Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 145

Kim Iversen: Award Winning CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Breaks Down Inner Workings of America’s Spy Agency

Link here.

Anatol Lieven: The Ukrainian government is now trapped by its own uncompromising—and increasingly indefensible—policy on Crimea

By Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy, 4/11/23

Clear differences are emerging within the Ukrainian government as to whether Ukraine should make the reconquest of Crimea a nonnegotiable goal of its war effort or be prepared to trade at least provisional Russian control of the peninsula for Russian concessions elsewhere. This issue also has the potential to create a deep split between Kyiv and Western governments, which fear that Crimea and control of the strategically vital military base of Sevastopol might be the point on which Moscow would be willing to escalate toward nuclear war. The question is becoming more urgent as Ukraine prepares for an offensive that could potentially allow it to cut the land route between Russia and Crimea.

My own research in Ukraine last month suggests that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would have very great domestic difficulty in supporting a cease-fire leaving Crimea in Russian hands. Not only would this face strong opposition from hard-line nationalists and the Ukrainian military, but the Ukrainian government has helped foster a general public mood that Crimea must be recovered at all costs.

In a departure from the previous government line, Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of the presidential staff and a veteran Ukrainian diplomat, told the Financial Times last week: “If we succeed in achieving our strategic goals on the battlefield, and when we are on the administrative border of Crimea, we are ready to open a diplomatic page to discuss this issue … [though] this doesn’t mean that we exclude the way of liberation [of Crimea] by our army.”

In a recent interview rebroadcast by Radio Liberty, another advisor to Zelensky, former journalist and hard-line nationalist politician Mykhailo Podolyak, took a very different line from Sybiha, ruling out any compromise with Russia:

“Could there be talks about a diplomatic way out of Crimea? … Yes, of course, if [Moscow] starts withdrawing those troops today, then we can wait a day, two or three, while those troops leave together with the [Russian] inhabitants.”

Podolyak said that after Russia leaves all Ukrainian territory, negotiations should be about Russian compensation to Ukraine and punishment for war crimes, together with the creation of a 100-kilometer (62-mile) demilitarized zone on the Russian side of the border. He also raised another issue of crucial importance to the issue of Ukraine’s recovery of the territories controlled by Russia since 2014: that of the fate of their populations, much of which have historically identified with Russia. Referring to pro-Russian Crimeans as mankurts (roughly, “brain-dead slaves”), he said:

“We have to completely close everything related to the Russian cultural space there. We have to eradicate everything Russian. There should be only Ukrainian cultural space or global cultural space. We should not have a dialogue about whether a person has the right to use the Russian language or not. … There shouldn’t be this line: ‘Maybe these are our people, maybe we need to talk about something with them.’ I was constantly surprised by this concept of reintegration in 2014-2015 and [the argument that] let’s reintegrate the occupied territories with a smile. Gangsters live there, criminals live there, occupying armies and administrations live there, but let’s reintegrate them with a smile. … They should be expelled, and some should be imprisoned.”

This vision (which many in the world would likely see as tantamount to ethnic cleansing) was not shared by most of the Ukrainians with whom I spoke during three weeks in the country last month. A clear majority said Crimea should be returned to Ukraine—but with some (usually unspecified) measures for the peaceful reintegration of its population.

A substantial minority, however, said Ukraine should be prepared to give up Crimea in return for peace and the return of the territory taken by Russia since last February. The reasons they gave differed, but the three principal ones were that “otherwise this war will go on forever”; that Crimea (which was transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republics in 1954 by Soviet decree) “was never really part of Ukraine”; and that the pro-Russian population of Crimea would be a perpetual internal problem for Ukraine. According to an opinion survey conducted last July, 58 percent of the Ukrainians who responded said Crimea must return to Ukraine—a majority but not a huge one.

There was one striking difference between the two positions on Crimea and a negotiated peace with Russia. The people with whom I spoke who stated that the return of Crimea to Ukraine was essential and nonnegotiable mostly spoke on the record. Not one of the advocates of compromise was willing to do so.

As a former dissident from the Soviet days (and leading supporter of the 2004 Orange Revolution) told me:

“Certainly, a great many people do believe that we have to fight on indefinitely to reconquer Crimea, irrespective of losses; but at heart, most sensible people know that it is not possible. The problem is that it has become almost impossible to say this in public without losing your job and perhaps worse. You know that under the Soviet Union people were afraid to say what they thought. Well, I have to say that a similar situation exists in Ukraine today. This is due to the anger and hatred in the population caused by the Russian invasion but also to repression by the state. Anyone who advocates compromise with Russia is immediately publicly branded a traitor and targeted by the SBU [the Ukrainian security service], no matter if they have always supported Ukrainian freedom and independence.”

As in most recent wars, this public atmosphere is greatly reinforced by state control of television, which since the suppression of allegedly pro-Russian channels has become almost absolute as far as news and analysis are concerned. Voices on television now speak overwhelmingly in support of the government line (or perhaps, the previous government line) that the return of Crimea and the eastern Donbas is nonnegotiable. This is backed up by pressure on the print media. As a journalist in the city of Dnipro told me, “The biggest problem is the atmosphere of censorship. Nobody gives a direct order, but everyone knows that if you write certain things, you will have bad problems, from your employers and the security services. So discussion now takes place only within very narrow limits.”

As Ukrainian analyst Volodymyr Ishchenko has stated, the result is a “spiral of silence” in which views held by many in private are wholly absent in public.

Whether the planned Ukrainian offensive succeeds and brings Ukrainian forces to the border of Crimea or fails and leads to an ongoing stalemate, Ukraine is likely to face increasing calls from Western governments for some form of provisional territorial compromise with Russia, coupled with the threat of a reduction of Western aid—and Sybiha’s statement suggests that some Ukrainian officials at least understand this very well.

But as in so many wars, state propaganda aimed at motivating the population to fight has helped create what one Ukrainian analyst called a “Frankenstein’s monster” for itself when it comes to compromise with Russia, a public mood that it helped create but now cannot control. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, has stated: “If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow, he will commit political suicide”—which is no doubt why Zelensky himself has not yet said anything about Sybiha’s remarks. All the Ukrainian analysts with whom I spoke agreed that only intense public pressure from Washington could allow Zelensky to agree to a territorial compromise—even if Zelensky himself felt compelled to respond to the pressure in public with bitter protest.

Jerusalem Post: Kyiv to name street for Ukrainian Nazi collaborator after public vote

Photo by Nati on Pexels.com

By Shira Silkoff, The Jerusalem Post, 4/11/23

The Kyiv City Council may be set to name a street after a Nazi collaborator and SS official, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky has reported.

According to Dolinsky, a street in the Ukrainian capital will be renamed following a motion passed by the city council, and will bear the name of Volodymyr Kubiyovych, who during the Holocaust was heavily involved in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Nazi military force made up of Ukrainian volunteers.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Dolinsky explained that a historical expert commission within the Kyiv City Council had put forward several options for the renaming of what is currently Przhevalsky Street in Kyiv.

The names suggested by the historical commission were then put forward by the city council for a public vote on the Kyiv Digital app, where voting will remain open until April 16.

The option to rename the street after Volodymyr Kubiyovych has so far received a majority, with 31% of the vote, with the second and third highest options receiving just 18% and 10% respectively.

Once the public vote is closed, the Kyiv City Council will then vote to approve renaming the street after Kubiyovych.

Who was Volodymyr Kubiyovych?

Prior to the start of the Holocaust, Kubiyovych was a strong supporter of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M) and in April 1941, he requested the creation of an autonomous state within Ukraine in which Poles and Jews would not be allowed to live.

Later in the war, in 1943, Kubiyovych took on a key role in the formation of the Waffen-SS Galizien and publicly announced his willingness to take up arms and fight for the Nazi cause.

After the Red Army approached Poland in 1944, Kubiyovych fled to Germany, and then France after the Nazi surrender. In France, he served as the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, the largest academic project taken on by Ukrainian expats during the Cold War.

The Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies was reflective of Kubiyovych’s nationalistic views and was intended to preserve Ukraine’s heritage under Soviet rule.

Kubiyovych’s airbrushed legacy

Today, the encyclopedia exists online, both in its native language and in English and is still frequently updated with articles focusing on Ukrainian heritage and culture.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine avoids mentioning Kubiyovych’s Nazi past, instead focusing on his work pre and post-World War Two, saying only that: “During the Second World War he headed the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) in Cracow and in 1943 took part in organizing the Division Galizien.”

Kubiyovych died in Paris in 1985, and to this day is recognized by many as a prominent and important Ukrainian scholar, and his works continue to be widely circulated, despite his Nazi past.

Should a road in Kyiv indeed be named after him, it will not be the first time that Ukraine has chosen to honor Kubiyovych. In 2000, a pre-stamped envelope was issued by the Ukrainian postal service in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, and in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, a plaque honoring the Nazi official still stands to this day.

Ivan Timofeev: Can Russia really break away from the West?

By Ivan Timofeev, RT, 4/5/23

Ivan Timofeev is the Valdai Club Programme Director & one of Russia’s leading foreign policy experts.

Long before relations between Russia and the West spiralled into a comprehensive political crisis, officials and experts here were enthusiastically voicing ideas about developing ties with the rest of the world. At the administrative level, such a course began to take shape as early as the 1990s, starting from the views of former Foreign Minister Evgeny Primakov. Subsequently, it also received practical development within the framework of a multi-vector foreign policy.

The gradual growth of contradictions with the West accelerated the formation of ‘pivot to the East’ ideas, although their implementation was slow. It was limited by objective infrastructural and economic conditions, as well as the absence of a direct and painful incentive for such a ‘turn’. However, the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West, for all its appearances, is irreversible, and has driven an increase in the number and quality of ties with countries which are outside the control of the US. The ‘sanctions tsunami’ and the impasse in relations with the West have become a very sharp stimulus for long overdue changes. At the same time, a number of difficulties and obstacles await us on our way to the ‘world majority’. Moscow must assess them realistically and objectively, and we must avoid the illusion that the pivot itself will solve all our problems. We have hard and painstaking work ahead, for decades to come.

The development of Russia’s relations with the non-Western world is likely to take into account several interrelated tasks. The first is the formation of centres of power which are relatively independent from the United States and its allies, with a high degree of political agency. These do not have to be consolidated into a single political project. There may be some contradictions between them. However, their independence in making fundamental decisions in the areas of security and development is the essential feature that unites them. Russia itself is unlikely to be able to cement and consolidate them alone. However, it exemplifies the very possibility of challenging the political West on fundamental issues. Not everyone is ready to follow the same path, but the very fact of its presence is an event which has a global dimension.

While avoiding imposing ideological conditions, Russia has nevertheless managed to create a significant precedent. That is why the suppression of the ‘Russian rebellion’ is a matter of principle for the West. The victory of Moscow – in any form – will mean the consolidation of the precedent, which means that the fight against the West will become uncompromising. The stakes are extremely high.

The second task is to create reliable opportunities for modernisation through interaction with the non-Western world. Here, success is far from guaranteed. The ‘world majority’ is closely embedded in Western-centric globalisation, although the existing system has its own problems.

One of the most obvious is the West’s growing use of its central position in global networks as a political tool. Politicisation is taking place on a broad front, from global finance and supply chains, to the media and universities. So far, the system is outwardly stable, but the number of dissatisfied voices is growing. If Russia manages to build a workable economic model that is not fundamentally connected to Western financial institutions or supply chains, the precedent will be very serious. Previously, such precedents have been associated with countries that are called ‘rogue states’. Despite the costs for them and their citizens, countries such as North Korea and Iran have managed to maintain their agency and build functional economic models. These are distorted by sanctions and restrictions. However, they still exist and develop. The emergence of such an alternative in a large and well-resourced power will significantly change the current state of affairs. In addition, China, as a major player, is very cautiously following the same path. While maintaining beneficial global ties and not forcing a confrontation with the US, Beijing is gradually building an economic system that is resistant to the external contour. Russia’s course is beneficial there because the Chinese get a partner in building their own economic system, protected from the influence of competitors and rivals. At the same time, Beijing is hardly interested in revolutionary breakthroughs that would make it lose control of the situation.

The third task is to ensure security vis-à-vis the West. The conflict has drastically undermined Russia’s security. On our Western borders, we are dealing with a powerful, technologically advanced and consolidated bloc. Its military strength will grow and it will be positioned to oppose Moscow. The military situation in Ukraine will determine the further dynamics of threats. The prospect of an open military clash between Russia and NATO is becoming quite real. Preventing such a scenario has already become a key military-political priority, in which the military rather than the diplomatic factors play the leading role. The prerequisites for a peaceful solution to the conflict are not yet visible. If we assume a peace agreement or a ceasefire will eventually happen, then the problem of the stability of such a deal will arise. Our disastrous experience with Minsk-2 has shown that it can become a cover for the next phase of the conflict, as some Western European leaders have directly confirmed. The countries of the Euro-Atlantic region will remain a direct military-political threat.

Does this situation mean the severing of all ties with the West and a painless restructuring? No. Russia’s links with its Western neighbours have been accumulating for centuries. Even such a powerful crisis like today’s cannot cut them overnight. Within the West itself, there is both an ideological and a purely material stratification. Behind the facade of general political slogans lies an extremely heterogeneous political and mental space. It bizarrely combines postmodernism and ultra-liberalism with conservatism and traditionalism. Moreover, the latter does not determine the proximity of positions to Russia. For example, Poland is one of the most conservative countries in Europe. However, conservatism in itself does not create the political prerequisites for rapprochement with Russia.

It is impossible to count on the proximity of cultures, values, and mentality as a prerequisite for political rapprochement. On the other hand, the very existence of such connections will continue to provide Russia and various Western countries with similar coordinates and human ties, no matter how distant political relations may be. To remain human even in the face of confrontation, to maintain cultural, humanitarian, and, ultimately, family ties amid hostility, hatred, and political confrontation, is a much more difficult, but nonetheless very important task.

In our relations with the ‘world majority’, there is no similar cultural commonality. However, this does not prevent the establishment of pragmatic relations. Does it mean that the cultural distance will remain significant forever? No. It will be necessary to build up our cultural competencies in working with a wide variety of non-Western countries. The civilisational diversity is amazing here. Russia has unique schools of Sinology, Arabic studies, Indology, and many other areas. Unfortunately, though, these institutional advantages are extremely limited when it comes to meeting the tasks of a full-fledged turn to the East. It is normal for us to speak European languages, we have absorbed European literature, and we more or less understand a person of European culture, with all the diversity of the West. At the same time, we know very little about the literature, culture, and mentalities of countries which remain friendly. For a complete turnaround, we will need dozens of schools like the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Lomonosov Moscow State University, not to mention language teachers. Without such competencies, working in the depths of Chinese, Indian, and many other societies will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

At the same time, we will have to take into account the fact that the countries of the world majority which are friendly to us have their own national interests. They are unlikely to sacrifice them simply for the sake of friendship with Russia. Every time, we will face a set of requirements and requests that will, ultimately, not be beneficial to Moscow. Many non-Western countries maintain close relations with the West. A considerable number of them still benefit from Western-centric globalisation, even if this gain is inertial in some cases. Moreover, many use a modernising process according to the Western model, preserving their cultural identity, and if possible, political sovereignty, but do not hesitate to use Western standards in the fields of economics, production, management, education, science, technology, etc.

When establishing and maintaining ties with friendly countries, Russia may well find itself in a situation in which certain Western models will again come to Russia through the East, just as the ideas of Aristotle came to medieval Europe through Arab intellectuals. It will be difficult for Russia to make a choice between the West and the non-West, simply because such a choice is impossible in practice. Rather, Russia will have to engage with a variety of cultures and ways of life.        

We may have to listen more than we talk and learn more than teach. What lies ahead is a time of patience, endurance, and sometimes humility, in the face of hardship, without which it will be difficult to survive a new historical epoch.

Jacob Siegel: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

By Jacob Siegel, Tablet Magazine, 3/28/23

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.

At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.

In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.

At around the same time, Hamilton 68 blew up. Publicly, Twitter’s algorithms turned the Russian-influence-exposing “dashboard” into a major news story. Behind the scenes, Twitter executives quickly figured out that it was a scam. When Twitter reverse-engineered the secret list, it found, according to the journalist Matt Taibbi, that “instead of tracking how Russia influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” The discovery prompted Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to suggest in an October 2017 email that the company take action to expose the hoax and “call this out on the bullshit it is.”

In the end, neither Roth nor anyone else said a word. Instead, they let a purveyor of industrial-grade bullshit—the old-fashioned term for disinformation—continue dumping its contents directly into the news stream.

It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

Read the full report here.

Glenn Greenwald: New DOJ Indictments Criminalize Dissent—Weaponizing the Very Censorship Tactics They Condemned in Russia

Link here.

Russian Pranksters Trick Former French President Hollande into Admitting that Minsk Agreements were a Ruse and the West Overthrew Yanukovich

Earlier this month, two infamous Russian pranksters tricked former French president Francois Hollande into an interview under the pretense that he was speaking to former Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko. The whole 15 minute interview is worth watching, but at around the 7-1/2 minute mark Hollande begins discussing the Minsk agreements. He confirms that they were a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military and he also proceeds to admit that the west overthrew the Yanukovich government in 2014 with Poroshenko’s assistance.

Link here.

Joe Lauria: Leaks Spelling the End for Ukraine

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 4/17/23

A Washington Post headline last week was a bombshell for someone who has only been reading about the Ukraine war in The Washington Post and other Western media: “U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.”

The story admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory. 

Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”  

In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism.

The Post said, as if it’s a bad thing, that the leaks will likely “embolden critics who feel the United States and NATO should do more to push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.”

That has begun to happen. Writing in the uber-Establishment Foreign Affairs, former State Department official Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, write that “it is difficult to feel sanguine about where the war is headed.”

In “The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine: A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table,” they say:

“The best path forward is a sequenced two-pronged strategy aimed at first bolstering Ukraine’s military capability and then, when the fighting season winds down late this year, ushering Moscow and Kyiv from the battlefield to the negotiating table.”  

The article does not mention the leaks, though it was published after the disclosures made clear that the Ukrainian offensive, intended to  break through Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, would fail.

Filled with the usual talk about Ukraine having better “operational skill” than Russia, and that the war will end in a “stalemate,” the piece represents an emerging strategy in the West: namely that before negotiating, Ukraine needs to launch its offensive to gain back some territory, “imposing heavy losses on Russia, foreclosing Moscow’s military options, and increasing its willingness to contemplate a diplomatic settlement.”

But that is a tall order. Moscow would be unlikely to negotiate at the end of the Ukrainian offensive, particularly as the article admits the “Russian military’s numerical superiority” and that Ukraine is “facing growing constraints on both its own manpower and help from abroad.” 

Moscow was ready to cut a deal with Kiev one month after Russia’s intervention but the West, with its strategy of lengthening the war to weaken Russia, quashed it. Why would Moscow accept a deal now when Ukraine is at its weakest and Russia is poised to make significant gains on the battlefield?

The Foreign Affairs piece admits, “This diplomatic gambit may well fail. Even if Russia and Ukraine continue to take significant losses, one or both of them may prefer to keep fighting.”

“Come the end of this fighting season,” the article says, “the United States and Europe will also have good reason to abandon their stated policy of supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes,’ as U.S. President Joe Biden has put it.”

And what comes next? “NATO allies would start a strategic dialogue with Russia on arms control and the broader European security architecture.”  

Incredibly this is what Russia was asking for before its February 2022 intervention and it was rebuffed by NATO and the U.S.  Now a Foreign Affairs article is recommending it.

Is there no better sign that Ukraine has lost this war?

Going Ahead With the Offensive Anyway

The strategy of Ukraine going ahead with an offensive it knows will achieve little is Kiev’s last gasp — unless delusional neocons continue to outmaneuver the realists in Washington.

Most importantly for the West, the failure of this last-gasp attempt would serve as a way for it to escape the disaster it has created for itself: namely, the backfiring of the economic war on Russia; the failure of the information war in the non-West and ultimately defeat on the battlefield in its proxy war.   

Already in February, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is also pushing this strategy, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy that the game was up.  This news was brought to us by the establishment Wall Street Journal. 

And then ten days later U.S. intelligence provided a story to The New York Times that a pro-Ukraine “group,” and possibly the Ukrainian government itself, was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, a way of distancing the U.S. from Kiev as the exit ramp looms into sight. 

Why Did the MSM Publish the Leaks?

Why did the Times, the Post and other establishment outlets publish stories about these leaks if they severely undermined their own credibility? There are three possibilities.   

The first is simply competition.  The Times or the Post may have gotten word that their rival had their hands on the leaks and did not want to be beat. There is almost nothing worse for an editor or reporter (in the petty world of journalism) then having to “match” a competitors’ story.

The second reason has to do with keeping up appearances. These leaks were eventually to come out somewhere and may not have been easily ignored. What would it have looked like if the big papers didn’t have it first?

More importantly, corporate journalism needs to keep up the pretense that it is actually doing journalism, i.e. that it will publish material from time to time that makes their governments look bad, and in this case, even themselves. They have to convince the public that they haven’t entirely given up on adversarial journalism if they are to survive.  

It was the same when corporate outlets partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish leaks that exposed U.S. war crimes. But eventually the media turned on Assange and WikiLeaks, and fell into line with the state. 

Why the Media Went After the Leaker

And that it is indeed what has happened here. After splashy stories about the leaks, the Times and the Post, teaming with Western intelligence-backed Bellingcat, turned their attention to finding the leaker, in what Elizabeth Vos in an article today on Consortium News argues makes corporate media the anti-WikiLeaks.

Rather than protecting the source of leaks, vital to the public, they hunted down the alleged leaker, 21-year old Air National Guardsman Jack Texiera, who was arrested by military-clad F.B.I. agents outside his Massachusetts home. 

So what is the third reason why the major media published the leaks?

Very likely for the same reason they published the stories about Macron and Scholz telling Zelensky he’s lost the war, and that the Ukrainian government may have been responsible for the Nord Stream sabotage:  to lay the ground work for the U.S. and its allies to pull the plug on their Ukrainian adventure by finally admitting Ukraine is losing.

Towards that end, there is speculation that Texiera did not act alone with the motive of impressing his teenage followers on the Discord chat forum, as the press has reported. 

Former C.I.A. analyst Larry Johnson believes Texiera was set up, possibly by a senior officer.  Johnson thinks this because among the documents Texiera allegedly leaked was one from the Central Intelligence Agency Operations Center, where Johnson used to work.

“CIA Operations Center produces two daily reports — one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is not a ‘Community’ product, i.e., it is not distributed to the other intelligence agencies. It is an internal CIA document (of course, it is available to the Director of National Intelligence), ” Johnson wrote on his website Son of the New American Revolution.

Texiera was not in the C.I.A. so there is no way he’d have access to an Operations Center document, Johnson wrote. So how did he get his hands on it?

The implication is that Texiera may have been a patsy for someone within the realist wing of the U.S. military or intelligence establishment who opposes the neocons’ obsession with continuing the war at all costs.  

The neocons are not going down without a fight. John Bolton, the former U.S. national security advisor and chief neocon, wrote a desperate piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, titled, “A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China.”  

Bolton gets it that the world is changing, and not in America’s favor. So his response is not to reverse failed U.S. policy, for the U.S. to become part of the rest of the world rather than trying to dominate it, but to double down like a riverboat gambler.  His solution: raise military spending to Reagan-era levels; resume underground nuclear bomb testing and taking “the North Atlantic Treaty Organization global, inviting Japan, Australia, Israel and others committed to NATO defense-spending targets to join.”

Bolton laughingly says the U.S. must “exclude” Moscow and Beijing from the Middle East, where both capitals are orchestrating the most dramatic diplomatic transformation in decades.

But Boltons saves his best laugh for Ukraine:

“After Ukraine wins its war with Russia, we must aim to split the Russia-China axis. Moscow’s defeat could unseat Mr. Putin’s regime. What comes next is a government of unknowable composition. New Russian leaders may or may not look to the West rather than Beijing, and might be so weak that the Russian Federation’s fragmentation, especially east of the Urals, isn’t inconceivable.”

Even if the ludicrous Bolton is dismissed, there’s still a major obstacle in the realists’ way: Biden’s re-election campaign. He says he’s going to announce soon. He’s already thrown his lot in with the neocons.

Is there any conceivable way that he could accept Ukraine losing this war, after all the blue and yellow flag-waving, without also losing the election? 

The Biden team’s aim was to bleed Russia. But it is Ukraine that is hemorrhaging. Will reality at last overcome delusion in Washington?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe   

Paul Robinson: Russia and the emergence of the post-Western world

By Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension ,4/5/23

A few years back, at the University of Ottawa’s summer convocation, I was startled to see a student come forward to collect his degree whose first name was Brezhnev. One suspects that his parents were African communists who named him after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as a mark of gratitude for the Soviets Union’s assistance in their country’s national liberation struggle against Western colonialism. It’s a striking example of how other people don’t see the world quite as we do.

In the eyes of most Westerners, their countries are bastions of liberalism, democracy and human rights. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was, as Reagan said, an “evil empire.” In the eyes of many others, however, Western countries are colonial oppressors who conquered and enslaved their ancestors. The Soviet Union—and by extension modern Russia—was free of guilt in this regard. It was even an ally in the fight against imperialism.

Consequently, the intense dislike of Russia that has gripped much of the West in recent years is largely absent elsewhere. This provides Russia with an opportunity that it is proving adept at exploiting.

As I mentioned in a previous article for Canadian Dimension, the Russian leadership is nowadays framing its political struggle with the Western world in terms of what one might call “civilizational theory.” This rejects the Western model of history as progressing inevitably towards a common future, normally defined in terms of liberalism, and juxtaposes to it the idea that history consists of multiple different civilizations each advancing according to its own logic. This concept provides a justification for why not just Russia, but also other parts of the world, can resist Western hegemony and assert their right to develop in their own way.

Over the past decade, civilizational theory has been gradually appearing more and more in official Russian rhetoric. Last week proved the point, with the publication of a new foreign policy concept for the Russian Federation, along with an executive order by Russian President Vladimir Putin approving the concept.

In his order, Putin firmly nailed his colours to the civilizational mast. Russia, he declared, was an “original state-civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that bound together the Russian people and other peoples who make up the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world.” This itself was nothing particularly new, but some of what then followed was.

For Putin’s decree specifically pointed to Russia’s status as the “legal successor of the Soviet Union” and as such a state with a “long role in the creation of the contemporary system of international relations and in the liquidation of the global system of colonialism.” Putin continued: “Humanity is passing through a period of revolutionary change. … It is impossible to return to the past, unequal model of global development, which for centuries guaranteed the rapid economic growth of the colonial powers by exploiting the resources of dependent territories and states in Asia, Africa, and the Western hemisphere.” Power was shifting, said Putin, but “some states… refuse to recognize the reality of a multipolar world… and try to hold back the natural march of history.”

These statements mark an important shift in Russian strategy, as Putin has never before played the anti-colonial card with quite such fervour. This shift reflects the factor that the centre of gravity in the struggle with the West has now moved to the Global South. Russia needs the support, or at least the neutrality, of states of the developing world in order to stymie the West’s efforts to isolate it. The civilizational rhetoric and the appeal to the Soviet Union’s record in fighting colonialism are useful tools in this regard, and so far they seem to be quite successful. Outside of Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan, and South Korea—what one might call the “collective West”—few states are actively declaring themselves Russia’s supporters, but almost none are lining up to join the West as active enemies. Not even Mexico has levied sanctions against Russia.

The Russians are enjoying particular success in Africa. In February, for instance, South Africa hosted the Russian and Chinese navies for joint exercises. And in March, representatives of 40 African countries attended a meeting in Moscow held in preparation for the Russia-Africa summit that is to take place in St. Petersburg in July, and that most African heads-of-state are expected to attend. At the Moscow meeting, Putin told the African delegates that it was “common knowledge that the Soviet Union provided significant support to the peoples of Africa in their fight against colonialism, racism and apartheid, how it helped many African countries to gain and protect their sovereignty, and consistently supported them in building their statehood, strengthening defence capabilities, laying the foundations of their national economies and workforce training.” In response, the delegates applauded.

Putin’s message fell on fertile ground. Russia won many friends in the Third World during the COVID crisis by providing them with its Sputnik vaccine. It is also investing heavily in the African continent, while the Wagner private military company is active in a number of African countries, whose governments have hired it to help fight domestic insurgencies. All this is having an effect. A report issued last month by the Economist Intelligence Unit noted that one year after the start of the war in Ukraine “an increasing number of countries are siding with Russia.” The report assesses that only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries condemning Russia, and another 21 percent in countries that are “West-leaning.” Just 5.6 percent live in countries “supportive of Russia,” but 27.5 percent are “Russia-leaning,” with 30 percent neutral. Overall, therefore, the numbers pro- and anti-Russia are roughly even, but the tide seems to be drifting slightly in favour of the former. Russian foreign policy vis-à-vis the West is in tatters. Elsewhere, however, its diplomacy is proving quite effective. It is a fact with which the West sooner or later is going to have to come to terms.

Washington Post: U.S. charges four Americans with aiding Kremlin efforts

By Devlin Barrett, Washington Post, 4/18/23

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

Authorities said Ionov sought to use the groups to promote Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine, and the eventual invasion of that country in 2022…

Read full article here.