John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Cultural Problem of Cheating & Lying”

“This is not just a lesson for parents, schools, the courts, and the marketplace. It is also a necessary lesson for our politics. But we have not managed to come up with a way to vet our leaders so as to assure their long-term honesty and integrity — a process we have been searching for since the time of Plato. Nonetheless, we should try harder…”

 

Yes, indeed, but I do find the piece weak and rather squishy, avoiding as it does the real source of the problem and putting things into philosophical terms of a search for ways to insure truth in American politics and in the wider society. It actually gets quite preachy, but preaching doesn’t change the real political economy of a huge state, and, indeed, I think it effectively offers a kind false hope to hide behind.

A little like the people in America who periodically stand in a crowd on a hillside with their arms outstretched in a kind of supplication, waiting for the Second Coming. They are sincere, to be sure, I have no doubt, but their efforts are utterly pointless since they ignore science and the realities of the human condition.

There are bricks-and-mortar causes for the ailments of American society, and if you refuse to deal with those, you are in a very real sense lying to yourself and just adding to the total volume of American lying.

Given America’s empire and the vast and costly military/security services supporting it, I don’t think there is any option but for leaders to lie, and doing so almost continuously. The emergence of American plutocracy, which is what the empire serves, and money-driven politics at home are at the heart of the problem.

Can America’s leaders in Washington openly admit that they are starving children and depriving the sick of medicine in Iran and Venezuela and were working to do the same in Bolivia and still other places?

Even the ugliest, most powerful government officials or the plutocrats they serve do not happily take public credit for such grim acts. So, lying and cheating just become built into the society at the highest level. Almost everyone, no matter how malevolent their intentions and actions, wants at least a veneer of respectability, credit for worthy motives. Only the genuine psychopaths, of which America has more than a few in powerful positions because they are useful, are likely to want such credit, much like credit for scalps on display.

So, destroying someone else’s elected government invariably is transformed into fighting for democratic values. Venezuela’s unelected Guaido, absurdly swearing himself in as President without ever running for election and financing his activities with American intelligence agency funds as well as American-appropriated Venezuelan national assets, becomes the hope for democracy over the party of twice-elected Maduro and his thrice-elected predecessor, Chavez.

Again, except for the scalphunters, who would want credit for shutting down Venezuela’s electricity grid several times so that millions of poor ordinary people likely lost the food in their fridges? And many life-sustaining machines stopped working?

Such are the realities of empire. And there are just so very many examples, the story of Ukraine being a prominent and tragic one in recent years.

According to the delightful Victoria Nuland, a high State Department official who was overheard at the time, America spent five billion dollars on the coup in Ukraine, doing absolutely nothing for Ukraine’s people, overthrowing an elected government, and indeed wrecking the country in many ways. All done just to threaten the security interests of Russia along a huge border. Needless violence and intimidation, with plenty of killing along the way.

Parts of Ukraine seceded under the unpleasant language and cultural policies of the coup-installed government, and I think it pretty unlikely they will ever return. Thousands died in an unnecessary civil war over the matter. Great numbers of people sought work in other parts of Europe as the Ukrainian economy literally collapsed under a corrupt and incompetent American-installed administration.

Versions of neo-Nazism now openly flourish in Ukraine because the groups’ capacity to intimidate the government is useful in preventing any turning back to rational policies. Such groups, some subsidized by the State Department or American security services, threaten the government into not making reasonable concessions for peace.

Incidentally, Joe Biden, in his then role as presidential proconsul to Ukraine, assisting the coup government in getting things right – “right” meaning the way America wants them – was photographed warmly shaking hands with the commander of one such group, the Azov Battalion, a group whose marches much resemble those of Hitler’s Brownshirts of the 1930s.

The post-coup Ukrainian military demonstrated gross incompetence. Despite its far greater numbers and resources, it had poor leadership and lack of motivation and managed only to kill thousands of civilians in breakaway Eastern Ukraine. Its efforts to draft soldiers in Western Ukraine to send to fight in Eastern Ukraine resulted in embarrassingly high levels of running from the draft.

And all the previous coup government leader, Poroshenko, could talk about was how the Russians were invading and how brave Ukrainian soldiers were preventing Europe from being invaded. Absolutely absurd stuff, but our press and politicians credited it as truth. Somehow, with all such claims, the hi-tech, unarguable evidence of America’s fleets of spy satellites and sophisticated radars just manages to disappear. America would in fact know in a heartbeat if Russia invaded Ukraine, and it would not sit silently watching it happen.

So, we not only have thick clots of lies, we have the government of the United States treating us all as though we were totally ignorant of the realities of around-the-clock surveillance.

Perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Ukraine’s post-coup military operations was the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, either in error or deliberately, an event which launched an industrial-sized cover-up with a shameless investigation which never even bothered to collect all the evidence, pieces of the plane and contents still being easily discovered in the region where it crashed. If you study the case, there are many powerful reasons for believing the Ukrainian military shot down the airliner with fighter planes, but imagine the risk to America’s five-billion-dollar coup investment if the truth had been broadcast right away? So, years of throwing dust in people’s eyes began, and now the matter is almost forgotten. And, again, no American satellite images or radar tracks were ever produced.

We have ugly stunt after ugly stunt – such as the infamous Skripal Affair of two years ago in Britain – done merely to hurt the interests of those America does not like. Truth is impossible, and the lying goes beyond all normal bounds to become a massive network of distortions, all dutifully attested to at the highest levels of government and by the corporate press which of course always serves the government which has so regulatory powers over it.

It was after all, Hitler himself in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, who propounded the concept of “the Big Lie.” It proved a highly successful idea, and tyrants and seekers-after-power have never stopped employing it since.

That is the very nature of empire, and there is no escaping it. It is impossible to behave the way America does and not lie about it, massively and continuously.

I’ve said it many times, but there’s no shame in repeating such an important truth: you can either have a decent country or you can have an empire, but you cannot have both.

The infrastructure of empire is built on threats, oppression, subversion, coups, dishonesty, and no shortage of violence.

And there is always an underlying assumption that a relatively small number of people in the United States are somehow entitled to tell the other more than 95% of humanity how they are to run their affairs. Are you not implicitly lying about your democratic and human-rights values when you do that? Of course, it isn’t America’s roughly 5% of the world’s people making the claim, it’s a tiny fraction of that, the highly privileged.

There’s no way the establishment politicians in Washington – including the best Congress money can buy – can one day just take a kind of Boy Scout Oath to reform things. Believing that goes beyond naïve to asinine.

Fundamental change is required – including basic matters like a tax structure which supports the creation of plutocracy and the grotesque role of money in politics – but I don’t think Americans are prepared to undertake it, and perhaps they are not even able to do so, given the establishment’s powerful tools of self-defense.

Right now, the Democratic Party is working to shut out Bernie Sanders, and it has already pretty much shut out Tulsi Gabbard, yet neither of those two admirable politicians is even advocating large-scale change. That’s a good measure of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

The other half of America’s money-controlled political duopoly, the Republican Party, supports a foul-mouthed madman who brags about stealing. Why? Because he vigorously continues the good work of imposing America’s will on the planet, and he actively works to hurt those who are going to become important parts of a very different future, as China and Russia.

Well, I believe sadly that America is stuck right where it is until larger events overtake it and the now-emerging multi-polar world becomes the dominant reality.

MAGA will be seen as a museum relic, like some Shaman’s pathetic talisman, representing futile efforts by America to claw its way back to where it was seventy years ago, pretty much king of the world.

Either that, or it is not impossible at all for genuine widespread and destructive war to emerge from America’s present global hostilities almost everywhere.

After all, what do bullies do when their demands are ignored but start throwing punches or using a weapon?

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MURRAY BREWSTER IN CBC NEWS

 

“Canadian-led peacekeeping mission in Ukraine ‘Plan B’ for Kyiv, official says

“For Ukraine, the preferred option would be a successful outcome to peace talks”

 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-canada-peacekeeping-1.5343320

 

The Minsk Agreement is ultimately the only way to end this conflict. Minsk says that the breakaway eastern region will rejoin Ukraine but with special status.

The region is completely Russian-speaking, and Ukraine’s last government tried removing rights of Russian-speakers. That’s what started the trouble. The situation somewhat resembles what anyone would expect from Quebec if Ottawa declared English as the language for education and other matters.

There never has been Russian state involvement there except for a great deal of humanitarian and other assistance since Ukraine, under the last government, cut the region off from almost everything, including pensions. Tales of a Russian invasion in Ukraine are simply not true. They are disinformation fantasies. Russia has declined to accept the region into the Russian Federation, despite being asked by them to do so.

Look at what America has been doing in Venezuela, and you will have some idea of what it did in Ukraine in 2014, to topple an elected government whose only sin was good relations with Russia. All the many problems of Ukraine come out of that fact.

The coup destroyed Ukraine’s economy, destroyed important long-term relationships with Russia (the two societies have a closely entwined history going back nearly a thousand years), generated civil war in eastern Ukraine, saw the rise of extremist right-wing forces who now play a role in its government, and put in place a government, Poroshenko’s, which most people there regarded as palpably corrupt.

Russia has always supported the Minsk Agreement for peace. It helped create it. Putin has repeated his complete support many times. Forces inside Ukraine are what prevent that happening. That’s where outside pressure is needed, but none comes. American anti-Russian interests are central to Ukraine’s position. After all, the coup was encouraged precisely to create threatening instability along a major Russian border. Does anything good ever come out of such actions?

Hopes were that Zelensky, a reasonable man who speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, would implement Minsk, but he has not been able to do so. Why? There are several extreme right-wing armed organizations in Ukraine, most notably the Azov Battalion, who intimidate Zelensky and make sure any orders he issues concerning military occupation of certain positions near the breakaway Donbass (eastern Ukraine) region are simply not followed. Minsk requires a series of steps to be taken in preparation for its full implementation, and the Azov Battalion-types are not prepared to allow those steps.

Ukraine’s State-Sponsored “Azov Battalion” Expands Use of Nazi-Inspired Symbols

The Azov Battalion was incorporated, inappropriately, into Ukraine’s national army by the last government, much like having one of those weird private right-wing American militias of the 1970s (eg, the armed Minutemen) incorporated into the American army, thus furnishing them with resources and support. It is one of the groups used in the violent coup of 2014, and it stands ready to repeat its activity if Zeleskey departs from its demands. They make compromise almost impossible.

It is important to understand that the 2014 coup was financed by the United States ($5 billion was allocated), something we know from the overheard words of a high former State Department official, Victoria Nuland. All the Joe and Hunter Biden controversy in our news recently stems from the fact that Joe Biden acted at the time as an American proconsul sent by Obama to the new coup government in Ukraine, offering certain help and making certain demands.

By the way, there are photos of Joe Biden in Ukraine shaking hands warmly with the commander of the Azov Battalion.

It is hard to see a sensible or useful place for Canadian peacekeepers here, but we have a foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, who is very responsive to American policy aims and warmly supported the troubled, coup-installed government of Ukraine that ruled before Zelensky while making many Russophobic remarks.

 

NOTE:

Joe Biden has a long history of scoring presents and privileges for his family in the course of carrying out various government duties – hence, Hunter Biden’s extraordinary board appointment in Ukraine with an income of $50,000 per month in a company and a country he knows absolutely nothing about.

Saying that does not put me in Trump’s camp at all. Trump is exactly the same kind of sleazy operator. He has his daughter and son-in-law sitting at desks in the White House. While they are not receiving government salaries, they are in extremely sensitive positions with top-level security clearance while receiving huge private incomes from Trump and Kushner family enterprises, something I think most people would regard as a serious conflict of interest.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Russia-Ukraine crisis – live: Kiev declares martial law as world powers call emergency meetings after Putin’s forces seize ships near Crimea”

 

Poroshenko is pathetic. Declaring martial law is a very serious matter in any society, and doing so just because a neighboring country stopped a group of ships off-course in a sensitive region makes no sense at all.

This declaration is really about the coming election in Ukraine and the likelihood, from polls, that Poroshenko is going to lose it badly. He is very unpopular, as we might expect with the basket-case his government has made of Ukraine since the coup.

Nothing like a good dose of fear to make people less likely to vote for change.

This was clearly a created incident.

The Ukrainian ships went where they knew they were not supposed to go.

They did not follow instructions of Russian Border Services.

Now, what kind of reaction will that earn you anywhere, most certainly including Britain?

__________________

Response to a reader who said “The West, by supporting this scumbag either out of natural stupidity or prejudice, plays right into his hands”:

Well, “the West” has behaved stupidly from the start.

First, by even going along with the American-induced coup against an elected government in Ukraine.

We know from ugly big-mouth, Victoria Nuland, American Neocon figure and former State Department official, that the US spent $5 billion on the project to destabilize Ukraine.

And “the West” completely tolerates the open displays of fascism in Ukraine by a number of ugly outfits – things like torch-light parades with Nazi-like symbols and some terrible words.

This whole American project was for the purpose of threatening Russia on a major border, a simply downright stupid act against a nuclear super-power.

This Ukrainian government has sent its own country into a tailspin, too. There have been major out-migrations of Ukrainians to other countries willing to accept them. The Ukrainian economy is in decline. Its trade is in decline. Civil War was needlessly started over language and cultural rights, resulting in the separation of regions. Everyone inside and outside the country is aware of large-scale corruption. There has been complete government paralysis in moving even an inch forward with the internationally-agreed Minsk Accords for peace in the country. I don’t think it would be possible to create a worse government.

_________________

For some perspective on this incident in the Kerch Strait, let’s remember what unarmed people – even women and children – receive just approaching the Israeli fence around Gaza.

A bullet in the head. A shattered leg. A blown-off foot.

More than 200 have been killed by Israel’s cowardly snipers, and many thousands wounded.

None of them armed. None of them ever setting foot on Israeli territory.

By contrast, here near Crimea, there were actually minimal problems despite the facts that the Ukrainian ships were well-armed and were definitely in the wrong location.

________________

Additional notes.

At least one Ukrainian official has claimed Russia used a missile from a fighter plane on one of the ships.

Well, first, we have quite a number of photos of the incident, and no missile damage is to be seen.

And there is no evidence of large numbers of crew members being hurt or killed, as there very much would be from a modern anti-ship missile. Instead, we have reports of just a few Ukrainians sustaining injuries in resisting Russian Border Services and receiving medical treatment.

Of course, the ships were brought to port by the Russians, something that wouldn’t be possible after a missile attack.

I think the bizarre nature of such a claim, despite much contrary evidence, tells us a good deal about the chaotic nature of Ukraine’s current politics and internal affairs.

Russia also reports that at least one Ukrainian intelligence service member was on board one of the ships. Just what you’d expect to find on a ship innocently straying off-course, is it not?

Readers should keep in mind that the Russians are very much on-guard for the Kerch Strait Bridge. Some idiotic Ukrainian politicians have actually openly advocated attacking it with explosives.

And it is a magnificent piece of engineering which provides daily testimony to Russia’s determination and creativity in a difficult situation.

Since Ukraine – whether individuals or the state, we don’t know – employed many deliberate obstacles and instances of sabotage against people on the Crimean Peninsula after their votes to leave Ukraine and join Russia, the bridge has become far more than just a symbol too.

________________

I see in this morning’s CBC News the headline: “Canada condemns Russian aggression in clash with Ukraine.” Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland condemned Russia’s seizing three Ukrainian naval vessels near Crimea. The article offers no opportunity to comment.

Freeland has been an embarrassment as Foreign Minister on a number of files, and she has always been ready to jump with both feet into Russian affairs she likely doesn’t even fully understand.

She’s proven a genuine Russophobe which I suppose is understandable given her growing up in a Ukrainian-Canadian family, the kind of families I know from experience often display narrow hostility towards Russia.

Well, that’s a shame, Russia being an increasingly important country and one trying as it never did in the days of the Soviet Union to be open and ready to do business with everyone, but it’s her own business so long as she’s not Canada’s Foreign Minister.

But she is Foreign Minister, and she has no business making statements like this, whose only purpose is to serve the Russophobia insanity gripping the United States. She makes Canada look petty and small and not well-informed.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA

 

“Blame MH17 on Russia: International investigation turns into demonic circus”

 

Good summary of events. What has always most impressed me is the vivid memory of some early images I saw on the Internet of the wreckage on the ground.

In the frame of the pilot’s seat and in some of metal skin of the cabin, there were the clearest possible perfectly round holes, as would have been made by a machine gun or small-caliber canon from a fighter plane. The image was unmistakable.

Then, when after much delay, the pilot’s body was sent home for burial, his family were ordered not to open the coffin. I couldn’t help but wonder about that. Was it so they didn’t see bullet holes?

I just don’t know. There clearly was other damage too. The holes I saw were definitely not from missile warhead shrapnel, although other damage suggests that too.

The bottom line for me is the inordinate length of time deliberately taken. This was not a difficult case at all. Everything should have been out to the public within weeks, but it was not.

Also, the investigators failed to comprehensively collect evidence on the ground – something always demanded in such investigations. Locals still had pieces long after and likely still do. The considerable time the investigators took to get around to collecting material gave the Ukrainians an extended opportunity to fiddle with the site.

Investigators also refused to use certain data supplied by Russian authorities and did not allow Russian collaboration. Why?

And then we get periodic announcements, after long intervals of time, always with imprecise conclusions and no new hard evidence. The pattern resembles nothing we’ve ever seen before in a crash investigation. It just screams cover-up with the vague conclusions at each announcement. The Dutch have undoubtedly been put under intense pressure by America in defense of its interests in the coup-induced Ukrainian government, who I think more than likely shot the plane down in stupid error after stupidly not closing the air space over a war zone as they were required to do.

_________________________

Response to a comment:

The Dutch are pretty fair people, and that is part of why they were selected, for credibility. I’ve always thought highly of them.

But even honest people can be pressured behind the scenes.

Especially by a muscle-bound bully like today’s America, which busied itself back then with projects like overthrowing Ukraine’s elected government and lying about all the mercenaries fighting in Syria posed as jihadists and a whole bunch of other dirty operations.

Do you even know what Hillary’s scandal at Benghazi was about? What they were doing was collecting weapons and cut throats to ship to poor old Syria, assistance for all the creepy al-Nusrah and ISIS types. But some of the thugs killed the ambassador instead.

Clinton and Company also, we know, sent very limited amounts of Qaddafi’s stock of poison gas to help create a “red line” incident in Syria so that good old smiley Obama could begin bombing the crap out of them. It all went wrong in part thanks to Putin, providing still another reason for disliking him.

The US spent $5 billion on the Ukraine coup. We know that amount accidentally from big-mouthed former State Department Neocon, Victoria Nuland, the same charmer who was overheard once shouting “F-ck Europe!”

How would you react if some American thug of the quality of a Nuland or today’s Pompeo or Bolton told you that if you didn’t cooperate, you were going to endanger a $5 billion investment by the United States? And if you did that, there would be serious repercussions for Dutch investments and banking, etc.?

America today, sadly, is country almost without honor.

_____________________

Additional comment:

‘”It is also worth mentioning that the United States has not provided satellite images, the presence of which was announced immediately after the catastrophe,” Zakharova said as quoted on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.’

It should be noted that America’s “Keyhole” spy satellites have camera equipment not so very different from the space telescope. And we know these satellites are active especially in any area of conflict. Nothing could be more suspicious than the failure to produce the images.

___________________________

FOOTNOTE: A MUCH LATER STATEMENT FROM THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER AS QUOTED IN “SOUTHFRONT”

 

“WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?”: MALAYSIAN PM SLAMS MH17 INVESTIGATION AS NOT IMPARTIAL AND POLITICALLY MOTIVATED

 

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that the investigation into the 2014 crash of the Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing in Ukraine was not conducted in an impartial manner, but was rather focused on simply pinning the blame on Russia for political reasons.

“For some reasons, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened. We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians. This is not a neutral kind of examination,“ the prime minister said, as quoted by the Malaysian National News Agency.

“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine. You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians, it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile”.

Both Malaysia and Russia were excluded from partaking in the investigation.

If one translates the recent remarks by the Malaysian prime minister from diplomatic language to direct speech, we see that he stated that Malaysia has little doubts that the MH17 was intentionally shot down by the Ukrainian government. He also points out that the side controlling the JIT and thus the investigation is concealing the criminals, hiding data, and limiting the participation of third parties in the ‘international’ investigation.

 

COMMENT ON CHARGES NOW LAID BY DUTCH INVESTIGATORS OF MH17

 

With the announcement of charges being laid by Dutch investigators, a British newspaper used the headline “MH17 suspects charged with murder over 298 deaths will likely escape justice”

What justice?

This American-appointed investigation has ignored all kind of evidence.

Including the fact that the Russians have shown that the BUK missile serial numbers found at the scene correspond to a unit sold to Ukraine many years ago.

The investigators have pulled this stunt of charging four men knowing full well that the individuals named cannot be extradited. They just wanted names for sensational headlines.

The entire performance is shameful.

Such a relatively simple crash, normally solved in weeks by professionals, has had its investigation stretched to years, with still no clear and indisputable findings.

Many pieces of evidence supplied by Russia were simply cast aside by these investigators. Pieces of physical evidence were left on the ground, some of them still in the possession of locals. The effort to collect physical evidence, normally meticulous and scrupulous after air crashes, was careless, and the effort came only after a substantial delay, allowing Ukraine plenty of time to sanitize things before investigators set to work. Still other pieces of potential evidence were never supplied, such as images or radar tracks from an American spy satellite working over the area at the time.

Shame on the Dutch, a people I’ve always admired, but there they are, under the American thumb, America trying to protect a coup-installed government from humiliation over its incompetence.