends and more are one-way, degenerate, and undeniable. All are driven by US-led private and transnational money-sequence multiplication which now moves into and through Ukraine. Without Russia’s past financial and energy assistance worth tens of billions of dollars and completely destabilized by the US-led violent coup, Ukraine verges towards collapse. That is where the Greek model comes in – the stripping of Ukraine to pay for what it has lost from Russia by the US-led coup which further enables military advance to Russia’s borders.

    As usual, such geostrategic intervention is life destructive at every level of its consequences, but the underlying causal mechanism is unspeakable in official culture. From Africa to Europe to the Middle East to Latin America, the unspoken master trend is systematic society destruction. Look, for example, forward and backward from the last manufactured crises geared to enable US-led destabilization to bombing – the “weapons of mass destruction of Iraq”, the “genocidal plans of the dictator Gadaffi”, “Assad’s chemical weapons used on his own people”, or, across the ocean, Venezuela’s “despotism” which priorizes public education, healthcare and poverty elimination. Always the victim society has more developed social programs than its neighbours.  The ultimate enemy is social life bases themselves.

    Observe the common pattern of social destruction. It begins with US covert forces sponsoring opposition forces in the society featuring fascist and jihadist terrorists, mounting global media campaigns against the targeted leader, murders committed by snipers pretending to be state agents, growing civil division and hate towards civil war, and absolutely one-sided reporting of the US point of view, and reverse-moral justifications for what ends as society destruction.  The US bombing stage has not yet been reached in Syria because Russia led the alternative of UN chemical-weapons destruction, even though Syria had never used the weapon. Not long after destroying Iraq and Libya on known false pretexts, the US proclaimed again and again the mass-murderous gas used in Syria was by “Assad the war criminal” although the evidence kept disconfirming the big lie mega-phoned by John Kerry. It went all the way to a White House plan to bomb civilian infrastructures as in Iraq and Libya. In revealing contrast, Russia “the world bully” has never bombed a city. Yet US reverse projection rules. As for Assad’s “war crime”, the truth found by multiple analysis was that “kitchen sarin” manufactured in Turkey and crude-missile lobbed by the al Nusra jihadists allied with the US and funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar was the source of the gas massacre (as Seymour Hersh has finally made public).

    Much the same generic script of engineered civil conflict and war combined with false threat and crimes of the constructed foreign enemy has been used over and over again against Iran and its “nuclear threat” with no evidence, while Israel has an illegal stockpile of them threatening to use them to stop Iran’s “nuclear threat”. In all, the reverse-projection tactic has become the signature of everything the US and its allies allege of others to ruin them.

    Ukraine in Motion as Another Paradigm Example of US-led Society Destruction

    Serial false allegations and pretexts thus unfold again against Russia in regard to Ukraine. The US-led mayhem and violence varies widely, but the dots have not yet been joined on what is always achieved beneath the political-ideological shows – the tearing apart and dispossession of one society after another by US-led financial and armed means.  Here it is Ukraine and the set-up of Russia at once. Not only is the society decapitated, as in Ukraine or Libya or Iraq or as demanded in Syria. That is the official script. Much more deeply the society’s civil bonds are rent asunder, its productive base is sabotaged, its social life supports are stripped, its environment and resources looted and its future despoiled. Always. There is no objective fulfilled except social life-system destruction. But the connections still go unmade. As General Rick Hillier, commander of Canada’s forces helping to bomb Libya said afterwards: “We did it because we could”. As CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard acknowledges about the permanent US war, but still without the consequence named: “It will be won by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see, and in ways you may not want to know about”.

    The supremely evil truth becomes testable by its continuous repetition. Dismantling or destroying society’s very life bases is the innermost meaning of US-led “freedom” and “globalization”.  It includes even US society itself by ever more monstrous misallocation of public resources away from what serves life bases to what deprives them. If one reviews the post-1980 trajectory of ruin of nations, the objectively evil pattern becomes clear. No other actually working goal has been achieved since the Reagan-Thatcher turn. It is the DNA of the global cancer system. Try to think of exception. Since the war-criminal destruction of poverty-ridden Nicaragua’s new schools and clinics by the signature method of covertly US funded and armed forces within, the society-destruction method has only grown and multiplied by terrorist as well as financial means. When Obama says “every society must chart its own course”, he follows the reverse moral syntax at work. The deliberate mass-diseasing of 500,000 children in the first manufactured crisis of Iraq as the nearby Soviet Union collapsed revealed what we could expect from the US without another superpower to contain it. In all cases, there has been one underlying principle of outcome – US-led civil disintegration of societies across the world. That is how a cancer works at the transnational level of life organization.

    Engineering civil war is the favored method with effective genocide the long consequence. This is true not only in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Syria, but Somalia, Sudan and the  Congo. Direct US  invasion may lose the war from Vietnam to Afghanistan, but its defeat is, more deeply another US-led success at destroying another society. The Wall Street metastasis to EU banker-run Europe has worked without invasion or even proxy uprising, but society destruction is still achieved by the small print of corporate treaties and bank powers people never see. Greece, Spain and Italy are effectively ruined, and behind the dismantling of these and all victim societies is the same transnational corporate system multiplying itself through societies. Big Banks, Oil, Military Contracting, Big Agri-Food and Pharma are themselves only vehicles of the one underlying economic disease of transnational money sequences self-multiplying across all borders without life limits or functions. They feed on ruined societies as their carrion.

    Ukraine follows this macro pattern. It comes into the fold of the EU through a US-led fascist coup posing as “freedom” and “revolution”, but in fact hollowing out the society’s lifeblood and bases as the US-led coup and EU financial straitjacket suck it dry. This is the unseen law of transnational money-demand multiplication to the top. In Ukraine the method features similar tools – increasingly armed and destructive oppositional forces on the ground, US bankrolling and direction of the opposition’s factions in orchestrated destruction ($5 billion under aid guises, $20 million for the street reported by Secretary Nuland in a speech to business), and pervasive transnational corporate propaganda about the constructed civil war as a “struggle for Ukraine’s  freedom” – decoded, transnational corporate and bank freedom to loot and pollute. As always, inside allies include  fascist and terrorist forces – the Svoboda and Pravy Sektor factions in Ukraine which now have key executive posts in the coup government and trace their history back to the Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) led by their hero Stephen Bandera who allied with the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941 and helped to round up Jews.

    The worst is yet to come. Never is there any US building of the victim society’s economy and life support systems, and so too Ukraine. Again we might compare Russia here to the US in Afghanistan over 14 years. The self-multiplying corporate money sequences which reap all gains have no committed life function or obligation including to the imperial state itself. They pay ever fewer taxes to it, and bleed ever more public money and resources from it. There is only one pattern of consequence and Ukraine too is now almost occupied by its ruling mechanism to impoverish the people further to feed the rich. As always, society’s common life capital bases will be further defunded, privatized for profit, and saddled by unpayable transnational bank debts. The real economy will be flooded with more junk foods, media products and social-dumping commodities, and bred to a violence culture already hatched by the coup. Collective life capital bases will be further laid waste for multiplying private money fortunes across borders.

    The Life-Blind Thought System Behind Global Society Destruction

    Since using the spectacular 9-11 event as pretext for the new PNAC plan of “full-spectrum domination”, falling on the anniversary of the destruction of Chile’s society in 1973, the U.S. has been on a non-stop crusade of destroying societies across the world.  The hollowing out of social bonds and bases includes the US itself. Its impoverishment grows as non-productive riches multiply at the top, middle classes fall to ever new levels of debt, the growing majority of youth is without a future, public squalor spreads across the land, and over 2000 million dollars a day is spent on armed force threat and operations with no real enemy to justify them.

    It all goes back to first principles. “There is no such thing as society” declared the fanatic Friedrich von Hayek who was mouth-pieced by his disciple Margaret Thatcher. “We owe our very lives to capitalism”. But deeper than words, the principle of no-society is built into the ruling economic paradigm. Without notice, every life coordinate is erased from account. There are no life needs, no environment, no society, no children, no relations with others, and no history in this life model. All unpriced life goods from water and sewer infrastructures and services to universal public education, culture and healthcare to social security support in age, unemployment, and disability are blinkered out except as “cost burdens”. The very terrestrial biosphere on which everything depends is ruled out of this moronic frame of reference.Demand itself is never people’s needs or necessity. It is private money demand minted by private banks without the legal tender to back it to indebt the great majority and to gamble on their future means of life. ‘Supply’ is not the life means people require. It is ever more priced commodities for profit promoting more human and ecological ill-being as far as corporate globalization extends.  Ukraine can look forward to this US-led thought system ruling over it from within the financialized European Union which is now as banker-run as America.

    The ruling value mechanism can be crystallized into natural language equations:  Freedom = freedom for private money demand = in proportion to the amount controlled = ever less freedom for those with less of it = no right to life for those without it.  Even more generally, the underlying master equations of the globalizing system now moving to rule Ukraine into Russia can be defined as follows: Rationality = Self-Maximizing Choice = Always More Money-Value for Self is Good = Self-Multiplying Sequences of Ever More Money to the Top = All Else is Disposable Means to this Pathogenic Growth. This is the innermost value logic of the US-led global system and it has no limit of dispossession and ruin if not stopped. It is perhaps emblematic irony that the favorite for Ukraine’s post-coup President is a billionaire sugar-commodity maker producing no food value, but more and more obesity and diabetes.

    World Empire or Globalizing Disease?

    Left critics coalesce around “US imperialism” as the common cause of the global meltdown on organic, social and ecological levels. Yet it is strange to call a system an “empire” whose imperial center is increasingly hollowed out on every plane; whose interventions and wars destroy productive forces at every level; and whose outcome is not more amenities for the poor, as apologists like Leo Strauss claim, but ever more societies as black holes with life support systems cumulatively devoured.  “Sometimes I think they feel like they’re in a lab and they’re running experiments on rats and not understanding the consequences of what they are doing,” Vladimir Putin wonders in partial sense of the derangement at work.

    More clearly, the states which the US planned to destroy in 2001 (as reported by General Wesley Clark in his memoirs) – Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Syria – are now in fact destroyed societies.  All but Iran are left with civil war and majority destitution where once they had been relatively prosperous and life secure. For example, before Western bombing of Iraq under the usual blame-the-enemy diversion to its leader (a paid CIA agent implanted in office by the US), Iraq led the Middle East in free public healthcare and higher education, and Libya provided free downpayments for young couples’ housing as well prior to its bombing. U.S.-led interventions and aerial bombing have destroyed the social life-organization of both nations without even the electricity and water back on. Syria was also a middle-income quasi-socialist nation, but was independent, friendly with Russia, and capable of fighting an expanding Israel. So Syria too was marked for destabilization. Its internal protests received US-Israel covert support, and turned quickly into civil war with US special operation forces and orchestrated funding of rival camps including jihadists still incinerating the country. As usual the national leader is blamed for everything. All the while, Iran is periodically threatened with annihilation while Venezuela across the ocean is subjected to US-led destabilization too as in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.

    While gas bombs have been thrown freely in Venezuela and Ukraine with US support against democratically elected states, Venezuela’s government serves the poor while Ukraine’s has been  oligarchic on both sides. Putin thus understands Ukraine’s protestors as “tired of seeing one set of crooks replacing another”. In contrast, no common life interest at all exists for the US. When bribes of officials, street gangs and press slander are not enough, US-led destabilization by financial system levers, covert operatives and civil war follow behind reverse-projection cover stories.  One can imagine if Molotov cocktails were thrown during the Wall Street uprising as in US-financed protests in Ukraine and Venezuela. “Violence-threatening protestors” is all they can say about peaceful demonstrations at home however just the cause. Concern about people’s lives, in short, never arises except as a media mask. This is why the US-led coup in Ukraine murdered people and usurped democratic process and legal warrant without a pause. It is also why it demanded the sieg-heiling violent thug Oleh Tyanybok of the Svoboda Party to be a chief advisor to the coup government although he blamed a “Muscovite/Jew mafia” for Ukraine’s problems and “Germans, Kikes and other scum” who want to “take away our Ukrainian state”. He is a symptom of the deep-structural derangement of US rule. In all cases – from Honduras to Paraguay, Egypt to Mali – covert funding, forces of destabilization and chaos are the modus operandi with US special operations leading the repertoire of financial destabilization, demonization of resistance, and armed civil-war training. Unlike classic imperialism, the system spreads by greed and fear, never by productive force development and universalizing rights and laws.

    Invasive war in 2014 is not so acceptable to the world after the obliteration of the societies and life infrastructures of Iraq and Libya. So drones, suitcases of money, special operations, propaganda campaigns and whatever else can sabotage resistance are deployed to pry societies open for competitively self-multiplying transnational corporations to exploit foreign resources, labor and forced markets. This is known as “the free movement of private capital and commodities”. Until 1991, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was still the biggest block and resource treasure of all to US-led global financialization. Thus military encirclement, pervasive international slander, ruinous armaments races and illegal embargoes followed for 50 years. It eventually worked to cause the intended collapse of the Soviet Union by spending it bankrupt on the armaments race, and forcing repression by perpetual war threats from richer societies. But US market magic and miracles for the world’s biggest country and its neighbours did not work at all. So the GDP’s of the Soviet republics fell by 60%, and polls today show that 56% of Ukranians would prefer to be governed as before. Social priorities and universal life necessities matter more to them than majority dispossession and glitz for the rich. But no Western journalist dares say it. And so the spectacularly failed global capitalist experiment has passed without a word of notice from “the free world”.  It remains unspeakable to name.

    Yet reality catches up. The US-led empire was itself unravelling in historical time without recognition. Its most gigantic failure has come back to haunt it – running the once relatively well-off societies of the USSR into productive and cultural ruin. “Well and good”, one is taught to think. “The Soviet Union repressed free speech”. But like Cuba today, a state which is continuously threatened with war, plague, assassination and hate by richer states reverts to tight control. But if one considers all the universal sciences, arts, pensions, education, and health-care provision of the Union of Socialist Republics which have been systematically destroyed, the meaning takes on a different complexion. It remains unspeakable but lies at the heart of the Ukraine-Russia crisis today. Nothing is better but only worse in collective life capital evolution.

    Many prefer the language of the imperial past. In this way reality is categorized as familiar, not mutant, backward and chaotic. The repetitions are not from “tragedy” to “farce”, as Karl Marx memorably observed in the case of Louis Bonaparte III of France. Today there is nothing but tragedy. It may all seem to be about oil and imperialism, what opponents focus on. Yet possessing others’ oil and territory are comparatively rational objectives compared to the actual performance of metastasising destruction. Far more is spent on unproductive technologies of killing and terror than has been won in new oil and territory. Both land and energy sources have been largely despoiled and wasted. The oil produced in Iraq, for example, is not close to pre-1990 levels and the oil in Libya is the site of unending civil war. The pattern is destroying not producing through generational time.  Corruption and insecurity are universalized, not life as human. Ukraine’s coup now binds it in the pathological direction – more civil strife towards war, more mountains of bank debt, more lack of affordable energy, more ethnic hatred, more mass homicidal weapons, and more rot of dysfunctional wealth inequality.

    Can this be an advance of empire? Or is it the next sign of morbid overreach, corruption and fall? An empire has a unified center, a state in control of its subjects and private enterprises, a productive capacity that leads the societies within its imperial reach, an historical civilization of architecture, art, and culture, and most of all enduring public infrastructures and great works across its domains of command. The US global system has ever less of any of these. Its imperial center is divided into gridlock, its productive powers have been increasingly exported or surpassed elsewhere, its architecture, arts and culture are increasingly mindless and violence-ridden, its capacities of civilization and public infrastructures are defunded and collapse at every turn. The US now leads only in monopoly of world currency issue, capacities to destroy life and life conditions, and mass propaganda methods. Its transnational corporations are no longer subservient to any imperial center or purpose but multiply their private money sequences on the back of monopolies of force and money-issue paid for by increasingly impoverished citizens.

    The collapsing US civilization cannot comprehend its derangement. Its money-party leaders can only see more opportunity for transnational corporate profits – the moral DNA of the cancer system. This is why the destruction of Russia has been long planned by the geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski – first in Afghanistan where he rallied the original jihadists to fight the Soviet Union along with tens of billions in US cash and weapons which developed into 9-11 and the 9-11 wars. In Ukraine the US continues the strategy. In Afghanistan the route to the ex-Soviet oilfields, the US funding was the beginning of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces whose US-manipulated function was and remains destroying societies by armed civil war to complement financial bleeding. This same method bled Yugoslavia and then the USSR dry and has worked from Afghanistan through Iraq and Serbian-Kosovo wars to Syria to Somalia, Mali and Nigeria under many names, but almost always it turns out the terror is manipulated by US money, arms and connections. Today Brzezinski has former Harvard graduate students who strategically game for the Obama administration to smash Russia into ungovernable pieces – the long game.

    This is not an exaggerated sense of danger, but a long track record. Wrecking the society in crisis is the testable generalization of all US interventions. More exactly, the unseen law of the ruling system across borders including those of the US is: Ever more public money is hemorrhaged into private money sequences with ever more ruined societies the result.

    Consider Ukraine with this diagnostic principle in mind. We can predict from this system law that only more disintegration of society and mutual life support systems will occur in Ukraine with more US-EU bank and corporate feeding on the post-coup remains. US and EU countries themselves will come apart more in the process, and the US will bleed vastly more public resources to keep metastasising the unrecognized fatal disorder while 90% of its own people and the world grow poorer, more malnourished and life insecure.

    US Script of Democracy and Freedom versus Facts of Violence and Society Destruction

    To put the matter in one sentence, the collapse and overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has been financed and directed by the U.S, cored in violence by the Nazi roots of the uprising linked with the US-selected coup leaders now in power, and after the swift take-back of Crimea by Russia fanned into hysteria by the corporate media. Revealingly, the Bandera-loving Nazis on the street leading the chaotic terror of Feb 22-24 caused the overthrow of the legitimate government exactly when the civil battle had already been won.   The elected President Yanukovych made concessions on everything – his PM was fired, the new protest laws against helmets, metal shields, and masks were revoked (even although banned everywhere else), with legitimate democratic turnover of government plainly in sight and further brokered by the EU in presidential succession. But there was no assurance of electoral victory of the US-allied Kiev forces. They had already lost two elections to the federalist Party of Regions and its alliance governments. It was then the US-led violent overthrow happened in bloodshed return of the Nazi past proclaimed as “freedom” and “revolution”. The violent coup was instantly validated by the US state, but the EU paused for days before diverting blame to Russia too.  No media of record appeared to notice that the US had criminally led the coup, and selected and instructed the new coup-government leaders with no vote, no election, and no public discussion. All the while the democratic referendum so abused in Crimea was never imagined for Ukraine by “the free press” and “leaders of the democratic world” even when eastern Ukraine popular uprisings demanded it.

    The coup was precisely rushed ahead to avoid any election. The US-backed forces had already lost two in a row. No reports mentioned this in the Free World.  The track-switch of attention was instead to Russia. How could the strategy fail? If Putin draws the line at Crimea, he forwards the plan of blaming Russia. If he does not, the long game to dismantle Russia moves faster. If Putin calls a sudden referendum in Crimea to show its citizens’ overwhelming support, he can be ridiculed for “the farce”, “the region under military occupation”, “the gun to the head”. If almost all the people of Crimea want in fact to join the historic mother country in a peaceful vote, just keep repeating “Russia’s annexation of Crimea”, “brute force”, “Russian aggression”. The violent putsch in Ukraine is thus erased from view. It disappears into reverse projection. The most basic reality test is always blocked – Does the society rise or fall in life means available and produced, social life infrastructures and services, employment levels, youth life purpose, and ecological integrity after US-induced “regime change”. It always falls. Is there any exception?

    Crimea joining historic Russia again after it was won from the Ottoman Empire centuries ago revealingly goes the opposite way.  Bridges, roads and tunnels are promised and planned in immediately in the wake of the Olympic building spree. Pensions, minimum wages and healthcare are invested in to “raise life standards”. Exposure of the world to Crimea’s historical treasure begins. In contrast, the opposing US-led forces silence the EU agreement for presidential succession in Ukraine, lead coup of the elected government with neo-Nazi snipers and violent chaos, direct IMF austerity and social dispossession for the people’s collapsing life support systems, set the main languages, cultures and identifications of citizens into irreparable division and civil war footing, and proclaim virulently against Russia taking an opposite path.

    Dividing society from within with no common or productive goal but only more tearing apart is the generic meaning – as in Yugoslavia before it, Libya and Syria in between, Honduras, Paraguay, where does it stop?  Direct the destabilizing in the street with billions for the purpose, play on real and invented problems, insert special forces to lead the mounting violence, bribe the people with dollars and bananas, divide classes and cultures to the death, proclaim freedom and prosperity, and run the country into the ground with no life construction undertaken nor any life base any longer secure for 90% of the people. The special forces at work here incredibly included Israelis trained in Gaza allying with the legacy of Ukraine Nazism. But the stakes are large and undiscussed. Ukraine is the biggest land mass of Europe, a leading global grain producer, and home to newly found gas-reserves of possibly trillions of cubic feet. The US-led lockdown on all of it is clear in the new coup state.  A neo-liberal banker is Prime Minister, a violence script-writer and chief aide to the Fatherland Party is President, and various neo-fascists are in cabinet positions with none elected. To complete the destruction of democratic legitimacy of Ukraine took only a few hours. But public panic and appointing banker presidents has already been managed in Italy and Greece, why not here too? With no mass media noticing the growing reversal of democracy and freedom in their name, Putin-bashing is the corporate-press game.

    Media Censorship and the Violation of International Law

    Crimea joining Russia was the lightning rod for the defining US operation of reverse projection, always blaming the other side for what one is doing oneself as the reason for attacking it. Since the Reagan regime made this the signature operation of US propaganda which is always repeated by the media as fact , an Orwellian rule of big lies has been normalized. Reverse projection combines with the earlier defined ad adversarium fallacy and ruling group-mind to overwhelm all reasoned understanding with cartoon-like masks of good (US) and evil (Them) where fact never interferes. Media-conditioned publics are in this way stampeded through one US-led war and civil war after another with official oppositions rationalizing the same belligerent stupefaction. With only the point of view of the US or its allies reported, only the US story line and point of view can be seen or heard by the great majority.

    So too in “the Ukraine crisis”. That Russia “invaded Crimea and annexed it against international law” has been the basic story for global denunciation of Russia.  In fact over 80% of Crimeans voted, over three times the electorate participation in the US, and almost all of them for integration with Russia not “annexation by it”.  The striking fact is that given the accuracy of these figures which is not denied, it is far more than could enable Quebec to legally secede from Canada even with universal language rights lacking in Ukraine. By mathematical deduction, the referendum also included the great majority of the nearly 40% identified as Ukrainians and Tatars. How is it that all you ever heard or saw in the mass media were selected opposing voices from Ukrainian and Tatar minorities? This is the ruling censorship by unseen means – selecting out of public view all facts that are not consistent with the ruling script. More exactly, the corporate media select for public showing only what sells the transnational money-sequence system. This is why we never hear of the US placing itself above all international laws as it enforces this ruling program. Its entire record here is blinkered out a-priori. So blame of others easily enters the ruling group-mind internalized by mass media audiences

    This point is worth pausing on because the US is the very “rogue state”, “international outlaw”, “criminal violator of human rights” and, above all, perpetrator of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” which it is always projecting onto other states. It has refused to ratify the International Criminal Court to uphold the law against war crimes and crimes against humanity, and publicly repudiated the Court’s right to investigate US criminal violations including the “supreme crime” of a war of aggression. While it is always invoking international laws to falsely blame others of violating them (e.g., Syria’s use of chemical weapons), the US has systematically undermined virtually all international laws to protect human life – treaties and conventions against landmines, against biological weapons, against international ballistic missiles, against small arms, against torture, against racism, against arbitrary seizure and imprisonment, against military weather distortions, against biodiversity loss, and against climate destabilization. Even international agreements on the rights of children and of women have been sabotaged. Yet this unrelenting profile of lawless US right to terror and destruction is nowhere published. This is how censorship by selection works without people knowing it.

    What then are we to say about “Russia’s brutal invasion and seizure of Crimea”?  In fact the number of Russian soldiers in Crimea were fewer than agreed by contract with Ukraine long prior to the referendum.  Crimea is and was also an historic Russian port and strategic peninsula even under Ukraine’s interregnum, and its place in Ukraine occurred only by a 1954 decree of the now-defunct Soviet Union. All of these facts are selected out by corporate media and states which only repeat “Russian brute force”, “illegal seizure of territory”, “war of invasion”, and even “what Hitler did back in the 1930’s” (Hilary Clinton). There is no limit to the absurd hypocrisy of accusation. Thus attention is diverted again and again onto the latest enemy as lawless and the US as law-abiding in contradiction to the facts.

    In reality, no injury occurred in the peaceful and overwhelmingly popular integration of Crimea with Russia. Ukrainian troops yielded in peaceful transition and were extended offers to stay. There was no bloodshed with one exception – a soldier in Sebastopol murdered by two men at night in masks and a getaway car tied back to the Ukraine coup leaders. They called it “the entry into the stage of military conflict” and the corporate media reported it without evidence or question. But the sniper murders of 21 people in the Kiev uprising by US-led coup agent was already diplomatically registered by March 4. Predictably, every detail was gagged in ‘the free press’ and the official ‘Free World’. Even the EU’s Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton to whom the facts of the mass murder were communicated by a fellow Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet of Estonia, remained silent. He reported that in fact the medical and forensic evidence proved all 21 murders were by “the same type of bullets” and from “the same handwriting” which could only be from “the new coalition” [of the coup government]. “The new coalition”, concluded Foreign Minister Paet in English, “don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”

    Such mass murder is grounds for prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law and prosecution by the International Court. But due process of law and criminal prosecution are repressed at the same time as the known diplomatic evidence is silenced in the public sphere. Group-mind, reverse projection and blame-the-enemy operations have become so automatic that the most important historical facts and heinous crimes do no register through their prism. Thus Russia goes on being accused of the “violations of law” and “international law” with John Kerry bawling loudest aginst the evidence. That the violent coup itself was propelled by mass murder of protestors perpetrated by the US-led insurrection to blame on the elected government has thus never made the news. The murderous logic was again evident in microcosm when troops of the coup state opened fire on unarmed citizens approaching their barracks to talk on the Easter eve of the Geneva agreement to repudiate armed violence. The day after the Geneva accord a worse attack exploded in Slavyansk with gunmen (named as Right Sector, the fascist armed group behind the coup whose activities the accord banned)  racing up in jeeps to a checkpoint killing at least three people including a bus-driver before disappearing. As always the US-orchestrated government in Kiev projected all attacks onto Russia with no evidence.

    All the while heavy Ukraine armed forces moved into eastern Ukraine blocked by citizens while Kiev’s own central street still remains occupied by coup forces. “Putin’s threats” continue to be manufactured along with “Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea” despite the inhabitants voting peacefully and overwhelmingly for re-unification with Russia in affirmation of a relationship over two centuries old. Altogether erased from reports are the facts that the Supreme Council of Crimea referred to the United Nations Charter and “the right of nations to self-determination” (Article 2, Chapter 1), the very right Ukraine invoked in seceding from the USSR in 1991, and the same right invoked for the separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Also erased is the UN International Court ruling in July 2010 that “general international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence” Once again we find on closer inspection that what is proclaimed as fact and law by US leaders and allied states is yet another level of a big lie system.

    Conclusion

    The Ukraine crisis is another variation on the great crisis of the world – the undeclared global war of transnational corporate money sequences to multiply themselves through human societies and life on earth in the diagnosable form of an invasive cancer. Yet what is different in Ukraine is that eastern Ukrainian citizens and the world’s largest nation have stood against the new metastasis across traditional borders and cultural regions. Activists with weapons and massive local support across Donetsk region hoist their own flag and demand referendum for constitutional independence from the fascist-led coup state. The elected Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, the equivalent of the US Congress, has given unanimous approval for defense of eastern Ukraine protestors against armed assault from the coup government, already underway with NATO flexing armed power all around. Yet this time the resistance cannot be just overrun or bombed. And this time the system DNA begins to be recognized – US-led destruction of societies to ensure their servile dependency and open borders for hollowing out.

    The very words “Russia” and “Putin” may provoke ruling group-mind reactions pro or con, so analysis here sticks to track records, trends and policy directions – the defining past, present and future lines of system decision on both sides. What is clear now are set-point differences and shifts towards recognition of the society-destroying forces. The most visible shift has been set into motion by the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, big-lie pretexts and serial murders in another US-made civil chaos. But Russia has moved decisively to stop it in the historical process still unfolding.

    The never-named enemy behind the coup and behind the collapse of evolved social and natural life systems across the planet has been blocked on the ground. Neither Putin nor Russia are a model, but like Venezuela and much of Latin America, they now stand against the invasive disorder overrunning life bases and needs in every region. The deepest issue is the US money-cancer system. In murderously destabilizing and overthrowing Ukraine’s elected government and advancing towards Russia’s borders in the latest metastasis, the pathogenic forces are now confronted by the world’s largest country, the longest-tested army and once socialist superpower. All the lies in the world cannot overwhelm this resistance. Everywhere the US-led collapse of world life security is being decoded outside corporate states and media. The Ukraine crisis, perhaps linked to Russia-China movement from the US oil-dollar, could be a new turning point against the Great Sickness of our world.

    John McMurtry, PhD, FRSC, is University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada.[1] The long-guiding thread of his work is the deep-structural study of social value systems across domains and cultures. Since the 1990s, he has focused his most well-known research on the underlying moral and economic logic of ‘globalization’. McMurtry’s principal research project from 2003 to 2011 followed from the invitation by the Secretariat of UNESCO/EOLSS (Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Paris-Oxford) to construct, author and edit Philosophy and World Problems as a multi-volume study. (John McMurty Wikipedia)

     

     



    OpEds: “Putin Should Send Troops Into Ukraine”

    By Paul Craig Roberts

    Cross-posted from Paul Craig Roberts

    putin-bayonets
    Finian Cunningham’s title will strike propagandized Americans as strange, as according to Washington Russia has already sent troops into Ukraine.
    .

    Whether one agrees with Cunningham’s advice to Vladimir Putin, Finian’s denunciation of the mendacity and inhumanity of Washington, its NATO puppet governments, and the entirety of the Western media is on the mark. It is an extraordinary thing that the US government, which markets itself as a light unto the world, the Great Policeman who defends, alone among nations, human rights everywhere, is in brutal fact a cruel, inhumane, vicious murderer of peoples all over the world. The murders of unarmed citizens that are underway in the Russian inhabited areas of Ukraine as I write are Washington’s murders. The neo-fascists, neo-nazis who are murdering Russians in Ukraine are murdering with Washington’s support and on Washington’s orders.

    The only conclusion I can come to is that the US government is in the hands of insane psychopaths. Why are civilized European countries allied with an insane psychopath? How did the Western media, allegedly the home of free speech, become an organization of sociopaths?

    Read Cunningham’s article below…
    PCR

    By Finian Cunningham

    Finian Cunningham.234With a death toll of at least 50 over the weekend inflicted by the Western-backed unelected, fascist regime in Kiev, has the time come for Russian President Vladimir Putin to send his troops into eastern Ukraine?

    The escalating violence committed by the Kiev junta under the Orwellian guise of “an anti-terror operation” strongly warrants that President Putin should give the go-ahead. The stakes are high. Washington and its European allies, their puppet regime in Kiev and the Western mainstream media have for weeks been accusing Russia of covertly orchestrating protests in eastern and southern Ukraine. With no facts to support its claims, Washington alleges that Moscow is “building a pretext to invade and annex Ukrainian territory.”

    If Russia intervenes now, there will be howls of Western assertions that Moscow’s “sneaky plot” is finally being executed. Already Washington is lining up more sanctions against Russia for alleged violation of Ukrainian sovereignty — again based on groundless assertions. And with NATO military forces assigned to Russia’s neighboring countries, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might risk a broader war. But regardless of Western propaganda accusing Russia of malfeasance and in the face of Western threats of punitive response, Moscow should act with boldness based on the facts.

    Despite Western claims, the facts show that the unrest and violence in Ukraine has stemmed from Western subversion in that country, beginning with the CIA-backed street agitation in Kiev last November that led to an illegal coup against the elected government of Victor Yanukovych in February. We could go further back to the CIA-sponsored Orange Revolution of 2004 and the $5 billion invested by Washington for regime change from the early 1990s onwards.

    The neo-Nazi paramilitaries and their political leaders who usurped power in Kiev have gone on to unleash a campaign of terror against ethnic Russians in the east and south of the country, and anyone else who opposes the regime’s power grab.

    The second “anti-terror” crackdown unleashed by the Kiev junta over the weekend was preceded by a similar operation last month following the visit of CIA boss John Brennan to Kiev on April 12-13. The latest more deadly crackdown has resulted in more than 50 dead. In the southern city of Odessa, more than 40 anti-Kiev protesters were killed when a building they were seeking refuge in was set ablaze by hundreds of neo-Nazi storm troopers acting on the tacit direction of the junta in Kiev and its Western state sponsors.

    As Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors are “up to their elbows in blood” following the weekend deadly violence.

    There were mealy-mouthed condemnations of “violence by all sides” from the US Secretary of State John Kerry; and there were attempts in the Western media, such as the BBC, New York Times and Voice of America, to downplay the criminality of the Kiev junta in the deaths, saying that victims in Odessa came after “clashes between two sides.” The BBC even gave prominence to the spin from the Kiev junta, which blamed the violence on police incompetence and “pro-Russian activists.”

    The fact is that people were massacred — including several others in the eastern city of Slavyansk — by Western-backed Kiev forces. Eyewitnesses in Odessa say that when people jumped from windows to escape the blaze they were “finished off” by neo-Nazis on the ground who had minutes before set the building alight with petrol bombs.

    These forces comprise remnants of the Ukrainian national army loyal to the fascist junta, as well as Right Sector neo-Nazi paramilitaries outfitted as a “national guard,” and very possibly the involvement of US-backed mercenaries and Special Forces.

    Reports have emerged that the CIA is now officially collaborating with the regime in Kiev, although the US State Department uses Orwellian language to describe the liaison as “security consultation.”

    Kerry’s disingenuous deploring of violence in Ukraine barely conceals the fact that Washington has given the green light to the lethal crackdown by the Kiev junta against its own citizens. President Barack Obama said while the crackdown was underway on Friday that “Ukraine has the right to restore order.” By “Ukraine” Obama is referring to the unelected criminal regime that Washington railroaded into office in complete violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and on the back of murderous street violence, including the covert sniper massacre on February 20 that killed up to 100 people.

    The Kiev junta is warning that the current “anti-terror operation” is to continue apace. We can expect more deaths in the coming days among ethnic Russian populations in the east and south of Ukraine — carried out with the full approval of Washington and with the assistance of its covert forces. Russian President Putin has already received authorization from his parliament in March to send in troops to protect the millions of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. He has moral and legal right on his side. The only “impediment” is Western propaganda claims — claims that have been discredited — and threats of sanctions and military response from NATO.

    But Putin should not be blackmailed by baseless lies when peoples’ lives are being threatened by a Western-backed fascist cabal and their murderous paramilitaries. Besides, more and more people around the world, including the US and European public, can see through the sordid tissue of lies that the Western governments and their pathetic news media have been peddling against Russia over the Ukraine crisis. The present situation resembles the previous covert US-led operation in South Ossetia in 2008 when NATO-backed Georgian troops tried to destabilize that country, a Russian ally. Russia acted decisively then, sent in its troops and routed the NATO plot. And Washington backed down.

    Washington is at it again: subverting, lying, killing and threatening. But it’s a cowardly bluff that Putin should slap down immediately. The reality is much too serious to entertain these cynical Western games. Peoples’ lives are in real danger in Ukraine from the fascist paramilitaries and politician-gangsters that Washington installed in Kiev and which it is now giving full vent to. The bloody events this weekend are tragic testimony to the urgent threat.

    If Putin takes action, he can be sure that world public opinion is on his side. Washington will find that it is a loser, and deserves it. It has nothing on its side but malign and negative forces.

    Seventy years ago, Russia defeated fascism in Europe. It is time to deliver that honorable blow again.
    __________________

    ABOUT PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

    Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente’s Trends Journal. He has had numerous university appointments. His book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available here. His latest book,  How America Was Lost, has just been released and can be ordered here.

     



    The Ukraine crisis and the political lies of the media

    Yea. he is a big problem. To whom?

    Yea. he is a big problem. But to whom?

    ALEX LANTIER

    As the Obama administration and its allies in Europe escalate their threats against Russia over the crisis in Ukraine, the American media plays its assigned role as propaganda mouthpiece.

    Not a single critical voice can be found within the so-called mainstream media. The newspapers and television news programs are filled with lies, anti-Russian propaganda, and—preparing for the possibility that the crisis escalates out of control—apologetics for war.

    The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” sets the general tone for the media as a whole. The Times boasts of having 12 reporters in Ukraine, yet it provides no serious reporting on what is happening. This is all the more significant given the extraordinary implications of a major conflict between the United States and Russia that could quickly evolve into the first war between nuclear powers in world history.

    Over the past two weeks, the Times has been caught in a series of fabrications. Last week, it ran a front-page lead story replete with photographs handed to it by the State Department and the US-backed Ukrainian government purporting to show that Russian Special Forces are directing the protests in eastern Ukraine.

    The Times report was quickly exposed as a fraud, including by the WSWS. It took only a quick search on the Internet to expose the so-called evidence as either doctored or fabricated. Subsequent acknowledgements of the “controversy” over the photographs—exercises in damage control and cover-up—have been buried on the newspaper’s inside pages.

    Far from being chastened by these exposures, the Times rapidly moved on to its next assignment from the State Department—a front-page article published yesterday alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a secret fortune of between $40 billion and $70 billion. The Times acknowledged in its own article that the allegations consist of “rumors and speculation” with “little if any hard evidence.” That did not prevent it from seeking to legitimize the gossip by elevating it to the status of a prominent “news” item.

    On the newspaper’s back pages are columns by various commentators, reflecting the generally stupid musings of one or another faction of the state apparatus. Sunday was the turn of Thomas Friedman, who infamously backed the 2003 US war in Iraq and boasted that he had “no problem with a war for oil.”

    Purporting to explain the Ukrainian crisis to Times readers, Friedman writes: “Quite simply, a majority of Ukrainians got mad as hell at the game imposed on them—serving as bit players in Putin’s sphere of influence, so Russia could continue to feel like a great power… After a bottom-up revolution in the Maidan…Ukrainians are asserting their own sphere of influence, a desire to be part of the EU.”

    Friedman does not mention that the Kiev government he glorifies as waging a struggle for individual liberty is an unelected puppet regime, and the “bottom-up revolution” was led by fascists working with the US and Germany.

    Questions of history, social and political forces, geopolitical agendas, beginning with those of the United States, are not even hinted at. Instead, one gets yet another foreign leader targeted for destruction by US imperialism presented as the devil incarnate.

    The powerful bond that united Ukraine and Russia arising from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that overthrew tsarism and opened the door to the liberation of the oppressed masses; the heroic struggle of the Red Army to liberate Ukraine from the murderous grip of German fascism in World War II; the catastrophic consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union—these issues are a closed book to this ignorant, complacent, but lavishly paid flunkey of the US ruling class.

    The Times ’ standard is followed by all the major newspapers and television outlets. In following the coverage in the American media, one would never know that the new government in Kiev is populated by individuals from the anti-Semitic Svoboda party, which was condemned in a 2012 vote of the EU parliament. Nor would one know that the Right Sector militia and Svoboda party glorify Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists participated in the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jews.

    The fact that the US has been aggressively backing the crackdown in eastern Ukraine—including sending CIA director John Brennan to Kiev—is covered over. The leaked phone call between US State Department official Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt before the putsch, discussing whom to install as Ukraine’s prime minister, is never mentioned.

    The media covers up the howling contradictions in the official presentation of the Ukraine crisis. Before the 2003 US war in Iraq, Washington denounced Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for “killing his own people.” US imperialism attacked Libya in 2011, claiming it had to forestall an imminent crackdown by Gaddafi on protesters in the rebellious city of Benghazi. The Obama administration declared Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unfit to rule because he unleashed his police and military against protesters. The official rationale for backing the coup against the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was that Yanukovych had destroyed the legitimacy of his government by attacking the Maidan protesters.

    But now, Washington is cracking the whip and demanding that its puppets in Kiev get on with the job of drowning the upsurge in the east in blood. At the same time, it calls Russian threats to intervene to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the violence of the state a crime against civilization.

    The media in the US has undergone a protracted degeneration. During the period of the Vietnam War, critical voices within the media played a role in bringing the brutal reality of the war to the attention of the American public. In 1971, the Times ’ and Washington Post ’s publication of the Pentagon Papers helped expose the lies used to drive the American people into war in Southeast Asia.

    The ruling class decided that would never happen again. The military and intelligence apparatus rapidly took the corporate-controlled media in hand. Even the pretense of independence from the state has been abandoned. The media has played an increasingly shameless role in each successive military intervention—the first Iraq war, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the “humanitarian” air war against Serbia.

    The final nail in the coffin of anything remotely resembling an independent media came with 9/11 and the “war on terror,” as demonstrated by the media’s “embedded” role in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its brazen propaganda in support of the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.

    The major newspapers today acknowledge passing articles through government channels before publication, a practice that in other contexts is called state censorship. The media talking heads and columnists make it their business to assist in the witch-hunt of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

    The fact that the entire foreign policy of the corporate-financial elite is erected on the basis of lies that cannot withstand the slightest critical examination is a sign not of strength, but of weakness. A vast gulf separates the working class from the warmongers in the American ruling class and their lackeys in the media.

    Opposition will come from outside this entire corrupt framework. It will center in the working class. A major task of an independent working class movement against war will be to hold accountable the war propagandists who dominate the media.

    Alex Lantier is a senior political analyst with wsws.org