Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he’s seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a “grim cloud” of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history.”
And don’t try to deny it! What a mess! (And yes, I do think this moment is worth more than a few exclamation points!)
Admittedly, I’m not an active, thoughtful 93 year old. I’m a mere 77 and feel like I’m floundering in this mad world of ours. Still, like my generation, like anyone alive after August 6, 1945, when the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single American atomic bomb, I’m an end-of-the-worlder by nature. And that’s true whether any of us like it or not, admit it or not.
In fact, I’ve lived with that reality — or perhaps I mean the surreality of it all — both consciously (on occasion) and unconsciously (the rest of the time) since my childhood. No one my age is likely to forget the duck-and-cover drills we all performed, diving under our school desks, hands over heads, to prepare for, in my case, the Soviet Union’s attempted atomic destruction of New York City. We followed the advice, then, of the cartoon character Bert the Turtle — in a brief film I remember seeing in our school cafeteria — who “never got hurt because he knew just what we all must do: he ducked and covered.”
As the sonorous male narrator of that film then put it:
“The atomic bomb flash could burn you worse than a terrible sunburn, especially where you’re not covered. Now, you and I don’t have shells to crawl into like Bert the Turtle, so we have to cover up in our own way… Duck and cover underneath a table or a desk or anything else close by… Always remember, the flash of an atomic bomb can come at any time, wherever you may be.”
That was life in 1950s New York City. On my way to school, I would pass the S-signs for “safe places to go” (as that cartoon put it) or later the bright orange-yellow and black fallout-shelter signs (millions of which were produced and used nationally). And like so many other young people of that era, I let The Twilight Zone nuke me on TV, went to world-ending films in my high-school years, and read similar sci-fi.
I was only 18 and in my first semester of college when, on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on national TV, not the norm then, to address us all (though I heard his speech on the radio). He warned us of a
“secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy — this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil — is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.”
Now, mind you, I didn’t know then that the U.S. military already had a Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, to deliver more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world. That included at least 130 cities which would, if all went according to plan, cease to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (which probably underestimated the effects of radiation). Nor did I know then that, in the 1950s, American officials, at the highest levels, focused endlessly on what was known as the “unthinkable,” all the while preparing to plunge us into a planetary charnel house.
Military and civilian policymakers then found themselves writing obsessive sci-fi-style scenarios, not for public consumption but for one another, about a possible “global war of annihilation.” In those new combat scenarios, they found themselves and their country on the horns of an unbearable dilemma. They could either forswear meaningful victory — or strike first, taking on an uncivilized and treacherous role long reserved in our history books (if not in reality) for the enemy.
Still, as the Cuban Missile Crisis began, for Americans like me, everything for which we had long been preparing to duck-and-cover suddenly seemed to loom all too large and in a potentially unduckable fashion. And believe me, I was anything but unique when, as the U.S. Navy launched its blockade of the island of Cuba, I wondered whether the “unthinkable” was now in the cards.
Welcome to the Nuclear Age, Part 2?
And here I am so many decades later. The world, of course, didn’t end. I never actually ducked and covered to ward off a nuclear attack in what passed for real life. In those years, that SIOP remained as much a fantasy as anything on The Twilight Zone. And though neither superpower actually dismantled its nuclear arsenal when the Cold War ended in 1991 with the implosion of the Soviet Union (quite the opposite, in fact), nuclear weapons did seem to retreat into the ether, into Bert the Turtle’s fantasy world, until… well, I hesitate here, but I have to say it: the invasion of Ukraine.
Only the other day, CIA Director William Burns, once deeply convinced of the dangers of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and long warning of a Russian backlash against such a policy, publicly suggested that, sometime soon, Vladimir Putin might turn to atomic weaponry in his disastrous war there. Admittedly, he was talking about so-called tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons (each perhaps one-third the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), not the monster nukes in both our arsenals. Still, welcome to the nuclear age, part 2.
And, of course, that’s just to start on a situation that feels as if it could implode. After all, the war in Ukraine has already reached mind-boggling levels of criminal brutality and destructiveness and you can feel that where it truly goes, no one truly knows. A recent Russian diplomatic note to Washington, for instance, warned of “unpredictable consequences” if the Biden administration kept arming the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the Russians all-too-publicly tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile, which President Vladimir Putin said would make the country’s enemies “think twice.” Worse yet, it seems as if the global situation could burst out of control in an altogether unpredictable fashion, if Putin begins to feel that Ukraine is a lost war.
Above all, since Cold War, part 1, ended, a second world-ending possibility has been piled atop the first in almost comic fashion.
In fact, I have the urge to cry out, “Duck and cover!” and not just because of those nukes that might sooner or later be brought to bear on Ukraine, leading to who knows what and where. After all, in 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated, who would have guessed that, more than three quarters of a century after the dropping of that first atomic bomb (followed, of course, by a second one on Nagasaki and the end of the most horrific global war ever), there would once again be war in Europe? Isn’t that the oldest story of all?
And don’t expect good news soon either. In fact, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the war in Ukraine won’t even end this year, while CNN reports that “some members of Congress and their aides are quietly making comparison to the Korean War, which lasted for three years.” And Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who once thought Russian invaders could take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in 72 hours, now evidently believes the war there could last “at least years for sure.”
Really? The Korean War? Such an old, old story (and another war where the nuclear threshold was at least approached). And once again, the world has split into two blocs in what could almost pass for a parody of the original Cold War, with each side already struggling for support from countries around the planet.
The Fate of the Earth?
If I were making all this up, let me assure you, it would be considered the worst-plotted “take two” imaginable. Oh, let’s see, those humans didn’t learn a damn thing from almost destroying the planet and each other back then! So, they decided to do the whole damn thing all over again. Only this time, they’ve thrown in an extra factor! Yep, you guessed it, another way to destroy the planet! (Duck and cover!!)
Yes, indeed, this strangely old-fashioned comedy of horrors is taking place in an all-too-new context, given a factor that wasn’t in anyone’s consciousness back then. Of course, I’m talking about climate change. I’m thinking about how the planet’s top scientists have repeatedly told us that, if fossil-fuel use isn’t cut back radically and soon, this planet will all-too-literally become a hell on Earth. And keep in mind that, even before the war in Ukraine began, global carbon dioxide emissions had rebounded from pandemic drops and hit a historic high.
And it could only get worse in the chaos of the Ukraine moment as gas prices soar, panic sets in, and all-too-little attention is paid to the dangers of overheating this planet. I mean, none of this should exactly be a secret, right? If, for instance, you happen to live in the American Southwest or West, parts of which are now experiencing the worst drought in at least 1,200 years and successive fire seasons beyond compare, you should know just what I mean. The worst of it is that such new realities, including, for instance, hurricane seasons to remember, are essentially the equivalent of movie previews. (And mind you, I’ve barely even mentioned the ongoing pandemic, which has already taken an estimated 15 million lives on this planet.)
It’s sadly obvious what should be happening: the great powers, also the great fossil-fuelizers (China, the United States, and Russia), should be working together to green energize our world fast. And yet here we are, fighting a new war in Europe launched by the head of a Saudi-style petro state in Moscow playing out his version of Cold War II with Washington and Beijing — oh, and in the process, ensuring the burning of yet more fossil fuels.
Brilliant! Excuse me if I stop a second — it’s just a reflex, really — to yell: Bert, duck and cover fast!
Oh, and lest you think that’s the worst of it, let’s turn to the globe’s second-greatest greenhouse-gas emitter of this moment (and the greatest ever, historically speaking). Right now, it looks all too much like the Democrats could go down fast and hard in the 2022 elections, and possibly in 2024 as well. After all, coal merchant Joe Manchin and the congressional Republicans have sunk the president’s Build Back Better Bill and so much else, ensuring the Democrats of all too few accomplishments as the midterm elections approach. And the polls already reflect that grim reality.
Whether you’re talking about former Gen Z supporters, Hispanics, or, well, you name it, President Biden’s approval ratings seem to be spinning toward a pollster’s version of hell as the war goes on, inflation surges, and the price of gas shoots through the roof. In fact, only the other week, his administration, which came into office singing its own climate-changing praises and promising, as the future president said on the campaign trail in 2020, “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” just opened bidding for new leases to do just that.
Meanwhile Donald Trump, the man who pulled this country out of the Paris climate accords and the greatest party boss in memory, luxuriates at Mar-a-Lago, raising sums beyond compare and paying no price for anything he’s done. If his party takes over Congress and then the White House, it’s not complicated at all. Just light a giant match and burn this planet down, assuming Vladimir Putin hasn’t already done that.
Call it hell on Earth and you’re anything but exaggerating. The “unthinkable”? Start thinking, my friend. The fate of the Earth, once the title of a classic book on the nuclear nightmare by Jonathan Schell, could soon be little short of a post-Trumpian joke.
My advice and I mean it: duck and cover!
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
PART ONE
SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL IN HUMANS DRIVES UKRAINIAN WAR FORWARD
If World War III’s Nuclear holocaust begins in Ukraine it will because of the same madness caused by the same hatred, greed, hypocrisy and fascism driven by the same oligarch’s, plutocrat’s and militarists in the same empires of both the west and the east, who, especially in the past one hundred years, have driven or caused all the same wars that have come before this latest pandemic of human madness in Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, up until now, in just over a century, either the American empire, and its western allies, or the Russian empire, and their eastern allies, have somehow had a direct hand in creating or fomenting over 270 major wars or conflicts for or against these empires and their allies. These conflicts have variously been called everything from: world wars; invasions; civil wars, wars of secession; insurgencies; revolutions, military coups; crises; revolts; rebellions, or; EVERYTHING, THAT IS, EXCEPT HUMAN MADNESS.
But none of the conflicts between these empires have ever quite reached the same cataclysmic point of potential nuclear annihilation of the human race and destruction of the planet as now does the war madness in Ukraine. The collective consciousness of the world can sense something significantly different in the etiology of the human story that now threatens.
Yet a point of no return has now been reached. The “Cat Has Been Let Out of the Bag!” as the old saying goes. Fascism, not Democracy, clearly rules the Human Race by the way the American Empire and its allies, so enthusiastically, have thrown their political, economic, moral, militaristic support behind Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist government in spite of its troubled political history of fascist and neo-nazi-leaning controversies.
But what is as puzzling as it is revealing is the noxious rationale that one commonly hears being so glibly advanced by Western proponents and strategists of the war who attempt to explain away the logic behind why the western world’s war industries, politicians and citizenry are now more than lustfully happy, one could almost call it ‘gleeful’, by how the West so eagerly and willingly continues to unload their massive stockpiles of war armaments on ‘White’ Ukrainians to do all the fighting and dying on their behalf?
Yet the same protagonists in this proxy world war on behalf of White Ukrainians have never once demonstrated the same willingness to likewise do the same for any non-white nation of peoples – such as the Palestinians, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqi’s, Yemeni and hosts of other non-white, non-western nations, who have also been so horribly put upon by the Israeli Jewish State, the Saudi Family and so many other allies of the American Empire; none of whom have ever been brought before the Hague, International Court of Justice (ICJ) or International Criminal Court (ICC) for their own reprehensible invasions and crimes against humanity.
This is especially troubling when historical evidence clearly reveals the extent to which Ukrainians have demonstrated such a racist, fascist, even neo-Nazi-bent towards not only Russia and Russians but to Poles, Jews, and many other non-Ukrainians. Especially, in the case of the current war in Ukraine when it means waging, at the behest of Western nations and citizenry, a proxy War virtually To The Death against the Russians, as U.S. President Biden himself has admitted, until, perhaps, all the Russians, Ukrainians and their allies in the West, alike, are all dead or mostly destroyed?
These same western world merchants of death and war also are seemingly happy beyond words to provide hundreds of billions and trillions of hard-earned tax payers dollars, which their hard-pressed tax payer citizenry seemingly remain quite happy to pay, as well – even if it means less critical monies to fund their own peoples sorely-needed human health and welfare infrastructure – to pay for the future gross production of even more war armaments to feed what many observers can clearly recognize now are the unabashed fascist, neo-Nazi motivations in continuing to press such a proxy world war in the first place. Forget any future fantasies of a world of peaceful civil societies.
Underlying the American and Biden-led Western World and their empire’s Proxy War against Russia is the same vengeful desire that not only is intent upon the violent overthrow of Moscow’s kremlin leadership but which it knows, at some later point in time, it must likewise address, in some similar manner, the future threat posed by the authoritarian—dictatorial Chinese Communist Empire to the western empire’s own corporate fascist-crazed ideology that drives both their obsessed desires for world dominance.
Nothing has fundamentally changed in a century of the world’s geo-political dynamics since World War’s I & II. This endless, unresolved struggle still is the hair trigger, set to go off at any moment, as it always has been. There is no question ‘if’ it will ever happen, but only ‘when’ and to what extent. Every world leader knows this even if they lack the courage to state it, openly.
Thus, the Western and Eastern empire’s corporate greed and militarism in WWI & WWII, soon turned into: the Korean War; that turned into the Korean War; then turned into the Vietnam War; that turned into the Iraq War; then turned into the Afghanistan War; that has now turned into the Ukrainian War; that yet may then turn into WWIII; that then may turn into Nuclear War; that will then turn into wholesale human & Planetary destruction on a scale yet unimaginable. All of them caused by: too many blood vendettas; too much hypocrisy, lying, deceitful propaganda, and too much male testosterone-fed struggles between the forces of democratic freedom and tyrannical, dictatorial rule among human cultures and nations; that has unwaveringly-raged for centuries.
All such struggles fostered by the same Human Madness, goaded on by the same mad men and women and the same fascist-communist-capitalist-nazi movements that continue to vex any resolution between them, other than continue the age-old warfare at the cost to themselves, the time-honored ways of life of their peoples and all living things upon this beautiful blue planet upon which they and we all dwell. But for how much longer is the question?
It’s an ancient human madness that lives in the blood and lusts for its spilling, the thirst of which, seemingly, must be periodically quenched before it can once again lie dormant until the lusting desire must again renew itself.
But once the killing hysteria begins anew, all the rhyme or reason as to why it began becomes lost amidst all the chaos, carnage, death, dying and lusting for still more blood-letting, until the requisite quotient is spent and a modicum of sanity can momentarily return to all the people.
One thing’s for certain, though, that the American Empire and its Western allies should always keep firmly in mind, especially in the instance of this latest war in Ukraine, is that if the communists in Russia, in particular, hadn’t once bravely and unstintingly defended the West, at a very heavy personal cost to themselves, and defeated the Nazi hordes in WWII, the so-called ‘Free’ World would no longer be free and the world, perhaps, would now be totally Nazified.
PART TWO
HISTORIC BLOOD FUEDS & VENDETTAS ARE THE PLIGHT OF THE HUMAN RACE
At the heart of the war in Ukraine and the seemingly unbridgeable ideological and psychological impasse between Western Ukraine and Russia, and, in a larger context, between the West and East, is the same vehement rage and hatred caused by the dark side of humankind that has been waging itself upon all human and non-human life on earth since the origin of homo sapiens. It’s what underlies the troubled histories of every human nation on earth, to varying degrees of intensity and longevity, given their cultural, ethnic and evolutionary makeup.
How each offshoot of the human species has historically chosen, individually or collectively, to address the suffering, rage, loss and hatred they’ve endured at the hands of whatever peoples or nations they perceive as responsible for all their pain and suffering, is what becomes the dominant driving force within the psyches, ideologies and propaganda they choose to manifest.
The most laughable propaganda joke so far made by the West in this ‘proxy’ war between Ukraine and Russia is that, “There exists only 1% real ‘Nazi’s or neo-Nazi’s involved in this war!” “And Bears Might Fly!”, as the old Australian truism goes.
Because what is going on in the 21st century in the brutal physical and ideological war between Russians, Ukrainians, Americans and their allies in the Western and Eastern Worlds, is one of those historic blood-feuds between fascist and communist provocateurs akin to the Hundred Years War that once raged between England and France throughout the 14 Century.
This blood vendetta, already has witnessed American and Western-fascist and Nazi allies murder, depose or economically attack countless socialist and communist leaders, like: Patrice Lamumba of the Congo; Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh; Cuba’s Fidel Castro; Salvadore Allende of Chile; Muammar Gaddafi of Libya; Suddam Hussein of Iraq, among countless others, and now, the West’s biggest, most sought-after prize of all; Vladimir Putin of Russia.
This constant murderous warfare is not unlike the infamous hatred that produced differing degrees of violent intensity and passion between: Scotland’s Campbells vs the MacDonalds in the 17th century, or; the legendary 17th century AKO Vendetta in Japan, or; the 14th century Scottish ‘Battle of the Clans’ between the Clan Kay & Chattam Confederation, or; England’s 15th Century battle royal between King James of Scotland and the Douglas Clan, or, on a smaller scale; the endless 17th, 18th, 19th Century feuds in the United States, like the duel between: Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton that finally left Hamilton dead on the green. It’s not unlike the warring rage in the 19th century that pitted the McCoy’s against the Hatfield’s who lived on opposite sides of the Big Sandy River between Kentucky and West Virginia, followed by; the 19th century blood vendetta’s that pitted whole families, clans and states of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends that led to the paroxysms of an American Civil War and two World Wars that still rage to this day. It’s just more of the same Human Madness, ad infinitum, that, periodically, somewhere must be purged and purified from so much uncontrollable evil hatred.
IT’S A WAR OF REALITY TURNED INTO UNREAL EVIL PROPAGANDA FROM START TO FINISH
The war between Russia and Ukraine will, perhaps, end up becoming yet another warring of unimaginable nuclear proportions because of one of the most daunting propagandic “gang swarms” ever perpetrated against the human race in history, that author Noam Chomsky might call the epitome of Manufacturing Consent.
This gang swarm being waged anew by the American Empire in league with Canada, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, NATO and the European Union bloc seeks to brainwash all the people to look upon the Russian Empire as if was their own sworn blood enemy and prime adversary in the world. This propaganda, step-by-step, continues to blindly lead the Human Race towards the coming Nuclear World War which seems all but inevitable at some point in time.
From the outset, one must know something more about who is behind such demonic propaganda, waged like a military operation, conceived and executed by swarm of legions of Washington D.C., and Kiev-based: political strategists, public relations firms and Western military intelligence-linked mass media outlets, who are far more dangerous and lethal than the actual Azov grunts shooting the weapons and throwing the bombs. These propagandists daily, are creating, for mass public consumption, like a made-up movie, with one false flag operation, staged battle scene or contrived photo-op after another. So much so, that one can no longer be sure what is actually true or untrue of anything anymore in this war. Pick your sources, as they say, of what you consider to be the truth and then take the rest with a grain of salt.
The problem, however, in this instance, is that if one doesn’t already know to rely on their own innate sense of what’s right and wrong, or what the truth’s and untruth’s of it all are about, and readily accepts the deadly diet of lies constantly being force fed them, day-in-day out, by mainstream print and media sources, like the: NYTimes, LATimes, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Fox, CNN and their affiliates they already are in trouble and in the dark. To willingly resign one’s self to such a life is to essentially to eventually become ‘brain dead’, as far as real truth is concerned, especially regarding what actually is going on in the war in Ukraine. For some details of who and what is behind this warfare, see:
Secrets of Ukraine’s Propaganda War Exposed: DC Lobbyists, CIA Cutouts and Neo-Nazis – News Punch
1% OF NAZI’S & NAZISM IN UKRAINE & THE WORLD IS A LAUGHABLE JOKE
According to the magazine Newspunch, whose banner reads Where The Mainstream Fears to Tread, some 3,000 recently released declassified documents, dated July 13th, 1953, have revealed an historic plot by the CIA, going back to the 1950’s, to install a regime in Ukraine led by followers of Stepan Bandera. Bandera once posthumously awarded the Hero of Ukraine metal for his accomplishments, during WWII, against the Soviets as a member of the much feared and hated Nazi SS auxiliary regiment OUN-B (still known today as “Bandera’s Faction”).
Among the 3,000 CIA declassified documents were those that revealed the Agency operated two major programs that were intent not only upon destabilizing Ukraine but ‘Nazifying’ it with followers of the WWII Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Bandera.
Among the documents, further released in 2016, was information about a program, spanning four years, that provided funding and equipment for anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups, like the ‘Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council’, as well as the CIA’s AERODYNAMIC program, whose intention was to destabilize Ukraine by using exiled Ukrainian agents in the West who were infiltrated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
“Such groups”, the documents revealed, “as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR), and its Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations, such as the OUN-B (Bandera’s Faction), will be utilized.”
The CIA documents show that under the Aerodynamic Program, the CIA operated an affiliate project, code-named CAPACHO. According to The Signs of the Times, CAPACHO “Took on in the region a psychological warfare operation veneer with the CIA setting. Both the Aerodynamic and CAPACHO project continued in operation throughout U.S. President Nixon’s administration during the 1970’s.”
The purpose of the CIA Aerodynamic Project was to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. These revelations may only be but the tip of the iceberg regarding other covert Western intelligence operations that were active back then, and have since continued to the present day; suggesting a long history of covert Western meddling in the region, especially by America’s political, corporate and military neo-con, neo-Nazi culture.
The overthrow of Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government in 2014 is the key lynch pin that set into motion everything since that since has led up to the current war in Ukraine; for which, if it finally culminates in a nuclear war, the United States, and its successive Democratic and Republican President’s, U.S. Congressional politicians and administrations should be rightly charged by the International Criminal Court for fomenting instead of Vladimir Putin. See:
Declassified CIA Documents Reveal Agency Plans to ‘Nazify’ Ukraine – News Punch
THE REAL MILITARY-POLITICAL TRUTH ABOUT THE CRISIS IN UKRAINE
Jaques Baud, author of numerous books about world politics and military secrets, a former Swiss colonel of the General Staff & Strategic Intelligence military analyst, trained by the American and British Intelligence Services, with a specialization in Eastern countries, and a Former Policy Chief for U.N. Peace Operations, wrote an article on “The Military Situation in the Ukraine” that explores the real roots of what led to the road of war in Ukraine. “The question”, as Baud points out, “isn’t so much knowing who is right in this conflict, but to question how and why the leaders in the West have so far made the decisions they’ve done in the war.”
Baud dispels many of the false assumptions that so far have been stated as facts for the cause of the war. He points to the referendums that were conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in 2014 that, to begin with, were not referendums of “independence” by “separatists” intending to break away from Ukraine, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” by “Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were protesting the fact that the first legislation undertaken by the new pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian government was to abolish the Kivalov-Kalesnichenko Law of 2012 that made Russian an official language.” Rather than the actions of those who were advocating for “separation’ from Ukraine, Baud says these autonomists were seeking “self-determination”, opposed to those in the new government who, as Baud characterizes it, were “acting like putschists who had decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.”
Baud further points out how this legislation by the not democratically-elected Ukrainian governments that followed the coup led to fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk), that, in turn, led to Ukraine’s militarization of the situation and some massacres that followed in Odessa and Mariupol.
Furthermore, Baud goes on to say that, from the Russian perspective, this remained an internal matter of the Ukrainian’s to resolve, which is why, as he points out, Russia was not a party to this conflict between these autonomists and the new pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian government that took over Ukraine following the 2014 Euromaidan coup; and, why, Russia since has demanded this first be resolved, and why Russia refused to be a party to the Minsk Agreements which the West – led by France – repeatedly tried to force what is happening now by putting Russians and Ukrainians in face-to-face hostile confrontations with one another.
This also explains why there never was any Russian troops in the Donbass Republic before 23-24 February 2022; that Baud says is confirmed by U.S. intelligence maps, published by the Washington Post on Dec 3rd, 2021, that showed no Russian troops in the Donbass.
But because the Ukrainian Army, since the 2014 coup, no longer enjoyed the support of the Russian-speaking population, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, due to those in their own ranks who either had defected or refused to go for one reason or another, finally had to resort to using paramilitary militias, composed essentially of foreign mercenaries, like the extreme far-right self-declared neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. These mercenaries constituted about 40% of the Ukrainian forces, numbering around 102,000 (according to Reuters), who were created, armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France and Switzerland which, all toll, comprised a force of some 19 Nationalities. Many of them being radical far-right advocates who, whether one could argue they were “Neo-Nazi’s” or not, were violent, anti-Russian mercenaries, with a nauseating virulently anti-Semitic ideology. For more of Baud’s insights, go to his article:
The Military Situation In The Ukraine – The Postil Magazine
Branko Marcetic, a staff writer for the Jacobin Magazine, in a recent article, also raises the additional question about whether or not the CIA has been providing actual neo-Nazi training in Ukraine; which raises the further question of whether or not the CIA may actually be intentionally breeding Nazi terror in Ukraine.
Marcetic says it’s “no small irony the U.S. President, Joe Biden, elected in large part to halt the perceived march of fascism at home, is continuing the long-standing US support for literal Nazi’s, in what might well be the nexus of international fascism. And if Ukrainian Nazi really are among the insurgents being trained by the CIA, it will be no small tragedy if they one day take the same career trajectory as Osama-bin Laden.” Read Marcetic’s piece for details:
The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine (jacobinmag.com)
PART Three
THE U.S., WESTERN POWERS, UKRAINE & NATO ARE ALL REAL WAR CRIMINALS IN THIS WAR
Putin’s 2022 invasion of Western Ukraine, unequivocally, was and is a clearly criminal act against international law. But this invasion is not unlike so many other equally monstrous criminal invasions that have clearly also violated international law and for years have perpetrated crimes against humanity that have continued to go unpunished by either the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or International Criminal Court (ICC), and allowed to go by the board, such as Israel’s horrid, evil crimes against Palestine and Palestinians; or the Saudi Dynasty’s war against the Houthi’s in Yemen.
Yet Putin’s ill-thought-out military hastiness also played right into the Western World’s perpetual Machiavellian conquest plan it has long had in mind. Not only to one day ultimately eliminate the Russian Empire as an impediment to the American Empire’s imperialistic ‘Manifest Destiny’ expansion into Eurasia; and its unending lustful desire for ever-greater hegemony throughout the world and, ever more, access to the earth’s dwindling natural resources. Putin, as it were, walked right into the veritable Russian ‘Bear Trap’ The West had set for him on their global ‘Empire’ Chess Board.
EVIL REIGNS SUPREME ONCE AGAIN IN THE 21ST CENTURY
There are no innocent victims here among all the world leaders responsible for continuing to contribute to the mayhem that’s being caused by the hideous ‘Proxy War’ in Ukraine. There only are more dead corpses and precious Russian and Ukrainian lives being needlessly wasted.
Western leaders, under the leadership of the Americans, by constantly pouring in more and more deadly weaponry to the Ukrainian Army, are intent upon leaving Russia with no reasonable exit from this war until either the Russian Empire is destroyed, or, in the end, the American Empire and all the other empires will be equally destroyed, because Russia will be given no other reasonable way out other than resort to a free-for-all Nuclear War. In which case, the real victims won’t just be more Russian and Ukrainians lives wastefully spent, but the wasted lives of the rest of we humans, non-humans and all living things on the planet, as well. It’s the work of the evil madness of the Devil incarnate himself, no matter how one spins it.
But something equally as evil and sweeping is the intensity of the geo-political propaganda by the ‘gang swarms’ of Western propagandist’s and their Allies who remain intent upon mind-fucking us all about the war in Ukraine. The target of the bludgeoning propaganda isn’t solely about Russia or Ukraine, but about how sweepingly-oppressive America and its Allies lust is for ever more empire-building, at the expense of whomever or whatever in the world.
Because, in the 21st century, the unshakeable goal and objective among fascist U.S. politicians and Western corporate imperialists, at the expense of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, and all the rest of us, clearly, is to perpetually expand America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ empire. The obvious prize is Russia’s endless supply of natural resources the West so desperately needs to maintain the privileged, rich way of life of all its 1% oligarch’s and plutocrats. But to achieve such an arrogant goal, they must first accomplish the numbing subjugation of the thoughts, minds, and wills of not only the American people but ‘force-feed’ the entire Human Race, as to what the ‘officially-approved’ version is they’re expected to believe about the war in Ukraine.
Thus, the mind controllers among the Western elite corporate press, assiduously continue to work overtime to erase from the world’s collective memory whatever resistance we humans still may have as to the fascist origins of the ugly underbelly of what, historically, always has been the driving force leading to this critical manifest moment of madness in Ukraine.
2014 COUP REVEALS COMPLICATED HEART OF UKRAINIAN & RUSSIAN IDEOLOGIES
The unbelievably-propagandizing corporate Western media has seldom ever reported a politically-balanced, democratic, communist and socialist perspective about any given issue on the globe, but especially the Ukrainian region. It was never the case during: the Russian Revolution of 1917; not throughout World War I & II; nor during the savage brutality waged in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan Wars, or Ukraine’s Civil War in 2014, between Western Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalists and Neo-Nazi fascists against their Russian-speaking cousins in Eastern Ukraine. In short, the Western press has provided ‘fuck all’ balanced news about Eastern Ukrainians who, before the current hostilities began, had already legally voted to become pro-Russian separatist governments known as ‘The Donetsk Peoples Republic’ and ‘Luhansk Peoples Republic’, in what, collectively, are the Donbas Territories of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither has the Western press ever provided both the right and left’s sides about the 2014 Euromaidan Coup of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who once dared to choose closer economic ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union over NATO and the West’s European Union (EU), that was the deadly trigger that led the West to pull on what all is happening now in 2022. The Ultra Nationalist Fascists in Western Ukraine simply have had a too-long standing, abiding hatred for the Russians and anything Russian, leftist or socialist, going back to WW II, and long before to the hideous period of Stalin’s Collectivization pogroms and Scorched Earth policies that, in truth, totally ‘Nazified’ forever the Ukrainian people.
But, in the case of the USA and CIA-sponsored seditious ousting of Yanukovych’s Government during the Coup in 2014, little has ever been widely shared about what the U.S. Government’s military and political wings of its CIA, and its State Department, mobilized over the years by President’s Clinton, Obama, Biden and their Secretary’s of State Madelaine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, and U.S. Asst. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, all well-known radical right-wing anti-Russian ideologues in their own right, who many Ukrainian’s refer to as “scum bags”, and; especially Albright who some say is the main cause of the current crisis in Ukraine.
Back in 2014, these agents of successive U.S. Presidential administrations vigorously plotted the violent overthrow of Yanukovych’s legally-elected neutralist government. But while Eastern Ukrainians still call Yanukovych’s violent overthrow a Euromaiden Coup; the Pro-Western Ukrainian Army, led by the infamous Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, known for its extreme brutality and shocking war crimes against all things Russian, who carried out the actual overthrow of Yanukovych, cleverly have spun it yet another way. Instead of calling it a coup, they deem it to be a Revolution of Dignity.
(wsws.org)https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/cDeclassified CIA Documents Reveal Agency Plans to ‘Nazify’ Ukraine – News Punch
So, what was an unmistakeably manufactured violent coup, the self-declared ‘Ultra-Nationalists’ and ‘Neo-Nazi’s’ of Western Ukraine, with the help of their Azov Battalion paramilitary militias, who already had long-before openly declared their abject hatred for the Russians; viciously killed some 14,000 Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainians, while seriously wounding another 50,000 more innocent civilians, for which the West did nothing. See:
The 2014 coup in Ukraine – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
THE TRUTH BEHIND WHAT STILL COULD LEAD TO WORLD WAR III
The most alarming reality is the back story of what underlies the current war in Ukraine as recounted by Eric Zeusse, an American investigative historian who specializes in government corruption and U.S. Deep State issues. Zeusse is a regular contributor to strategic-culture.org and Modern Diplomacy, who focuses on the reality that, as Zeusse points out, “Ever Since America’s founding to the present time, America has switched from doing war against military occupiers, to doing war As military occupiers.”
In one Modern Diplomacy piece: “How and Why the U.S. Government Perpetuated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine” Zuesse points out, “Clearly, Victoria Nuland, U.S. President Barack Obama’s control agent overseeing the coup when it climaxed in Feb 2014, was crucial not only to the overthrow of the Yanukovych Government, but in selecting and installing its rabidly-anti-Russian Yatsenyuk Government who became officially-approved to rule the then clearly-evolving fascist country.”
For starts, Zuesse says, it’s a Western Myth that the ‘new Cold War’ between the U.S. and Russia first began with Russia’s involvement in the breakaway of Crimea and Donbas from Ukraine…Incontrovertible proof plainly exists that the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s legally elected Yanukovych government, was, and still remains, illegal according to international law.” He prophetically warned in 2015, “Therefore, that globally mega-dangerous coup set the world on a future course increasingly moving towards global annihilation”.
Zeusse, again in 2015, commented, “U.S. Propaganda still treats the coup as if Russia is what mainly threatens Ukraine, but that’s generally not the case in the propaganda by other governments. Even UK propaganda now commonly acknowledges that a more overtly fascist (even Nazi) takeover of Ukraine’s government is what mainly threatens Ukrainians. The U.S. regime and its massively-deceived population are being increasingly-isolated, internationally.”
The Origin Of The ‘New Cold War’ By Eric Zuesse (countercurrents.org)
It’s clear the U.S. Government increasingly stands out in the world as a proponent of fascism, and even as the main leader and supporter of one of fascism’s most racist forms (Jewish Apartheidism). Whatever may be the case, the fact remains that the U.S. Government did perpetrate a coup in Ukraine, and did replace it with a neo-Nazi, anti-Russian regime, and thereby is directly responsible for re-starting the ‘Cold War’ that now threatens to turn into the biggest ‘Hot War’ of them all. The blood on its hands already is far too thick to ever wash off.
The late Gordon Hahn, a senior researcher at The Centre for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS) Akribus Group, and author of “Russian Revolution: Towards Orderly & Peaceful Regime Transformation in Russia”, once said to restrict the blame for the coup only on Ukrainian Nazi’s doesn’t fit the bill, because, clearly, there is leadership of Ukrainian Nazi’s by the U.S. regime.
Gordon Hahn: NATO Expansion, Maidan Ukraine, and the Donbass War – The Transnational
PART FOUR
THE ANTI-RUSSIAN HATRED IN THE WAR IN UKRAINE IS PALPABLE
Ever since, the neo-Nazi Nationalists and their leaders in Western Ukraine have spent the past eight years shelling, murdering, raping, lynching and persecuting thousands of their Eastern cousins in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, who have dared to choose closer economic ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union over NATO and the West’s European Union (EU). With the assistance of Western nations from the American-led Empire, they’ve continued to threaten, antagonize, provoke, in every which way possible, the Russian Empire; seeking the placement of every conceivable military foothold, as close as they can to Russia’s borders, within quick-strike distance to menace and harass Russia’s political, military and industrial centres of power. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know what the real intent all along has been and steadfastly remains the focus now of the war in Ukraine.
So, when the Yanukovych government was overthrown in 2014, and there was no one else to protect the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, 80-90% of whom already had voted to join a separatist government, Russia, Russia then stepped in to protect them from the wrath of the Russian-hating Azov’s and seized the Crimea.
Russia’s intent all along has been to ultimately link Crimea, Donbas and Lagan with a land bridge across the Black Sea and rekindle something of the Soviet Union era, that once gave Russia and the Russians so much more pride and respect in Eastern Europe, if not the world.
INHERENT DANGERS OF WESTERN ALLIES ARMING THE UKRAINIAN ULTRA-NATIONALISTS
The roots of fascism in Ukraine, from the World War II days of its collaborations with the Nazi occupation forces to the Maidan of today, is a long, nasty story of betrayal of democratic principles. Politicians among the Western Nations now allied with the Ukrainians, should already have known a great deal more about all this before they so willingly, generously, and, more to the point, dangerously armed those fighting against the Russians with the very latest in 21st century armaments, high-tech weaponry and cutting-edge military intelligence capabilities. Given the long-standing hostilities that exist between the two nations this could only but predictably enflame the hatred and lead to a calamitous ending of mega proportions.
BUT ALL THE NAYSAYING FALLS ON DEAF EARS
Ever since the war in Ukraine began, one will hear one Western politician after another, from whatever country, justify their pell-mell willingness to provide heaps of whatever the latest, cutting-edge war materials are needed by the Ukrainian government, army and paramilitary nazi militias. The same argument commonly posed by Western politicians in defense of such reckless military arms defense transfers repeat the argument, “There isn’t anything to worry about here. Those in the Ukrainians army, who are self-declared “neo-Nazi’s” only represent an insignificant 1%, if that, of the total number of combatants and politicians.” But this is perhaps the single biggest propaganda spin of all that flies in the face of reality.
One need only begin to delve into Ukraine’s history during the past century, during and following the World War II, to discover a great number of shocking accounts of Ukraine’s Nazi activities and formations of any number of its organizations, associations and groups who were clearly involved in a great many shocking persecutions, murders and massacres; waged against any number of non-Ukrainian ethnic groups (Roma, Jewish, Polish) who, during the German occupation of Ukraine, accompanied the Nazi SS on their sweeps through the countryside to take these ethnic groups away to concentration camps or worse.
So, to now contend, in 2022, that there only exists 1% or less of actual neo-Nazi’s in the Ukrainian Army and Ukrainian government is either a totally absurd and laughable statistic, or a bald face piece of propaganda meant to correspond to some new modern mythology of 21st century life in Ukraine. See:
The roots of fascism in Ukraine: From Nazi collaboration to Maidan – Liberation School
WESTERN UKRAINE’S AZOV BATTALION ARMY INSIGNIA “A3O-B” SAY’S IT ALL
Since the outset of the war, the Western Press has intentionally sought to downplay, minimize, or omit, the fascist elements of the Volodymyr Zelenskiyy Western Ukrainian Government. The so-called Western Democratic ‘Free Press’ would prefer to say its patently untrue, and those like the Azov’s are simply another official regiment of the Ukrainian Army. See:
But the Azov Battalion’s historical roots, indisputably go back to the Patriot of Ukraine, a group described as being racist and neo-Nazi’s, whose leader Andriy Biletsky went on to become the commander of the Azov Battalion; that constituted a paramilitary wing of the Social National Assembly (S.N.A.); that also was an assemblage of neo-Nazi organizations, co-founded by Biletsky himself, and those who shared his social-national ideology and mutually agreed upon need to build a social-national state.
Neither is any mention commonly made in the Western press about the political contradictions posed by Zilenskyy himself when he once attempted to appoint Serhii Sternenko, the former head of the radical Right Sector, another equally violent Ukrainian fascist organization, to the head position of Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU); even though Sternenko himself already had been implicated in the 2014 Trade Union House Massacre, where 46 people were, intentionally, horribly burned alive. Yet in the rabidly anti-Russian press and think tanks in the West, Sternenko is typically otherwise more commonly depicted as being a pro-democracy figure.
The same sources of news in the West also play down or totally avoids how Zelenskyy himself has sought to control and muffle the news about the current war by the banning of leftist news outlets, such as the pro-Russian television stations ZIK, NEWS ONE and 112 UKRAINE. When challenged as to why this is so, the excuse given is to “combat Russian “disinformation”, or because these leftist news outlets were said to be “too pro-Russian”, or somehow favoured a negotiated peace settlement. Zelenskyy even banned the station for YOU TUBE in Ukraine.
THE TRAGEDY THAT IS UKRAINE, RUSSIA & THE WORLD IN 2022
Some call Ukraine The Frankenstein Nation! The real tragedy of Ukraine, they say, is that it isn’t a real country at all, but a collection of parts that all absolutely hate each other. The roots of evil and hate, especially between the Ukrainians and Russians, go back to the darkest times in Ukrainian history. ”Ukrainians are true Slavs but Russians are mongrels”, say many Ukrainians as a clear indicator of their basic sentiments.
Such deep, abiding fury underlying such viscerally-felt sentiments go all the way back to what the Soviet’s under Stalin did to the Ukrainians, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when he collected all their food grains, forced them off their lands, and, if they objected, sent his notoriously-evil secret police chief to haul them off to Siberia. Stalin, in effect, turned the entire Ukraine into a genocidal death camp, where starvation forced many of them to even turn to cannibalism within their own families, as Timothy Snyder recounts in his book Bloodlands:
In the face of starvation, some families divided, parents turning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU, found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine “Families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating.” Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation later anyway. One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. One 6-year-old girl, saved by other relatives last saw her father when he was sharpening a knife to slaughter her. Other combinations were, of course, possible. One family killed their daughter-in-law, and fed her head to the pigs, and roasted the rest of her body.”
Stalin, cannibalism, and the true nature of evil. (slate.com)
For some, the reality of modern Ukraine as a country is viewed as a ‘curse’; divided as it is along rigid ethnic, linguistic and political lines. with a radically different language than Russia, yet actually closer to Polish as a language than it is to Russian. Yet many are Russian-speaking and identify with Russia in spite of the fact that at least 10 million Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s collectivization pogroms of the 1920’s and 1930’s.
IN 2014, When Ukrainian President Yanukovych expressed his willingness to partner with Russia, it thus made him an immediate target for Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalists and neo-Nazis who, with the help of the CIA and MI6, was the main cause for his eventual overthrow. The Ukrainians have simply had too much pain inflicted upon them by Russia in history.
THE ARRIVAL OF GERMANY’S NAZI INVADERS IN WW II ESCALATED FASCISM IN UKRAINE
When Germany invaded Ukraine in 1942, Stalin again ordered a “scorched earth” policy, which further starved the Ukrainian people. Ukraine’s entire ideology could be summed up by the blunt saying, “Ukraine Good, Russia Evil.”
These Ultra-Nationalists continue to be, as the saying goes “Funded by the Western Powers, Armed by Israel, Trained by the British and Poles.” In short, they’re violent ultra-nationalists to the point where actual and literal Neo-Nazism among them can freely promote White Power.
Pages of documentation exist of the many executions, murders and the like that were committed during WWII against Russian, Ukrainian Jews, Roma peoples, not to mention Catholics and other religions, by far-right individuals and groups in Western Ukraine.
One could characterize Ukraine’s sobering and terrible lessons to the world are the inherent, underlying dangers that can come from ultra-nationalism once it has descended into “the deep end”, and ends up becoming a convenient excuse to demonize those different from white people and seek their annihilation.”
BANDERITES, BANDERISM, BANDEROWCY & THE LEGACY OF STEPHAN BANDERA
The legacy of Bandera in Ukraine cannot be too much over-emphasized. Anti-Russian Banderism is said to be the most radical Ukrainian ideology on or off the battlefield. In 2010, the out-going President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, posthumously awarded Stepan Bandera, the title: “Hero of Ukraine”. Not surprisingly, this award was vehemently protested by the European Parliament as well as Russian, Jewish, Polish and Roma people who historically have been so terribly victimized by Banderites, Banderism and Banderowcy ideology.
As a World War II Nazi collaborator, Bandera is the central figure in modern Western Ukraine’s political evolution. His personal history mirrors Ukraine’s own turbulence. Among other things, Bandera personally negotiated the creation in WWII of the Ukrainian Legion under the German High Command. The Legion, at the time, was under the command of the Abwehr ((German Military Intelligence Service). As the leader of the OUN, Bandera also wrote a manifesto entitled Ukrainian National Revolution that called for the annihilation of Ukraine’s so-called ‘ethnic enemies’.
It’s telling that when the Coup of 2014 occurred, one of the first acts the new government took, after ostensibly throwing out all the so-called ‘bad guys’, was to glorify Hitler’s collaborators, like Bandera; followed by re-commemorating memorials in his honour and renaming significant places for Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators. Torchlight parades are still even annually held in Western Ukraine cities in Bandera’s honor. In Western Ukraine, “Bandera”, as many say, “still casts a very long shadow”. Banderites – Wikipedia
The BANDERITES are members of an assortment of right-wing organizations in Ukraine. The term derives from its originator and leader Stepan Bandera, who was the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B); formed in 1929 as part of an amalgamation of Ukrainian movements that included the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. As militiamen of the Ukrainian Independent Army, OUN-B soon became the dominant political movement of the Ukrainian far right. The letter ‘B’ that follows ‘OUN’, worn as a proud insignia arm or shirt patch, signifies that its forces are exclusively part of ‘Bandera’s Faction’.
OUN-B, quickly became known as totalitarian, anti-Semitic, Fascists who, as independent collaborators with Nazi Germany during WWII, soon teamed up with the Germans and accompanied them on ethnic-cleansing sprees throughout the occupied territories, engaging in atrocities that included the massacres of Jewish, Polish and Roma people. As a result of such a sordid historical past, once can often hear Ukraine’s critics cynically note, “Modern Ukraine is a broken, divided, corrupt, kleptocracy and a puppet client-state of the Empire of Lies”.
One could say that Ukraine’s most sobering lesson to the world are the inherent dangers that come once ultra-nationalism has gone way off the deep end; where language and blood makes one ethnic group more worthy than another. Though doubtful, one can only hope the world one day can grow beyond such a dark, ugly place where such misplaced pride is used as an excuse to demonize those different from them to the point of seeking their annihilation.
Yet after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Ukrainian’s sought independence from the Russian Empire but were conquered by the Russians Red Army under Stalin. Western Ukraine thus continues to harbor what has come to be called a totally irrational hatred, which isn’t actually that totally irrational, given the violent peoples and nations of all those to the East and South of them. It could be said of, and better understood, as simply being the result of what has been a horribly-terrible history. Yet to re-grow a healthier, more prideful form of Western Ukrainian ultra-nationalism, in the opposite direction from its old roots buried in such utter hatred, an always wise first step is to recall for one’s self that biblical passage from Duteronomy (24:16):
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. Ezekiel 18:19-20 – Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father
PART FIVE
SUPERMAN, AMERICA’S COMIC BOOK HERO CHALLENGED BY WAR IN UKRAINE
Not enough people in the world can readily see the mass hypocrisy being played out in the war in Ukraine between Nazism, Communism and Democracy. Some, however, still continue to wonder, “Does America’s original comic book hero – Superman – and his famous motto, “Truth, Justice & The American Way”, still ring true after over 83 years; when Americans and their Allies, inspired by Superman’s lofty motto, first went off to fight and die in WWII against two very real live humans who also thought of themselves as ‘Supermen’ in their own right: Adolph Hitler and his Nazi forces in Europe and Africa, and; Emperor Hirohito’s Japanese Fascist forces in Asia and the South Pacific.
Many also now wonder, as the world faces yet another possible even more grim and calamitous, perhaps even an un-thinkable nuclear, war in Europe, if another real-live ‘Superman’ or ‘Supermen’ are again on the rise and the DC comic book character’s bold motto still holds true in 2022?
It’s always fascinating to see how art mimic’s life and the real world exactly as it should. Many now wonder, with the new war in Ukraine, if the motto of Superman, still America’s biggest DC COMIC book hero, has stood the test of time for over eight decades?
So much has changed, though, everywhere in the world since the Allies first fought against another horde of fascist Nazi’s who were then threatening the whole world. But has anything really changed, at all, given the state of the world as seen through the prism of 2022?
America, along with the Western World now is back in Europe, everywhere fighting, with the Ukrainians as their proxy army, but, OMG, can it be true, this time on the side of the fascists? What would Superman, the character, think about this? But against whom exactly are they fighting this time? Themselves? Their own countrymen and countrywomen? Who are they ultimately now fighting for or against? It’s all very confusing.
America and the rest of the Western World, in toto, obviously has dramatically changed since the days of the: New Deal, GI Bill, Government of the Little Guy, or Mom & Apple Pie; but instead has become ever more progressively fascist-leaning and reactionary in its politics and religion.
So, Surprise, Surprise! Even Superman’s motto has now had to change with the times, as well; because ‘The American Way’, now means too many conflicting things, some very good, some extremely bad, to too many different people, like the war in Ukraine, itself.
Now, the banner motto heading on every DC Superman comic has been changed to instead read, “Truth, Justice and Hope for a Better Day and a Better World. For a time, some cartoonists at DC Comics argued it should instead read: “Truth, Justice and Hope for a Better Tomorrow”.
But apparently, DC Comic cartoonists thought longer on it. “A Better World”, they conjectured, might withstand the test of time more than “A Better Tomorrow”. Or, perhaps, given the very real nuclear threat that now looms ever larger on the horizon, and suggests there may no longer be a “Better Tomorrow”, or maybe not even a ‘Better World’, as an ever more fascist-leaning, rather than a democratic, world also looms ever larger in the future.
In keeping up with the changing social demographics of the times, and the wide disparity that exists now in sexual preferences among the world’s populace, DC Comic cartoonists have also added yet a new main character to the storyline of the DC Superman classic series.
Here comes still another surprise! Now, newspaper reporter Clark Kent has a new half-earthling son, Jon Kent, who, not surprisingly, is bisexual; which means either Clark Kent (i.e. Superman), or his wife (i.e.‘Lois Lane’, or whomever on Earth or on Krypton), also must have some bi-sexual genes or tendencies floating around somewhere between them in outer space.
Now young boys and girls in each new issue, everywhere in the world, including Ukraine, will also be challenged, not only by so many confusions about war, but forced to deal with the world’s many complex hostilities, prejudices and confusions that exist about not just sexual identity but about who they really are, and what they actually believe in, as well as all manner of other taxing things that so bedevil young people today everywhere, as no doubt young Jon Kent will also have to face in each new Superman comic book issue. Isn’t that so de rigueur.
(DC Comics Changes Superman Motto, Drops ‘American Way’ – The Hollywood Reporter )
THE END GAME SEEMS FORDAINED
What Ultra-Nationalist and neo-Nazi’s in both the West and East now are doing to try to totally crush Mother Russia is pure evil. They’re calling this a Watershed Moment in empire-building history. They can smell the blood in the water, absolutely thirst for it, and think they’ve got the Russian Bear finally cornered and can now totally take him and his empire out.
But if they’re wrong and the now severely-wounded, but still extremely dangerous and not yet mortally wounded, Russian Bear still has some genius, devious, Russian tricks up its ‘bruin’ sleeve; one need only recall the equally genius, heroic struggle Russia’s leaders and their people once bravely-marshalled against the so-called ‘invincible’ Nazi Germans. They should then know the awesome threat the West is still up against. In the end, for all the West’s efforts and its smarts, the whole world might end up on the same short-end of the same stick. And we all maybe will end up equally dead!
THE WAR IN UKRAINE IS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
It’s also once again important to remind one’s self of the fact that if Russia, during World War II, hadn’t once bravely defended the West and defeated Nazi Germany, at enormous cost to itself, the so-called ‘Free World’ would no longer be free and this world would instead by a more fascist, Nazified world than it already now is or could more so become.
But, the EU now, without any previous legal precedent or wisdom to fall back on, continues to ship weapons to every hamlet and berg in Ukraine. A once major tabooed breach in basic international law, if not world diplomatic rule of law, has now been seriously, dangerously, violated forever. The only weak, dishonest lie the EU has so far been able to give as a reason is, “We live in unprecedented times.” But what a sly, duplicitous, self-serving excuse that is! Only yet one more egregious two-faced lie to try to swallow and keep down.
Zelenskyy tries to cover for his own warring aggressions by sending out prepared duplicitous smoke screen press releases about so-called ‘peace talks’, but then, before the talks ever even began, Zelenskyy told the press, “I do not believe in the outcome of the peace talks.” Still more cooked-up dishonest political tripe. While the world’s Western press, media and its governments continue to invite him to speak before all the peoples and elected officials of the world, as if to herald the grand democratic historical event that is taking place for the betterment of us all.
But the genie now is out of the bottle. It’s clearly ‘Open Season’’ on ‘Commies’. Now everyone has been duly brainwashed to hate the Commies once again. Zilenskyy, Biden and all the rest are looking for every legal or illegal way they can to finally cut the snake’s head off, without personally endangering themselves. “They’re laughing”, as an old Aussie might sarcastically say.
It’s a daring, reckless gambit with nuclear bombs dangling over all our heads, serving as the deadly pawns in the game. Every human and every nation is under threat, with wide swatches of their homelands threatened to possibly end up being ravaged and left in ruins. It’s Doctor Strangelove time at the movies for real.
UNAF forces and their Western allies are looking to destroy the last of the real democracies the way the Communist Revolution once swept the world and led to a whole generation of rebellions, rebels, refugees, murderers bred on war and fueled by chaos. Good luck!
It’s now already not out of the impossible realm, that someone’s quick, nervous finger is already quivering on the button and, in a moment of insanity or panic, quicker than anyone can say Armageddon, or ‘BOOM’; places like: Ukraine; US; Russia; Kiev; Vladivostok; Moscow; and everywhere in-between in: Europe’, North America and South America will disappear in the blink of an eye; segue to Turtledove’s trilogy in 2016.
In 2016, Author Harry Turtledove, wrote a ‘Hot War’ trilogy on the Effects of a Nuclear War in three novels: Armistice; Bomb’s Away; and Fall-Out. Turtledove, realizing what the Russian coup of 2014 portended, wrote about an unthinkable ‘alternative history’ of an ‘unthinkable’ nuclear war caused by such: a simple act of folly; one poor decision; one instance of rage; one fit of madness; when the Cold War instantly turns ’Very Hot’ and the U.S., and Russia or the U.S. finally have been goaded into unleashing their vast nuclear arsenals at one another, in one last big Donnybrook.
In Turtledove’s trilogy, of course, millions die and millions more are displaced. Germans end up fighting next to Americans. Polish freedom fighters stand next to Russian fascists; each trying to protect themselves and their tiny portion of Mother Russia or Mother Earth from extinction.
Yet, in a real live 2022 setting, it could just as easily be something like: Russian patriots and leftist ‘greenies’, worldwide, are forced to fight together now against New World Order mad men and women; trying to protect Mother Russia and Mother Earth against Ukrainian Azov and Right Sector neo-Nazi storm troopers and other mercenary armies.
With the weaponry and destructive power humans now have at their ready disposal, this moment in history is perhaps bigger than any or all the other revolutions put together that have come before – whether by the Americans, French, Russians or Chinese. Yet much of the duped Human Race still are just as ignorant, flat-out stupid, still as selfish and brainwashed as what led up to and caused any one of the world conditions that contributed to all the former revolutions now past that already have doomed us if they had had ‘The Bomb’.
WHAT TIME IS IT ON THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK
The Doomsday Atomic Clock was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein who helped develop the first atomic weapon in the Manhattan Project. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is sent every year to the Board of Scientists, eleven of whom are Nobel Laureates. The clock has become an internationally-recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe, man-made or natural. It was last updated on January 20th, 2022, but before the beginning developments of the war in Ukraine.
International analysts once said there was “no chance” that the Soviets would ever go to the ‘nuclear’ level over any issue with Korea, or even China and the US, but all bets are off now when nations and peoples get pushed as far and as hard as the way the insane Western propagandists and international fascists now are pushing Russia and the Russian people.
Up until this moment, the closest the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have ever said the Human Race has come to a ‘Doomsday’, ‘Armageddon’ moment was 3 minutes to Midnight during the Reagan arms race with the Soviet Union. In 2017, the Bulletin sent out its first bulletin update of the clock since 2015. By then, the 3 Minutes to Midnight hands had moved closer by one minute to ‘2-and-a-half Minutes to Midnight’, the closest the world had then been to Armageddon since 1952, during the Korean war and the H-Bomb tests.
On Jan 20, 2022, before the Ukraine War broke open, the Doomsday clock was the closest again it EVER has come to an apocalyptic moment, where its hands have remained frozen a mere “100 Seconds to Midnight”, for the third-year running.
With the proliferation of nuclear devices in Israel, Iran, North Korea and China, and now the war in Ukraine, along with the United States testing of tactical nuclear weapons, and Russia’s bombing of nuclear plants inside Ukraine, it’s impossible to know how many fewer-seconds closer to Midnight are the hands of the Doomsday Clock’s. But they must be very, very close.
Where Will The Madness End
Nothing Has Changed. The world economy is once more in a catastrophic, cataclysmic shambles. The Military-Industrial-Corporate Complex is still totally responsible as before for creating, still to come, yet another senseless, perhaps bloodiest, most destructive, perhaps fatal, world war for the whole planet.
Meanwhile. the corporate and fossil fuel elites remain gleeful beyond words, as do the arms manufacturers. They all claim that what they are doing is to protect the future of Democracy. But it’s a lie! They’re only doing it to maximize their profits. Because, whatever happens, as a result of the war, they will still make billions, perhaps zillions, quadrillions, quintillions, sextillions, septillions, octillions, nonillions, decillions and even more than any of the Oligarchs and Corporate-Industrial Plutocrats will ever be able to count in their lifetime, or release in their wildest dreams; of course, at everyone and everything else’s expense. In the end, they all simplywill become that much richer and fatter.
This time the West’s high-tech 21stcentury propaganda machine has effectively implanted within the entire world’s every thought and mind the image of Putin as yet another ‘evil’ Stalin or Hitler who must be summarily eradicated; while Volodymyr Zelenskiyy, and his Western Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalists and Azov neo-Nazi Battalions are the new ‘White Knights’; with the U.S. NATO and their Allied forces all ‘International Proxies’ on the sidelines, cheering the Ukrainian Army ever onward, thrusting more and more of them into the meat grinder, while supplying them with ever bigger, more deadly weaponry, edging the world ever closer to the 21st century’s first real big ’Nuclear’ war. But who are the real “Good Guys”, “Liberators” and “Patriots” who will do the necessary eradication of EVIL this time around? Are there any left?
This age-old blood vendetta war of hate and violence among humans has been cleverly orchestrated by a level of propaganda, the magnitude of which has never quite been known before. It could be likened to a repeat of the prelude To WWII in Spain, when the Nazi’s provided Franco’s Ultra-Nationalist Fascists and their Blue Division allies with all the cutting-edge war materials needed to carry out their proxy war against the world’s Republicans.
Only This Time Around, if the Western Proxy World War in Ukraine ends up becoming a prelude to engulfing the whole world in a nuclear holocaust it couldn’t perhaps be between a more predictable bunch of more-crazed adversaries, in a no more likely insane ‘Blood Feud’ killing field, than Ukraine and Russia.
Where it all will end this time, ‘only the Shadow knows!’
One can only hope that when the war does end, if it doesn’t culminate in a nuclear conflagration, America and its NATO allies will have learned by then that in order to De-nazify Ukraine, the West & East first must do the same to themselves before it’s too late.
To begin to do that they must first learn what Albert Einstein, the creator of the Atomic Doomsday Clock, meant when he once warned:
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American freelance writer and author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Indigenous Soul. Irwin’s long ago experiences as a Volunteer in Service to America, continue to inspire and inform Irwin of so many on-going problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual-political issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples that he attempts to pass on to others through his writings.
jerome_irwin@yahoo.com
(Continuing my testimony about the massacre Zionists committed in the Palestinian Burj shimali camp during the Israeli invasion to Lebanon in 1982)
One day someone came from the camp and told us that the Israelis did not enter the camp. We were tired of being in the Lebanese village, and we were in a horrible situation, although the Lebanese owner of the room was kind with us and did not try to pressure us to leave.
The difficult question was how to return to a destroyed camp surrounded, as we heard, by Israeli army checkpoints. But in the end, we decided to return to the camp, whatever the results.
We were dozens of people, men, and women walking towards the camp. We were hungry and thirsty. The shops were closed, and we could not buy anything. I told them I knew a fellow teacher in the school, his name is Hussein Hashim, and he is a kind man.
I was in a miserable condition. My beard was thick, and my clothes were dirty. I did not take a shower for two weeks. I knocked on the door, and he asked about the knocker while he was still inside, and I told him who I was!
He cautiously opened the door and shook hands with me warmly, shaking his head in regret over the tragedy. I told him the reason of my visit. I drank coffee, and he offered me a packet of cigarettes. His wife came with a bundle of cheese, bread, and olives. I left while he was repeating words from The Qur’an that God changes the situation to another situation.
I went back to my friends and gave them food, and we sat under the trees to eat and rest.
On the way, we met soldiers from the forces of the Palestinian middle battalion. They were four fighters retreating north, and they were exhausted. They told us that the whole region fell into the hands of the Zionist invaders. They also told us that the resistance forces collapsed and major Bilal, commander of the middle battalion was killed. Major Bilal was a brave leader who the people respected.
He was the commander of the middle battalion for several years. He also fought the Zionist invasion in 1878.
They also told us that Major Azmi, commander of the western battalion, was also killed with other comrades.
And although what they said was not surprising to us, we felt feelings of sadness and despair. We gave them what we had left of the food, then they said goodbye and went north.
We were about thirty people at the time when a pickup truck stopped for us, usually carrying vegetables and fruits from the nearby orchards. We got into the car and sat in the place designated for the vegetable boxes, and the car went towards the camp. On the way, I saw Israeli military vehicles near us for the first time. The sight of seeing the Star of David, which for us is a symbol of death, was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But we had to continue towards the camp without knowing what awaited us.
The question was whether to go to my flat in the city of Tyr or go to the camp. I decided to stay with my people because it was a difficult time, and I had to stay in the camp alongside my family and people, whatever the price could be.
Close to the camp junction, an Israeli checkpoint was not stopping anyone. Someone told me that if they allow people to return to gather, they shall begin to arrest people, and he was right because that’s what happened later.
We entered the camp and saw in the camp yard some people. It was the first time I saw the destruction in this way.
The camp was lumps of rubble everywhere an earthquake struck.
People were trying to collect what was left of their homes and searching to find half-destroyed houses to stay in.
The whole camp was destroyed except for one neighborhood, located behind the orchards, and the Zionists did not know that it was part of the camp.
People started with primitive means to remove the rubble. They were men, children, and women removing the rubble with their own hands. There were no Arab or foreign journalists to cover it.
So I wish I had a camera to document this great work of the camp residents.
I was told about 150 Palestinians of the camp residents mostly woman and children were killed and buried under the rubbles.
Our house was destroyed, as was the whole neighborhood. So my father went to a half-destroyed house and lived there. My grandmother slept in a small room next to the house. And one evening, I heard my grandmother screaming that the Jews would kill me! (The usual Palestinian language is to call them Jews and not Israeli or Zionists)
I calmed her and stayed with her until she slept.
I’m sure that Zionists will remain at war with every Palestinian generation. They indeed have an enormous capability for oppression and killing. The hypocritical West certainly supports them. But the world changes and nothing remains the same. And the victory of Palestine is coming no matter how long it takes.
I devote this article to the soul of my parents , they never live in peace in their life because of the international Zionist criminals.
Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad. Palestine in heart
Fascist groupings and their associated policies of religio-fanaticism are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries – slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony – some have already taken the reins of state power. India is no exception to this global trend. In this political context, April 22, 2022 – the 152nd birth anniversary of Vladimir Lenin (the founder of Soviet Union) – can serve as an occasion to explore the contemporary relevance of his perspective on the issue of religion. Following the method of materialism, Lenin emphasized that religion is a byproduct of the concrete logic of its surrounding system of social organization. In “Socialism and Religion,” he said:
Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.
From this passage, two points can be gleaned. First, on the structural level, religion itself can’t be said to be a source of oppression; it is only an indication of oppression. In the words of Lenin, “economic slavery” is the “true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.” In “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” he commented: “The deepest root of religion today is the social oppression of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in the face of blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment”. Second, on the ideological level, religion is a source of oppression because, as Lenin says, it leads to “the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses”. In his essay on the collapse of the Second International, he elaborates that “the priest is required to console the oppressed, to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these prospects will be “achieved”), while preserving class rule, and thereby to reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination.”
Taking into account the fact that the survival of religious abstractions is dependent on historically specific modes of production, Lenin remarked that the “combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion.” Interestingly, Lenin said that atheism should not be made a prerequisite for joining this material struggle aimed at depriving religion of its material support and making it a purely private affair. In defense of this viewpoint, he stated: “No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.”
In other words, while atheist propaganda is used to weaken religion, the process of secularization is not singularly reliant on this pedagogic method; instead, it is internally driven by the productive tension that a proletarian individual feels between the supernatural character of his/her religious belief and the wholly earthly agenda of communism, when he/she joins a workers’ movement. In this dynamic interaction, the passivizing and reactionary aspects of religion are thrown away and the anthropological dimension of religion is fully regained. Religion is, in part, the infinitization and projection of humanity’s most cherished values (love, righteousness, wisdom and so on) onto a mythic notion called God. That’s why Ludwig Feuerbach had commented that “God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.” With the contradiction induced by the Leninist strategy of the political coexistence of private religious beliefs with a communist programmatic outlook, the aforementioned positive and human-centered components of religion are re-appropriated.
What importance does Lenin’s opinion on religion have for India? Aijaz Ahmad notes that British colonialism had a negative impact on India’s cultural fabric. Due to the divide-and-rule policies of the imperial administration, Indian colonial society had become “organized, socially as well as politically, around the axes of caste, religion and region”. “So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as “equal respect for all religions,” in the telling and broadly accepted phrase of Dr. Radhakrishnan, a conservative Brahminical scholar who served as the second president of independent India.” Ahmad explains that this redefinition of secularism was inherently problematic:
For the actually believing person there is always something unique about his own religion so that he cannot possibly have “equal respect” for a different religion; for a believing Muslim, Hinduism is intrinsically inferior. More to the point, equal respect for all religions in the conduct of the affairs of the state would necessarily lead, especially in the context of the corruptions of liberal democratic politics, to greater respect for the religion of the demographic majority whose votes count for more, whose privileged classes command much more money and power, and among whose middle classes new kinds of religiosity are now rampant.
In contrast to this attempt to restrict secularism to the traditional ethic of religious toleration, Lenin’s open attack on the crudeness of religious convictions and the proposal to secularize religion through the force of class struggle can function as effective ways to counter the extreme Right. By deploying these strategic tools in the present-day conjuncture, the Indian Left can create a new civic culture based upon a subjectively thick mode of religious understanding that facilitates a culturally informed openness toward different religions. In this Leninist model of secularism, the public importance of religion would decline not through its privatization and individualization but through the revolutionization of religiosity that would make it expressive of subaltern needs and thus, extract a common humanistic core from every religion.
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