OMNI
RUSSIA, UKRAINE
ANTHOLOGY #15
March 27, 2022
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Omnicenter.org/donate/
CONTENTS
NATO AND wHY DOES uKRAINE mATTER?
Jordan Smith, “They Saw It
Coming.” The New Republic (April 2022).
Quick Summary of NATO Formation and
Expansion (Dick)
Diana Johnstone. “For Washington, War Never Ends.” Consortium
News (March 16, 2022).
Mary Elise Sarotte. Not One
Inch. Apparently the definitive book
on US, NATO,
Ukraine, and Russia.
WWIII
Caitlin Johnstone. Report on Steven Starr. Call to World to Pay Attention to Nuclear
WWIII.
Bryan Dyne Interviews Steven Starr on
WWIII and Nuclear Winter.
Art Hobson. Pondering Ukraine in Context of Nuclear War.
No Fly Zone: 2 Articles
Zelensky Calls for No Fly Zone
Ben Burgis. No Fly Zone Will
Start WWIII
Ukraine’s Wealth Part of the Conflict?
but little discussed.
SANCTIONS Add to the Conflict and
Hypocrisy.
War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy: 4 Essays
Wars are Misinformation and Delusion Machines
Free Ourselves of Propaganda Tunnels.
Ukrainian Nazis and Propaganda by Omission
Lt. Gen. Fabio Mini, Interview on
Hypocrisy in Wars the Ukraine/Russia War
Russian or CIA Lied in the Election,
Biden’s Laptop
Youtube, US Hypocrisy
IMF Connection
Russia and China
Russia, Ukraine Anthology
#14
TEXTS
OMNI: RUSSIA, UKRAINE ANTHOLOGY #15
NATO FORMATION AND EXPANSION
Jordan Michael Smith. “They Saw It Coming.” The New
Republic (April 2022). Smith
provides a thumbnail history of NATO expansion and Western opposition.
“Throughout
the 1990s and early twenty-first century, critics…warned that U.S. decisions
were provoking and humiliating a weakened but still powerful country.”
When the Clinton admin.
wished to expand NATO, Charles Kupchan in The
New York Times in 1994 warned Western leaders it would inflame Russian
nationalism.
In 1995, distinguished
diplomats warned in The New York Review
of Books that “NATO expansion would be disastrous.”
George Kennan wrote in
1997 that expansion was “a historic error.”
In the 1990s Clinton
ignored the warnings. And in 1998
Senator Moynihan rebuked Senator Biden’s
promotion of the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as
full NATO members.
President W. Bush also
disregarded the warnings.
At the 2008 NATO Summit in
Bucharest, the org. declared that “Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become
members, over Russia’s threats of retaliation.”
The historian James Goldgeier labeled that “hugely provocative.”
A few months later the
Russian-Georgian War erupted.
But the Ukrainian “2014
revolution,” the coup overthrowing the elected pro-Russian president, and the
Obama admin. support of the
“pro-Western, anti-Russian forces in Ukraine” was the final threat to Putin.
The result: Biden
v. Putin, a New Hot War and China and Russia
“increasingly cooperating.”
The historian Michael
Mandelbaum observed that Putin had learned from this history that Russia had to
reinforce its military, and not trust the USA.
--Dick
References cited:
Samuel Charap. Everyone
Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.
James Goldgeier. The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO.
Vladislav Zubok. Collapse:
The Fall of the Soviet Union.
NATO
For Washington, war never ends. Editor. Mronline.org ( 3-20-22).
The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the
war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.
West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to
the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Photo:
Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with
the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this
complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by
forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor
Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early
elections in an accord with European leaders.
Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme
right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing a leadership in
Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.
By the end of the year, the government of “democratic Ukraine”
was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance
was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the
State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy
was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The
ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor,
Sandro Kvitachvili.
Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili
was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President
Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son,
Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company
Barisma.
The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused
resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by
ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in
Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to
the coup.
The U.S.-installed regime in Kiev then launched a war against
the provinces that continued for eight year, killing thousands of civilians.
And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful
return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia’s main naval base at
Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea
had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in
1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This
was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia,
accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.
But to the United States and most of the West, what was a
humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.
The Oval
Office Back Door to NATO
Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass
Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join
whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was
always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a NATO member,
perhaps France or even Germany.
But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the
White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was
reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic
Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s success is
central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy”–Washington’s
current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus
Communism.
It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against
Russia:
In the 21st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw
borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states
have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The
United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia
accountable for its aggression. America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and
territorial integrity is unwavering.
The Statement also clearly described Kiev’s war against Donbass
as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising assertion: “The
United States does not and will never recognize
Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” ( my emphasis). This is followed by
promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of
recovery of Donbass and Crimea.
Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously
transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily
turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked
increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault
on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to
“understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason
that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don’t. But
they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.
Ambiguous
Echoes
Putin explaining his reasons for
going to war. (Photo: AP screenshot from YouTube)
Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in Ukraine as
necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the
U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality, the
situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than
it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of
Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.
But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian
invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.
Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer
a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S.
command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it
chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation
of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any dramatic
lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya
provided a second example.
Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might have been
expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact
that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries,
Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic.
Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.
But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The
racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian
security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes
that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly “Asiatic” due to the
Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.
Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy
Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic
fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they
fight on our side against the Slavs?
[I have not yet read Not One Inch, but the reviews of it I
have read and of her other books praise her scholarly excellence. I am giving several contacts. --D]
Mary Elise Sarotte. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making
of the Cold War Stalemate, by the prize-winning historian Mary
Elise Sarotte,
The
United States and the NATO Non-extension Assurances ...
https://direct.mit.edu ›
isec › article › The-United-States-a...
Jan 1, 2021 — See Mary
Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the
Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO ...
The
Historical Dispute Behind Russia's Threat to Invade Ukraine
https://www.newyorker.com ›
News › Vladimir Putin
Jan 25, 2022 — ... is
one focus of a new book by the historian Mary Elise Sarotte. ...
Looming most of all is the question of NATO: Putin
considers the ...
To
grasp what's going on at the Russia-Ukraine border ... - NPR
https://www.npr.org ›
2022/02/24 › to-grasp-whats-going...8 days ago — ... the
Ukraine crisis, NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Mary
Elise Sarotte, ... get what Mikhail Gorbachev didn't
get, which was a veto over NATO ...
Mary
Elise Sarotte and Robert Zoellick — Not One Inch
https://www.belfercenter.org ›
event › mary-elise-sarott...
Nov 15, 2021 — With these
words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin ...
The
End of the Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO ...
https://russiamatters.org ›
analysis › deal-or-no-deal-en...
May 5, 2016 — Mary
Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the
Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement ...
Not
One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher ...
https://academic.oup.com ›
article-abstract
by ME
Sarotte · 2010 · Cited by 51 — ...
Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment
toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990. Get access Arrow. Mary
Elise Sarotte.
NUCLEAR WWIII
Caitlin
Johnstone. “The
Huge Gap Between How Serious Nuclear War Is And How Seriously It’s
Being Taken.” Interview of Steven
Starr.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/16/the-huge-gap-between-how-serious-nuclear-war-is-and-how-seriously-its-being-taken/
Sometimes I’m not sure what presents a greater threat to humanity,
nuclear war or the colossal stupidity that has made it possible.
Due to the skyrocketing risk of a world-ending
confrontation between the United States and Russia, World Socialist
Website is re-releasing a series of interviews it conducted in 2017
with experts on the subject of nuclear war. One of them is with a
senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility named Steven Starr, which WSWS has titled
“Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war”.
Starr discusses the research which has shown that in addition to
the unthinkable horrors of flattened cities and nuclear fallout we’ve all been
told about, “a war fought with existing US and Russian nuclear arsenals is
predicted to make agriculture impossible for a decade or longer, dooming most
people to die from a nuclear famine.”
Starr says a false narrative has been spun that the science behind
nuclear winter theory is weak, a narrative I’ve had parroted at me from time to
time in my commentary on this subject. He says the science is in fact
peer-reviewed and robust, and actually makes very conservative estimates of the
environmental havoc that would be unleashed by black carbon soot thrown into
the stratosphere by a large nuclear exchange. But this science has been
actively suppressed and marginalized by a junk science smear campaign and the
slashing of research funding.
“After the success of the smear campaign against nuclear winter,
most people eventually accepted this narrative and funding for new research
dried up,” Starr said. “This had a big impact on the public, who got the
impression that the nuclear winter theory had been disproven. As a result, this
issue is hardly ever talked about now in the mainstream media.”
“One of the reasons for this is that over the years, trillions of
dollars have been spent on nuclear weapons,” Starr adds. “If the conclusions of
the nuclear winter research—that nuclear war is suicide for all peoples and
nations—had gained widespread acceptance and understanding, it is likely that
the whole nuclear weapons industry would have been shut down.”
Indeed, when you’re talking
about the movement of trillions of
dollars (Obama committed $1 trillion to modernizing
America’s nuclear arsenal for the explicit purpose of better confronting
Russia), you’re talking about the kind of money that any amount of underhanded
gangster tactics would be employed to secure.
But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact
that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on
this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers
of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.
If people truly understood that their life and the lives of
everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship
maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared
empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire
architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw
fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power
struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about
what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.
So I think we’re seeing a
broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the
precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed:
because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they
deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to
happen.
A responsible news media
would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it
would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding,
or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations
as nearly happened many times during the last cold
war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to
manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it
can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.
This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it
means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant
looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in
reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they
are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action
against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding
this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of
the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to
democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you
roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.
These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a
violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life.
There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the
primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and
making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses
they themselves don’t understand.
In the aforementioned interview Starr also touches on the ease
with which a nuclear war could be set off by a technical malfunction, and what
the earliest moments of a nuclear war will likely look like:
If the US early warning systems detect a missile launch, the
President can order a launch of retaliatory nuclear strike before incoming
nuclear warheads take out communication systems and weapons. Of course, if this
is a false warning of attack, then the “retaliatory” strike becomes a
first-strike and a nuclear war has started.
Moreover, if somebody has launched a nuclear strike against
the silos in which your nuclear weapons are housed in, you don’t retaliate by
targeting their empty silos. You target their cities. Russia only has about 230
cities with a population greater than 100,000 and the US has 312. So it’s not
that hard to wipe out a couple hundred cities in an initial salvo.
Starr also discusses the
insane belief that Russia will probably back down when threatened with the
possibility of nuclear war, a line of thinking that’s becoming so common today that it’s almost
its own genre of natsec punditry:
The strategists often say, “Oh, well, Russia will back down.” What
if they don’t? And why would they back down on their own border? Any
US/NATO-Russian direct military conflict will very likely lead to a full-scale
nuclear war.
In another 2017 World Socialist Website interview, this one with Los Alamos
Study Group secretary and executive director Greg Mello, we get some more
insight into the reality of the nuclear threat:
To a first approximation, in a nuclear war between the US and
Russia, everybody in the world would die. Some people in the southern
hemisphere might survive, but probably not even them.
…
The imagination cannot encompass nuclear war. Nuclear war means
nuclear winter. It means the collapse of very fragile electronic, financial,
governmental, administrative systems that keep everyone alive. We’d be lucky to
reboot in the early 19th century. And if enough weapons are detonated, the
collapse of the Earth’s ozone layer would mean that every form of life that has
eyes could be blinded. The combined effects of a US-Russian nuclear war would
mean that pretty much every terrestrial mammal, and many plants, would become
extinct. There would be a dramatic biological thinning.
The gulf between these expert analyses and what people are
consuming in the news could not possibly be wider. People simply don’t
understand what’s being done with their lives by powerful people who care only
about imperial domination, and the powerful intend to keep it that way.
It doesn’t need to be like
this. There’s no reason our planet needs to be dominated by any one single
power structure, especially if doing so means risking complete annihilation. We should all be pushing
for de-escalation, diplomacy and detente, and for the nations and peoples of
this world to begin working together for the good of everyone.
“Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of
nuclear war.” Verbatim interview of scientist and
anti-nuclear activist Steven Starr by Bryan
Dyne. 13 March 2022.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/14/nucl-m14.html
“I do not know with what
weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with
sticks and stones.” – attributed to Albert Einstein
In 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published
a series of interviews with leading experts on the subject of nuclear war. They
spoke on both the inherent dangers of such a conflict, even of a “limited”
nuclear exchange, as well as the decades-long effort by the American military,
media and political establishment, to conceal the true horror that such a war
would bring.
Today we are republishing the
first of these interviews, in which Steven Starr, a senior scientist at
Physicians for Social Responsibility who maintains the website Nuclear
Famine, spoke on the fallacy that any country could
somehow “win” a nuclear war.
The threat of nuclear war is
now more acute than at any time in history. The continuous eastward expansion
of NATO following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has culminated in
the US-NATO provocation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has already had
immense global repercussions.
Thousands of soldiers and
civilians have been killed in Ukraine and nearly 3 million people have been
displaced. The Western media and sections of the political establishment
recklessly demand that NATO impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, in which NATO
aircraft would attempt to shoot down their Russian counterparts. This would
immediately provoke a direct confrontation between the world’s two largest
nuclear-armed powers, with incalculable consequences.
Amid the war in Eastern Europe,
the coronavirus pandemic continues unabated. According to estimates of excess
deaths, between 18 and 20 million people have likely died directly or
indirectly from COVID-19 during the past two years. A nuclear war would raise
such a scale of death from the millions to the billions.
The pandemic—which amounts to a
social crime of staggering dimensions—has proven once again the willingness of
the capitalist ruling elites to sacrifice the lives of millions of people, as
took place in World War I and World War II. The same ruling elites are entirely
capable of starting a nuclear war, which could quickly snuff out all human life
and potentially all life on Earth.
The fundamental conclusion that
must be drawn from the present drive to World War III and the ongoing pandemic
is that capitalism is a bankrupt social system which threatens the health and
very existence of humanity. The international working class must overthrow
world capitalism and build a new society upon socialist foundations, based on
nuclear and military disarmament, social equality and scientific planning.
All workers who understand the
present dangers and the need to build a revolutionary movement to stop the
drive to war and stop the pandemic should make the decision to join and build the International Committee of the Fourth
International (ICFI) as the world party of
socialist revolution.
* * * * *
Bryan Dyne: First, could you tell me something
about your background and how you became so involved in exposing the full
consequences of nuclear war?
Steven Starr: I’ve been fixated on nuclear war ever
since experiencing the Cuban Missile Crisis in third grade. I remember the
teachers huddled around a little black and white TV set and telling us to not
look at the flash and to sit against the interior of the walls. All the
duck-and-cover drills left an imprint on me.
Later on, I came across Carl Sagan’s book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear
Winter and the End of the Arms Race which was published in
1990. In it, Sagan talks about the atmospheric research that was done in
the 1980s that shows the climatic and environmental consequences that would be
caused by a nuclear war. Sagan and four other NASA scientists looked at the
data collected on the global dust storms on Mars and specifically were looking
at the difference of the Martian surface temperature when there was a dust
storm and when there wasn’t. Then they asked, “What could cause something
similar on Earth?” The answers they came up with are volcanic eruptions or
nuclear war.
A nuclear
fireball lights up the sky (Photo: Federal government of the United States,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
This made me
realize just how dangerous the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia really
were. Even with the simple atmospheric models of the 1980s, it was clear that
the massive firestorms created by a nuclear war would produce enough smoke and
black carbon soot to block the majority of sunlight from reaching the surface
of Earth. The original nuclear winter research predicted that a war fought with
the nuclear arsenals of the 1980s would create temperatures colder than those
experienced at the height of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago. This would
leave the Earth virtually uninhabitable. The recent research found that the
original studies actually underestimated the consequences of nuclear war. . .
. MORE
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/14/nucl-m14.html
BD: You mention in one of your articles
that the US is “sleepwalking towards nuclear war.” Is this sleepwalking or a
deliberate policy?
SS: That’s a legitimate question. I agree
with you. “Sleepwalking” was the most polite way I could say it.
To give an example, Foreign Affairs published
an article in 2006 written by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press called “The Rise of
Nuclear Primacy.” It was very disquieting, basically claiming that the weapon
systems in the US had gotten to the point where it could undertake a first
strike against Russia and Russia would lose any ability to retaliate. Nuclear
primacy conveyed the idea that the US could “win” a nuclear war against Russia
should the US attack first—except that Lieber and Press took no account of the
environmental consequences of such a first strike. Robock and Toon tell us that
the resulting nuclear famine from such a nuclear first strike would kill the
inhabitants of the side that “won” the war.
Russia also fears that the
US/NATO Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) that has been deployed at sea and on
land surrounding Russia could be used as part of a US first-strike. This is
because Russia considers BMD to have offensive capabilities, that it could be
used as a “mop up” system to take out any surviving Russian missiles not
destroyed in a nuclear first strike.
This has led to Russia
targeting the US/NATO Ballistic Missile Defense sites that the US has set up in
Eastern Europe, including the operational system in Romania and the one being
built in Poland. Russia also sees a special threat from these facilities
because they can also be used to launch nuclear-armed cruise missiles. This
fact has been widely discussed on Russian mass media and the Russian people are
demanding that Putin take some action against these sites.
BD: Given how dangerous nuclear war is,
what do you think of the increasingly hysterical denunciations of Russia and
the Russian government in the US media and by the Democrats and Republicans?
SS: It’s very disconcerting to see the
leadership of both the Democrats and Republicans to come out with this type of
thinking. These anti-Putin and anti-Russian stories keep coming up on thousands
of different media sources simultaneously, including the New York Times and Washington Post, which are
supposed to be the newspapers of record, and it acts like a smear campaign.
Almost all such stories are based on no information or false information and
they have created a narrative that is pushing us toward war with Russia. There
are no two ways about it.
A war with China wouldn’t be
any better. China happens to be a strategic partner of Russia. They also have
20-30 ICBMs that carry three-megaton warheads; each warhead could set 600
square miles on fire. China also has submarine-launched ballistic missiles that
can be armed with nuclear warheads.
Yet there is no discussion of
the existential threat of nuclear war in the US. This has to be the starting
place for any discussion on nuclear weapons. If we have the best scientists in
the world telling us that a nuclear war would wipe out most of the human race,
that should be our primary concern. Why should these arsenals even be allowed
to exist?
ART HOBSON: As the planet remains on high alert, does it make sense to risk
global destruction to preserve Ukraine’s option to join NATO?
Pondering the effects of nuclear
war by Art Hobson | March 15, 2022
https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2022/mar/15/opinion-art-hobson-as-the-planet-remains-on-high/
On Feb. 8, during a joint press conference with French President
Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an alarming answer to a
reporter's question: If Ukraine joined NATO, and if war erupts between Russia
and Ukraine, then NATO will join with Ukraine against Russia. In this case,
Russia would be unable to match NATO's military might, and would need to resort
to nuclear weapons.
As outlined in several recent columns, a certain segment of
Russian culture, including Putin, is paranoid about attack from the West. It's
an obsession born of such terrifying experiences as invasions by Hitler and
Napoleon.
If this all seems bizarre, you aren't alone. Will we really risk
the end of civilization so that Ukraine can retain the option to possibly, at
some uncertain future date, join NATO?
It's time for all of us to note a few realities:.
In 1979, the U.S. government published "The Effects of
Nuclear War." Among other things, it reported on the effects of a single
one-megaton nuclear bomb dropped on the center of a typical city such as
Detroit. There would be over one million immediate casualties, half of them
fatalities, in this city of 4 million (in 1979). This excludes longer-term casualties
due to radioactivity on the ground and in dust lofted into the mushroom cloud
that later falls out downwind. Nothing significant will be left standing out to
two miles (in all directions) from the central point on the ground. At five
miles out, 50 percent of the people suffer casualties and most structures, such
as the automobile plants, are destroyed or severely damaged. There is
significant damage and casualties out to 10 miles from the center.
Starting about an hour after the blast, radioactive fallout
begins in some areas, depending on wind speed, wind direction and rain. In
these areas, and during at least the first week, fallout is fatal within a few
hours of outdoor exposure. Nuclear radiation will remain dangerous out to 10
miles from the center for about 10 years, after which it will slowly decay to
lower levels comparable to the natural radiation we all receive daily from our
environment.
A one megaton nuclear fusion bomb or "hydrogen bomb"
packs the energy of 60 fission bombs, or "atomic bombs," of the type
that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in 1945, killing 200,000 -- 50 percent of
the city's population. Today's nuclear weapons are somewhat smaller than one
megaton. Russia, for example, has 2,565 nuclear weapons including 500 in the 0.5-0.8
megaton range and most of the remainder at 0.1 megaton (six Hiroshimas) or
less. The U.S. has a similar arsenal.
For further perspective, consider a single U.S. Navy Trident
submarine. It can carry 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each packing
eight hydrogen bombs ("re-entry vehicles") that can be directed to
different locations. Each bomb releases 0.12 megatons of energy. Thus one
Trident submarine can destroy 192 targets, each target receiving the equivalent
of seven Hiroshima bombs.
The United States has 18 missile-launching submarines, of which
14 are Tridents. Generally, four are deployed underwater at any one time,
although more would be deployed under high alert. They are essentially
invulnerable.
Russia and the U.S. both have a "strategic triad" of
nuclear-weapons vehicles: Land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles and
bombers. Russia and presumably the U.S. have now put their triads on high-alert
-- a kind of hair trigger that is dangerous even if there is no war.
War between the U.S. and Russia could destroy much or all of
what we are pleased to call "civilization." Humankind is treading
perilous territory. Right now, the greatest danger lies in the skies above the
battlefield. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed to NATO to
enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and strongly criticized NATO's rejection of
this request. A no-fly zone would bring NATO, and hence the United States, into
battle with Russia.
Alarmingly, on Sunday, Russia began shelling an airbase in western
Ukraine only 15 miles from Poland's (and thus NATO's) border. Although NATO
supplies a steady flow of weapons to Ukraine, U.S. Security Advisor Jake
Sullivan warned America would respond if Russia's strikes traveled outside
Ukraine and hit any NATO members, even accidentally.
There is one ray of sunshine. Zelensky recently told Germany's
Bild newspaper "We are ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine
... and, of course, for the security of Russia." This touches on what
Russia has asked for all along but we have foolishly ruled a
"non-starter": a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality.
NO FLY ZONE
Zelenskyy calls for no-fly zone over Ukraine in emotional
plea to U.S. Congress
MARCH 16, 2022 / 10:28 AM / CBS NEWS
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/zelensky-congress-ukraine-no-fly-zone/
Washington
— Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a plea directly to members of Congress on
Wednesday for the U.S. to help create a no-fly zone over Ukrainian skies and to
provide more weapons to bolster Ukraine's ability to combat Russia's airpower
as Moscow continues its bombardment of
the country.
In a
virtual address before both chambers of Congress, Zelenskyy invoked key events
in U.S. history, including the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and September 11,
2001, terror attacks to urge members to provide his country with more
assistance to beat back Russia's aggression.
"Just
like nobody else expected it, you could not stop it," he said. "Our country
experienced the same every day, right now at this moment, every night, for
three weeks now."
Russia,
he continued, "has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for
thousands of people."
Speaking
through a translator for the first portion of his speech, Zelenskyy asked
whether it is "too much to ask" for the U.S. to create a no-fly zone
over his country and provide air defense systems such as the Russian-made S-300
surface-to-air missile systems. He also called for the U.S. to impose new
packages of sanctions, including on all Russian lawmakers, "until the
Russian war machine stops" and pushed lawmakers to pressure businesses in
their districts who have continued operating in Russia to cease doing so.
Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, March 16,
2022.CBS
NEWS
"'l
have a dream,' these words are known to each of you today," he said.
"I have a need, a need to protect our sky. I need your help."…Continued
NO FLY ZONE AND WWIII
A No-Fly Zone in Ukraine Would Start World War III.
It’s the Worst Idea Possible.
BY BEN BURGIS
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/03/no-fly-zone-ukraine-russia-us-war
A growing chorus of voices is calling
for Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone — an action that would risk the future
of human civilization.
I’m not much of an R.E.M. fan, but I’ve had “It’s the End of the
World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” stuck in my head for days. A disturbing
number of high-profile voices have been calling for President Joe Biden to
establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine. To his credit, he’s steadfastly refused to
do so. But these forces are only going to get louder as the Russian invasion
drags on. My boiling-hot take is that — and hear me out on this — starting
World War III would be a bad thing.
Biden’s State
of the Union was interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” A member of
the US House of Representatives has proposed deporting all
Russian students from the United States. A prominent United States senator
has publicly
urged the
assassination of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The political atmosphere in
the United States has quickly turned xenophobic, bloodthirsty, and dark.
While the United States has provided a great deal of military
aid to Ukraine, direct action by the American government has so far been mostly
restricted to economic sanctions. It’s worth noting that not all sanctions are
the same. Putin’s government is waging a monstrous imperial war. While we
should oppose any sanctions that add to the misery of working-class Russians,
targeted sanctions against individual Russian oligarchs are a different issue —
just as it would have been hard to object if other powers had responded to the
invasion of Iraq with targeted sanctions on politically connected American
billionaires.
But there’s a pervasive atmosphere of jingoistic fervor, a sense
of urgency that the United States “do something.” On the level of civil
society, this has expressed itself through absurdities like the International
Cat Federation banning Russian-bred cats
from competition and petty or not-so-petty cruelties ranging from calls in the
mixed martial arts world to ban Russian fighters to the Oncology Network
pulling out of Russia. I guess if you can’t punish Vladimir Putin, you can at
least punish cancer patients who live in his country.
Most disturbing, though, has been the parade of calls for
American military intervention. In most cases, this takes the form of calls for
the United States to set up a no-fly zone in Ukraine. A sitting US congressman
has made that
call.
So has a senator. Dan Hodges of the Mail on Sunday, the
biggest-selling Sunday paper in the UK, has said that not establishing a
no-fly zone would be “an act of appeasement no different to our appeasement of
Hitler in 1938.”
Calls for a no-fly zone are calls for a war between the United
States and Russia.
A few prominent figures have gone even further. Former world
chess champion and fierce Putin critic Garry Kasparov breezily explained that World War III
has “already” started, so direct NATO fighting in Ukraine would be fine. NBC
News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel publicly mused that it might be a
good idea for “the US/NATO” to “destroy” Russian forces on the ground in
Ukraine.
Given how much of the twentieth century was defined by
collective terror about the likely consequences of a war between the United
States and Russia, it’s remarkable how cavalier all these commentators and
politicians have been about starting one now. And make no mistake: calls for a
no-fly zone are calls for a war between the United States and Russia.
It could be argued that the Russian government would simply make
a rational calculation and back off in the face of direct American military
intervention. But the invasion of Ukraine was itself a wildly
irrational act. And I wouldn’t trust the American government not to engage in
potentially catastrophic future escalation if the Russian military directly
involved itself in a war against American forces.
In a just released poll, 74 percent of American
respondents said they would support a no-fly zone. I hope most of them don’t
understand what that would actually mean.
“No-fly zone” is a combination of words that might not sound
innately alarming. If Russian planes are participating in a horrific war of
aggression, what’s wrong with prohibiting them from doing so?
As George
Carlin liked
to emphasize, euphemistic language is an enemy of both clarity and basic
humanity. Let’s call things what they are. Calls for a “no-fly zone” are calls
for the United States to shoot
down Russian planes.
Take a beat to really think about how the phrase “the United
States shooting down Russian planes” would have sounded during the decades of
the Cold War. And then remember that the two nations’ gigantic nuclear
stockpiles, enough to blow up the entire world multiple times over, haven’t
gone anywhere.
Starting a war with Russia could indeed be the end of the world
as we know it. As the world confronts that slim but real possibility, I don’t
trust anyone who feels fine.
The Ukraine Economy adds to uS/nato v. russia
conflict over ukraine
|
From
Tami Banister 3-18-22
|
|
)
|
|
|
[The great natural resources and agricultural and industrial
wealth of Ukraine might make it an inevitable source of conflict between East
and West. Following are the statistics
from my friend Tami. I have not yet
found even a short essay on this subject.
Is this a war over natural resources? –Dick]
For those who ask "Why does
Ukraine matter? “
How the nation of Ukraine ranks:
1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores;
2nd place in Europe and 10th place in the world in terms of
titanium ore reserves;
2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of
manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world's reserves);
2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons);
2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves;
3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas
reserves (22 trillion cubic meters)
4th in the world by the total value of natural resources;
7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)
Ukraine is an agricultural country:
1st in Europe in terms of arable land area;
3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world's
volume);
1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower
oil;
2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in
barley exports;
3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the
world;
4th largest producer of potatoes in the world;
5th largest rye producer in the world;
5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons);
8th place in the world in wheat exports;
9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs;
16th place in the world in cheese exports.
Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.
Ukraine is an industrialized country:
1st in Europe in ammonia production;
2-е Europe's and 4th largest natural gas pipeline system in the
world (142.5 bln cubic meters of gas throughput capacity in the EU);
3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of
installed capacity of nuclear power plants;
3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail
network length (21,700 km);
3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production
of locators and locating equipment;
3rd largest iron exporter in the world
4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the
world;
4th world's largest manufacturer of rocket launchers;
4th place in the world in clay exports
4th place in the world in titanium exports
8th place in the world in exports of ores and concentrates;
9th place in the world in exports of defence industry products;
10th largest steel producer in the world (32.4 million tons).
SANCTIONS
Sanctions anyone? Imperialist contradiction or the unintended consequence
of involuntary decolonization. Editor. Mronline.org
(3-19-22).
In support of the white supremacist Ukrainian
puppet government, many U.S. and European companies have been withdrawing from
doing business in Russia.
MEDIA
WAR, PROPAGANDA, AND MISINFORMATION
Homicidal drives: U.S. dreams of killing Putin
Editor. Mronline.org (3-19-22).
Wars disturb and delude. The Ukraine conflict is no
exception. Misinformation is cantering through press accounts and media
dispatches with feverish spread.
War in Ukraine: Dispatch of Weapons and Propaganda. Editor.
Mronline.org (3-19-22).
Italian Lieutenant General
Fabio Mini. Originally published: United World by
l’AntiDiplomatico (March 12, 2022 ) | -
Posted Mar 18, 2022
WarItaly,
Russia,
Ukraine,
United StatesInterviewItalian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini
The
following interview with the Italian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini, General of
the Corps of the Italian Army and former Chief of Staff of NATO’s Southern
Command, was first published by l’AntiDiplomatico.it.
The original interview can be read here.
Translation was provided by l’AntiDiplomatico, with
editing from United World International. Subheadings were set by UWI.
Italian
Lieutenant General Fabio Mini concludes: “Negotiate, stop being
only focused only on one thought and on propaganda, help Ukraine to coming to
her senses and provide Russia a chance to get out of the tunnel of the
encirclement syndrome–not with plain talks but with concrete acts”. This is the thought of Fabio Mini, Lieutenant
General of Corps of the Italian Army, “And when the crisis is overcome, hoping
to be still alive then, Italy and Europe will have to make a serious commitment
to conquer that autonomy, dignity and strategic independence that guarantees
European security regardless of the interests of others.”
It has
been correctly written that generals are the most sensible voices in a
landscape of one-sided propaganda, as they know well how to weigh words at
times like these. As L’AntiDiplomatico, we had the honor of being able to
interview one of the most authoritative of them.
l’AntiDiplomatico: From
the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–and even going back a
long way in history–you have brilliantly reconstructed in your book [?]“Why are
we so hypocritical about war?” the forgeries that have determined the pretext for the outbreak
of several wars. What is the hypocrisy and falsehood behind the ongoing
conflict in Ukraine?
FM: The false claim is
that the war began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In reality, this
invasion is not even the final act of a war between Russia and Ukraine, a war
that began in 2014 with the insurrection of the provinces of Donbass, which
later declared independence. Since then, Ukrainian forces have battered the
Russian-speaking population on the verge of the massacre and no one has said
anything. For that population in revolt against the Ukrainian regime, the
expression ‘war of liberation’ or self-determination, so dear to some
international observers, was not even used.
It was
sufficient for them to state that “Putin’s Russia” wanted to return to the
tsarist empire–and the issue was settled. Hypocrisy
is the attitude of pro-Ukrainian Western propaganda, which, recognizing that
there is a war, pretends not to know who and what caused it. Instead, that
propaganda is surprised that someone shoots, someone else dies and many are
forced to flee. The hypocrisy even more serious than the propaganda is the
conspiratorial silence of those who disregard the fact that since 2014, the
United States and NATO have poured billions in aid almost entirely destined to
arm Ukraine and thousands of war professionals. Extremist groups and neo-Nazis
were trained and enriched.
“NATO’s
deliberate goal was to turn Ukraine into an outpost against Russia” MORE https://mronline.org/2022/03/18/war-in-ukraine/
Looking
for the casus belli to justify war in Ukraine - Il ...
https://global.ilmanifesto.it ›
looking-for-the-casus-belli...
Jan 24, 2022 — ...
belli,” let us remember – as NATO General Fabio
Mini writes in his great and forgotten pamphlet “Why are we so
hypocritical about war?
REPORTING OF UKRAINIAN NEW-NAZIS
JOHN MCEVOY.
Western Media Fall
in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine. FAIR, Extra!
(Feb. 23, 2022).
Media resolve
the issue of the integration of neo-Nazis into
the Ukrainian military by ignoring this inconvenient
fact altogether.
When the
corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.
In the case of the
recent crisis in Ukraine, Western
journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end
of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).
A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the
integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate
media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian
security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US
foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater
question.
As recent
coverage demonstrates, one way of resolving this issue is by not mentioning the
inconvenient matter of Ukrainian neo-Nazis altogether.
The Azov Battalion
The Azov
Battalion’s Nazi-inspired logo can be
seen in an MSNBC segment
(2/14/22).
In 2014, the Azov
Battalion was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) to assist with fighting against pro-Russian
separatists in eastern Ukraine.At the time, the militia’s association with
neo-Nazism was well documented: The unit used the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, while its soldiers sported
Nazi insignia on their combat helmets. In 2010, the
Azov Battalion’s founder declared that Ukraine should “lead the white races
of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”The
Azov Battalion is now an official regiment of the NGU, and operates under the
authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
‘A granny
with a gun’
Pointing out
that people training the 79-year-old woman to use an assault weapon
(London Times, 2/13/22) were
members of a fascist force would have spoiled the heart-warming aspect of the
image.
In mid-February
2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the Azov
Battalion organized a military training course for Ukrainian civilians in the
port city of Mariupol.
Images of
Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47,
soon featured across the Western broadcast and print media.
The figure of a
pensioner lining up to protect her homeland made for an emotive image,
collapsing the conflict into a simple good versus evil binary, while adding
weight to US and British intelligence assessments forecasting an
immediate full-scale Russian invasion.
Such a narrative
was not to be ruined by reference to the neo-Nazi group training her. Indeed,
mention of the Azov Battalion was largely erased from mainstream coverage of
the event. The BBC (2/13/22), for instance, showed a
clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the
National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing
Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion
insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the
report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an
ammunition magazine.
The BBC (2/13/22) depicts a young boy
getting a lesson on how to load ammo—without mentioning that the training was
sponsored by a far-right paramilitary.
The BBC (12/13/14) has not always been so reluctant to discuss the Azov Battalion’s
neo-Nazism. In 2014, the broadcaster noted that its leader “considers Jews and
other minorities ‘sub-human’ and calls for a white, Christian crusade against
them,” while it “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.”
Both MSNBC (2/14/22) and ABC News (2/13/22) also reported from Mariupol, showing similar
video footage of an Azov Battalion member teaching Konstantynovska to use a
rifle. As with the BBC, no mention was made of the regiment’s far
right association.
Sky News updated its initial
report (2/13/22) to include mention of the “far right”
trainers (2/14/22), while Euronews (2/13/22) made a rare mention of the Azov Battalion in
its initial coverage.
RUSSIAN OR CIA LIES IN US ELECTION
The NYT now admits the Biden
laptop – falsely called “Russian Disinformation” – is authentic. Glenn
Greenwald. Mronline.org (3-20-22).
The media outlets which spread this lie from
ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by
Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.
Ukraine War Exposes US Hypocrisy, Double Standards ...
https://www.youtube.com ›
watch
Mar 1, 2022 — ... the US has
been called the “United States of Amnesia.” The same leaders who invaded
Iraq and killed a million people, who are
starv...
The IMF CONNECTION WITH THE UKRAINE CRISIS
Prabhat Patnaik. Mronline.org (3-8-22).
THE security concerns of Russia arising from
Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO have been widely discussed in the media.
But the IMF’s link with Ukraine which is a parallel issue has scarcely received
much attention.
RUSSIA
AND CHINA
Context to China: What do Chinese citizens say about Ukraine?
Editor.
Mronlline.org (3-20-22)
Chinese people
and the Chinese government are two different things on this issue. Among
Chinese people there’s been huge energetic support for Russia, there was even a
movement among people to buy all the Russian products from online shops in
China and everything sold out very quickly.
END #15 RUSSIA/UKRAINE , NEWSLETTER/ANTHOLOGY
