Goodbye Ukraine, Goodbye Europe
In what has been a frenetic period over the past few days of fairly earth-shattering developments the past 24 hours, by contrast, have been relatively calm and I do not have much that is new to report.
There are two matters of critical importance to which I would like to add a moment’s thought, before then moving on to some other sources that I think visitors to this site might welcome.
Broken Hearts in Ukraine
The relationship between Trump and Zelenskiy may well have broken down entirely. It is still very possible that the spoiler behavior of both Europe and Zelenskiy may make a US-Russia agreement inoperable. Europe may decide to keep the war going by continuing the flow of arms and cash to Ukraine. Zelenskiy may decide to keep the war going by refusing to agree to any terms offered by the US and Russia and by refusing to arrange for new elections in Ukraine.
The excuse that Zelenskiy gives for not calling elections, by the way, is not credible. All kinds of countries in conflict situations have managed to call elections. Zelenskiy’s claim, citing poll results from a sociological institute in Kiev, that he is still very popular, would be laughable were it not tragic.
Although alleged “dictators” almost universally lack the extreme power that the term suggests that they can exercise, I think the argument that Zelenskiy is a dictator, as Trump has called him, has far more substance to it than application of that term to Putin whose alleged “authoritarianism” could easily be matched with findings from many so-called Western democracies.
But I digress. The issue is: what happens if Europe plus Zelenskiy or either one of that unholy pair manages to block any kind of US-Russian agreement with respect to Ukraine? I think the most likely outcome will be a US abandonment, a complete abandonment, of Europe, NATO and Ukraine by the US.
What will be the consequences? For a time, Europe will continue the flow of weapons to Ukraine, perhaps helped by some form of European access to seized Russian funds or the interest on those assets (although the interest is nowhere sufficient to cover the kinds of money that would be necessary).
With Ukraine (and Zelenskiy) essentially under management by European intelligence (led by MI6 and Keir Starmer, avowedly for the next one hundred years), with or without Zelenskiy, a number of outrageous attacks on Russia, possibly on nuclear facilities, will occur in a demonstration of European “strength.”
Russia will brush these off, intensify the speed of its invasion, and continue westwards until such time as there is a formal surrender by Ukraine, conceded by Europe, or until Russia takes the entirety of Ukraine and dictates terms.
Russia will come to new and probably quite peaceful terms, in some way, eventually, with the Europe that had so greedily and stupidly hungered to share with the US the spoils of breaking Russia apart. But this will be a new order, a new security architecture formulated in alignment with Washington and Beijing and in it Russia will be more secure, more powerful, more influential.
In the meantime there will be growing dissension within both NATO and the EU. This will become so intense within quite a short space of time that these institutions will fracture and possibly collapse.
There will be growing public outrage as information of the utter wastefulness and unnecessary, cruel bloodiness of Project Ukraine (doubtless amplified by likely further damaging revelations of Obama and Biden perfidy), of the fecklessness and vanity of this generation of European leaders, and of the supine imbecility of coopted western mainstream media and their routine stenographer commentators, becomes more and more apparent. Deindustrialization and economic recession will deepen across the continent; governments will topple. Bit by bit a new class of politicians will emerge; they will digest the bitter lessons that must be learned and begin to learn how Europe is to survive in the transactional world of Donald Trump and the multipolar world of the BRICS.
For some amusing reading: this from Intellinews on the German Foreign Minister’s unintelligible ideas for financing a continuation of the war in Ukraine (Intellinews)
“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock announced that today EU foreign ministers will discuss a new plan to put together an extraordinary €700bn package for Ukraine on top of a more concrete €6bn package just announced that will actually go to Kyiv.
“€700bn is a ridiculous sum and a complete pipedream. For starters Baerbock had a huge public fight with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after he refused to send just €3bn to Ukraine. Second, no one in Europe has that kind of money. One of the reasons Scholz nixed the €3bn was the German budget doesn’t have €3bn spare and would have to cut social spending etc to fund it unless the “Schuldenbremse” limits on borrowing are lifted. And finally, to put that in context, €700bn is well over three times more than Ukraine’s entire economy is worth at its pre-war peak. Wars are an extraordinary waste of money and resources, but €700bn is an extra-extraordinary waste. Far better to simply give Ukraine to Putin and let him pay for it, as the EU needs that money for itself as it is in a very ropy state already.”
The Unutterable Tragedy of Palestine
Earlier today, in his daily broadcast, Alexander Mercouris makes the point that Trump, whether you like or loathe him, whether you think he is sincere or otherwise, is the only major leader who has thought in his recent public statements to acknowledge the utter tragedy of the loss of millions of lives in Ukraine.
Yes, we should all think about that, very hard. Our blessed leaders, blasted from hell, have reigned with supreme indifference over the slaughter, literally, of at least a million, almost certainly many more, Ukrainians and Russians for a conflict that need never have occurred and which could have been stopped, so easily, back in Istanbul 2022 had there been a shred of integrity, maturity, compassion across the collective West’s band of political musketeers.
With that in mind, therefore, the second matter that I will now briefly consider has to do with Gaza. Most knowledgable voices that I am listening to are far from sanguine as to the current situation. They do not believe that Trump’s plan is viable. They are intensely aware of how, in addition to the world’s intense (but sadly ineffectual) concern for two million Palestinians in Gaza, the lives of up to five million other Palestinians are at stake in the West Bank - yes, we are talking about SEVEN MILLION people at risk of annihilation or displacement.
Further afield, Zionist projects are putting at risk the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples of southern Syria and southern Lebanon, both illegally occupied by Israel. And as if this is not enough, many experts are convinced that Israel intends to attack Iran in the very near future.
I noticed this on the pro-Israeli site MEMRI:
California Islamic Scholar Iyad Hilal: Europeans Should Facilitate 'Return Of Jewish Migrants' To Europe – They Created This Crisis; Otherwise, Bloodshed Will Continue Beyond Gaza.
A piece by Shabat and Jalal in Drop Site News (Shabat and Jalal) reports on the utter misery that is the Israeli-created wasteland of Gaza.
“Life in northern Gaza has become almost impossible to maintain. Getting water or finding a piece of nylon for a roof are remote luxuries. Under the terms of the “ceasefire” agreement, 200,000 tents and 60,000 mobile housing units are supposed to be allowed into Gaza, but they largely remain on the other side of the Rafah border crossing, with Israel obstructing their entry.
"The agreement is fragile,” al-Qarm said. “Trump's recent statements about deporting Gaza residents are making the situation more complicated and this increases our concern about renewed fighting."
“Occupation forces are even preventing people from returning to the piles of concrete that were once their homes. Umm Mahdi, a resident of eastern Beit Hanoun, tried to return to her destroyed house last week in what is supposed to be a “safe” area only to be met by a hail of bullets. One of her grandchildren was injured in the attack. This was not an isolated incident. Thousands have been prevented from reaching their homes—or what is left of them—and are being forcibly displaced from their land.
“The most brutal moments now are when the occupation army positions its vehicles near the homes of citizens and floods the area with gunfire. Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire deal since it came into effect on January 19, targeting Palestinians in Gaza on an almost daily basis with over 130 killed over the past month, according to the Ministry of Health.”
The Blessed Donald
Perhaps with some justification so far as progress on the Ukraine crisis is concerned, some analysts continue to extol the “brilliance” of Donald Trump. Looking both at Ukraine and at the Middle East, and at home here in the US, I remain skeptical. I shall refrain from addressing him as Saint Donald, but may from time to time I could be persuaded to refer to the somewhat lesser status in the Roman Catholic hierarchy of goodness, namely The Blessed Donald. (I fondly remember my Dublin namesake, The Blessed Oliver Plunkett now mercifully elevated to Full Saint on what I have say to say are, in my humble estimation, very unconvincing grounds).
I saw a comment, in a newsletter written by my favorite source of green vegetables at a local restaurant-farm, to the effect, namely, that the owner’s neice in Hawaii has just lost her job. She was the chief environmental officer to the US Pacific Fleet in Honolulu. Her job had been to make sure the Marine Corps didn’t destroy the reefs in the Marianas where the US is building a mega base to “scare” the Chinese.
Yes, there we have a small and humble confirmation that in the great game of Trump dismantling of the “liberal” Deep State, which I applaud, there are and will be many, many, many innocent victims, many of them young, idealistic and talented, now just cast by Trump and Musk to the rubbish heap, to appease their vanity and because they simply cannot be bothered to find a kinder, less hurtful and more precise ways of achieving their goals.
Well, that’s billionaires for you. Blessed Donald indeed. And I think it is going to be a while before I call Donald “brilliant.”
The Myth of Independent Media
By far the most significant article I have found (in Consortium News - see Macleod) in the past day or so is from Alan Macleod of Mint Press News on the USAID propaganda network. Although he talks principally about USAID there are many other agencies engaged in comparable operations, such as the self-described “non-government organization” that is almost entirely funded by government or other government-funded “non-government” organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy.
Alan has done more than anyone else that I know to expose the gigantic machinery of mind-control operations that has developed since the last time, back in the 1970s, when we the people were offered a window into the dirty psycho-games played by the CIA with the help of hundreds of US journalists and academics during the first two decades of its existence.
This has been a dark and threatening menace in the lives of countless millions around the world and it has certainly exercised, a negative, bullying, constraining influence on my own professional life, making it so much more difficult to understand how the world has actually been working since World War Two, cutting me out of professional opportunities, and embedding me in social, near monopolistic networks of thought that have been thoroughly and irrevocably, aggressively, derisively, yet so self-confidently (!), polluted.
Macleod starts with how Trumpian decimation of USAID (now reduced and folded into the State Department) and comparable agencies has plunged hundreds of “so-called “independent media” outlets into crisis, exposing a worldwide network of thousands of journalists, all working to promote U.S. interests in their home countries”.
Indeed, manipulation of the consciousness of US citizens is the main point of USAID operations.
This has possibly been done because Trump and Musk hate liberals, not realizing that the work of these agencies has been to undermine governments at the service of US capitalism and good ol’ US empire.
Many international media are dependent on financing from Washington, and the lies they spin on behalf of Washington slip back into US media who site such “independent” sources as though they were gospel. USAID has spent over $250 million dollars a year training and funding a network of more than 6,200 reporters at nearly 1,000 news outlets or journalism organizations.
Almost 90 percent of the country’s media in Ukraine are bankrolled by USAID, including the Kyiv Independent and outlets such as Hromadske and Bihus.Info. In Cuba the coopted included the Madrid-based Diario de Cuba, and the Miami-based CubaNet which last year received $500,000 in USAID funding to engage “on-island young Cubans through objective and uncensored multimedia journalism (i.e. Washington anti-Cuba talking points). Between 1985 and 2013 alone, Radio and TV Martí received over half a billion dollars in taxpayer money. In Mynmar around 200 journalists are thought to be directly paid by USAID.
In Belarus (!), 60 percent of the budgets of 20 leading media outlets come from Washington. In Iran (!) more than 30 Iranian groups held a crisis meeting to discuss how to respond to the aid cuts. And in Nicaragua (!) anti-government Nicaraguan media such as Nicaragua Investiga are highly dependent on these subsidies.
In short, even in countries which are constantly the butt of collective West denunciations for their lack of “press freedom,” there are plenty of anti-government media, financed by Washington! The same can be found in Georgia, Serbia, Moldova, many other areas of the former Soviet Union, and across Latin America.
Many USAID-backed journalists candidly admit that their funding dictates their output and what stories they do and do not cover.
Macleod cites a recent 97-page USAID document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed a vast operation to censor and suppress wide swaths of the internet, including Twitch, Reddit, 4Chan, Facebook, Twitter, Discord and alternative media websites.
“Chief among the methods USAID outlines to suppress independent media is what it calls “advertiser outreach” — in effect, threatening advertisers into cutting ties with smaller websites to throttle them financially.”
Among other agencies engaged in comparable work is The Department of Defense, which according to Macleod runs a giant clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion.
“Newsweek described the operation as, “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” and warned that this troll army was likely breaking domestic and international law……The highest echelons of top social media apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Reddit, are filled with former officials from the C.I.A., USAID, and other national security agencies.Furthermore, U.S.-based groups with close government links, such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, all give huge grants to journalists and foreign media outlets”.
In the remainder of his article Macleod gives details of USAID involvement, some of it very violent, in color revolution shenanigans around the world.
On further propaganda news, see this piece from the Intercept on how Oracle, poised to take over Tiktok, is a pro-Israeli propaganda outlet: Oracle. This piece from Kevin Barrett describes the ways in which the Palestinians have been used by Israel as guinea pigs for innovative tools of surveillance and repression: Barrett. And, here, a description of yet another hysterical German attempt to shut down criticism of Israeli policy on Palestine: Berlin.