Monthly Archives: March 2022

Russias aggression against Ukraine has brought widespread condemnation. Yet despite good intentions from citizens across Europe to assist in the cause, there are also traps of the past that are important to avoid.

DiEM25s Ivana Nenadovi gave her perspective on what the world can learn from her personal experience which has parallels with the current situation that is unfolding today.

Increased NATO involvement in the conflict is among the most popular calls to remedy Russias actions but, having lived through NATOs bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Ivana stressed her concerns.

I would like to mention another part of the war that is always brutal and never a solution more arms and guns are not going to bring peace, she said during DiEM25s How to end the war in Ukraine discussion.

Ivana is also concerned about the war of words that is happening at the same time, particularly from the left, and that disdain towards Russias government should not spill over to everyday Russian citizens.

On the left I can see this need to be on the right side of history, this moral high ground that we will condemn Putin. And of course we should do that, she said. However, what I would like to emphasize from my experience is that when we say Russia, or when we say Putin, it also spills over to the people of Russia.

There are progressive Russian people who are trying to fight this oppression for a very long time, just as we in Serbia tried to fight, and did fight, [Slobodan] Milosevic, and then we ended up being bombed.

This is one big injustice that I can tell you about, its not something that will help too much, but it is something that is perceived as injustice, especially because this whole region of Eastern Europe, ex-USSR, ex-Yugoslavia is very difficult for our Western friends to understand and comprehend.

And all of a sudden we have this big interest and geopolitical knowledge about this region, which doesnt really exist because of various reasons.

Above all, Ivana warns against being lured into further division.

Each side will have their own point of view. Of course, there is a history of oppression repression, and antagonism, she added.

And what we should do as an internationalist movement is to bring people closer together, to understand that war doesnt end even if I hope that it will end soon for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, I doubt it will happen. And even if a peace agreement would be signed tomorrow, war lingers on and has its aftermath.

And [judging by] ex-Yugoslavia or Serbia, because Serbia bears the legacy of Yugoslavia and everything that was bad and connected to Yugoslavia, its something that Russian people will suffer for a very long time, when Putin is gone and has his place in history books.

But we must be careful about more divisions, especially on the left, on the side where people are thinking [in a way that is] progressive or humanitarian and trying not to create more divisions that we already unfortunately have.

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I lived through NATO's bombing. These are the mistakes we can't repeat with Ukraine - DiEM25

DetailsBy Native News Online StaffMarch 04, 2022

The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. has released a statement titled, The American Genocide of the IndiansHistorical Facts and Real Evidence, in the news section of its website. The statement identifies the definition of genocide and goes on to state that, According to international law and its domestic law, what the United States did to the Indians covers all the acts that define genocide and indisputably constitutes genocide.

The Chinese Embassy did not respond to Native News Onlines requests for comment.

The article is a brief yet thorough overview of the American Indian experience since the time of the Declaration of Independence and the slandering of the American Indian with the phrase Merciless Indian Savages. It further explores vicious, genocidal atrocities committed against Native Americans by the U.S. government and white settlers, and cites numerous U.S.-based non-profits, news media, and thought leaders on the issue.

Select quotes from the article include:

American soldiers saw the slaughter of Indians as natural, even an honor, and would not rest until theywere all killed. Similar hate rhetoric and atrocities abound, and are well documented

In 1930, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs began sterilizing Indian women through the Indian Health Service program. Sterilization wasconducted in the name of protecting the health of Indian women, and in some cases, even performed without the womens knowledge. Statisticssuggest thatin early 1970s, more than 42%of Indian women of childbearing age were sterilized

Sadly, to whitewash this part of history, U.S. historians often glorify the Westward Expansion as the American peoples pursuit of economic development in the western frontier, claiming that it accelerated the improvement of American democracy, boosted economic prosperity, and contributed to the formation and development of the American national spirit. They make no mention ofthe brutal massacre of Native Americans.

The article also explores the issue of Indian boarding schools and disenfranchisement, in addition to the failure of U.S. schools to properly teach about Native Americans as part of U.S. history. It presents former Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum as an example of this ignorance:

[Santorum] saidpublicly that We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here... but candidly, there isnt much Native American culture in American culture. His remarks dismissed and negatedthe influence of [I]ndigenous people in American culture.

To put the deeply researched statement from China into context, we spoke with Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California-Riverside, and a China scholar who spent much of his career at Princeton.

The article is coming out now, he told Native News Online, because of the controversy from the last several years over the incarceration and treatment of the Uyghurs in the northwest Xinjiang region of China.

In Trumps final days in office, Link explains, his administration called Chinas oppression of the Uyghurs genocide. The Biden administration has maintained that position.

It's a radioactive word, Link says, adding that using it obligates the government to take action. For the government labeled as committing it, its embarrassing. Link points to the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton debated whether of not he should use the G-word.

In the case of the Uyghurs, you have this proud Peoples Republic of China that is very worried about its international image. And, he says, it is deeply irritated at being called genocidal.

One way to fight back is to look at how Native people were treated, Link explains. Its a good report. Theyve done their homework. Americans should be embarrassed about it. Genocide does apply. All of that is fair.

However, while the U.S. is currently grappling with its pastand presentatrocities with Native Americans, China, in contrast, is not.

In fact, notes Link, this report is in part an attempt of the Chinese government to coverup and disguise the genocide of the Uyghurs.

Uyghurs are an ethnic minority, they speak a different language, and they are Muslim, Link explains as to why they are targeted by a government leery of groups that might organize and cause trouble. Daily life in Xinjiang is much different from the rest of China. Time is even different, as Xinjiang is naturally 3-4 hours later than Beijing. (All of China is in one time zone, on Beijing time.) Theres their time, and theres official time, so theres a bifurcation even at that level, says Link.

Link says the number of Uyghurs who have been killed is difficult to say, although he says the number currently in prison camps is between 1 and 2 million.

Theyre hoping to blunt criticism of what theyre doing, says Link. And it may work in part. Its a good report. Its a sorry history, and it will make a lot of Americans feel like yes, we have no business criticizing others. This is the psychological effect the report is aimed at setting off.

Link notes it wont work on all Americans, and that just because the U.S. government isnt squeaky clean does not mean Americans cannot point out the injustice and atrocities committed by other governments on other peoples.

The Chinese Embassys article ends by calling out the U.S. governments genocide and also its hypocrisy:

The slaughter, forced relocation, cultural assimilation and unjust treatment the United States committed against American Indians have constituted de facto genocides. These acts fully match the definition of genocide in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and have continued for hundreds of years to this day. It is imperative that the U.S. government drop its hypocrisy and double standards on human rights issues, and take seriously the severe racial problems and atrocities in its own country.

I sympathize with the Native Americans and the Uyghurs, says Link. "In a sense, they have suffered similarly, and it's great this connection is made Theyre comrades in mistreatment. Beaten underdogs whove been unfairly beaten. It gives them communal [connection].

To learn more about the situation of the Uyghurs, Link recommends China File and the peoples tribunal in the U.K.

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China Calls What the U.S. did to Native Americans Genocide - Native News Online

WASHINGTON, USA FEBRUARY 21 : John Mearsheimer speaks during a panel organised by Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) Foundation in Washington, United States on February 21, 2019.(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Photo: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

A minor squall on Twitter this past week may have largely gone unnoticed amid the larger hurricane about Russias invasion of Ukraine. But its worth taking a close look at it, because it illustrates something significant about U.S. foreign policy since World War II, and how propaganda works everywhere.

It started when Russias Ministry of Foreign Affairs the equivalent to the U.S. State Department did something unusual: It tweeted out an endorsement of a2014 article in Foreign Affairsthe publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, probably the most influential American think tank on U.S. foreign policy. The piece was by John Mearsheimer, a professor in the political science department at the University of Chicago and a prominent member of the realist school of foreign policy thought. You can understand why the Russian government liked it, because it was called Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the Wests Fault.

This led to a response from Anne Applebaum, a neoconservative journalist whos currently a staff writer at The Atlantic.Now wondering if the Russians didnt actually get their narrative from Mearshimer et al., she wrote. Moscow needed to say West was responsible for Russian invasions (Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine), and not their own greed and imperialism. American academics provided the narrative.

The et al part is important here. In U.S. political lore NATO was created in 1949 as a defensive military alliance against the Soviet Union and its allies. The reality was somewhat different. But for realists in general, not just Mearsheimer, the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War meant that an expansion of NATO could lead to dangerous conflict with Russia. Fifty American foreign policy leaders, largely realists, wrote to President Bill Clinton in 1997 that pushing NATOs borders eastward would be a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma

To comprehend Applebaums glee here, her tweet should be seen as not just about Ukraine, but as part of a decades-long battle between realists and neoconservatives. And her rhetorical gambit is a favorite of neoconservatives, one theyve used many times before and will surely use many times again. Neither the realists or neoconservatives are any great shakes from a progressive perspective, but you have to understand them to understand U.S. foreign policy.

Realists believe that the U.S. should run as much of the world as possible,while being mindful that there are limits to American power and remember other countries(in particular, great powers like Russia and China)have their own interests. For realists, morality, democracy, the sovereignty of small countries, etc., are nice in theory but its nave to think they can ever play much role in great power politics.

For instance, in Mearsheimers 2014 article, he wrote that it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them. But of course the same thing could have been written about the U.S. before the invasion of Iraq. From a realist perspective, the only question about that war was whether it was wise or foolish for U.S. power, not whether it was right or wrong.

Likewise, in a recent interview with Mearsheimer in the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner brought up the long history of ugly U.S. actions in the Western Hemisphere, and remarked, Were essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business. Mearsheimer replied with equanimity, We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.

What makes propaganda propaganda is oftennot its lack of factual basis, but its bad faith.

Then there are the neoconservatives. The term neoconservatism wasnt coined until the 1970s, but it arguably has its roots in the desire of one U.S. foreign policy faction after World War II to confront the Soviet Union and reverse the communist revolution in China. Neoconservatives believe the U.S. can and must run the entire world, and justify the necessary wars with intense sloganeering about our devotion to democracy and human rights. This is sincerely felt by some neoconservatives, in the same way there were Soviet apparatchiks who were sincerely angry about the oppression of African Americans in the U.S. But the practical effect of this sentiment is near-zero: When the rubber meets the road, neoconservatives usually have no problem supporting the most vicious dictatorships if it serves their larger goals, and spend little energy fretting about democracy and human rights in America.

Neither school has much concern for basic justice or the lives of regular, non-powerful people. But the realists at least tend to be more tethered to the world we live in, while the neoconservatives consistently succumb to bizarre fantasies of omnipotence that lead to catastrophe. (There is arguably a third school that embraces an 1821 admonition from John Quincy Adams that America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. But its so weak that for practical purposes its irrelevant.)

In any case, Applebaums attack on Mearsheimer that his analysis sounds similar to Russian propaganda, or even inspired it in the first place is the kind of ugly, childish rhetoric in which neoconservatives specialize. For neoconservatives, if any external criticism of the U.S. is similar to internal criticism from Americans, that immediately discredits the internal critics. That argument seems to make sense until you think about it for two seconds. The fact is that when countries engage in propagandistic attacks on others, its rarely all lies. Indeed, propaganda often contains a surprisingly high percentage of truth. Thats because powerful nations are constantly doing terrible things, so other powerful governments dont always have to make things up to criticize them.

What makes propaganda propaganda is often not itslack of factual basis, but its bad faith. In this particular case, Mearsheimer was correct that the West had been moving into Russias backyard and threatening its core interests. Meanwhile, Putin has been vociferously making the same complaints for years. But obviously Russia doesnt object to a country moving into anothers backyard on principle.Just ask anyone who lives in Aleppo.

Likewise, in 2006 when Irans then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a long letter to George W. Bush, his indictment of the U.S. was mostlyon point and indeed sounds a lot like criticism from Americas left. Yet Ahmadinejads words about the injustice of our treatment of prisoners at Guantnamo Bay did not carry great moral weight, since you could just go to EvinPrison to find how much Ahmadinejads own government actually cares about the brutal detention of human beings.

From the other direction, consider the attacks of Alexey Navalny, a prominent Russian opposition leader currently in prison, on Vladimir Putins war:

What Navalny says is generally true.And when he speaks about the aggressive war against Ukraine and the fact Putin is not Russia it also sounds a lot like the criticisms U.S. officials make in bad faith against Russia. But this does not invalidate what Navalny is saying even though Applebaums equivalents in Russia have surely claimedthat it does. (And like Mearsheimer, Navalnyis by no means a progressive hero.)

The lesson here is straightforward: Everyone who wants their country to improve should feel free to engage insincere, accurate criticism of theirgovernments actions. It is both inevitable and irrelevant that it will likely end up soundingsimilar to criticism of theircountry byforeign enemy governments. And those who claim the similarity discredits the internal criticsshould be ignored like the propagandists they are. To keep this in mind, youcan memorize this article, or just keep a copy of this chart handy:

Chart: Soohee Cho for The Intercept

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No, Russia Didn't Get its Propaganda From John Mearsheimer - The Intercept

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has split the hacking community, sending some of the most recognizable and powerful groups scrambling to pick a side to declare which has their allegiance.

In a tweet, hacking group Anonymous declared "a cyberwar against the Russian government" and has claimed to be responsible for attacks that brought down Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet, and several government websites. It also said it hacked other Russian state-TV channels.

Conti, a ransomware group with possible ties to Russian intelligence that attacked more than 290 American targets last year, declared its "full support of Russian government" and said it would use "all possible resources to strike back" at any adversaries. Cyberthreat intelligence company Orpheus Cyber reported another group united with Russia obtained stolen data from more than 45 Ukrainian government websites, and some of it is up for sale.

Motives that push hacking groups to pick a side range widely. Members of Anonymous have stated that their guiding principle is "anti-oppression," while Russian-aligned attacks may be state-sponsored. Pro-Russia attacks can also come from groups who feel pressured to operate on their behalf by the Kremlin.

"It's not entirely clear what the connection is between the ransomware gangs and the Russian government," said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft. "At best, they are working within a permissive environment. At worst, they are working for certain wings of the Russian government."

"Some of the actions of Russia's government just prior to the war shutting down the REvil gang or arresting them and shutting down a number of dark web forums and shops these cybercriminals are afraid that if they don't support the regime, they're going to be next," said Alex Holden, the founder of Hold Security.

Hacking groups may become targets for moving away from their usual financial motives for attacks. After Conti declared support for Russia, an apparent insider who objected to the group's support for Russia leaked a trove of internal chat messages and other files that Holden says "mortally wounded" the gang.

"When we see things like this, we are learning how in 2021, 2022, cybercriminal enterprises operate, so we have [the] ability to detect and deter organizations like this in the future," Holden said.

Moving forward, experts say that any further cyber escalation could spell trouble for those outside the conflict zone, including Americans. Groups like Conti could come back to hit the U.S. as well.

"They are a highly effective ransomware group, albeit one that has terrible operational security," Callow said. "They likely do still have access to certain U.S. networks that they have yet to encrypt, and they could potentially do that any time."

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Hackers are being forced to pick sides in the Russia-Ukraine war - ABC15 Arizona in Phoenix

The ideological propaganda campaigns waged to justify the imperialist wars of the past invariably relied on distortions, fabrications, and outright lies. As the writer Stefan Zweig observed in his recollections of the outbreak of the First World War, All the warring nations were already in a state of over-excitation and the worst rumor was immediately transformed into truth, the most absurd slander believed.

So it is that during the week since Putins invasion of Ukraine, the hysterical anti-Russian campaign spearheaded by the corporate media and sections of the middle class with the aim of legitimizing the US-NATO war drive has assumed horrifying proportions. Singers, artists, conductors, products, and even cats are being excluded or banished solely due to their Russian nationality or origin.

On Tuesday, Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter announced the immediate firing of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev from his position as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. Reiter, a Social Democrat, issued an ultimatum to Gergiev shortly after Putins invasion of Ukraine: either he publicly criticize the Russian government, or he would be fired. After Gergiev failed to respond, Reiter cancelled all contracts with the world-famous conductor with immediate effect.

Star soprano Anna Netrebko suffered a similar fate at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. After a sustained campaign by the New York Times over Netrebkos Putin ties, i.e., her Russian nationality, Netrebko withdrew from her upcoming engagements at the Met and Berlins Staatsoper. In a statement declaring her opposition to the war, Netrebko said, Its not fair to force artists, or any other personality, to express their political opinions in public and denounce their homeland.

Similarly brutal treatment has been meted out to Russian filmmakers, who have effectively been banned from international film festivals, and athletes, who were prohibited from competing in the Paralympics, football World Cup, and other sports competitions. Retailers in North America and Europe have removed Russian products from their shelves. A university in Italy went so far as to attempt to ban a literature course based on the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian novelist who died in 1881 after writing such iconic works of world literature as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The University of Milano Bicocca only relented after a public outcry.

This chauvinist campaign is being led by a section of the upper middle class infected with war fever. Media outlets, academics, and scientists who ought to know better have lapped up the pro-war propaganda of US imperialism and the NATO powers according to which the world was a peaceful paradise until the evil mastermind Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. They have cheered on the sanctions imposed on Russia, which amount to economic warfare and will devastate the population, and applauded the massive military build-up by the NATO powers throughout Eastern Europe.

It seems to have occurred to none of them that there is a principled, left-wing basis upon which to oppose Putins reactionary invasion of Ukraine, which he justified by invoking right-wing Russian chauvinism.

This opposition, rooted in the struggle to unify workers in Ukraine, Russia, and internationally in a global anti-war movement, does not require that one adapt to the predatory interests of the imperialist powers or cover up the role of fascism in Ukraine. It does not oblige one to maintain a shameful silence about the fact that among the NATO powers allies in their battle for a democratic and independent Ukraine are far-right nationalists and fascists whose political forefathers collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Among these complacent layers of the middle class, no critical examination of these historical and political issues raised by the Ukraine-Russia war is allowed. As the World Socialist Web Site noted yesterday, In reporting on the conflict, the distinction between journalism and propaganda has been obliterated. Everything is presented in black and white, and the media gives no space for the brain to work. According to the universal narrative, Russia invaded Ukraine because there is a monster called Putin, just as there were monsters named Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic.

Learned academicseven those who have grappled for decades with the complex problem of historical causationare in a state of intellectual collapse and are content to let CNN, MSNBC and, of course, the New York Times, think for them.

Listening to the lectures from opera company managers, sports officials, and academics attempting to justify the banishing of everything Russian, one would never know that US imperialism and its NATO allies have been waging uninterrupted war for the past three decades. None of these individuals or institutions asked American musicians or artists to answer for the horrific war crimes of the Clinton, Bush or Obama administrations, including the savage bombardment of Serbia, the invasion of Iraq, black site torture programs, Terror Tuesday assassinations, and the massacring of civilians in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.

No performer who accepted a US government award, performed at the White House, or served as an academic or scientific adviser to the government was threatened with exclusion and the effective end of their professional careers due to American imperialisms wars of plunder, which conservative estimates suggest led to the deaths of some four million people.

Many of the same individuals engaged in whipping up anti-Russia hysteria have been no less vociferous in their denunciations of bans against Israeli academics to protest the Zionist regimes brutal oppression of the Palestinians. In the Gaza Strip, the impoverished population faces indiscriminate violence from the Israeli military in conditions that aid organizations have likened to an open-air prison. Yet when supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign call for the suspension of ties with Israeli academics and bans on Israeli products, they are routinely vilified as anti-Semites. As of 2019, 27 US states had passed laws banning government agencies and employees from doing business with anyone who supported a boycott of Israel.

The pro-war layers of the upper middle class see nothing wrong in these gross double standards, because they long ago made their peace with American and European imperialism. During NATOs air war against Serbia in 1999, which included the German air forces first participation in warfare since World War II, there were no shortage of intellectuals and ex-radical politicians ready to justify the slaughtering of Serbian men, women, and children with hypocritical blather about NATOs warplanes protecting human rights.

Explaining the material roots of this phenomenon, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote in 1999:

The social structure and class relations of all the major capitalist countries have been deeply affected by the stock market boom that began in the early 1980s. Perpetually rising share values, especially the explosion in market valuations since 1995, have given a significant section of the middle classespecially among the professional eliteaccess to a degree of wealth they could not have imagined at the outset of their careers. Those who have actually grown rich comprise a relatively small percentage of the population. But in numerical terms, the newly rich represent a substantial and politically powerful social stratum. [After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War, included in A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016]

This stratum is now determined to provide the ideological justification for a catastrophic war between the US imperialist-led NATO alliance and Russiaa conflict which would be fought with nuclear weapons. Indeed, the savagery of the anti-Russia campaign they are leading can only be compared to the demonization of enemy nations during a state of war.

Even the right-wing Canadian daily National Post, a firm supporter of NATOs war drive against Russia, wrote somewhat nervously Friday, Its all seeming a bit like the opening months of the First World War, when Canada, and the wider British Empire feverishly renamed everything with even a whiff of German association. Berlin, Ont. got renamed to Kitchener. The Alberta communities of Bingen, Carlstadt, and Dusseldorf were all assigned more patriotic names. And the Royal Family even changed their name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the extremely British House of Windsor.

But while war fever has a firm grip on the privileged layers of the middle class, the present crisis is viewed very differently by the broad mass of the populationthe working class. After thirty years of unending war and a steady decline in their living standards, workers have no appetite to be stampeded into a disastrous global conflagration. And after more than two years of a pandemic in which workers have been forced by governments around the world to sacrifice their health and lives for the protection of corporate profits, they treat with skepticism or outright scorn the claims of the political elite and their upper middle-class hangers-on to be fighting for democracy and on behalf of the free world.

The critical task now is to transform this latent opposition to war among the international working class into a conscious political struggle for socialism.

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The hysterical anti-Russian campaign and the US-NATO drive to war with Russia - WSWS