This really shouldn't need stating. I focus on the West's crimes, provocations and distortions not because I'm a Saddam, Assad, Putin apologist. I do so because I'm trying to fill in knowledge gaps for *western audiences* starved of critical information by western corporate media
You don't need more western propaganda from me. Your eyes and ears are stuffed with it. You need to hear other sides, and missing information, to be able to judge whether what you're being told by the establishment media is true or propaganda
Not least, you need that counter-information to judge whether the state-corporate media have a collective agenda – and whether that agenda is about empowering you against the establishment, or about empowering the establishment against you
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My latest: Everything US and European leaders have done over the past 15 years, and since Russia’s invasion, looks as though it was, and is, designed to scupper any hopes of a regional security framework capable of embracing Russia middleeasteye.net/opinion/russia…
The goal has been to keep Moscow excluded, inferior and embittered. For that reason, the current war looks more like the culmination of post-Cold War planning – again a feature, not a bug
The return of a geopolitical siege mentality in the West will serve the same purpose as demands for austerity and belt-tightening have done: it will justify the redistribution of wealth from western populations to their ruling elites
My latest: New tidbits of information reinforce Russia’s narrative, not Nato’s. This week ex-Israeli PM Naftali Bennett said his mediation efforts that were making progress between Moscow and Kyiv early in the war were 'blocked' by the US and its allies middleeasteye.net/opinion/russia…
The West’s justification for sending arms was to support Ukraine's struggle for sovereignty. But paradoxically, the more the US becomes the arbiter of what Ukraine needs, the less sovereignty Ukraine enjoys – including the right to decide when it most makes sense to sue for peace
According to the media, Ukraine's serving as a lab for testing 'state-of-the-art weapons and information systems.. that Western officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come' – and viewed as vital to preparing for a confrontation with China
Bookmark this! Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's chief apologist for Israel, finally offers a coded concession that Israel is an apartheid state.
Or in his words, the self-declared Jewish state is 'a de facto single state, in which the Israeli government is the master'
That’s the same Freedland who insisted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which precludes calling Israel ‘a racist endeavour’, was ‘internationally agreed’.
Corbyn’s Labour party was supposedly proven antisemitic for demurring on approval of all the IHRA's pro-Israel examples
Doubtless Freedland made the apartheid admission inadvertently, as part of his desperate attempts to defend Israel’s supine supreme court as a supposed 'liberal' bastion against the religious fascists in Netanyahu’s government
Forget 'madman Putin'. Dozens of cables exposed by Wikileaks show US officials warning for years of a Russian consensus – 'among policymakers, experts and the informed population' – against continued Nato expansion. Ukraine was the 'brightest of red lines' countercurrents.org/2023/02/diplom…
Cables from 2008 show Nato officials pressing reticent Ukrainian leaders to declare support for Nato membership, and discussing how to persuade Ukraine’s population to 'be more favorable' toward joining. Public education campaigns in Ukraine followed
William Burns, now Biden's CIA chief, warned in 2008: 'Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over Nato membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war'
The blindspots in this exchange are extraordinary. The interviewer suggests antisemitism stopped being an issue the moment Corbyn stepped down as Labour leader. Try telling that to Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and all the other 'wrong sort of Jews' forced out of Labour by Keir Starmer
In fact, antisemitism in Labour truly started to be an issue the moment Starmer became leader. He ensured the rights of lobbyists for the apartheid state of Israel (Zionists) were prioritised over the rights of Labour members critical of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews
But ultimately none of this is really about racism. It's about whether the Labour Party continues to submit to a political and military alliance with the US empire and its forward base in the oil-rich Middle East. This is about cynical power politics, not a battle to save Jews
One can argue about how serious is the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine. But how in good faith can the Guardian claim, as it does here, that Ukraine is 'a country without any Nazis'?
It's a rewriting of the media's own historic coverage of Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem worthy of Stalin
Here's the Guardian, for example, pointing out nearly five years ago that neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine were recruiting Britons to attack Russian-speaking communities in the Donbas – another part of the story now erased by the western media from Ukraine's history
And here two years ago is the Guardian joining the attacks on Facebook for not doing more to crack down on neo-Nazi groups, including two it identifies in Ukraine. It even uses a photo of Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion to illustrate the article