Musings on Ukraine and Gaza

My posts have been sporadic of late. Apologies for prioritising summer breaks even as the world grows more horrifying, to the at least partially awake, by the hour.

At least partially awake. Ye who drape windows and FB profiles in blue and yellow, where were you when that borderland was engulfed in eight years of civil war before  February 2022? I ask not to out you as hypocrites for you know not what you do. The real culprits are our leaders, and systemically corrupt media (see Caitlin’s 15 points of corruption) which may not tell us what to think – on that score they simply help us along – but assuredly tell us what to think about.

They lie by commission when the stakes are high enough, but for the most part lie by omission.

One aspect of liberal delusionality is to confuse matters of fact with matters of opinion. It is not possible for an honest person acquainted with the facts to maintain that Russia’s invasion or SMO – let’s not get hung up over the terminology – was an act of unprovoked aggression. I’ve given my reasons many times, and you can find a summary below this post. ¹ The image below, worn out from repeated use, is just the least wordy.

But let’s set aside the rights and wrongs. Nato has been humiliated in Ukraine. That humiliation, the calculations of reckless men and women in Washington, a West in accelerating decline and, last but not least, a Zelensky whose term expired on May 20 and whose only chance of political if not personal survival is to escalate war by all possible means … these things place humanity closer to thermonuclear war than ever before. Cuba ’62 not excepted.

One way of confusing matters of fact with matters of opinion is to blur the distinction between provoked and unprovoked. That’s easy when the full gaslighting might of Western ideological systems, spearheaded by news media and backed by cradle-to-grave assumptions that We Are The Good Guys, is brought to bear.

Speaking of gaslighting, those same ideological systems may guide us with greater or lesser subtlety into believing a genocide is not a genocide – alternatively, that this too is a matter of opinion. Which brings us to Gaza and another leader whose political and personal survival – since he faces jail the moment he leaves office – depends on escalating his own war by all possible means. Here too, as we await Iran’s response – which it will make in its own good time – to a string of provocations of which Israel’s murder in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh is simply the latest, humanity stands closer to thermonuclear war than ever before. Cuba ’62 not excepted.

Food for thought, no? Let me close, before I load the van and point it north, with the genocide – and another graphic outpouring from Fantagraphics. These images by Joe Sacco, author of “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza”, form part of a wider set: The War on Gaza“.

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1. • In 1989, apropos German reunification, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not an inch eastwards”.
   • Given the smoking gun nature of Mr Baker’s promise, echoed by other Western leaders including Mrs Thatcher – given too the difficulty of memory-holing it once and for all – an energetic “debunking” industry was to be expected. Do the research. (Consider ditching Chrome and Bing in favour of Tor and Duck-Duck-Go.) And broken promise or no, NATO’s expansion threatens Russia existentially. That’s one reason Vladimir Putin was re-elected by a landslide in March this year. Nor would the US ruling class allow – think Cuba ’62, and the savagery of Washington backed dictatorships in Latin America – a tenth of such provocation near its own borders.
   • NATO expansion has been worsened by Washington walking away from treaty after arms limitation treaty. With Russia on the ropes, a Beltway drunk on its toxic fantasy of a New American Century now already consigned – rather like the Thousand Twelve Year Reich if we’re trading Hitler/Munich comparisons – to the dustbin of history had seen no call for compromise or diplomacy. As I wrote in March:

   Ukraine joining NATO irked the Russians, yes, but more serious was Bush’s 2001 abrogation of the ABM Treaty. This, in tandem with a Georgia and/or Ukraine in NATO, could place nuclear missiles within a few seconds’ strike time of Moscow

   • US meddling in Ukraine and Caucasus led first to the failed ‘orange revolution’ of 2005, then to the successful ousting in February 2014 of Russia-leaning Viktor Yanukovych to place a US pliant regime in Kiev. (The media-fest over Victoria Nuland’s “fuck the EU” remark obscured the graver truth of a US Assistant Secretary of State calmly discussing, with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who would and who would not be allowed to serve in that regime.)
   • Other moves to curb Russia and shore up the US as the global hegemon are set out with remarkable, and remarkably prescient, candour in the 2019 Rand Report cited at some length here.
   • Ukraine fell hostage in 2014 to “nationalists” as Russophobic as they are anti-Semitic. (To say that Zelensky being Jewish negates the latter is too childish for words.) The laws and policies it ushered in triggered eight years of civil war in east Ukraine, where the UN say 14,000 ethnic Russians died before February 2022.  Zelensky, who now rules by diktat as an increasingly deranged fall guy after the expiry of his term on May 20, was elected on a 2019 ticket of mending fences with Russia and, by honouring Minsk to give the Donbas a say in its destiny, east Ukraine. Instead, west Ukrainian “nationalists” – fascists of Azov, C14 and generally Banderite stripe – made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. That’s easily forgotten when journalists who from 2014-21 voiced frequent alarm at Ukraine’s slide to the right now find it better for their careers to forget all that. 
   • The West’s deceit over Minsk cannot be listed as a provocation since Angela Merkel and François Hollande only admitted or more accurately boasted of it after the SMO began. But was foot dragging on self determination in the Donbas, calculated as we now know to further that deceit while slaughter continued apace in east Ukraine, an aggravant? Is the pope a Catholic?