miscellany

this post is a very lightly edited copy-paste of a piece by Caitlin Johnstone*

I – Caitlin Johnstone – have been ranting all week about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really can't say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.

One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five "experts" (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph – screenshot above – has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:

Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.

Do you see what they're doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange "aberration", and war as the status quo norm. They're saying Australians require a "psychological shift" and a "mobilisation of mindset" from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.

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Betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars.
—Chris Hedges*

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. He serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, and an SDG Advocate for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, most recently A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), and The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020).

Eva Nowotny, Board Member of Bruno Kreisky Forum, Amb. ret., Chair of the Vienna University Board

Recorded at Kreisky Forum, December 14, 2022*

No Sunny Days For A Decade, Extreme Cold And Starvation: ‘Nuclear Winter’ And The Urgent Need For Public Education https://t.co/7IxrdeekCn pic.twitter.com/8E4MiJl34D

— Forbes Europe (@ForbesEurope) February 14, 2023

…

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh to talk more about his new piece, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” While the White House has described Hersh’s reporting as, quote, “complete fiction,” calls are growing for an independent probe into the explosion.

Sy Hersh, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can flesh out what it is you found in your report and what first tipped you off, albeit there were a lot of public comments, including the Polish government right after the bombing saying, “Thank you, America.” Lay it out for us, Sy.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, first of all, I think the reporting really can be described as a friend of mine did: What I did was really deconstruct the obvious. I mean, you have to hear what the president said. But, of course, there were secret plans, that I’m writing about, and they include — there was a committee set up. Jake Sullivan was directly involved. He was the national security adviser, still is. They set up a team to look at options about how to put pressure on the Russian government to back off.

…

source: transcript on the Democracy Now! website* – archived*

Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn't refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position. Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That's suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.

source: Common Dreams, 2022-06-25, archived*

After Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage. So Putin is now routinely compared to Hitler, while the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda.

So you don't hear much about the Ukrainian government's veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government's ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down, and false identifications of Russian special forces are relayed as fact.

The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west's attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.

No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

source: The Guardian, archived*