71. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #71, April 27, 2022
1. Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill on Ukraine War, Media,
Propaganda and Accountability
2. Ukrainian Academic Olga
Baysha on The Real Zelensky
3. Caitlin Johnstone: Everyone’s Anti-War until the War
Propaganda Starts
4. Pope Francis states the NATO may have provoked Ukraine War
Video: “Noam Chomsky and
Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Media, Propaganda, and
Accountability.”
TRANSCEND
VIDEOS, 25 Apr 2022
Jeremy
Scahill | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service
Video:
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/04/noam-chomsky-and-jeremy-scahill-on-the-russia-ukraine-war-the-media-propaganda-and-accountability/
Noam Chomsky spoke with Jeremy Scahill in a
wide-ranging discussion on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
14 Apr 2022 – The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now surpassed 50 days of
sustained mass death and destruction. Despite several rounds
of negotiations over the past seven weeks, the war continues to
intensify. Russian President Vladimir Putin remains defiant and has indicated
that the brutal military campaign will continue unabated. On Tuesday, Putin said negotiations had hit a “dead end” and Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov warned that Russia will not pause its military operations during
future peace talks. U.S. President Joe Biden announced this week yet
another allocation of $800 million dollars in “more sophisticated and
heavier-duty weaponry” than previous transfers to the Ukrainian side.
Meanwhile, NATO appears set to expand further, with both Finland and Sweden
indicating they are actively considering joining the alliance. Germany and
other European countries are publicly committing to buying and selling more
weapons and spending more on defense. NATO is raising the prospect of expanding
its permanent military presence in Europe, and Washington is reasserting its political dominance over Europe on security matters.
On Sunday, in an interview on NBC, national security adviser
Jake Sullivan cast the war not just as a defense of Ukraine but also an
opportunity to deliver significant blows to the stability of the Russian state.
“At the end of the day, what we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine,
a weakened and isolated Russia, and a stronger, more unified, more determined
West,” he said. “We believe that all three of those objectives are in sight,
can be accomplished.”
As Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of
heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including massacres of large
numbers of civilians, Putin’s government and media apparatus is waging an all-out campaign to denounce the allegations as lies and fake news.
Biden has officially accused Putin of war crimes and suggested
he should face a “war crime trial.” Russia, like the U.S., has steadfastly refused to ratify the treaty establishing the
International Criminal Court, so it is unclear how or where the administration
believes such a trial would take place.
This week, renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky joined
me for a wide-ranging discussion on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
holding the powerful accountable, the role of media and propaganda in war, and
what Chomsky believes is necessary to end the bloodshed in Ukraine.
UKRAINE: The Real
Zelensky
April 29, 2022
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/29/ukraine-the-real-zelensky/?fbclid=IwAR3MiEIbcBCga5j_v04yINJ-m24xyXFKt4BYQDG7G26hS62tH5D3QXFtwyA
Natylie Baldwin
interviews academic Olga Baysha about Ukraine’s president, a former
TV actor who has become, since the start of the war, an A-list celebrity in the
U.S.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 23, the eve of
Russia’s invasion. At the time he was hosting the presidents of Lithuania and
Poland in Kiev. (President of Ukraine, Flickr)
A comedic
actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was
virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in former U.S.
President Donald Trump’s impeachment theater.
But when
Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, Zelensky was suddenly transformed to an
A-list celebrity in U.S. media. American news consumers were bombarded with
images of a man who appeared overcome by the
tragic events, possibly in over his head, but ultimately sympathetic. It
didn’t take long for that image to evolve into the khaki-clad, tireless hero
governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the
barbarians of autocracy from the east.
But beyond
that carefully crafted Western media image is something much more complicated
and less flattering. Zelensky was elected by 73 percent of the vote on a
promise to pursue peace while the rest of his platform was vague. On the eve of
the invasion, however, his approval rating had sunk to 31 percent due to the pursuit
of deeply unpopular policies.
Ukrainian
academic, Olga Baysha, author of Democracy,
Populism, and Neoliberalism in Ukraine: On the Fringes of the Virtual and the
Real, has studied Zelensky’s rise to power and how he has wielded
that power since becoming president.
In the
interview below, Baysha discusses Zelensky’s embrace of neoliberalism and
increasing authoritarianism, how his actions contributed to the current war;
his counterproductive and self-absorbed leadership throughout the war, the
complex cultural and political views and identities of Ukrainians, the partnership
between neoliberals and the radical right during and after the Maidan uprising
and whether a Russian takeover of the entire Donbass region might be less
popular among the local population than it would have been in 2014.
Continued: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/29/ukraine-the-real-zelensky/?fbclid=IwAR3MiEIbcBCga5j_v04yINJ-m24xyXFKt4BYQDG7G26hS62tH5D3QXFtwyA
From the excellent Media Watchdog organization Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
https://fair.org/extra-newsletter/
Lifting
the Lid from the Memory Hole: Afghanistan
“Today we
Afghans remain trapped between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and the
U.S./NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other.” Malalai Joya, A Woman Among Warlords (2009), 227.
Patriotic Dissent: How a Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars” STEVE EARLY - SUZANNE GORDON
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/24/patriotic-dissent-how-a-working-class-soldier-turned-against-forever-wars/
(Also in the VFP The Peace Sentinel (Formerly Peace in Our Times)
JULY 24, 2020
When it comes to debate about US military policy, the
2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of
2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in
the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our
troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”
In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind
of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a
hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point,
Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless
wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.”
In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no
reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year
required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian
and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes, “endless
wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in
something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues
to increase astronomically.”
When the National Defense Authorization Act for the
next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders
proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion
could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee
introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts.
Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol
Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56
to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring
the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.
An Appeal to Conscience
Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US
military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the
never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics,
with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan
is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book
called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)
Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same
kind of punch as Howard Zinn’s classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his
service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of
the foreign policy establishment, and the military’s own current generation of
“yes men for another war power hungry president.” His appeal to the conscience
of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an
eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and
painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful,
and disastrous our post 9/11
Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West
Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a
fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at
the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls “deep-seated
toxically masculine patriotism.” As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he
was still a “burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer” and
definitely not, he reports, any kind of “defeatist liberal, pacifist, or
dissenter.”
Sjursen’s initial experience in combat—vividly described
in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the
Myth of The Surge (University
Press of New England)—“occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife”
in Iraq. “The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life,” Sjursen
writes in Patriotic
Dissent. When he returned, at age 24,
from his “brutal, ghastly deployment” as a platoon leader, he “knew that the
war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral.” This “unexpected,
undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of
the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East—what was then
unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).”
A Professional Soldier
By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province,
Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but “no longer
believed in anything we were doing.” He was, he confesses, “simply a
professional soldier—a mercenary, really—on a mandatory mission I couldn’t
avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a
triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return.”
Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of
returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly
competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school
first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the
“People’s Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant,
militarist sea of Republican red.” During his studies at the state university,
Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his “own doubts about and
opposition to US foreign policy.” He completed his first book, Ghost Riders, which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency
critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on
active duty, but with “almost no blowback” from superior officers.
Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen
pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles
for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West
Point so that body of work triggered “a grueling, stressful, and scary
four-month investigation”by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the
author was subjected to “a non-publication order.” At risk were his career,
military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment
for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words “contemptuous of the
President of the United States.” His “PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses” helped
him qualify for a medical retirement last year.
Sjursen has now traded his “identity as a soldier—the
only identity I’ve known in my adult life—for that of an anti-war,
anti-imperialist, social justice crusader,” albeit one who did not attend his
first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several
left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about
military affairs and veterans’ issues. He’s a frequent, funny, and always
well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as
a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal
publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom
fellow.
In Patriotic Dissent,
Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to
peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by
reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society
and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of
dissent. One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major
General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service
between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and
working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus
payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously
declared that “war is just a racket” and lamented his own past role as “a
high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Reframing Dissent
Sjursen contrasts Butler’s anti-interventionist
whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking
veterans today after “nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful
American wars.” Among friends and former West Point classmates, he
knows many still serving who “obediently resign themselves to continued combat
deployments” because they long ago “stopped asking questions about their own
role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare
state.”
Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like
Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq
Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home.US, a network of veterans
influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to “reframe
dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism.” But
actually taming the military-industrial complex will require “big-tent,
intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike,” on a much larger scale.
One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the “vast
majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve” in the military and the “one
percent of their fellow citizens on active duty,” who then become part of “an
increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran
community.”
Not many on the left favor a return to conscription. But
Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the U.S. replacing “citizen
soldiering” with “a tiny professional warrior caste,” created in response to
draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military.
As he observes:
“Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign
policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the
possibility of having to put ‘skin in the game.’ Without at least the potential
requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless
wars, an entire generation—or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft
in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to
distance themselves from its reality.”
At a time when the U.S. “desperately needs a massive,
public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave” sweeping over the country,
we have instead a “civil-military” gap that, Sjursen believes, has “stifled
antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so.” That’s
why his own mission is to find more “socially conscious veterans of these
endless, fruitless wars” who are willing to “step up and form a vanguard of sorts
for revitalized patriotic dissent.” Readers of Sjursen’s book, whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace
activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to
be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive
study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across
the country. Let’s hope that the author’s willingness to take personal risks,
re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many
others, in uniform and out.
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