Op-Ed: Anti-vaccine patients vent anger on healthcare workers like me. It takes a toll on care


Venktesh Ramnath
Thu, January 20, 2022,

As hospital workers risk their lives to fight the pandemic, some COVID-skeptic patients and families vehemently claim that healthcare workers are "poisoning" and "punishing" people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

As a pulmonary and critical care physician in Southern California treating hospitalized patients with COVID-19, I am noticing a rising tension. Beyond just being overwhelmed, we are now part of the collateral damage.

I recently asked a security guard to accompany me and an ICU nurse to meet the family of an unvaccinated 42-year-old firefighter who refused to accept that COVID-19 caused his respiratory failure. Adamantly refusing intubation despite worsening over weeks, it was only when his oxygen levels precipitously dropped and he complained of excruciating breathlessness that he accepted a breathing tube.

A dozen irate family members and friends now demanded answers. Because of visitation restrictions to limit contagion, they awaited me in lawn chairs outside the hospital. Through my N95 mask, I tried to explain in simple terms what was happening to their loved one. They hectored with incessant questions about test results, accusations of mistreatment and demands for therapies like vitamins, ivermectin and sedatives.

Warning repeatedly “not to lie,” they recorded me with their camera phones. I tiptoed through a minefield of distrust. My careful medical explanations and efforts to connect empathically never landed. After 45 minutes, the three of us walked back into the hospital. The nurse, an ICU veteran of 20 years, sighed and said: “I can’t believe they attacked you like that.”

Once it would have been unbelievable, but it’s becoming all too common. Endless months of rancor from COVID-skeptic patients and their families takes a psychological toll on front-line healthcare professionals. I’m seeing a new casualty: Worn down, many practitioners are compromising long-standing practice norms.

Among patients who disbelieve the experts about COVID-19, there is a familiar pattern. They get sick. They end up in the hospital with severe COVID-19 illness. They initially demonstrate a nonplussed defiance, which morphs into utter helplessness when they progressively worsen.

A 43-year-old woman insisted “it’s just the flu” right up until she was begging to be intubated when oxygen masks failed to alleviate the panic caused by low oxygen levels. I pleaded with a 40-year-old man to accept my recommendations for care, only to have him grip my hand, look squarely in my eyes and say: “Feel my grip? I am strong. I am a man. Let me push through this.” (He went on to accept intubation but died several weeks later.)

Navigating the Kubler-Ross stages of traumatic grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — has always been part of providing critical care. But it’s a different challenge when patients are being wheeled into the hospital because of their deep denial of what we do know about the pandemic. It’s a different challenge when their family and friends conflate their misgivings about the science with our sincere efforts to help.

Incredulous families summarily deny that COVID-19 (and absence of vaccination) could be responsible for the critical illnesses I see every day. Patients and their relatives vehemently claim that healthcare workers and hospitals are “poisoning” and “punishing,” as if part of an Orwellian plot, leading to belligerent, abusive behaviors against staff.

Many providers have become inured to uninformed rebuffs of medical recommendations, including vaccination. Educational efforts have devolved into counterproductive debates.

Far from “heroes” or even compassionate advocates for health, providers are viewed as biased technicians with dubious motives locking loved ones behind hospital doors.

One response to this emotional onslaught is, understandably, attrition. Most veteran ICU nursing staff where I work have left, replaced by temporary assignment nurses from across the country. Some physicians who have become ostracized by the very communities they serve now contemplate nonclinical work or early retirement.

Among those of us still in the trenches, some medical professionals are now breaking traditional practice norms. Providers are resorting to less evidence-based practices, desperate to help and also to avoid another conflict. By opening the door to “try everything,” they have become unwitting supporters of anti-science movements, placing additional stress on others who promote well-established, proven practices.

Another understandable but disappointing strategy is to avoid tough prognostic conversations. Providers may avoid a confrontation with someone by not relaying the bad news about where a patient’s deteriorating condition is headed. This perpetuates false hopes of recovery and can leave patients clamoring for more and more treatment — which the provider knows would only amplify and prolong suffering, and which would detract attention from patients with higher probabilities of improvement.

There are no simple solutions, but there are many pieces to the puzzle: We healthcare providers must set realistic expectations early and throughout hospitalization. Hospitals must provide more palliative care, social work and other supportive services for patients and families. More and better public health messaging must combat medical misinformation. Medical systems and healthcare workers need more resources, more security, more public belief that we are all on the same side against a common viral enemy.

And to my colleagues who have been on the front lines: I am with you. If you need to step away, we understand and we thank you for everything you’ve done to carry us through this pandemic. Those of you who can come to work again tomorrow, please do, because we need you — not only to fight the virus, but also to uphold the principle that we share to do no harm.

Venktesh Ramnath is medical director of critical care and telemedicine outreach at UC San Diego Health.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

NORDSTREAM 2 ECODISASTER

Is Data the New Gas?

Oleksiy Radynski

e-flux
Journal #107 - March 2020

Smiley-face graffiti on a gas pipe at the Nord Stream 2 construction site in Lubmin, Germany. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt.

1.

In Brussels on May 1, 2019, Rick Perry, then-US energy secretary, announced that “seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States was again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent.” And, in the twenty-first century, he added, “rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”1 Perry was referring to a deal that would double the size of US gas exports to Europe. But from what, exactly, would Perry’s “freedom gas” liberate Europe?

Perry’s colorful statement came as an explicit snub to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a project that Russia and Germany have been pursuing since the 2010s to link the two countries directly via the Baltic seabed. The pipeline’s route bypasses intermediary countries like Ukraine, whose state budget depends heavily on gas transit revenues. Nord Stream 2 is expected to double the capacity of the already existing Nord Stream pipeline, increasing the volume of transmitted gas up to 110 billion cubic meters a year. Into 2020, Merkel’s government continues to defend this massive gas infrastructure project that’s been mired in controversy from the start.

Strangely enough, most of the criticism facing the Nord Stream 2 project comes from a geopolitical, rather than an ecological, perspective.2 Its critics say that this pipeline would disproportionately increase the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel exports.3 It’s also quite clear that the actual political rationale for this project is to render obsolete the subterranean, Soviet-era natural gas arteries that run through large parts of the European continent that are no longer under Russia’s control. Following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2014, Merkel’s government’s adherence to the Nord Stream 2 project did not cease to raise eyebrows.4 After the downing of a passenger plane over the Donbass in July 2014 by pro-Russian proxies, the ensuing sanctions against Russia did not affect the project in any way. In German public debate, the fact that the completion of Nord Stream 2 would likely cause the economy of Ukraine to collapse, a country at war with Russia, has been constantly referenced—but to little avail.5

The intricacies of the ongoing Nord Stream 2 debate, however, miss a rather large elephant in the room. Without questioning the importance of countering Russia’s neocolonial wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, it is easy to see why the biggest problem with the new pipeline is not at all the fact that it will deprive Russia’s neighbors of their transit revenues. Such revenues, in fact, fuel gross corruption schemes, like those that define Ukraine’s political process, and guarantee the concentration of exorbitant wealth in the hands of oligarchs.6 Nor is the biggest problem the fact that Nord Stream 2 will provide the Russian autocratic elite with another powerful tool to subvert European politics. The real problem is that this tool, just like its countless counterparts, undermines the future of planet Earth by bringing the irreversibility of climate change one large step closer. And this time, placing the blame squarely on Russia is clearly not an option.

With Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a manager, and Mathias Warnig (an ex-Stasi officer with a long-standing connection to Vladimir Putin) serving as the CEO of the project, it is not surprising that the German government values its Nord Stream 2 commitment more than its widely anticipated green transition. In a truly Orwellian move, Nord Stream 2 presents itself as an environmentally friendly initiative that will help decrease carbon emissions from oil and coal, fossil fuels that are, it is claimed, much dirtier than natural gas. This argument is refuted by ecologists who assert that, despite being relatively “cleaner” than much of the existing carbon infrastructure, projects like Nord Stream 2 would increase the structural, long-term dependency on fossil fuels to such an extent that a transition to a carbon-free economy—something that the Earth’s biosphere needs much earlier than we plan to institute—might actually never occur.

At the time of this writing, the construction of Nord Stream 2 has been halted due to US sanctions against the project, which will most likely merely delay the pipeline’s completion by about a year. But why is it that the only real form of opposition to Nord Stream 2 comes from the power that would simply prefer to cook the planet with its own “freedom gas”?

Gerhard Schröder, ex-chancellor of Germany and chairman of the board of directors of Nord Stream 2, and Matthias Warnig, former member of the Stasi and CEO of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Wolfram Scheible.

2.

In May 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an executive order titled “On the Strategy of Economic Security of the Russian Federation until 2030.” This order includes a list of ongoing “challenges and threats to the economic security” of Russia identified at that time. High on the list—number six of twenty-five points—is a threat formulated as follows: “Changes in the structure of global demand for energy resources and their consumption patterns; development of energy-saving technologies and reduction of material consumption; development of ‘green technologies.’”7

This statement warrants closer attention. It’s not difficult to see why the “development of ‘green technologies’” is an existential threat to the Russian Federation, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels and, according to most estimates, the owner of the largest stock of reserves of natural gas on Earth. This particular list of “threats and challenges” also happens to coincide more or less with a number of actions that are necessary to undertake if humanity is serious about its survival on the planet. As it becomes increasingly evident that the future of humankind depends on its ability to switch to a global economic model that would make the industrial burning of fossil fuels obsolete, the mere hope of such a switch—however distant it might seem at the moment—is now officially recognized as a threat to the regime that governs Russia. Clearly, the Russian political model values the future of fossil fuel and capital flows over the future of the innumerable species (including humans) whose existence is threatened by climate change. A question worth asking, then: Is the Russian government actually being, perversely, more straightforward than most other governments about the fact that they are ultimately accountable to entities such as gas, oil, and their derivative petrocurrencies, rather than to the members of human society who voted them into power?

Well before Trump came to power, it was abundantly clear that the global carbon-based capitalist model is incompatible with the futures of democracy and of the environment. Despite the broad scientific consensus on the grave effects of the fossilized economy on the planetary climate, and despite the cautious intergovernmental half-measures to prevent a catastrophic scenario (like the nonbinding Paris Accord of 2015, which the US government has already opted out of anyway), “extreme” fossil fuels investments continue to surge.8 Of all the fringe ideologies and discarded ideas that the Trump presidency has brought into the mainstream, climate change denialism could probably have the most lasting and damaging impact on the future of humankind. Of course, Donald Trump’s “climate skepticism” is far more publicized than that of his Russian counterpart and political patron—even though the effect of the latter could be more fundamental, given Putin’s global support of fossil fuel kleptocrats and right-wing conspiracists, Trump included. Like Trump, Putin has repeatedly questioned the human-made nature of climate change, and went as far as to ridicule the use of alternative energy sources like wind turbines for the alleged harm their vibration may cause to worms, urging them to “come out of the ground.” (The US president, meanwhile, focuses on turbines’ apparently murderous effect on birds). Again, this unprecedented (and scientifically baseless), disproportionate concern for subterranean, nonhuman entities—inanimate, like oil and gas, or animate, like worms—provides clues as to the actual allegiance of a certain public servant named Vladimir Putin.

Most commonly, the Russian political model is the object of human rights–based, postcolonial,9 or liberal-democratic criticism of what the Putinists themselves call “the illiberal model.” In order to make sense beyond the redundantly anti-communist “post-sovietology” in the vein of “Cold War 2.0,” these perspectives should necessarily be supplemented with (or sublated in) more universalist—that is, ecological—modes of critique. It is well-known that the infrastructure for the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels—mainly, the oil and gas pipelines that cover the Eurasian continent—form the basic source of the economic and political survival of Putinism. Moreover, those networks guaranteed the emergence of a particular political regime, which arose in the 1990s on the ruins of the Soviet Union and solidified in the early 2000s—largely due to high prices of oil and gas on the global market.

Surprisingly, Russia’s catastrophic climate policies are largely ignored in most critical accounts of the looming ecological disaster. Naomi Klein’s verdict in This Changes Everything (2015)—that capitalism is incompatible with the survival of planetary ecology—is nowhere more obvious than in the case of Russia’s current capitalist model. Still, Russia is conspicuously absent from Klein’s critique: in This Changes Everything, Russia is only mentioned twice; the collapse of the USSR also gets two mentions. For the ecological critique of capitalism to become a truly global political front, as Klein urges, Russia’s disproportionate exemption must be overcome.

Given the overwhelming importance of oil in the twentieth-century economy, political and economic theorists have given this kind of fossil fuel a great deal of attention. In many cases, this scrutiny is informed by the notion of the “oil curse,” that is, the tendency of oil-rich states to evolve into autocracies: internally oppressive, externally aggressive, and overall inefficient. This notion has of course been unfavorably applied to Russia and the fossil fuel lobby that is running the country, along with Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and other states “cursed by oil.” In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell exposes the limitations of the “oil curse” theory. Instead, Mitchell undertakes a study of “democracy as oil—as a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the process of producing and using carbon energy.”10 Mitchell’s book seeks to answer a critical question: “Can we follow the carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the problem afflicting oil-producing states to other limits of carbon democracy?”11 As natural gas overtakes oil’s previous status as the most important fossil fuel of the current century, this inquiry should be extended. Will oil-based liquid modernity make way for a data-based, gaseous postmodernity?

What follows is an attempt to “follow the carbon itself,” by tracing and collaging its various footprints within histories of ideas, technology, and popular culture, in an effort to grasp the evasive substance of natural gas through the no-less-evasive field of the social imagination—informed by the Cold War and the current geopolitical attempts at its reenactment.

In 2017, The Economist famously claimed that “data is the new oil.” At the time, Wendy Chun’s response to this statement was: “Big data is the new COAL. The result: global social change. Intensely energized and unstable clouds.”12 Still, both coal and oil are likely to decline as energy sources. Another question worth asking, then, is: what if data is actually the new gas?

Participants in the Baltic Sea Day Environmental Forum 2017 couldn’t care less about the ecological aspects of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Anatolij Medved.

3.

The first ever computer hacker to feature in a Soviet film appeared in a political drama called Deal of the Century (1985). In one scene, this American hacker (played by popular actor Valentin Gaft) struggles to break the computer security system of a Soviet trade mission in Germany, in his effort to prevent the signing of a gas contract between West Germany and the USSR. The film is generously interspersed with documentary news footage of the Reagan administration’s attempts to prevent the deal that would allow the export of Siberian gas to West Germany. Those attempts did, in fact, happen, but they failed to halt a decades-long process that ultimately led to the emergence of the Soviet Union—and later, of Russia—as a major carbon empire.

In 1970, the Soviet Union and West Germany signed the contract that inspired the film. The contract was preceded by a decade-long global dispute following the discovery of unprecedented reserves of natural gas in Siberia. The Soviet Union lacked the technology to construct the pipeline system needed to transport the gas to consumers, while West Germany—whose industry was capable of providing these pipes—began showing interest in helping the Soviets build this system. West Germany’s offer of assistance with construction came with the condition that the new pipelines would penetrate the Iron Curtain and that Siberian gas would flow to the West. Throughout the early 1960s the US government fiercely opposed the idea, and in 1963 then-chancellor Adenauer had to ban German pipe exports to the USSR. Still, part of German industry cherished the plan, and in 1970 the pipe ban was overcome. After the deal was signed in Essen in 1970, it was colloquially called “gas in exchange for the pipes.” Russian historians unequivocally refer to this contract as “the deal of the century.” This was the first in a long series of deals between Western powers and the Soviet Union that, after its collapse, has led to the emergence of an autocratic system based on a ruthless extractivist attitude to the Earth’s resources, facilitated by transcontinental oil and gas transportation networks.

Those networks—the world’s longest at the time—required unprecedented technological expertise, and in this regard the Soviet Union could not count on Western technology (as it did with the German pipes). In the Soviet TV series Acceleration (1984), a group of cybernetic scientists are tasked with computerizing the natural gas transportation network after the US blocks delivery of some needed technology. In one of the scenes, the cyberneticians discuss this gas network as a self-regulating living organism. One of them proposes the concept of the “animation/resuscitation of the equipment.”13 In other words, they recommend reframing the gas network as an intelligent being with a subjectivity of its own, carrying billions of cubic meters of natural gas to be emitted into the atmosphere—a truly post-humanist utopia of a Soviet kind.

This animation or resuscitation of the gas network wasn’t an outlandish fantasy on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, the plot of Acceleration was loosely based on the life story of Viktor Glushkov, a pioneering computer scientist tasked with building oil pipeline networks, among other things, after his bold idea of an information network for the USSR was shelved, and his groundbreaking research on socialist artificial intelligence was put on the back burner by authorities. Glushkov was a leading figure in Soviet cybernetic science, a science that he claimed had to be applied to each and every sphere of socialist society. He declared that cybernetics allowed for the transformation of “the social sciences into exact sciences.” As a result, he claimed, society as a whole would function as one gigantic cybernetic organism running on feedback loops and socialist self-regulation. In 1970—the same year of the “deal of the century”—top party officials downsized Glushkov’s idea for an overwhelming information-management-and-control network to a series of smaller-scale, disparate network projects. For the better part of the 1970s, he was busy computerizing the Druzhba (Friendship) oil pipeline network that carried Siberian oil into Eastern Europe.

In public, Glushkov held that his Druzhba network was an example of a perfect marriage of cybernetics and ecology, claiming that

we’ve developed methods that allow for the use of contemporary computing machines to predict the behavior of all kinds of ecological systems, to model all future options for the development of these systems, and to discover the solutions that would allow us to find the right compromise between the economic needs of the people and their natural need to preserve the environment.14

During closed-door meetings, however, he delivered much darker accounts of his fossil fuel networks, claiming that they were not economically feasible due to the inevitable exhaustion of oil resources.15

Glushkov’s cybernetics had its roots in the Cold War reception of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theories, which proliferated in the USSR soon after Stalin’s death. However, Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a tool for mastering nature stemmed from a strand of philosophical thought that had much deeper roots in the Soviet context. It’s hard to ignore the affinity between Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a mode of total socialist management and the “universal organizational science” of Alexander Bogdanov—philosopher, natural scientist, and militant Bolshevik. Bogdanov coined the term “tektology” to describe his totalizing vision of a neopositivist science outlining the universal principles (those of organization as opposed to disorganization) that underlie every known phenomena in the universe: from galaxies to human societies to bacteria. Bogdanov radically undermined not just the distinction between natural sciences and the humanities, but also between theory and practice—a stance later adopted by Glushkov, who claimed “unity of theory with practice” as a founding principle of his cybernetic science. The latter’s position also shared with Bogdanov’s tektology the belief that natural, social, and technological systems function according to the same organizational principles, which may be scientifically identified and put to purposeful use.

For Bogdanov, nature was “changeable,” following knowledge of the universal rules of progress that he had offered to the Bolsheviks (no wonder that McKenzie Wark, in her 2015 book Molecular Red, regards Bogdanov as a Soviet prophet of the Anthropocene). Bogdanov’s work on tektology, published in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, was no doubt a major influence on the Bolshevik project of “revolutionizing nature,” as Oksana Timofeeva names the Soviet effort of “diverting rivers, blasting mountains, making animals speak: the idea was to transform the Earth by means of technology in order to make it, as Andrei Platonov says, more ‘kind to us.’”16 Bogdanov’s tektology is also cited as a major (albeit, uncredited) influence on Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory, the cybernetic theories of Ross Ashby, and the writings of Norbert Wiener himself—via the German translation of Tektology, published in 1926. For instance, it’s been pointed out that in Tektology, Bogdanov described the notion of feedback, crucial for cybernetic science, using a different term of his own coinage: “bi-regulation.” In the Soviet Union, Bogdanov’s writings were officially denounced as idealistic perversions of materialist dogmas. His tektology only made a comeback in the postwar decades, as it was incorporated into Western cybernetic science and reimported back to the USSR in a vertiginous transcontinental give-and-take of ideas.

The abridged English translation of Tektology starts with a claim that’s actually absent in Bogdanov’s original—at least in such straightforward terms: “In the struggle of mankind, its aim is dominion over nature. Dominion is a relationship of the organizer to the organized.”17 Still, this entangled paraphrase of Bogdanov accurately reflects the perception of his ideas by later practitioners. When Glushkov proposed building a computer network for the total management of economic and information flows, he was setting out on a truly tektological endeavor. When the Soviets were building the transcontinental networks for fossil fuel flows, they were guided by the idea of “changeable” nature. Few could see the direction this change was taking.


A munitions clearance operation on the Nordstream 2 pipeline route, which runs in close proximity to World War II chemical weapons dumping grounds. Copyright: Axel Schmidt.

4.

In the summer of 1982, a gas explosion of unprecedented proportions was said to have destroyed the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline. In his 2004 memoir At the Abyss, Reagan administration official Thomas Reed claims that this explosion was caused by Canadian equipment added to the pipeline—sabotage via a Trojan horse tactic. (Post-)Soviet experts, on the other hand, vehemently deny that this explosion ever took place.18 They claim that the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline network could not be hacked at the time, because it was not yet computerized to a sufficient degree. Given the lack of evidence related to this purported explosion, it seems that the gas network hack took place in the realm of information, rather than through technology—a case of information warfare.

By that time, massive amounts of Siberian natural gas were being exported to Western Europe, and new contracts signed in the wake of the Soviet–German “deal of the century” were proliferating. This caused consternation amongst US officials, who saw this German strategy as suicidal: not only would Europe’s access to energy be dependent on Soviet gas networks, but the latter could also, according to some military experts, be used to fuel the Soviet army in case of European invasion. The Germans themselves, though, had adopted a more dialectical-materialist approach to the problem of Soviet natural gas.

Otto Wolf von Amerongen, chairman of the German East–West Trade Committee from 1955 to 2000, later recalled the logic behind the deal: “The gas pipe through the continent is, if you wish, an instrument that not only makes us dependent on the Soviet imports, but also, vice versa, renders their ‘crane’ dependent on the West.”19 In his conversations with German chancellor Ludwig Erhard, von Amerongen introduced the political dimension into this dialectical vision: “If we are linked together through our gas pipelines, this will mean much more than the sale of pipes or the purchase of gas. The will also lead to a positive change in the political picture in the Soviet Union.”20

What kind of change would that be, and how would it be achieved? Von Amerongen: “I was always sure that this deal had introduced another constant medium of communication, a reliable bridge for further development, or to be more precise, the rebirth of the traditional German–Russian connections that were lost in the course of decades after the October coup in Russia in 1917.”21

Construction corridor for the Russian onshore section of Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 AG / Agiteco.

With gas as a medium of communication, what kind of message did its networks convey? At stake was no less than the legacy of what von Amerongen (an ex-Nazi) referred to as “the October coup.” In the 1980s, with the Soviet economy failing while (and, in fact, because of) the lucrative fossil fuel export deals proliferated, party elites were faced with the chance to put this enormous wealth to personal gain. The top-down collapse of Soviet Communism was, among other things, the result of a successful attempt by the party apparatus to privatize the enormous profits derived from the extractivist economic model in its transition to capitalism. The message delivered by the Western elites to their Soviet counterparts—“abandon communism for your personal profit!”—was conveyed through the medium of natural gas.22

In the post–Cold War world, after the “end of history”—which is gradually morphing into the end of a habitable climate—is a project like Nord Stream 2 designed to serve as another channel of constant communication? With US sanctions against Nord Stream 2 strangely appearing as a reenactment of the Reagan-era sanctions against the Trans-Siberian pipeline, are we definitively stuck in a final historical loop, a dead end in which the only real resistance to this politically and environmentally devastating project comes from a no-less-devastating competitor whose only solution is: burn “freedom gas” instead? Abandon the planet for your personal profit!—this is the message conveyed by virtually every communications medium in this echo chamber, be it the medium of an underwater gas pipeline or an liquid natural gas terminal.23

But if carbon infrastructure is a medium of communication, then it can be—like any other such medium—disrupted, subverted, and hacked. This is where, to quote Nick Dyer-Witheford, the dominant structures are most vulnerable today: “If we’re going to look at the equivalent of something that was like strike power, we need to look to hacking, we need to look at the new vulnerabilities of capital that lie in its transportation and logistics networks, we need to look at the possibilities of the interruption of its various types of energy flows: both electrical and otherwise.”24 But who would be the agent of this strike power?

One recent development in the extraction industry provides a glimpse of what form this agent might take. In January 2020, Russian Gazprom announced a major decrease in its monthly production of natural gas. The reason for this decrease? Unexpectedly high temperatures in gas extraction areas.25

Postscript: This is a revised version of an essay that was intended for publication in the Almanac of the Center for Experimental Museology, but it was withdrawn by the author after it was censored by the publisher, V-A-C Press (Moscow). The fragment excised by the editors is reproduced here in full:


The moment at which this text is written is crucial and greatly impacts what I have to say in the following paragraphs. I’m writing these lines on the fortieth day of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike, while he is held in a Russian prison camp in the Arctic. Sentsov demands the immediate release of all political prisoners from Ukraine currently jailed in Russia. Before he was kidnapped by the Russian Federal Security Service during the military occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in May 2014, Sentsov resided with his family in Crimea. Together with the anti-fascist eco-activist Olexander Kolchenko, he was accused of plotting a terrorist attack as a protest against the annexation of Crimea by the Russian army. Detained in Crimea, Sentsov and Kolchenko were then kidnapped and transported to the Russian Federation, where, in defiance of all judicial norms, the two were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship and put on a show trial that found them guilty—despite the absence of evidence, and on the basis of forced confessions by two other tortured political prisoners. Sentsov and Kolchenko were sentenced, respectively, to twenty and ten years in prison camps. In Russia, this trial had been instrumental in silencing any possibility of dissent against the 2014 occupation of Crimea and Russia’s sparking of the war in East Ukraine. This silencing especially targeted artists and cultural workers: the scapegoating by the Russian secret services of Oleg Sentsov, who had worked in Crimea as an auteur filmmaker, was conspicuously random, as if its sole meaning was to send a message to other artists: stay away from politics, for this can happen to anyone. In a similar vein, the conviction of Olexander Kolchenko was meant to introduce a purely Orwellian dimension into this process: a committed anti-fascist, he, along with Sentsov, was accused of participation in a far-right Ukrainian group. The imprisonment of Sentsov and Kolchenko led to a swift deterioration of cultural and artistic links between Russia and Ukraine, with numerous Ukrainian artists and cultural workers boycotting any Russia-related projects. As a counterpart to this boycott, since 2015 I’ve been practicing a strategy of accepting invitations from Russian non-state institutions with the purpose of hijacking public debate and staging interventions based on the cases of Sentsov and Kolchenko. While working on this particular essay, I was surprised to discover that no special intervention of this kind would even be needed in this case, as my research trajectory had actually brought me to a point that reflects the context of Sentsov’s case with unexpected clarity. While this research is focused on the manifold ways that the exploitation of natural resources, primarily natural gas, affects cultural and political developments by boosting colonial and authoritarian practices, Sentsov is holding his hunger strike in a town called Labytnangi in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far North, which is where one of the world’s largest gas fields is located. There, reduced to the position of homo sacer, Sentsov is challenging the regime from the very heart of Russia’s natural gas empire. It is an extremely dire, but somehow, still strangely hopeful coincidence which reinforces the intuitions that brought this text into existence.

As of March 2020: Oleg Sentsov survived his hunger strike, which lasted for 145 days. He and Oleksander Kolchenko were released by the Russian government in a prisoner swap in September 2019.

V-A-C press is a project of V-A-C Foundation, cofounded by Leonid Mikhelson, head of Novatek company, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer, based in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region where Oleg Sentsov was held illegally.

XXXXXXXXX


Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig, Bar Laika by e-flux, and Kmytiv Museum among other venues, and received awards at a number of film festivals. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and in e-flux journal. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut). Radynski is a participant of the Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. Currently, he is a BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

© 2020 e-flux and the author

The Horror of Glorifying Bomber Command

The Canadian campaign to legitimate Bomber Harris and his use of fire bombing against Dresden in WWII began with the CBC documentary the Valour and the Glory.

Today that long campaign of historical revisionism has concluded with the National War Museum agreeing to revise its Bomber Command display.

And it has resulted in more not less controversy.

Veterans force WWII museum exhibit change

Fighting words rile historians

Historian decries change to war museum exhibit

Beyond dispute

The cowardice and the horror

We owe our freedom to Bomber Command vets

Museum consultation pledge pleases war veterans

Veterans claim victory - Canadian War Museum to change wording on controversial Bomber Command Plaque

A fellow progressive blogger who runs a Canadian History list has opened up discussion on this amongst academic Canadian historians.

What do historians think about the Canadian War Museum controversy?

Of course amongst the Blogging Tories there is the popping of corks and tinkling of toasts in celebration of their Orwellian victory.

Revised does not equal 'Revisionist'

The plaque in question is poorly worded because it purports to be a neutral commentary on Bomber Command but then goes on to draw a negative conclusion about the Canadian air campaign against Germany. The plaque draws a reader's attention to the 'enduring controversy' regarding 'the morality and value' of the air strikes and then wraps up by drawing the conclusion that the raids were ineffective except in their slaughter of innocent civilians. Hansen might believe the conclusion is factual, but then why does the plaque pretend the issue is controversial if this conclusion is unequivocally true?

He Who Controls the Present . . .

Historian David Bercuson seems to have summed it up best, "I don't see it as giving in. I see it as correcting something that was unfortunately and badly placed in the first place, and I don't see why anyone shouldn't be given leeway to correct errors."

'Right wing ' historians like David Bercuson who is part of the Calgary School with his pal Barry Cooper , along with their political compatriots in the think tank that created the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party have made Bomber Command their political bugaboo since CBC ran the WWII documentary series; the Valour and the Glory. His opinion appears to have influenced the Senate Committee that raised the issue of the display at the War Museum.

So it's worth noting that the Senate report here identifies the four historians who examined the War Museum text: Serge Bernier (Department of National Defence), Desmond Morton (McGill), Margaret MacMillan (Oxford University) and David Bercuson (University of Calgary). Indeed, that is four experienced and credentialled historians, one actually working in a public museum.

Margaret MacMillan has been very public in condemning the change to the museum's text. I understand Desmond Morton has also publicly defended the integrity of the text as it stands. That would suggest the two experts who endorsed making the change were David Bercuson and Serge Bernier.

Bercuson is not an objective historian in the least, and one with an axe to grind. Far more so than even Jack Granatstein. He is a neo-con hack who along with Cooper has advocated for a right wing shift in Canadian politics.

Neoconservatives criticize social scientists for putting forward ideas that are not necessarily workable, yet the Canadian neoconservatives David Bercuson and Barry Cooper argue that inventive intellectual suggestions are vital to the political system, and that the give and take of politics, and the inherent need to compromise, generally sand down the most unrealistic edges of intellectuals' prescriptions

And they share an advocacy for an Imperial and Imperialist Canadian Military is colored by they right wing politics.

Bercuson and the other Reform Party ilk used the Honor and the Glory segment on Bomber Harris and the Dresden Raids to attack its producers and directors, the McKenna Brothers, along with CBC as being historical revisionists. They claimed, falsely as they still do, that the Honor and the Glory smeared Harris as a war criminal and in doing so slighted the troops who carried out his commands.

Aired on the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Valour and the Horror is a Canadian-made documentary about three controversial aspects of Canada's participation in World War II. This three part series caused a controversy almost unprecedented in the history of Canadian television. Canadian veterans, outraged by what they considered an inaccurate and highly biased account of the war, sued Brian and Terrance McKenna, the series directors, for libel. An account of the controversy surrounding The Valour and the Horror with statements by the directors, the CBC Ombudsman and an examination of the series by various historians can be found in Bercuson and Wise's The Valour and the Horror Revisited.

The second episode, "Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command," proved to be the most controversial of the three episodes. It details the blanket bombing of German cities carried out by Canadian Lancaster bombers, including the firestorm caused by the bombings of Dresden and Munich. The McKennas claim that the blanket bombing, which caused enormous casualties among both German civilians and Canadian aircrews, did nothing to hasten the end of the war, and was merely an act of great brutality with little military significance. In particular British commander Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris is cited for his bloodthirstiness.

What it did was raise the well known public fact that Bomber Harris was hell bent on proving air war worked especially against civilian populations. He had proved it in Iraq!

Yet it was in Iraq that Britain employed its air force for the purpose of suppressing local revolts most widely and for the longest period. Full-scale bombing in Iraq by eight RAF squadrons began in October 1922 and continued until 1932, the year that the British mandatory rule of Iraq officially ceased. Various types of bombs--including delayed and incendiary bombs--were dropped in attacks on villages where militia were believed to be hiding, and in some cases petrol was sprayed over civilian houses in order to intensify the fires ignited by the bombing. Tents and other types of Bedouin dwellings and even their cattle became targets, resulting in the death and injury of many women and children. British Forces justified this indiscriminate bombing by claiming that their operations “proved outstandingly effective, extremely economical and undoubtedly humane in the long run” as they could swiftly put down revolts and riots. One of these RAF squadron leaders in Iraq was Arthur Harris, who later headed the RAF Bomber Command during World War II. Based on their experience in Iraq, the RAF leaders concluded that the best way to defeat the enemy was to conduct "strategic bombing" on civilian dwellings, in particular those of industrial workers.

And that along with the Americans the Brits planned massive fire bombing raids on civilian populations in Germany. The Americans built models cities of Berlin and Tokyo in the Utah desert to test the allies fire bombing theories.

Unfortunately what they found was that fire bombing was not effective, it was not controllable for precision strikes, and it laid wholesale waste to civilian as well as military targets. Knowing this they recognized that it was a not weapon for use except as a final solution, a weapon of mass destruction, to be used as a last resort.

Often contrasted with Britain’s policy of “promiscuous bombing” of urban areas, the United States Army Air Forces entered the fray in 1942 with a precision bombing doctrine that called for the destruction of critical nodes in an adversary’s war economy. Owing to a series of disastrous daylight raids in the summer and fall of 1943, however, American forces implemented a policy of radar bombing through clouds that conserved American aircraft but drastically increased the loss of life among German civilians.

The effects of incendiaries on a city made of paper were soon seen. On the evening of March, 9, 1945 a fleet of over 300 B-29’s flew towards Tokyo containing napalm and cluster bombs. As the bombs burst into flame, aided by the wind, the resulting fires flew across streets and buildings creating a firestorm engulfing the center of the city with flames burning at temperatures exceeding 1,800°F. The heat from the fire created additional winds traveling at velocities of over 40 miles per hour that fed the flames and created thermal winds that were beginning to affect the flight paths of the bombers flying above. Many people attempted to escape the firestorm by jumping into the canals surrounding the city. Of those who did immerse themselves in the canals, most died not from drowning but were either boiled alive when the water began to heat or died from asphyxiation caused by the inhalation of the thick black smoke. Many characterized the conditions within Tokyo that night as a holocaust not knowing that they were witnessing the most destructive fire in human history. Death counts were averaged to be around one hundred thousand with over one million homes and buildings destroyed making this the second most destructive air attack of the entire war next to Hiroshima. Had a significant number of the citizens not already evacuated the city, many more would have lost their lives making the loss of human life in this bombing greater than any other battle or attack in the entire war. This same bombing technique continued until numerous towns, villages, and six of Japan’s seven largest cities had been destroyed.

Dresden was the result of Britain's use of incendiary bombing resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. The American's on the other hand came up with a much better weapon for mass destruction, a final solution, the weapon of last resort; the Atomic Bomb.

However the mass of deaths of allied forces, the bomber crews themselves occurred before the fatal assault on Dresden. Our men as well as British crews ended up dead because Bomber Harris believed in low level bombing missions. Rather than using height for safety he had his planes fly low and through anti-aircraft fire . Aimed at Dam busting, they resulted in massive losses of life of allied bomber command. Harris considered incendiary bombing as less effective than large scale bombs. The type still used today by American Armed forces.

Night after night tens of precious bombers and their irreplaceable crews failed to return from missions which only managed to damage a house or two and kill the odd cow, as bombs were almost randomly scattered within a huge area usually somewhere vaguely near the intended target. Depressingly often, Bomber Command casualties far outnumbered German casualties on the ground.

Harris was hopelessly optimistic when it came to assessing the effectiveness of bombing, making unrealistic claims as to accuracy and destruction, and displaying a remarkable complacency when assessing the effectiveness and failure rate of weapons. He also had an entirely unrealistic view of the overall significance and importance of Bomber Command’s role. He predicted in mid-1942 that it could win the war alone, with a continental land campaign having no use except for mopping up, and describing the ‘entirely defensive’ Coastal Command as ‘merely an obstacle to victory’.

While politicians maintained the pretence that Bomber Command was attacking military and industrial targets Harris was more honest, seeing no shame in attacking the German people and having no problem with describing the aim of his attacks on Berlin as being ‘to cause the heart of the German nation to stop beating’. When pressed to use a higher proportion of incendiaries, he argued the case for high explosive, saying:

I do not agree with this policy. The moral effect of HE is vast. People can escape from fires, and the casualties on a solely fire raising raid would be as nothing. What we want to do in addition to the horrors of fire is to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill Boche and to terrify Boche.

For that reason, his sacrifice of his own troops and his decision to assault civilian targets, there is a public revulsion of his actions today in Great Britain, except amongst Bomber Command veterans.

Even in wartime Britain, a backlash developed as the extent of the devastation and the number of civilian casualties became known. At the end of the war, all major British commanders were elevated to the peerage except Sir Arthur.

Unlike other senior officers in the fight against Nazism, Harris was knighted only in 1953, eight years after the war ended. He died embittered in 1984.

Convinced that Harris was treated badly, the 7,500 members of the Bomber Command Association, a British veterans organization, have collected $200,000 to erect a statue of him in London. They want the memorial to stand opposite one of Lord Dowding, commander-in-chief of the Royal Air Force's fighter command, in St. Clement Danes, the RAF church in the Strand.

The Times of London has urged that the project be abandoned, calling Harris a "fanatical believer in the carpet bombing of civilians."

But Bomber Command Association spokesman Ray Gallow insists the statue is appropriate. "When we started area bombing, we were losing on all fronts. The public didn't find a thing wrong with bombing German cities then."

In 1992, a statue to Harris was unveiled near Trafalgar Square in London. Within 24 hours, red paint was poured over it - such was/is the controversy the beliefs of Harris caused.

This statue of the infamous ‘Bomber’ Harris was greeted with a hostile reaction when first erected in 1992. This was due to the mixed feelings about Sir Arthur Harris, who was responsible for the indiscriminate bombing policies on German cities during World War II. Although his widespread bombing helped win the war, he as criticised for his lack of remorse at the death of civilians and his own men. The statue, which is located outside St Clement Dane’s RAF church, had to be kept under 24 hour guard for a period of months as it was often vandalised.

Of course Harris was made a scapegoat for decisions made by those in command of the war, none the less his enthusiasm for the use of bombing to terrorize civilians was his downfall.

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, should be reviewed. Otherwise, we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land." Winston Churchill, 1945 ordering Bomber Command to halt operations over Germany.

Harris's defence of himself and Bomber Command is clear-cut and straightforward. It bears and deserves another hearing. In his memoirs, published in 1947, he wrote: 'There is a widespread impression that I not only invented the policy of area bombing but also insisted on carrying it out in the face of natural reluctance to kill women and children felt by everyone else. The facts are otherwise. Such decisions on policy are not in any case made by Commanders-in-Chief in the field but by the Ministries, the Chiefs-of-Staff Committee and by the War Cabinet. The decision to attack large industrial areas was taken long before I became Commander-in-Chief'.

Sir Arthur Harris, who died in 1984, aged 91 felt aggrieved and slighted at the end of his career, not, perhaps, without reason. He complained that he was not consulted or invited to contribute to the official history of the air offensive directly concerned with his own Command. His official dispatch, written in 1945, was placed on the restricted list apparently because the Air Ministry took objection to it. From all this, the author says, it is not hard to infer that the RAF and the political establishment which had supported him during the war later decided to distance themselves from him and the odium created by the bombing offensive in general.

In Canada the right wing use our vets to justify their glorification of this mass murderer and war criminal. They are after all war mongers, and now have their own war in Afghanistan to tout. And that is the reason that the campaign to change the War Museum display is both revisionist and a revulsion.

The bombing of Dresden in World War II, and to a lesser degree the 1943 bombing of Hamburg, and the firebombing of Tokyo remains a source of controversy to this day (though in the case of the latter, the effect on Tokyo's intentionally decentralized subcontractor war industry manufacturers was devastating).

The bombing of Dresden, led by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and followed by the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945, remains one of the more controversial Allied actions of World War II. The exact number of casualties is uncertain, but most historians agree that the firebombing resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Historian Frederick Taylor says:

“

The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of Baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare

Firebombing destruction

In pictures

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Since the war, discussion of World War II war crimes has focused almost exclusively on those committed by the Nazis. But hundreds of thousands of German civilians were also immolated in firestorms created by English and American bombs. Should not Allied excesses be addressed as well?

Taylor: We have to discuss them frankly. There is something inherently fascistoid in air warfare -- you don't see the person you are bombing and killing or injuring and you have this sort of psychopathic gaze from above. The air war is the only part of the war where the Allies, leaving aside the Russians, seriously ran the Axis powers a good race in terms of ruthlessness. But it is now 60 years after the fact, most people involved are dead and we shouldn't start pointing fingers except for in the case of the Holocaust. But the English and especially the Americans have continued since World War II to rely on bombing as an instrument of policy and that really concerns me. I feel uneasy about it. So I think Allied excesses are a legitimate subject for discussion. Absolutely.

SEE:

Vonnegut, Dresden and Canada

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Hong Kongers sing protest anthem one year after major clashes

AFP / Anthony WALLACERiot police declared gatherings of pro-democracy Hong Kongers who sang a popular protest anthem unlawful assemblies, and made multiple arrests throughout the evening

Thousands of Hong Kongers sang a popular protest anthem and chanted slogans across the city Friday as they marked the first anniversary of major clashes between police and pro-democracy demonstrators.

Riot police declared the gatherings unlawful assemblies and a breach of anti-coronavirus bans on public meetings of large groups, sending snatch squads to make multiple arrests throughout the evening.

The financial hub's protest movement kicked off on June 9 last year with a huge march against an unpopular bill that would have allowed extraditions to the Chinese mainland.

But it was three days later that the first sustained clashes broke out between protesters and riot police firing tear gas outside the city's legislature.

AFP / DALE DE LA REYA protester holds a flag reading 'Free Hong Kong -- Revolution Now' in a shopping mall -- thousands took part in protests, defying a ban on public gatherings due to the coronavirus outbreak

Such scenes became a weekly, and at times daily, occurrence over the next seven months as Hong Kong was upended by unprecedented unrest fuelled by fears Beijing was eroding the semi-autonomous city's limited freedoms.

Hong Kong enjoys liberties unseen on the mainland as part of the "one country, two systems" deal made when colonial power Britain handed it back to China in 1997.

On Friday night, thousands answered online calls to gather at 8:00 pm (1200 GMT) in local malls and neighbourhoods to chant pro-democracy slogans and sing "Glory to Hong Kong" -- a protest anthem that became hugely popular during the turmoil.

Live television showed rallies taking place in half a dozen districts, defying the ban on public gatherings put in place because of the coronavirus outbreak.

AFP / ISAAC LAWRENCEHong Kong protesters light up their mobile phones while chanting slogans and singing songs to mark the first anniversary of major clashes between police and pro-democracy demonstrators

"I came here because our goals have not been achieved, so I have to continue coming out," a 28-year-old social worker, who gave his surname So, told AFP in Causeway Bay, a popular shopping district where hundreds had gathered.

"We have to tell the government that we won't give up, no matter how many of us are left," he added.

Police said a total of 35 people were arrested.

In the district of Kwun Tong, live broadcasts showed a man with a knife being subdued by protesters and then police. Police said the man had stabbed another person and was arrested.

- 'Panic-mongering' -

Demonstrators are pushing for an inquiry into police brutality, an amnesty for the roughly 9,000 people arrested over the protests and universal suffrage.

AFP / ISAAC LAWRENCEHong Kong police start a clearing operation as protesters gathered in Mong Kok district

China has refused and portrayed the protests as a foreign plot to destabilise the mainland.

Last month it unveiled plans to impose a new national security law on Hong Kong targeting subversion, succession, terrorism and foreign interference.

Beijing says the law will restore order.

AFP / Anthony WALLACEA Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrator wears a mock bloodied bandage over one eye in honor of a female protester who lost her eye last year, allegedly struck by crowd control projectile fired by police

But critics, including many Western governments, fear it will bring mainland-style political oppression to a city supposedly guaranteed freedoms and autonomy for 50 years after its handover.

China has described Britain's concerns that the security law might undermine Hong Kong's autonomy as "groundless panic-mongering".

The comments came a day after Britain renewed its call for an independent inquiry to "rebuild trust" and heal divisions.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying dismissed British concerns as "unwarranted foreign interference in Hong Kong's affairs" that "will only make China more determined in advancing the national security legislation for Hong Kong," state-run Xinhua news agency reported late Friday.

AFP / Anthony WALLACEPro-democracy protesters rally in a shopping mall in Hong Kong

In an earlier rally Friday, more than 100 students formed a human chain outside a school where a teacher was reportedly fired because she allowed a candidate to play "Glory to Hong Kong" in a music exam.

The rallies since Beijing announced its national security law plans have been smaller and less violent than last year.

On Tuesday, flash mob rallies were held to mark the one-year anniversary of the start of protests.

A week ago, tens of thousands defied the public gathering ban to peacefully mark the anniversary of Beijing's June 4, 1989 deadly crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square.

At least 13 prominent activists have since received court summons for inciting unlawful assemblies.

AFP / Anthony WALLACEHong Kong police detained protesters in the city's Causeway Bay district on the one-year anniversary of major clashes between police and pro-democracy demonstrators

Amnesty International called the charges "the latest assault on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly in the city" in a statement on Friday.

"With China's Orwellian national security law coming, the Hong Kong authorities appear emboldened to ramp up repression of critical voices," said Man-Kei Tam, the rights group's Hong Kong director.

Beware the Hawkish Pundits Pushing for War Over Ukraine

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.


A billboard hanging outside a night club reads: "No War!" on January 18, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Tensions between Europe, Ukraine and the U.S. on the one side and Russia on the other remain high as the threat of war through a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to loom.

 (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)


GREGORY SHUPAK

January 19, 2022

 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.

Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): "A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support" could persuade Russians "to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition"—i.e., regime change.

Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that "the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance." He argued that "the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization," even while calling for a strategy that "avoids crossing into military adventurism." He went on to say that "the United States has to be more assertive in the region."

Yet the US has been plenty "assertive in the region," where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.

Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21). The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).

Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia's border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).

"Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding," Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US's violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.

In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take "military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility." They wrote that "the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities." The authors claimed that these actions "will help ensure a free and stable Europe," though it's easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.

Indeed, US "military measures" have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn't create a "stable Europe": Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedent

Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia "that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland." Pretty sure they're aware of that, Max.

Max Boot, also writing in the Post (12/15/21), argued:

Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.

The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.

But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that "Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies." The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.

Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that "outside support" is "usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency": Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan "were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties." Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).

That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing Nazis

The Nation (5/6/21): "Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn't a glitch but a feature of today's Ukraine."

US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine's. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state's political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government's noteworthy tendencies:

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of "Jews Out!" rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent with antisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….

Ukraine's total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can't be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, "To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that's cool!"

Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria's social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which "has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people": the Azov movement's militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.

Absent information

The fact that that Ukraine's government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.

From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word "Nazi." Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine's armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:

On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.

Nothing in the article indicates that while "controlled" may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn't mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.

In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word "Ukraine." Of these, six mention the word "Nazi," none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot's earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that "all is not lost" in case of a Russian invasion, because "Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers":

They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country's independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.

"All is not lost," for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn't bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities "Ukrainian patriots" is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that,

the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky's government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.

Evidently neither the UPA's precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine's armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He'd rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren't a concern of Boot's.

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.

© 2021 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)



Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, "The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media," is published by OR Books.