The Self-determination Struggle in Russian Crimea and the Pro-autonomy Struggle in Donbas (formerly eastern Ukraine)

by Roger Annis / December 20th, 2021

Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector

Dissident Voice has published an article by U.S. writer William Boardman on December 14 titled ‘Ukraine is a problem only as long as the West makes it one’. The article is reprinted from Reader Supported News and warns of the dangerous consequences emanating from the military threats by the Western powers against Russia. The U.S. and Russia are the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Boardman reminds. He asks rhetorically in his article, “What could possibly go wrong?”

The danger is even more acute, Boardman warns, because of “the U.S.-led nuclear arms race”. Recall that the imperialist nuclear powers have refused to heed the call to abolish their nuclear weapons or even to swear off a ‘first strike’ policy.

Western governments and media are currently spouting a tidal wave of lies and misinformation about the situation in eastern Ukraine, warning of an imminent ‘Russian invasion’ of the country. They are doing more than talking; they are also boosting their supplying of arms and provision of military training to the Ukrainian armed forces and its associated, extreme-right paramilitary battalions.

As a result, it is more important than ever for antiwar activists and alternative media to provide reliable and factual information that can counter the government and media barrage emanating from Western capitals. This article aims to further explain the important points made by the article in Dissident Voice and add some clarifications of the recent history of Ukraine.

The Minsk-2 peace agreement remains foundational

Boardman’s article states an essential truth for understanding the anti-Russia propaganda barrage: “The essence of a solution for Ukraine issues has already been outlined in the so-called ‘Minsk II’ agreement of 2015, reached by leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine.”

The nine-point, Minsk II agreement reached in February 2015, and unanimously endorsed several days later by the UN Security Council, contains the essential provisions for ending the NATO-encouraged, low-intensity war by the Ukrainian government and its armed forces against the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. It proposes measures of political autonomy for the two autonomous republics as well as other measures to normalize the situation along a Ukraine-Russia border. But as Boardman writes, “Despite their formal assent to Minsk II, three U.S. administrations [since 2015] have supported Ukraine in refusing to implement the agreement. Nor have they proposed any better idea. This is an example of foreign policy guided by denial of reality.”

The measures in Minsk-2 are essential for a settlement of the conflict in Donbas, the historic, heavily industrialized region lying between Ukraine and Russia. The region comprises the former Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. The population is majority Russian speaking but includes a significant minority of residents who consider themselves Ukrainian.

The importance of keeping Minsk II in the picture is underlined by three recent commentaries on NATO’s anti-Russia aggression, which are all very informative but which neglect to mention Minsk II. They are: Russell Bentley in Covert Action Magazine on Nov 12; Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation on December 8 and Nicolai Petro (U. of Rhode Island) in The Nation on December 10.

Restating some facts about Donbas and Russian Crimea

Boardman writes near the outset of his essay, “Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, has been a war zone since March 2014 when separatist Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk started fighting for independence from the central government in Kiev. This is a civil war between the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk against the Ukraine government.” There are inaccuracies here that merit clarification.

The people of Donbas and their self-defense forces are not ‘separatists’. They never were. Their struggle began as a resistance struggle against the new, right-wing government in Kyiv that emerged from the violent, extreme-right coup there in February 2014. Their struggle quickly transformed into military resistance against extreme-right and neo-Nazi paramilitaries from Ukraine who commenced violent incursions into Donbas in late April 2014. The Donbas resistance and struggle quickly became a fight for political autonomy, and this was codified in the Minsk II agreement (text here).

Only a properly conducted referendum in Donbas could determine whether a majority there today would support outright secession from Ukraine and joining the Russia Federation, as occurred in Crimea in March 2014. With all the violence and killings that Donbas has suffered at the hands of Ukrainian forces, it would hardly be surprising if secession were to win a majority in a referendum vote. But that remains speculation. Disappointingly for many in Donbas, Russia is in a poor position to defy the NATO countries and support the holding of a referendum in Donbas. For NATO, a referendum is the last thing it would wish to see.

The armed resistance to Kyiv and its extreme-right paramilitary battalions began in late April 2014, not in March as Boardman writes. This was two months after the coup in Ukraine and more than a month after the March 16 referendum in Crimea. A majority of Crimea’s population voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The reasons for the nearly two-month delay between mass, anti-coup resistance in Crimea and that which erupted in Donbas tell us a great deal about the modern history of Ukraine.

The self-determination struggle in Crimea

Crimea was an autonomous republic of Ukraine, the only part of Ukraine with such a status. Its constitutional powers resembled something similar to those of U.S. states or Canadian provinces. Otherwise, Ukraine is a highly centralized state with all power sitting in Kyiv. Indeed, Ukrainian was the only official language in Ukraine. One of the first acts of the new Crimean government following the 2014 referendum was to legislate three official languages—Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar.

The struggle for Crimean autonomy dates back, through various iterations, to the self-determination policies of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was founded in 1921. It became a constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) upon the founding of the USSR in 1922. Crimea’s political status was obliterated by the catastrophic invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941. It was the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of World War Two; the Nazi occupation was finally defeated in 1944.

In 1954, Crimea was attached to Soviet Ukraine by a decision of the central government of the Soviet Union. This was done without the slightest consultation with the population and it never sat well with the population and its elected leaders. Some autonomous status was retained, but very limited. Many Crimeans consider that they didn’t ‘join’ but ‘rejoin’ Russia in 2014 since they had no say in the original decision by the Soviet Union in 1954 to remove the peninsula from the Soviet Russian republic and attach it to Soviet Ukraine.

The survival of Crimean autonomy was such that the people there had an elected and constitutional governing authority to turn to when their world turned upside down with the February 2014 coup in Kyiv. When the new leaders in Kyiv, including from neo-Nazi paramilitaries, began to threaten Crimea with military intervention if it did not acquiesce to the coup, the leaders of the republic did not shrink from their duty to protect the population. They called on Russia to protect them from a looming bloodbath, and they proceeded with a referendum vote in less than a month following the coup. The vote passed by a sizable majority.

No such autonomous political power, bequeathed by history, existed in Donbas in 2014. The people there had to build representative political institutions more or less from scratch. Thanks to heroic efforts by self-defense fighters, the Ukrainian assaults in 2014/early 2015 were slowed and eventually pushed back. But the assault never ended, despite Minsk II. Ukrainian forces have maintained their occupation of the western areas of Donetsk and Lugansk and have waged deadly and continual sniper shootings and artillery shelling of autonomous areas.

Why were the people of Donbas so vulnerable at the outset? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this article, but should be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Due largely to the intense military intervention and economic blockade by the Western powers against the early Soviet Union, the new country evolved over time into a form of authoritarian socialism. Its early, exemplary policies of self-determination and autonomy for national minorities were eroded and reversed during the rule of Joseph Stalin. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was abolished in 1945.

The people of Crimea chastened under Soviet Ukrainian rule, which began in 1954. It was one of the poorest regions of Ukraine but the population had few political means to change their status. That all changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. Crimeans resisted the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, which set in motion a regression back to capitalism. The dismantlement prompted a resurgence of self-determination struggle. Crimeans voted in a January 1991 referendum to restore the ASSR. Several months later, they voted strongly in favour of a Soviet Union-wide referendum to retain the Soviet Union (albeit with important reforms to its political structure). Included in that mix during the 1990s were strong demands in Crimea for affiliation to Russia or outright independence.

Russia and Crimea

Russia did not “take advantage” of the chaotic, post-coup situation in 2014 and “walk into Crimea unopposed and annex it,” as Boardman writes. The referendum vote of March 16, 2014 was organized by an elected and constitutional authority, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. A strong majority of Crimeans voted in favour of joining the Russian Federation. The legitimacy of it all—legally and morally–is confirmed not only by events at the time but also by subsequent opinion polling of the population. In the months and years following, polling has consistently shown strong support, higher, even, than the original vote, for the 2014 decision, including among the minority populations of Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. (One of those polls, by a German firm in 2015, was partly financed by the Canadian government.)

It is true that Russia dispatched police and soldiers to aid the Crimean government with its referendum and to provide safety and protection from the rightist paramilitaries in Ukraine threatening to invade. But they did not ‘walk into’ the peninsula. Russia had approximately 20,000 soldiers already stationed in and around its naval base at the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, under the terms of a treaty between Ukraine and Russia negotiated amidst the breakup of the Soviet Union.

As I wrote in in 2017:

With violent intervention against Crimea imminently threatened, yes, Russia moved quickly and decisively to facilitate the Crimea referendum. This was not an ‘annexation’. It was an emergency situation in which the people and elected representatives of Crimea were demanding protection from the threats by the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and also demanding a referendum on their future political/economic status. They would not take ‘no’ for an answer from the Russian government on a referendum. As well, there was strong pressure on the Russian government from its own population to defend the Crimean people and facilitate a referendum. The agreement between the European Union and Russia on February 19 (2014) to advance the date for the next presidential election in Ukraine, scheduled for 2015, was quickly sabotaged. Given who was now in power in Kyiv as a result of the coup, Russia had no reason whatsoever to believe that a compromise was possible allowing for a safe and meaningful future for Crimea in Ukraine. (United Nations ‘human rights’ ideologues issue report condemning Crimea, Sep 25, 2017.)

Never mentioned in corporate and state media reports in the West are the outrageous measures by Ukraine immediately following the referendum. Most of Crimea’s water and electricity supply came from Ukraine along the narrow isthmus connecting the two territories. This was severed by Ukraine. Likewise for all road, rail and aircraft connections. These were serious human rights violations but the Western ‘democracies’ looked aside and censoring Western media has gone along for the ride.

(For an overview of Crimean history, see the excellent The Crimea Question Identity, Transition, and Conflict, by Gwendolyn Sasse, Harvard U. Press, 2005, paperback edition in 2014, 384 p.)

Impoverishment in Ukraine under the EU economic association agreement

Boardman writes, “In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put NATO and European Union membership in play, then reversed course under Russian pressure.” Yes, but the Russian ‘pressure’ was coming in the form of a better economic agreement, compared to what was on offer from the European Union. The proof of the poverty of the EU association agreement is in the results nearly eight years later. During that time, Ukraine has suffered a serious degrading of its political sovereignty at the hands of the EU and NATO as well as a further, desperate impoverishment of the Ukrainian people.

The most recent measure of Ukraine’s impoverishment is the blow delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. The country has a high rate of Covid-19 infections and the lowest rate of vaccination in Europe. This is but one of many measures of poverty.

A report by UNICEF in April 2021 details the poverty of families with children in Ukraine. It reports that the rates of ‘absolute poverty’ of families with children in Ukraine in 2019 was 47.3 per cent. For families without children, the rate was 34.3 per cent. The threshold of ‘absolute poverty’ is defined in the report as the minimum requirements necessary to provide for minimum standards of food, cloths, healthcare, and shelter. (See the two charts enclosed immediately below.)

Absolute poverty rate in Ukraine, by type of households with children (UNICEF, 2021)

Child absolute poverty rate in Ukraine (UNICEF, 2021)

Another measure of impoverishment is the high number of Ukrainians seeking to emigrate to central and western Europe for work. Indeed, a compelling reason why many Ukrainians supported the 2013 economic association agreement with the European Union (and supported the coup the EU helped to incite) was that it offered a path to leave the country and work in higher income countries in Europe.

Exact figures on economic migrants from Ukraine vary. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy, 3.2 million Ukrainians work permanently outside the country. (All figures here do not include the populations of Donbas and Crimea.) Between 2014 and 2019, 3,446,793 Ukrainians received first-time residence permits in the EU. Poland remains the top destination for Ukrainian labour migrants to the EU. During the period 2014-2019, Ukraine received US$67.914 billion in remittances, with this source of income accounting, on average, for 9.5% of annual GDP, exceeding ten per cent for the three years 2016-2018. (source: Report by Prague Process, Mar 15, 2021)

Politico put the number of economic migrants at four million in a report on May 31, 2020. That report also said, “According to the World Bank, 2019 remittances were the highest in Europe at nearly $16 billion–ten percent of Ukrainian GDP.” Open Democracy said in a June 2020 article there are five million Ukrainians working abroad.

Then there are the privatizations of state-owned enterprises that are continuing. In a brief report published by the pro-NATO think-tank Atlantic Council in April 2021, Dmytro Sennychenko, head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, explained that his government forecasts 2021 budget revenues from privatizations amounting to more than USD 430 million. Of that, USD 320 million will come from large-scale privatizations, meaning the industrial giants inherited from Soviet Ukraine. An additional USD 110 million will come from the sale of smaller, private enterprises. Sennychenko writes that the forecast is “entirely realistic” because the Ukrainian government oversaw similar amounts of privatizations in 2020.

Why the U.S. and NATO act as they do

Boardman opens his article with, “Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity.” He writes in his conclusion, “Ukraine is a wholly American-made pseudo crisis in which the US national interest is close to zero.” He adds, “President Biden has the opportunity to re-direct US policy on Ukraine in a peaceful direction… But it will take serious, steadfast courage… And we don’t know if he has the strength to wage peace.” Many readers of these words will no doubt be unconvinced by the image of a bumbling U.S. and NATO.

The U.S. and its allies are waging a multi-front economic war with military threats against Russia and also against China, Venezuela, Cuba and others. The exact pretexts vary from one targeted country to the next. But the overall reasons are evident. The capitalist and imperialist system and the countries that police it worldwide are in decline. Their criminal negligence has brought the world to the brink of disaster due to global warming and now a coronavirus pandemic. Their economic order is highly unstable and will not tolerate rivals or even friendly competitors outside the tight club of imperialist countries (North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia) whose membership is largely unchanged since 1945. They have shown time and again that their ultimate option in dealing with rivals is violence—be it starvation by sanctions or bombing from the air.

The big capitalists are driven to act violently by the all-powerful economic laws of growth and expansion of their system. These same laws are driving the global warming emergency.

This is the scourge which the world must join together to challenge and overcome. Those who foment militarism and environmental destruction must be unseated and replaced by governments dedicated to building a new world based on social justice and environmental stewardship. The building of broad, anti-imperialist alliances to oppose militarism and economic blockades is a key step towards humanity’s survival and progress.

*****

Recommended, related readings:¹

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Postscript, December 22, 2021:

The opening lines of the above article explained, ‘It is more important than ever for antiwar activists and alternative media to provide reliable and factual information [about the situation in eastern Ukraine and Crimea] that can counter the government and media barrage emanating from Western capitals.’ The relevance of this sentence is highlighted by a December 15 commentary by John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus, a publication project of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. His commentary is titled ‘War with Russia?’. It has been re-published in CounterPunch, on December 22.

Feffer’s commentary creates an appearance of objectivity by criticizing both the U.S. and Russian governments for the deterioration in relations and heightening of military tensions between them. But the weight of Feffer’s criticism falls most heavily on Russia, including the false accusation of a Russian ‘invasion’ and ‘annexation’ of Crimea in 2014 and the false claim that the self-defense forces of Donbas (the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk) are ‘seperatists’.

The overall picture created by Feffer’s commentary is that of an ‘aggressive’ Russia being cautioned and held to account by a careful U.S. government and its NATO alliance. Feffer writes not a word about the Minsk-2 ceasefire and peace agreement of February 2015. But that agreement remains foundational for any settlement of the continued aggression by Ukraine and NATO against Donetsk and Lugansk, as informative article by William Boardman published earlier in Dissident Voice put it. Minsk-2 was endorsed unanimously by no less than the UN Security Council, on Feb 17, 2015. John Feffer’s silence on that agreement is deafening and reveals deep biases against Russia. His commentary is a disservice to the cause of peace. Reader beware.
—Roger Annis

1. “Russia’s ‘plan to invade Ukraine’ exists only in the U.S. and NATO imagination,” commentary by Scott Ritter, RT, Dec 5, 2021.

   “Who is fighting who in Ukraine?,” commentary by Glenn Diesen, published in RT, Dec 5, 2021 (Glenn Diesen is a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an editor at the journal Russia in Global Affairs.)

   “Is Russia going to invade Ukraine?,” essay and commentary by Paul Robinson (U. of Ottawa), published in RT, Nov 24, 2021. []Facebook

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Roger Annis publishes a website of news and analysis, A Socialist In Canada. In 2014, he travelled to Crimea to attend an international, antiwar conference. In 2015, he traveled with others on a reporting mission to Donbas. Read other articles by Roger.

This article was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2021 at 4:25pm and is filed under Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk), Imperialism, Russia, Ukraine.

A Nation of Perverts

by Vern Loomis / December 20th, 2021

pervert\transitive verb: to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right: corrupt.

pervert\noun: one that has been perverted.

So, it must be true; we have turned away from what is morally right as a nation, and we refuse to change our ways.

It wasn’t always for affectation. For many years it was a necessity. A gun was a tool for procuring food. A gun provided protection in a hostile environment. It was true two hundred years ago. It was still quite true a hundred years ago, particularly in rural areas. Fifty years ago, it was not so much true anymore, not even in rural areas. Today it’s hardly true anywhere. For the vast majority of Americans, there is no physical necessity met through gun ownership. But there is a psychological need, and it’s met with increasing fervor. It seems the further we progress from the actual need to own a gun, the greater is our emotional need to possess one. We adore them. We demand them. We can’t get enough of them.  We collect and display them. It’s the look: we want the guns and ourselves to appear ever more formidable (“it looked cool,” said Rittenhouse). It’s the power: we want our guns to be ever more potent, ever more capable of ending a lot of lives in a little amount of time. The urge is moronic; there’s nothing much left in our civilized world to shoot at anymore, other than each other. And so, we do; we shoot and kill each other ever more efficiently and ever more needlessly.

We do it because we’re perverts. We’re a nation of perverts.

If it’s still the latest, it won’t be for long. Perhaps it already isn’t. Before the murders at Oxford High School, there had already been at least 28 school shootings across the country this year – more than two a month. School shootings are always the most heart wrenching, but they comprise just a small part of the 225 mass-killings over the same time period of 2021. Every other day or so, another multiple shooting is reported.

We allow it because we’ve been seduced … and we seem to be okay with that.

Our nation condemns the Crumbley family. The Oxford High School murders were so flagrantly perverse. How could they, how could any parent with any sense, with any accountability, purchase a Sig Sauer hand gun for a troubled adolescent boy? Who could be so brainless? The sheer audacity makes it easy for us; the Crumbley’s are low-hanging fruit to point at. It’s them, not us. But we made them; we enabled the Crumbley’s; we’re a nation of Crumbley’s.

It’s not just them, the stupid people. It’s us, the self-ascribed sensible people who set it all up and watch it happen. We are the ones complicit with the NRA, the politicians, and the arms merchants; we allow and encourage the abuse they heap upon us. We pay them to hurt us.  It’s self-abuse. We’re a nation of self-abusing perverts. We, the sensible people, consciously abet an industry willing to sacrifice our children for their profit. When the sacrifice plays out, we wallow in shocked horror and incomprehension. We’re shocked every time, as if it has come fresh out of the blue. And then, quite predictably, we reload our sensible emotions and move on.

The NRA and the gun merchants seduce and pervert us for profit. In 1871, the NRA was founded as an organization teaching marksmanship and gun safety. For many years it was a grassroots hunting club, funded solely through individual membership dues. Not anymore; today, the NRA is minion to a supportive master. Recreational hunting is increasingly less popular, and NRA dues-paying membership is in decline. The arms industry has stepped forward, taking up the slack. More than half of the club’s revenues now come through company donations and other corporate deals. With their funding come expectations. Compliantly, the NRA has become agent to the arms industry, an industry with ambitions beyond the dwindling sales to traditional sportsmen. Hence, the proliferation: guns for freedom; guns for patriotism; guns for God; guns for adornment; guns to save people; guns to kill people.

The weapons and their ads aren’t aimed at sportsmen; there aren’t enough recreational hunters to generate the desired profit margin. The ads seek a wider market; they’re meant to stimulate fantasies of buyers beyond the deer-hunting crowd. The profit-generating ads are for guns designed to kill something other than four-legged animals. The ads glamorize weapons made to kill two-legged animals; they’re designed to kill human beings. The ads glamorize the power to be had in owning that kind of weapon. The ads work. When we contemplate buying a gun, we fantasize using it for its intended purpose. We purchase such a weapon because the ad and the fantasy of killing a human being has made us feel powerfully good. We’ve been seduced.  32% of us own guns, but only 4% of us use them for hunting. Ninety-two million Americans own guns, but don’t hunt. That’s a lot of gun fantasizing going on that doesn’t involve the shooting of birds or a four-legged animal. For many, the fantasy might envision a “good” person killing a “bad” person. For some it might be another fantasy. Whatever the fantasy, it always imagines the killing of a human being as a feel-good, cathartic event. Every day or so, one of those fantasies erupts, and another cathartic event takes place.

It’s become normalized. We accept it, perhaps uneasily, but we accept it just the same. Recently Rep. Thomas Massie posted a Christmas card for all to see on Twitter. He posed, with children and wife, in front of their holiday tree, all holding lethal weapons. Nearly all the weapons were assault rifles, designed for killing human beings. The card’s message read, “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” The photo caused a national stir for a few days, primarily for its insensitivity in regards to the recent Oxford High School murders. Little has been said of its perversity; Massie has placed an instrument designed to kill human beings in each of his children’s hands and a seed within their heads. He joyfully celebrates the manipulation as if it were wholesome. We see it as insensitive rather than perverse. We might not approve, but we accept it; it’s just some snarky gun fun meant to tease liberals. The stunt will likely help rather than hinder his re-election bid.

What if it were something else? What if instead of a gun shop, Massie had visited a sex shop? What if he posed himself, his wife, and his children under the family Christmas tree, each smiling joyfully, while holding a dildo?  What if his Twitter card message was, “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring Vaseline.”?> Would we think him just a bit insensitive, or would we see him as grossly perverse? Would we be concerned with his mindset? Would we be aghast with what he was obviously doing, or had already done to his children? Would we re-elect him? I think the answers are known.

With a sex toy, we’d be abhorred; we’d see his derangement and the abuse done to the minds of his children. We’d react; he’d not be re-elected; even gun-enthusiasts would turn on him – even if each family member held a dildo and a gun. But when it’s just a gun, not so much; we see the posing as distasteful, but let it slide. Each family member holds an instrument of war made perfect for mass-murder. The image bothers us for a while, but its implications have become normalized. We end up accepting it because we’ve been perverted.

We’ve formed a circular firing squad, or more aptly, a circle jerk party. Our NRA and the arms industry, our politicians, and our gun owners form a triad of mutually abetted empowerment. The arms industry peddles (see ads again) expensive military style weapons to the general public. Gun sale profits are funneled to the political campaigns of willing sponsors. Political sponsors verbosely validate the industry inspired fantasies of the gun-buying public. The gun-buying public provides votes for the political sponsors and profit for the NRA/arms industry. So, around it goes, each one of the trio first perverting, then validating the perversions of the other two. Every couple of days, another mass-killing takes place. Every week or so, another school-shooting occurs. It’s all quite normal.

Congressional legislators are perverted with money from the NRA/arms industry, pressure from the gun lobby, and votes from the gun-buying public. Legislators protect the industry from oversight and grant it immunity from victim lawsuits. Manufacturers knowingly sell military-style weaponry to civilians that are repeatedly used in mass-murders, yet bear no liability for the abuse. You (or anyone) could step unto a hotel balcony with an AR-15, shoot and maim dozens of people, and its manufacturer would be immune from lawsuit as long as the weapon efficiently met advertised expectations (the power to end a lot of lives in a short amount of time). Perversely, if the gun somehow misfired and injured one of your eyes while firing upon the crowd, you could conceivably sue the company for damages. We, through our legislators, have given our gun merchants carte blanche license to advertise and sell instruments specifically designed to efficiently kill human beings, knowing that some will be used to that purpose. Further, we, through our legislators, resist any legislation which might lessen either the sale or the lethality of the instruments.

Shortly after the Oxford High School murders, a committee chaired by Sen. Rosemary Bayer introduced bills in the Michigan Legislature that would lessen the lethality of assault weapons, but not impact their sale – nor would the bills introduce any form of liability upon weapon manufacturers. The bills would prohibit selling or possessing a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, beginning on Jauary1, 2023.

Wow, imagine that! If you’re a shooter, you’d be restricted to 10-round bursts of gun-fire rather than the 15 that Ethan Crumbley enjoyed. If you hoped to target 30 people, you’d be inconvenienced into carrying three clips rather than two. The proposed legislation illuminates the depth of our perversion. We’re amendable to accepting mass murder in 10-burst increments, but no more than that. We’re willing to allow 10 quick deaths, but not 15; that would be too much. Actually, it’s not even that; we’d just require that the murderer perform more clip-changes to fulfill his fantasy. It’s the type of legislation the arms industry would decry publicly, but profit by privately (they’d sell more magazine clips).

Seduction is a term usually relegated to sexual matters. One party manipulates a second party into activity that gratifies the first party. It doesn’t always mean the second party receives no gratification, but it does mean it was manipulated into gratifying the first party’s desire, often through pretentious means. Our nation of gun owners has been seduced by the arms industry. We “give it up” and buy into their hype. We believe it, and make it feel real. With a gun, an expensive and lethal gun, we feel strong, safe, dangerous, and powerful. It’s a heady feeling. The feeling is so good that we’re willing to allow daily mass killings for it; we’re more willing to watch weekly school massacres than risk losing that feeling. We sacrifice our children to feel strong and powerful. We’ve been seduced. We’re a nation of perverts.

It’s us. We’re all in this together and there’s no one else. It’s us, and we’ve really made a mess of things. It’s us, and there’s no one else; we’re in need of a self-induced intervention.

Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring strength and valor.Facebook

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Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Read other articles by Vern.

This article was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2021 at 9:21pm and is filed under Guns, Opinion.

Forced Pregnancies

Adoption Supply & Demand and Money in Decisions to Dismantle Roe V Wade

by Mirah Riben / December 22nd, 2021

Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Justice’s recent comments about adoption during oral arguments on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization set off a firestorm of responses and op-eds.  Some focused on the irony of the American Right invoking “My body, my choice” regarding Covid vaccines and mask mandates. More outrage, however, was directed at adoption seeming to be presented as an easy or less painful “fix” for an unintended pregnancy than abortion.

The good news is it has gotten us talking about adoption, with three particularly good examinations of the issues have been written by Gretchen Sisson and Jessica M. Harrison, Anna North and Elizabeth Spiers. Sisson and Harrison echo the major conclusion of my 2008 book and which I have written about in my blog entitled FamilyPreservation, and in 2009,  again in 2015, and again in 2016: Family Preservation is not anti-adoption – not in the sense that anyone is advocating keeping children in harm’s way. It is placing stranger adoption as a last resort after all efforts to keep families intact have been tried. This third option – excluded by anti-abortionists – is preferable to adoption in that it eliminates the well document lifelong trauma of mother-child separation experienced by adoptees and their mothers.

Yet, even these wonderfully enlightening and important contributions miss from the enormous role that the exceedingly high demand for babies to adopt – and the money adopters are willing to pay – is at the root of and driving anti-choice legislation. Adoption is positioned as a solution or a choice, when it is, in fact, a major purpose of the destruction of Roe v Wade.

Background

People adopt for a number of reasons, including starting or growing a family, inability to conceive or carry a pregnancy, legal acknowledgment of a parental relationship with a nonbiological child, or for humanitarian reasons. From approximately 1945 to 1973 the shame of the “sin” of extra-marital sex for women created what became known as The Baby Scoop Era (BSE) a time during which it is estimated that up to 4 million parents in the United States had children placed for adoption, with 2 million during the 1960s alone.  During this time, as now, class and socio economics played a huge role, hitting the poor disproportionately. American high school girls from middle and upper-middle class families were always able to obtain pregnancy termination either by going out of state or out of the country or by having a physician state that carrying the pregnancy would be detrimental to their physical or mental health. Wham-Bam: end of the “problem.”

Shame was a powerful and successful tool for many decades allowing adoption agencies to enforce strict qualifications for adopters who, of course, had to be married, and not too young or too old.  Some agencies restricted adoption to infertile couples and many served only couples of the religious background of the agency. It was what is known as a “buyers-market” with agencies trying their best to match eye and hair color of prospective parents with that of the relinquishing parents while social workers told clients they should not reveal to the child that they were adopted.

Over the course of the next decades, the tables have turned. Birth control became more accessible. Women no longer needed their husband’s permission to obtain contraception and pregnancy termination became more widely available. Additionally, single parenthood steadily became less stigmatized, to the point that singles now adopt. All of these social factors combined to drastically reduce the number of babies needing to be relinquished for adoption as compared to prior decades.

At the same time, women were attending consciousness raising groups and discovering there was more to life than being a wife and mother. Feminism began encouraging women to delay childbearing for graduate degrees and careers and women wanted it all: careers and motherhood. However, delaying childbearing played a role in increased rates of infertility. As the shame of pregnancy outside of marriage dissipated and less women felt the pressure to place children for adoption, the shame of infertility also dissipated and a huge reproductive technology industry grew to help those who suffered with treatments including IVF, for those who could afford the expense of multiple tries. An imbalance in the supply and demand of babies to adopt began.

It was thus that at this time in American history on ”Adoption not Abortion” became a common slogan on bumper stickers based on the misperception that women who did not want to be mothers would “choose life” ignoring the fact that abortion is about women’s reproductive rights. It’s a pregnancy option; an extension of contraception.  Adoption is about parenting, not being allowed to (in cases of involuntary termination of rights), or believing others could offer your child a better life. Very different things.

Currently, it is estimated that there are 36 couples vying for each baby placed, but it is likely higher when you factor in the number of same-sex couples added to the queue following gay marriage. More than 16,000 same-sex couples are raising an estimated 22,000 adopted children, four percent of all adopted children in the United States. The LGBTQ+ community is a large and powerful voting bloc.

These shifts changed adoption from finding homes for children in need to a mega-billion dollar industry filling a demand by those “desperate” to adopt and willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for white infants – domestic and transnationally – all of which do nothing to decrease the nearly half million children in state care, but all of which receive federal tax credits and equal admiration for “rescuing” children in need.

With shame no longer an influencing factor, Open Adoption became the new sales pitch, with vulnerable mothers not made aware that contact agreements are unenforceable.  Expectant mothers are told – and the public believes – that adoption will provide children a more stable and secure family. Why then are there untold numbers of fundraisers from bake sales to commercial donors, churches, and online crowd funding to help pay adoption fees? Meanwhile no similar efforts appear to help struggling families and help mothers and babies avoid the trauma of separation.

Either or Dichotomy and the Missing Component

Despite all advances since the 1970s, including changes in social mores and adoption practices, the binary bumper sticker sentiment of “Adoption no Abortion” remains the focus of The Right as expressed by Barrett, who said in December of 2021:

It seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more, and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.

Forcing women to remain  pregnant and hand over their child is Orwellian with shades of Atwood’s Gilead.  Where is the option to parent in this dichotomy?

Let’s be very clear: Adoption – being proposed as a solution – does absolutely nothing to reduce abortions, since adoption obviously can only occur upon or after the birth of a living baby.  If the goal was actually about reducing abortion we would be discussing early and continuing sex education, free birth control including vasectomies, healthcare for all, making childcare financially feasible, mandatory parental leave, increasing WIC and more stringent sentencing for rape.

In fact, the Dutch boast the lowest abortion rate in the world with complication and death rates from abortion almost non-existent. Instead of tightening restrictions and enacting limitations, they accomplished this by making abortion and contraception freely available on demand, free and covered by the national health insurance plan. Holland also carries out extensive public education on contraception, family planning, and sexuality. Rather than encouraging teens to have more sex, Dutch teenagers tend to have less frequent sex, and start at an older age, and the teenage pregnancy rate is 6 times lower than in the U.S.  We, however, try to resolve teen pregnancies and abortion with the same tactics that failed to end drug addiction – criminalization and “just say no.” Neither of which worked.

 Conflating abortion with adoption is a red herring and very offensive to mothers who have lost children to adoption, labeling them potential murders, and insulting to adoptees, who as a result of these artificially opposing choices are positioned to feel gratitude for being alive when in truth those who are adopted are no more likely to have been aborted than children born to married parents. Barrett’s flippant mention of legal abandonment via “Safe Havens” also shows disregard for the well-being of adopted persons who are left with no birth records to access even in states that allow it.

Cory L. Richards, former executive vice president and VP of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, wrote in “The Adoption vs Abortion Myth”, LA Times, 2007:

Politicians of all stripes, and whatever their position on abortion, should face reality.

Increasing the rate of completed adoptions, however valid on its own merits, is irrelevant to the abortion rate. And increasing the rate of newborn relinquishments, even assuming it could be done in an ethically and socially acceptable way, at best would be tinkering at the margins. Even if relinquishments doubled, and each one of them represented an averted abortion, it would make hardly a dent in the abortion rate.

It also ignores the effect accessibility of birth control has had on the declining birth rate and the obvious fact that less babies being born results in less babies for adoption.

The “Adoption not Abortion” campaign pits two of three options against one another, asking women to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea excluding the option of parenting when the fact is that most women (90% per the Turnaway Study) who are denied access to abortion chose to parent.

Unplanned, unintended, does not mean unwanted. Nor does it mean unfit to parent. Many surprise conceptions are happily carried to term by married and unmarried women and couples, including “change-of-life” babies born to women who thought they could no longer conceive. The blatant omission of the parenting option defies any claim that anti-choice is about saving the life of the “unborn.”  If  the goal was saving a life,  both adoption and the ability to raise a child be equally supported.

Adoptee, Elizabeth Spiers responded to what she describes as Barrett’s glib “adoption is some kind of idyllic fairy tale” while ignoring serious lifelong consequences of mother-child separation to both parties:

What Justice Barrett and others are suggesting women do in lieu of abortion is not a small thing. It is life changing, irrevocable, and not to be taken lightly. It often causes trauma, even when things work out, and it’s a disservice to adoptees and their families, biological and adopted, to pretend otherwise in service of a neat political narrative.

 Marshall H. Medoff, Dept. of Economics, CA State, likewise found:

Abortion or relinquish an infant for adoption are not considered to be substitutes by women with unwanted pregnancies and that for poor women with unwanted pregnancies either an abortion or raising an infant is preferable to relinquishing an infant for adoption.

Kate Livingston, Ph.D., a birth parent and educator of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, points out an even more concerning aspect is the implication:

 . . .  that with the termination of parental rights, that experience is over. But I know that the termination of parental rights in adoption is only the beginning of a very complicated and ongoing, changing, lifelong experience that impacts not only me — the decision maker — but my relatives, my family, not to mention my child who was placed for adoption, and so on. One pro-life communication strategy is to push the idea that abortion has long-term impacts. That abortion can produce grief and loss and regret, and it can have a health impact. But you don’t see that kind of language when they talk about adoption.

My four decades of researching adoption separation and loss confirm that the loss of a child to adoption is an irresolvable, lifelong limbo without the finality of death and often results in PTSD.  The trauma, guilt and grief experienced by mothers who lose children to adoption are universal and do not dissipate over time.  I was one of the original members of Concerned United Birthparents in the early 70’s and in 1979 co-founded the original Origins, a support group for women who lost children to adoption. I met and networked with hundreds and hundreds of mothers helping them deal with their regrets, grief, hopes of reunification with their child.  Precious few ever considered aborting. Some were simply opposed to it; others did not know they were pregnant until it was too late to consider it. The vast majority, as Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., who studies abortion, adoption, and reproductive decision-making in the U.S. found were either hoping or planning to have the resources to parent:

It is nine times out of ten a function of lack of financial resources that leads to the adoption. And for those people, when I ask how much money would you have needed to parent, if you intended to parent, it is usually a very small amount of money, under $5,000. And that is a reflection of our overall lack of social investment in families and parents.

 None of these findings are new:

• In 1866 Dr. John Condon reported in the Medical Jr. of Australia that:

“A most striking finding . . .  is that the majority of these women reported no diminution of their sadness, anger and guilt over the considerable number of years which had elapsed since their relinquishment “A significant number actually reported an intensification of these feelings, especially anger. . . a very high incidence of pathological grief reactions which have failed to resolve although many years have elapsed since the relinquishment.”

•  In 1994, Michelene K. Davidson, wrote in Family Systems Research and Therapy:

“Sometimes the best a birthmother can do is to remain in denial and numbness for the rest of her adult life, unconsciously encumbered by her silent sorrow.”

•  In 1999 Askren and Bloom, of Obstetric, Gyn & Neonatal Nursing found that:

“The relinquishing mother is at risk for long-term physical, psychological, and social repercussions.”

• In 2005 Wiley and Baden concluded one cannot compare the loss of a child to adoption to any other maternal loss, saying:

“Birthparents experience a loss that is nearly unparalleled in society.”

All of this research and more ignored. Rather than enter into a coemption of which loss is greater, which causes more or longer lasting trauma, let us concede both ways to lose a child are grievous. Why then promote one over the other while offering no support for the option of parenting in which there is no loss?

Barrett is mother of seven, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, a nation which has received its share of scrutiny and criticism when missionaries rushed after a 2010 earthquake grabbing up children for adoption who were not orphaned. Indeed, one of Barrett’s children was reportedly adopted following that earthquake.

She admits that forcing women to continue to remain pregnant against their will in order to give away their child, as Handmaids for others’ children, is “an infringement on bodily autonomy” but she and other proponents ignore the emotional rejection that is felt by the fetus in utero of such mothers. Maternal mortality has been rising in the US for 20 years, and the most recent data places us 55th in the world when it comes to the safety of childbirth and 10th out of 10 comparable countries in a 2018 study of maternal deaths. Those who propose forcing women to remain pregnant ignore that with 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019, forced pregnancies are barbaric, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment that risks a woman’s life for no crime.  Who will pay the medical bills for women forced to continue a high risk pregnancy?  Who pays the lifetime of medical bills for the child and a lifetime of caregivers?

It’s shameful and egregious that at a time when Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Scotland are issuing apologies for forced adoptions – and it is in process in the UK – the U.S. is encouraging them. It’s the same reason the U.S. is one of the only countries that allows surrogacy: MONEY!

Behind the Curtain: Follow the Money

Is it religious dogma that creates anti-choice mind-set or are Evangelicals and other anti-choice cheerleaders in actuality political pawns?  Is it about saving lives or about punishing women thought to be sinful or simply irresponsible while continuing in the 21st century to discount men’s role in copulation and conception – even that which is incestuous, abusive, adulterous, totally inappropriate because of power imbalances, or out and out felonious?

Or, is there something else entirely at the very foundation of the “adoption not abortion“ cries?

The truth is always found by following the money.  In 2009, prior to Guatemala closing their international adoption programs as a result of high rates of corruption, I visited to support four mothers on hunger strike. They represented hundreds whose babies had been abducted and trafficked for adoption. Taken by subterfuge or at gunpoint by former drug cartels who found child trafficking for adoption more lucrative and with less chance of being arrested.

There are an estimated 135 – 140,00 children adopted per year in the U.S. each at fees of approximately $15-50,000 each, depending on race, age and health. The industry market statistics, however, set the total figure of the adoption industry at $19.1 billion, compared to the Cola industry which is a mere $8.92 B.

With the exception of adoption from foster care and step-parent adoption . . . all infant adoption domestic and transnational is privatized and entrepreneurial. Adoption agencies are businesses with overhead and employee salaries to pay.  For-, not-for, and non-profit are all just tax categories. All are dependent upon the transfer of custody of children for their livelihood. And In America, all adoptions require an adoption attorney: stepparent, second parent, foster care, transnational, private/independent, or through an adoption agency. The American Academy of Adoption Attorneys is a national association of approximately 460 attorneys who practice, “or have otherwise distinguished themselves”, in the field of adoption law.  Four hundred sixty attorneys who depend on adoption for their livelihood from adoption and thus have a stake in redistributing babies to those who can pay the price tag.

There are no guardians ad litem protecting the best interest of the children being transferred. Nor are there separate attorneys representing the interest of original families. There are only paying adopters and those profiting and the child commodities being transferred. Meeting a demand and financial gain far outweigh best interest of children. Lawmakers and judges also have a stake in generating votes by passing legislation which makes adoptions happen quicker and easier for the paying customer, knowing the large number of their constituents – estimated at 2 million – who are eagerly hoping to adopt including the LGBTQ voting bloc.

The current demand for babies that far surpasses the dwindling number of babies being placed for adoption has brought with it a desire to reignite and reverse historic gains for women’s reproductive rights turning women into brood stock for affluent recipients in a process I have dubbed Reverse Robinhoodism, updated to include affluent gay men, along with infertile affluent women, who seek to exploit women down on their luck, turning them into unpaid surrogates by denying them the opportunity to opt out of an unintended pregnancy even if it resulted from incest or rape.

Adoption race-based price list

Struggling mothers and families in crisis have no agency which is why affordable daycare is once again facing the chopping block. As Gretchen Sisson and Jessica M. Harrison note: “Support for adoption is one of the most enduringly unifying issues in American culture and politics.“ Being pro adoption as however, sounds warm and fuzzy and wins votes by making lawmakers look like they care about saving orphans and rescuing kids from abuse. But the reality is that there were 125,422 children in care  waiting to be adopted in 2018 while the demand for infants remains and grows with 62% of children placed with their adoptive families within a month of birth. Infants are the gold standard prize.

Anti-choice offers one option – adoption.  No choice to parent. Opposition to abortion is thus not about saving unborn lives but about maintaining the livelihoods of those who depend on keeping women as cash cows producing highly sought commodities for the approximately 1-2 million couples and singles “desperately” waiting for and willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for white infants. Pregnancy termination reduces the infant adoption assembly line and the billions of dollars it earns those depending on it.Facebook

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Mirah is author of two internationally acclaimed books, more than 200 published articles, and cited in twenty professional journals having been researching, writing and speaking about American and global child adoption, restoration of adoptee rights, as well as contract anonymous conception and surrogacy since 1980. More at her website and Wikipedia. Read other articles by Mirah, or visit Mirah's website.

MONTANA
Court rules to cancel energy lease on land sacred to tribes

By MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press - 

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Attorneys for a Louisiana oil and gas company have asked a federal judge to reinstate a drilling lease it held on land considered sacred to Native American tribes in the U.S. and Canada.

The long-disputed energy lease in the Badger-Two Medicine area of northwestern Montana near the Blackfeet Reservation was cancelled in 2016 under then-U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. That decision was upheld by a federal appeals court last year.

Now Solenex LLC — the company that held the lease — is making another run at getting a court to restore its drilling rights. In court documents filed Thursday in a lawsuit against the Interior Department, its attorneys argued that Jewell exceeded her authority and the lease should be reinstated.

Solenex founder Sidney Longwell, who died last year, bought the 10-square-mile (25-square kilomter) lease in 1982 but never drilled on the site. Instead, Longwell confronted major bureaucratic delays within the U.S. departments of Interior and Agriculture that prompted the company to sue in 2013.

The Badger-Two-Medicine area near Glacier National Park is the site of the creation story of the Blackfoot tribes of southern Canada and Montana’s Blackfeet Nation. There have been efforts to declare it a national monument or make it a cultural heritage area, and tribal leaders have bitterly opposed Solenex’s drilling aspirations.

The Blackfeet have intervened in the case on the side of the government. Blackfeet Nation historic preservation officer John Murray said tribal officials were confident in the case against drilling.

“We knew they still wanted to try to do drilling,” Murray said. "We've got some good attorneys. I think we're going to prevail."

Solenex attorneys said the government unlawfully “outsourced” its decisions by deferring to the tribe's wishes to block drilling. They said officials should have considered ways drilling impacts could be lessened or offset if it were to proceed.

Interior Department spokesperson Tyler Cherry declined to comment on the case.

Solenex's lawsuit is being waged by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Colorado-based firm that pursues cases involving property rights, guns rights and other conservative causes.