The ICC: a kangaroo court, yes. A joke, no

Well worth a read is Finian Cunningham’s forceful response, today on Information Clearing House, to the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for President Vladimir Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova.

Many have yet to grasp that states like Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Holland etc are junior partners of a US empire. Ditto that the elephant-in silence of every section of corporate media on this small point is indicative not that no such empire exists, but that corporate media are systemically incapable of being truthful with us on matters vital to power. Ditto too that quasi international bodies –  from IMF to WHO, and OPCW to ICC – are, regardless of their formal make-up, at best incapable of standing up to and at worst direct instruments of the said empire.

This depressingly large constituency needs to collectively wake up and start paying attention. Our lives may depend on it.

I don’t say Finian’s piece is perfect. It oversimplifies relations between Ukraine’s powerful far right and the Kiev regime. Rather than the two being paramilitary and political wings of the same current, the evidence – from Zelenski’s 2019 electoral vow to mend fences with Moscow and end what was already five years of bloody civil war in the Donbas, to his U-turn in the face of Neo-Nazi threats on his life – points to Zelenski being a prisoner of the fascists.

(And of Washington, and of Zelenski’s criminal oligarch backer, Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Holding up Jewishness as an insuperable obstacle to being in bed with anti-Semites – the real kind – is a textbook symptom of the liberal disease of oblivion to realpolitik. There’s a lot of it about.)

And call me old fashioned, but a reference to Hunter Biden “banging the widow of his dead brother”  strikes me as puerile in its gratuitousness when the facts Finian marshals make such tittle-tattle redundant. (Though I see as wholly legitimate his citing in the same paragraph of Biden Jnr’s drug fuelled financial shenanigans, for which a president-in-waiting dad would have offered gold-seal collateral.)

My third carp is Finian’s overstating of the kitsch  aspects of the ICC move. It threatens to crowd out his most important point. The warrant brings into the open a truth hitherto denied: viz,  that Washington craved this war and did all in its power to bring it about through provocations like this.

Why? Because it desires, for reasons I’ve gone into many times, regime change in Moscow. A goal all the more pressing now, as the future of dollar rule is called increasingly into question, at home and across the globe.

WSWS made this point in a piece cited in my previous post. I’d go further still. That the warrant is as unenforceable as it is made in bad faith is not the point. Its trumpeting by Western media  will reinforce in the world’s most propagandised public – few of whom will study its content or consider its context – the trope that Mr Putin is the devil and Must Be Stopped – even at risk of a very brief WW3. The point made in Finian’s final paragraph …

Biden, Macron, von der Leyen, Stoltenberg, Trudeau, Sunak, Scholz & Co (fill in your clown’s name here) aren’t actually concerned about arresting Putin. They are shitting themselves to arrest the mounting public revolt against the Western capitalist clown show.

… is diluted when we focus too much on the warrant’s many absurdities of content, timing and presentation.

All the same, Finian Cunningham gets far more right than wrong.

Arresting Putin – Or Arresting All-Out Western Public Revolt?

Western propaganda outlets (also known as “news media”) are suddenly full of reports that The Hague-based International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The over-the-top coverage (that is, orchestration) is intended to give the ridiculous legal ploy an impression of gravitas and significance when in reality the so-called arrest warrant is meaningless and oozes with kitsch politicized theater.

Along with Putin, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova is also named as a wanted person to face “war crimes” prosecution. The alleged crimes are in connection with the supposed deportation of children to Russia during Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine conducted since February 2022.

The basis for the ICC move is as flimsy as an errant weather balloon. It is also an audacious distortion of reality. Russia has evacuated thousands of civilians, including children, from the regions formerly of eastern Ukraine that are now part of the Russian Federation for the precise reason of taking them out of harm’s way from the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev whose forces have been indiscriminately shelling the Donbass and other areas.Ukraine

If anyone should be facing prosecution for war crimes it is Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his Nazi-adulating commanders, as well as their sponsors: American, European, and NATO leaders.

The Kiev regime has been shelling the Donbass for nine years since the CIA coup brought to power this fascist junta. NATO trained the Azov Battalion and other Waffen SS-style paramilitaries which are firing U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets with the help of American, British, French, German, Canadian, and Polish mercenaries. Russia intervened in Ukraine last year to put an end to the genocide that Washington and Europe along with their Western media are complicit in. Not a word of this is reported in so-called bastions of journalism, the New York Times and BBC. They’re too busy selling propaganda about the ICC and Russia.

Is this the best case that the ICC and its Western handlers can really find against Russia? Kidnapping children? What about all the other allegations about Russia shelling apartment blocks and civilians? If there were any truth to these widely peddled claims in Western media then why haven’t those allegations been cited for prosecution? They haven’t because there is so little evidence. In fact, the NATO-backed Kiev regime is guilty of using apartment blocks and civilian human shields. Hence, the fallback on an emotively appealing issue of alleged child kidnapping. The cringe-worthy sense alone tells you it is a fit-up.

But the tenuousness of it all only makes the Western claims and the ICC look even more absurd than they already do.

In any case, the ICC has no jurisdiction over Russia, so the arrest warrants are dead letters. They’re not meant to be taken seriously anyway. This is all political theater aimed at smearing Moscow.

Neither has the court jurisdiction over the United States. Just as well, it might be said, because if there were any genuine principles of justice, U.S. President Joe Biden should be in the dock facing multiple war crime charges in connection with America’s illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen among other countries.

On more recent crimes, Biden and his NATO crime partners should be in dock over the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

Or for sponsoring and weaponizing the Israeli regime’s renewed war crimes against Palestinians.

Or for persecuting and torturing publisher Julian Assange because he dared to reveal the truth about American and British war crimes.

The astounding hypocrisy and double standards are another proof – if such proof were needed – that the latest ICC maneuver against Russia is a cheap political stunt to bolster badly needed authority for the United States and its Western minions.

This week, as American and British leaders hail the ICC indictments on Russia, also marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. A war that killed as many as one million civilians and destroyed a nation, based on outright fabricated lies, lies that Biden as a then-senator helped to promote. The main architects of those crimes, George W Bush and Tony Blair have never been mentioned even in passing by lawyers at the ICC. Why is that? Because the ICC is a Kangaroo Court and a political plaything that Western imperialism uses to pursue political enemies.

Meanwhile, in other news…

We have more reports confirming previous allegations of Joe Biden and his family having received illegal payments worth millions of dollars from Chinese businesses. Biden and his drug-addict son Hunter (who was banging the widow of his dead brother) are up to their eyes in corruption from shady wheeling and dealing using “the big guy’s” political office as collateral. The same scam routine was used in Biden’s unofficial business dealings with Ukraine after the CIA coup in 2014.

Meanwhile, the past week has seen the U.S. banking system teetering on another historic collapse following the implosion of indebted Silicon Valley Bank and others. To prop up the coming financial avalanche across the entire financial sector, the Biden administration is once again throwing hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money to bail out Wall Street.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. and across Europe millions of workers are taking to the streets in unprecedented strikes and protests against corrupt capitalist regimes. The revolutionary conditions are at boiling point in France where the elitist President Emmanuel Macron (a Louis the XVI figure if ever there was one) is ramming through public spending cuts by decree, deliberately bypassing the parliamentary process (well, it is a sham anyway). But all across Europe and the United States the public mood is becoming increasingly intolerant and contemptuous of so-called governments that are spending hundreds of billions on sponsoring an insane proxy war in Ukraine against nuclear-powered Russia while at the same time, these same Western elite rulers are demanding more economic austerity on the suffering public. This is while inequality, deprivation, homelessness, hunger, and poverty are crushing societies.

Meanwhile, we get supposedly upbeat Western media reports this week that the U.S.-led NATO axis is now moving to send warplanes to the Kiev regime on top of previous moves to supply Leopard, Abrams, Leclerc, and Challenger battle tanks – craziness that will lead to all-out war with Russia. The dissonance among Western elites and their media echo chambers is so gulf-like it is courting revolutionary anger, à la Marie-Antoinette, and her reputed let-them-eat-cakes remark.

The charge list goes on of daily mounting anger and disgust over the collapse of the corrupt Western racket otherwise called Western capitalist democracy, otherwise known as the dictatorship of billionaires and warmongers.

Biden, Macron, von der Leyen, Stoltenberg, Trudeau, Sunak, Scholz & Co (fill in your clown’s name here) aren’t actually concerned about arresting Putin. They are shitting themselves to arrest the mounting public revolt against the Western capitalist clown show.