USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Institutional Russophobia Dangerous Game

 

On 7 April the UN General Assembly decided to suspend Russia’s membership in the Human Rights Council.  This establishes a destructive precedent not only for the future of the Human Rights Council, but for the future of other United Nations institutions.

I do not wish to overestimate the consequences of the GA decision.  Obviously, it is a blow to Russia’s prestige, and adds to the general atmosphere of Russophobia that we have seen over the decades. We can expect in the future that efforts will be made to exclude other countries from membership in the Human Rights Council – one could think of excluding several NATO countries for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by their forces during the wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria.  We could think of excluding Saudi Arabia because of its genocidal war against the people of Yemen. We could think of excluding India for its systematic war crimes and gross violations of human rights against the people of Kashmir, including widespread extra-judicial executions.  Another credible candidate for suspension would be Azerbaijan because of its aggression against the hapless Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh during the Blitzkrieg of September-November 2020, where war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed, including torture and execution of Armenian prisoners of war. We could think of excluding Colombia because of its lethal para-military activities and consistent pattern of killing human rights defenders, social leaders, syndicalists and indigenous peoples. And, foremost, Israel, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Let us not shed too many tears over the Human Rights Council, whose authority and credibility are questionable, and whose resolutions are routinely ignored by many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Since its creation in 2006 the Human Rights Council has not served human rights well – but it has certainly served the geopolitical and informational interests of the United States and the European Union.

The GA decision also puts a further nail on the coffin of the General Assembly itself.  It manifests how the Assembly can and is manipulated by the United States and by the bullying, arm-twisting and blackmailing practices of the Department of State.

Far more serious for the world are the economic sanctions and financial blockade imposed by the US and EU countries on Russia, which will have a long-lasting impact on the world economy, hurting the most vulnerable not only in Russia, but also in Europe, Africa, North and South America, and Asia.

The decision of the GA sets a dangerous precedent and further politicizes the Human Rights Council. One would think that precisely because some countries do not like what Russia is doing that they would like to “tame” it by involving it in the human rights work of the Council.  Isolating a country is always counter-productive.  What is needed is greater inclusion and greater debate – not exclusion and hate-mongering.

The GA vote illustrates the success of the “information war” that has been waged against Russia for decades – not just since 2022, not even since 2014 and the Maidan coup – long before there was systematic dis-information about Russia and a consistent negative narrative.  This has a simple explanation:  NATO has had no raison d’être since the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991.  In order to continue existing, NATO must have an “enemy” – and that is the only role that the US and NATO assigned to Russia.  The Russian bogeyman is necessary and guarantees that the US military-industrial-financial complex can continue its war on the world and on the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

The allegations of war crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces in Bucha in the vicinity of Kiev precipitated this move by the US to have Russia removed from the Human Rights Council.

How much do we know about the events?

While Ukraine accused Russia of murdering 400 civilians in Bucha before retreating from the town, the Russian government has refuted these allegations, pointing out that Russian forces withdrew in an orderly fashion on 30 March and that no allegations of extra judicial executions were made until 2 April, four days later, when Ukrainian security forces and TV cameras arrived in Bucha. The US and NATO accepted Kiev’s claims uncritically and used them to justify imposing further sanctions against Russia.  However, serious doubts have arisen about a possible staged event and tampering with the photos and videos.

Do we have here another false flag operation as we have seen multiple times in Syria, staged chemical attacks that could not be confirmed by expert inspectors?  Are the dead persons civilians or military?

Were the bodies those of Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians victims of artillery bombardment?

Were the bodies Russian soldiers wearing white armbands or Ukrainian civilians with white armbands to signal their peaceful intentions and subsequently lynched by Ukrainian Neo-nazi extremists for collaboration with the Russians?

One day we may find out whether the US had advance knowledge of the alleged crimes in Bucha or whether it was involved in manufacturing evidence for the information war.

Of course, nobody knows. Yet.

What we need is whistleblowers, more Julian Assanges and more Wikileaks.

By the way, as Russia appoints a veteran of the war in Syria as its overall military commander in Ukraine, who is expected imminently to launch an offensive in the Donbas industrial area, pundits ask if the tactics that proved successful in Syria could now be employed in Ukraine.

The new appointee is General Alexander Dvornikov, who was sent to Syria in September 2015 when Russia intervened directly in the war to stop a rebel offensive backed by Saudi Arabia which was making ground against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

Russian air support for the Syrian army was of crucial assistance for the Assad government and continues to this day with 182 Russian air strikes since the start of April according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Gen Dvornikov, who became commander of the southern district in Russia in 2016, was credited by Moscow with turning the tide in Syria. American critics accused him of inflicting heavy civilian loss of life by bombarding villages, towns and cities, making them uninhabitable.

These may have been his tactics, but they had been used by the Syrian government since at least 2012. The appointment of Gen Dvornikov was confirmed by US official, but not by Moscow which does not announce such appointments.

Long before Russians intervened directly in Syria, we would drive through districts in north Damascus where every structure had been smashed by shellfire and bombs and the ruins then levelled by bulldozers to prevent them being used for cover by snipers.

Surviving inhabitants had fled and nobody knew how many had died: in Daraya, once an opposition stronghold in south Damascus, the tall apartment blocks were still standing, but gutted and emptied of people.

The Russians fine-tuned and reinforced what the Syrian government was already doing, suggesting that it rely less on massive but ill-directed firepower and more on squads of infantry with snipers’ rifles and machine guns.

This is effective, but the problem for the Syrian army – and the same may be true of the Russians in Ukraine – was that they were short of infantry and wanted to keep their casualties low. Simple lack of numbers may also explain the Russian failure to make headway in north Ukraine and the reliance on vulnerable columns of tanks and armoured vehicles that proved easy for Ukrainian forces to ambush.

A key difference between the military landscape in Syria and Ukraine is that Syria is a jigsaw puzzle of hostile communities divided by religious and, on occasion, by ethnic allegiances. Although the same could be right for Ukraine with the division between Ukrainian and Russian ethnics and the Neo-nazi militias, which would correspond to Daesh in Syria.

In a Damascus district named Barzeh, artillery fire had reduced anti-government Sunni Arab neighbourhoods to a tangle of broken concrete beams and collapsed floors, while nearby tall blocks populated by pro-government members of the Alawite community, who believe in a variant of Shi’ism, were unscathed.

In Ukraine so far, Russia has succeeded in mobilising local support in the Donbas self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk where fighting is expected to escalate in the near future. And also in the south Russian majority provinces.

One parallel between Syria and Ukraine which works all too well is that modern urban warfare everywhere inevitably involves heavy civilian casualties, and this is true regardless of who is doing the attacking.

Whole districts of Damascus, Homs and East Aleppo have been wrecked or levelled by Syrian government/Russian bombardment, but the same is true of Raqqa, formerly the Islamic State de facto capital in northeast Syria, which was subjected to intense airstrikes and artillery fire by the Americans in support of Kurdish-led forces.

The city of Mosul, the Isis headquarters in Iraq, suffered a nine-month siege in 2016/17 by Iraqi troops backed by American airstrikes and much of the Old City was annihilated. Air forces the world over tend to be dishonest about their ability to distinguish civilian from military targets. But investigation on the ground after airstrikes has invariably shown that civilian and military personnel were in the same place or one can be easily mistaken for the other.

This happens naturally but also as a result of deliberate choice with jihadis in northern Syria sometimes occupying one floor of a five-storey building while floors above and below them are occupied by the normal residents. The same is true for Azov militia in Ukraine.

On the propaganda point of view, there is a contrast between the Russian armed forces’ intervention in Syria in 2015 and in Ukraine in 2022 is in the level of military competence.

Western governments had hoped that Russia would become bogged down in the Syrian quagmire, but instead it made political and military gains using airpower and a modest number of advisers.

Now Nato want to make believe that Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February stumbled from the beginning. Its troops are supposed to have failed to achieve their objectives, though for Nato and Western media the precise nature of these is still unclear. They say that too few Russian troops advanced on too many fronts to enjoy a battle-winning superiority in numbers and were forced to retreat after suffering heavy losses – the information comes from Kiev, not Moscow.

Therefore, triumphalism on the part of Ukrainian leaders and western military experts could turn out to be dangerously premature – and the Russian success in Syria was not as atypical as it now Nato and Western media want it appears to be.

General Alexander Dvornikov is no butcher. He is as good strategic as it gets. With him in command, the war may be beginning to end.   

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Russophobia is not OK II

How Western media propaganda machine magically came out with the same headlines on Bucha within minutes and with zero evidence. This isn't the first nor will it be the last time they manipulate information to servee their narrative in order to vilify an ebtire country. Syria comes to mind....

“Vladimir Putin adores Fyodor Dostoevsky,” I recently read in an article. “A close reading of the legendary author’s texts reveals the feeling might have been mutual.”

Before long in Italy a university had cancelled a literature course on Dostoyevsky over the Ukraine crisis. If the world is left at the mercy of such acts of juvenile barbaric lunacy, we will sooner lose the moral parameters of our earthly existence than we do the environmental conditions of human survival. What has Dostoyevsky to do with Putin? We might as well ban Faulkner because we oppose USA's plundering claws around the world – or stop reading Emile Zola because we do not like Macron. What sheer sophomoric puerility is this, or… sorry, Bush and Netanyahu don’t read.

People around the world aghast at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (as they were with Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq?) must be very careful not to fall into this trap. “A plague on both your houses,” we should instead we should reach for our copies of the masterpieces of Russian literature to reread in protest, beginning of course with Dostoyevsky.

Years ago, in St Petersburg, Russia, a Russian colleague generously gave me a tour of the neighbourhood in which Dostoyevsky had lived when writing Crime and Punishment (1866), a book I second read when I was a graduate student in Brasil, not too dissimilar to the main character of the novel, Rodion Raskolnikov – minus, of course, murdering any pawnbroker Iranian counterpart of Alyona Ivanovna.

I was walking through that neighbourhood like a pilgrim retracing every inch of it graced by the memories of a lasting monument to a man’s literary genius, a novelist whom Nietzsche had praised as “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn”, the towering moral figure on whom Freud wrote his iconic essay, “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”.

Extract Dostoyevsky from our moral memories and we will be one step closer to Dante’s Inferno. Dostoyevsky is irreplaceable. Please leave him alone.

The issue however is not just Dostoevsky. There is an alarming, pathetic, rise and resurgence of Russophobia in Europe and the United States – almost instantly following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Blame Putin for Ukraine, as you blame George W Bush and Tony Blair for Afghanistan and Iraq or anywhere else on his map of the “War on Terror”.

Take Blair, Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Putin, if you may, and a whole gang of kindred thugs together, put a leash around their necks as you dispatch them all to the International Criminal Court and charge them with war crimes, and crimes against humanity. But this stupid demonisation of one of world’s greatest, if not the greatest, cultures of the is pathetic.

I recall how back in January 2020, US President Donald Trump threatened to bomb 52 Iranian sites, including many that are considered world heritage monuments. The barbaric mentality that just a while ago was targeting Iran and Islam, has now turned to Russia.

It is one thing for European and US media to shed their thin veneer of journalistic ‘neutralit’ and be utterly vulgar in their partisan coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is an entirely different thing for the classic European and American Russophobia to rear its ugly head and reconnect to its fascist roots to demonise Russians with dizzying speed and insidious tenacity.

Denounce Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, if you want, but keep on reading Dostoyevsky’s novels, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, and marvelling at Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical brilliance. Repeat these few phrases three times a day and leave the world be.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a naked act of military campaign straight out of the American playbook. With some of its brutality and vulgarity, the Russians have done a lot less nothing that the US and its European and regional allies have not done for decades and centuries – most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere‌ – or what their client Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have not done in Yemen. So what is the big deal? Everything is in order when they do it to Black and brown people around the globe. The world is coming to an end if someone does the same thing to white people with blue eyes and blonde hair.

The US and its European allies are the last entities on planet earth with any moral authority to point fingers at Russia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has achieved the highest admiration of people around the globe for, backed by Nato military power, staying put and leading his country in a battle of against Russia – but this is the same man who is walking hand in hand with Neo-nazis and who is a solid Zionist fully behind the continued Israeli theft of Palestine and murder of Palestinians. Wherefore this failure to see the larger global picture?

If we were to remain free of the political propaganda and focus on the human costs of such follies, the demonisation of regional and global cultures is revealed for the nonsensical gibberish that it is. The best of Russia is the best of our humanity. The worst of Russia has an uncanny similarity with the worst we have seen of Europe and the US. We did not stop reading Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen when the US and its European partners unleashed their barbarism on Afghanistan and Iraq. We will not stop reading Leo Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev or Nikolai Gogol now that Russia has done the same in Ukraine.

The malignant (generic) anti-Russian sentiments in Europe and by extension the US goes back at least to the Napoleonic Wars when Russia was pictured as the barbaric antithesis of “Europe”. The fictitious document known as “The Will of Peter the Great” (forged early in the nineteenth century and repeatedly revived any time there is a war in Crimea) has attributed to the Russian emperor the desire to conquer Europe and subjugate its people. The same delusional phobia would later be recycled for Arabs and Muslims “reconquering Europe”.

Delusional Europeans and their American counterparts are very limited in their conspiratorial imagination and not so clever in making up newer fearful fantasies so keep recycling the old ones. According to them, Arabs want to conquer Europe, Muslims want to conquer Europe, Turks, Africans, Russians, ad absurdum, want to conquer Europe – all the while they do not seem to notice that they are the ones who are bombing Asia, Africa and Arab nations at will, besides installing puppet dictators wherever they want, and can.

It is impossible to exaggerate how gullible a whole spectrum of Americans is at such moments, drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid without the slightest doubt or hesitation, acting like robots commanded in one direction or another. “Russian Restaurants Feel War’s Impact,” reports The New York Times, “most owners are antiwar, and many of them are from Ukraine. But customer numbers are down all the same.” What did Beef Stroganoff, Borscht, or Pirozhki do to you anyway? They are delicious. Much better, in fact, than the ghastly hamburgers that McDonald’s has evidently decided to stop bad-feeding the Russians supposedly in retaliation for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Whereas the truth is that their “restaurants” were emptied before they decided to cut back the losses.

Like many other cultures around the world, American no-culture cannot understand itself except by demonising a constellation of others. A fictive white interlocutor stands at the epicentre of all these systematic acts of alienation and tireless demonisation of others. All that is needed is a hint to trigger the machinery into action.

Over the course of its history, Hollywood has emerged as the main barometer of American propaganda, consistently marking and targeting the presumed enemies of “the American way of life”.

As I said previously, from Hollywood blockbusters like the Rocky series and Diehard to spy thrillers of successive generations, Hollywood thrives on demonising Russians.

“In Hollywood,” Michael Idov recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “the ‘evil Russian’ stereotype isn’t back. It never left.” Nina Khrushcheva, a scholar of cinema at New York University even makes the perfectly plausible claim that Putin’s self-image is in fact influenced by Hollywood’s portrait of evil Russians. In the movie Equalizer (2014), the chief Russian villain is called Vladimir Pushkin. Any relation to Alexander Pushkin perhaps – the greatest Russian Romantic poet and playwright of all time?

Any time Hollywood as the chief propaganda machinery of the US and Europe goes low, the world must go high. Today is the best time to rediscover the masters of Russian Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Verlov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov - and countless other masters are waiting for you. While you are at it, get to know a few Ukrainian artists too. Begin with Taras Shevchenko, their glorious Kobzqr - then discover their many other poets, artists and folklorists. As Russia is not just Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is not just Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

By the way, The difference being that Vladimir Putin is well-read and knows all about Russian culture. Whereas Zelenskyy is an uncultured comedian who landed in the presidency thanks to whom? To the Russian voters with the promise of listening to thei concerns about being attacked for eight years and their will of independency, mainly in the Donbass.

Worth Following: THE GRAYZONE

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Russophobia is not OK

 

All around the world we have been carefully programmed to hate Russians by an American culture machine that engaged in an aggressive campaign to demonize all things and all people Russian. In every mainstream movie and TV show that addresses their “malign” existence, even after the Cold War, Russians are consistently presented as the enemy, a race of duplicitous villains who hate freedom for no other reason than because they do, because evil defines their national character without meaning. Growing up, I watched Sylvester Stallone and the Brat Pack murder scores of these people like they weren’t even human, just soulless props to highlight the blood-spattered glory of American exceptionalism with their primitive inferiority. Their slaughter was comedy.

And all the politicians and history books seemed to take their cues directly from the action movies. There was never any reason provided to explain the deep-seated hostility of our eastern adversaries. There was no Western invasion to strangle their revolution against Czarist tyranny in the cradle as Winston Churchill so eloquently put it. There were no Jupiter missiles on Khrushchev’s borders beckoning him to Cuba. They just hated us – according to the USA and our military dictators installed by Washington in South America - because we were “free” and they were evil, and we should hate them too, even the ones who escaped communist tyranny, even their children.

I had to grow up a little before I could realize that at the end of the day Russians were just people like anyone else.

Today we find ourselves living at the height of a whole new Cold War and even in an era where perceived wokeness reigns supreme it has never been hipper to hate people just because they’re Russian. As the news media hovers with a magnifying glass over every gruesome detail of Putin’s complicated war in Ukraine, Russophobia has once again taken the West by storm. Russian restaurants and Orthodox churches are being vandalized and harassed with death threats. Children with Russian names are being taunted and bullied. Sporting events like the Paralympics are barring Russian and Belarussian athletes from competing even as neutrals. Cultural institutions from the Munich Philharmonic to the Met are canceling Russian performers and pressuring others to pass purity tests on their proper hatred for Putin just to remain on stage. Even those sanctimonious self-appointed scions of tolerance at social media conglomerates like Facebook and Instagram have all but greenlit anti-Russian hate-speech and removed their previous ban on neo-Nazi death squads like the Azov Battalion just so long as they exterminate the right variety of untermenschen.

And once again, the US and the European Union  can’t pretend like they’re innocent, as if provoking this heinous bloodbath with decades of reckless NATO expansion wasn’t bad enough. The combined forces of the so-called free world have united to punish Putin’s first victims within Russia’s own borders en masse with a crippling embargo that just keeps tightening like a noose around their throats. Sanctions like the kind being lobbed at Russia from the United States and being celebrated and encouraged by everyone from late night talk show hosts to self-anointed antiwar activists essentially amount to the collective punishment of an entire nation for the crimes of its crooked government.

These measures won’t deprive Putin or the oligarchs of a single spoon of caviar, but they will cause great stress for millions of Russians. Sanctions are a form of economic terrorism designed to torture the already desperate into affecting American-approved regime change. These actions are every bit as evil and indiscriminate as Russia’s bombs and I fear that they and the Russophobic propaganda barrage that goes with them are only the beginning of something far more sadistic.

The United States of America has long used its corporate tentacles across the mass media to soften up it’s natural intolerance for total war by systematically demonizing entire races of people. As Japan embraced imperialism in a gruesome attempt to defend their own rich culture from western expansion in the Pacific during the 1930s, everyone from Tinseltown to Dr. Seuss jumped on the bandwagon to demonize the Japanese people themselves as being senseless Oriental savages killing for amusement while the American government upped the ante with crippling sanctions that eventually resulted in a full-blown embargo that provoked the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

It’s not being a conspiracy nut to believe that this was as intentional as USA&NATO’s provocation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Navy admirals lost their jobs just trying to warn FDR of the storm he was reaping with arms wide open. I shouldn’t have to tell people the results of this frighteningly familiar racist campaign of synergistic propaganda and economic warfare. 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps, whole cities roasted alive with napalm, and 226,000 innocent civilians obliterated by two nuclear bombs after their nation had already thrown in the towel. I don’t want this nightmare to repeat itself, but I can’t ignore the growing signs all around me. They keep me up at night.

The Russian people are not the enemy. Russian history and culture is alive with resistance to tyranny and resilience under oppression. Russia won World War II on the ground, with the Red Army marching towards Berlin liberating Poland, Ukraine and the Concentration camps to the very end. You can feel it breathing inside your chest when you read the prose of Tolstoy or listen to the wild mood swings of Tchaikovsky. There are still those who despise NATO and their puppet regime in Kyiv. The USA & Nato don’t really care about all those lost lives. To them, they are just cannon fodder to excuse their own war crimes to come. Imperialism thrives on racism and Europeans and Americans all need to fight the racism of Russophobia before it gives our own “devils” in power the license they seek for atrocity.