New Evidence Supports Restoration of Jim Thorpe as the Sole Gold Medalist for His Victories in the 1912 Olympics 

Jim Thorpe 1912 Summer Olympics. (Photo/Courtesy)

BY LEVI RICKERT 

 NATIVE NEWS 

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox, Potawatomi) is an iconic figure in Olympic history. Those familiar with Thorpe will remember he won two Olympic gold medals in 1912 in Stockholm. What many may not know is Thorpe was stripped of the gold medals by the International Olympics Committee (IOC) one year later after it was discovered he had been compensated—payment amounted to the costs of his room and board—for playing minor league baseball prior to participating in the 1912 Olympics.

The IOC erased his records from the Olympic record books. To those concerned with Thorpe’s legacy and historical accuracy, his medals and records were stolen from him.

Attempts to have the medals returned were not rewarded until 1982, almost 30 years after Thorpe's death (1953), when replicas were delivered to his family. Even though the gold medals were reinstated, the IOC did not restore Thorpe’s records in Olympic history.

Many feel the IOC did not go far enough.

For the past couple years, Bright Path Strong has had a petition that seeks to have the have the gross injustice corrected. In order to correct the wrong, Bright Path Strong wants full restoration of Jim Thorpe as the sole gold medalist for his victories in the 1912 Olympics.

This week as the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games are underway, Bright Path Strong is proud to present a case study to support the petition to reinstate Jim Thorpe as the sole recipient of the gold medals.

The case study was authored by Robert W. Wheeler and Dr. Florence Ridlon for The Doug Williams Center.

The report tells the story of Thorpe, an orphan at 17, trusting two unscrupulous men who clearing did not have Thorpe’s best interests at heart.

An excerpt from the case study says:

“The sad truth was that without a lawyer or some honest person to advise him, Jim lost his titles and medals because he had no one to tell him he did not have to give them up. According to Jim’s daughter, Grace, Warner entered Jim and Gus Welch’s room when they were not there and took his medals and trophies, packed them up and shipped them to the Swedish Olympic Committee (G. Thorpe, personal communication, 1974). Thorpe trusted the white man and his system of justice, and both failed him.”

“We are honored to have the opportunity The Doug Williams Center has given us to provide a  distinguished forum through which we can discuss the underlying illegality and racism behind the decision to strip Jim Thorpe of his awards and honors,” said Wheeler and Ridlon.

For Nedra Darling (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation), co-founder of Bright Path Strong and one of the producers of the Bright Path Strong, The Jim Thorpe film now under development, says it is important to correct the injustice against Thorpe.

“Correcting Jim Thorpe’s achievements in the official  records would not end the systemic prejudices that pervade our institutions, but it would send a powerful message of  hope and liberation to Indigenous communities in the United States and around the world, whose past and present  should no longer be invisibilized,” Darling said in a press release.

“The startling injustices we observe throughout Jim Thorpe’s career are a small glimpse into the numerous wrongs against the Native American community that must be rectified,” explained Brandon A. Logan, Executive Director of The Doug Williams Center. “We are committed to telling his story and hopeful that this research will open the door for more solutions.” 

Thorpe’s legacy continues with an active grassroots petition campaign, feature motion picture, and ongoing work with Ms. Anita DeFrantz, the first woman and first African American, to serve as a representative from the IOC to the United States. Mr. Logan added “Jim Thorpe deserves to be a household name, highly regarded in every place that American sports legends are mentioned.” 

Abraham Taylor, Bright Path Strong co-founder and one of the forthcoming film’s producers, said: “Jim Thorpe’s  unrivaled athletic achievements are well known throughout the world, but what truly defines his greatness is  something not widely known—what he overcame to accomplish what he did. The team behind the film, which will tell this remarkable story, is proud to contribute to Mr. Wheeler’s and Dr. Ridlon’s near half-century effort to right this historic injustice.” 

One fifth of starving Afghan families sending children out to work

Published  February 14, 2022
By Ariana News

(Last Updated On: February 14, 2022)

Up to one-fifth of families in Afghanistan have been forced to send their children out to work as incomes have plummeted in the past six months with an estimated one million children now engaged in child labour, according to new Save the Children research.

A survey of 1,400 households across seven provinces of Afghanistan found that 82% of Afghans have lost income since the collapse of the former government and transition of power last August, with 18% reporting they had no choice but to send their children out to work.

According to Save the Children’s analysis, if just one child in each of these families is being sent to work, then more than one million children in the country are engaged in child labour.

More than 80% of those surveyed reported a loss of income, with a third (34.8%) having lost all of their household income, and a quarter (26.6%) having lost more than half. Families living in cities were hit hardest, with half of families in Kabul saying they had lost their entire income.

The huge spike in prices caused by the economic crisis has left many families unable to afford food. About 36% of families reported that they are purchasing food in the market on credit, whereas 24% said they did previously. Thirty-nine percent are borrowing food from better-off families, compared to just 25% previously.

As families sink further into debt and poverty, 7.5% said they were begging or relying on charity to feed their families.

Last month, Save the Children reported that the number of dangerously malnourished children visiting its health clinics had more than doubled since August.

Save the Children’s Country Director in Afghanistan, Chris Nyamandi, said:

“I’ve never seen anything like the desperate situation we have here in Afghanistan. We treat frighteningly ill children every day who haven’t eaten anything except bread for months. Parents are having to make impossible decisions – which of their children do they feed? Do they send their children to work or let them starve? These are excruciating choices that no parent should have to make.

“There is no shortage of food here – the markets are full. Yet children are starving to death because their parents can’t afford to pay for food. This could, and should, have been prevented. But it is not too late to prevent further tragedy if we act now.

“We’re doing everything we can to get families the help they need. But the truth is that humanitarian aid can only go so far. This is an economic crisis, and it needs an economic solution. Governments must find a way to unlock vital funds and unfreeze financial assets to prevent the crisis from spiralling any further.”

Save the children is providing families with urgent cash assistance and winter kits with essential items to get them through the winter. Cash assistance helps to prevent families from resorting to desperate measures that adversely affect children such as child labour, early marriage and reduced meals.

Since September 2021, Save the Children has reached 763,000 people, including 430,800 children, and provided more than 127,000 people with multi purposes cash transfers and cash for food.

One Protester Killed As Thousands Rally Across Sudan Against Coup - Medics


By Khalid Abdelaziz
02/14/22 

Protesters march during a rally against military rule following coup in Khartoum, Sudan, February 10, 2022.

 Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

At least one protester was shot dead as security forces confronted crowds marching in Khartoum on Monday demanding the release of prisoners and an end to military rule, medics and a Reuters reporter said.

Elsewhere, thousands returned to streets across Sudan, in some of the biggest demonstrations in nearly a month against an October coup.

Across the River Nile from Khartoum, officers fired teargas to try and disperse thousands of people who approached the disused parliament buildings in Omdurman and got close to a key bridge.

Columns of smoke rose into the sky as demonstrators blocked one of the main streets in Omdurman with stones. Some held giant pictures of protesters killed during previous rallies.

"We won't let the martyrs' killers seize our country. We won't let the military and the (former regime) return again. We are a free and democratic generation," Sara Ahmed, a 19-year-old student, said.

At least 80 have been killed by security forces since the coup, according to medics.

The military and police say they allow peaceful protest, that members of the security forces have had to defend themselves, and that casualties are being investigated.

In Khartoum, separate groups of protesters demonstrated about 2km from the presidential palace amid heavy security, witnesses said.

One unidentified protester was killed by scattered gunshot, said the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors, a group aligned with the protest movement. There was no immediate comment from the military leadership.

Pictures of rallies in other towns and cities across Sudan were posted on social media.

In recent days security forces have arrested three high-profile civilian figures connected to a task force that was working to dismantle the regime of former President Omar al-Bashir, who was toppled in an uprising in 2019.

"Freedom for the detainees," read a banner unfurled in Omdurman.

An activist lawyers group said last week that more than 100 political detainees were being held without charge.

Japan's Kirin Brewery To Withdraw From Myanmar


By Sara HUSSEIN
02/14/22

Japanese drinks giant Kirin said Monday it would withdraw from Myanmar, after a failed bid to disentangle its operations from a joint venture with a junta-owned company after last year's coup.

With international pressure building against the military since it ousted and detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and waged a widespread crackdown on dissent, the brewery becomes the latest foreign company to pull out of Myanmar.

Kirin said its decision came after months of wrangling following last February's coup, which prompted the company to express concerns about human rights and eventually seek to end its joint venture Myanmar Brewery Limited.

It had decided "to withdraw from the business in Myanmar in order to urgently terminate its joint venture partnership" with military-linked MEHPCL, the company said in a statement.


Myanmar Brewery, whose beverages include its flagship and ubiquitous Myanmar Beer brand, boasted a market share of nearly 80 percent, according to figures published by Kirin in 2018.

Kirin's attempts to terminate the partnership with MEHPCL were unsuccessful, and the Japanese drinks maker said in November it would contest a bid to dissolve their joint brewery over fears liquidation proceedings would not be fair.

On Monday, Kirin said it had taken "every measure to find a way forward that would allow it to continue to contribute to Myanmar's economy and society".

That included filing for arbitration in Singapore in a bid to end the joint venture and proceed without the military-linked partner.

"In the end, Kirin Holdings determined that it would be difficult to quickly terminate the joint venture in the manner it desires," the company added.

"Therefore, Kirin Holdings has now commenced and is proceeding with discussions with MEHPCL in order to withdraw from the business in Myanmar, giving top priority to the termination of the joint venture as soon as possible."

A junta spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Myanmar has been wracked by violence following the military's overthrow of civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi Photo: AFP / STR

With the economy tanking and pressure mounting from rights groups, companies from France's TotalEnergies to British American Tobacco and Norway's Telenor have upped sticks or announced they will leave Myanmar.

After the coup and arrest of the country's democratically elected leaders, Kirin said it was "deeply concerned" by the military's actions.

The brewery had been under pressure even before the coup over its ties to Myanmar's military, and launched an investigation after pressure from rights groups over whether money from its joint venture had funded rights abuses.

In a statement, Justice For Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung welcomed Kirin's decision to withdraw from the country, praising the firm for "listening to the voice of Myanmar people and Myanmar, Japanese and global civil society".

"Kirin should never have entered into business with a brutal and corrupt military conglomerate," she added, accusing the brewery of having "financed atrocity crimes and enriched top generals".

The activist group urged other Japanese firms doing business with the military to cut ties, and called on Kirin to avoid payments to MEHPCL or the military during the withdrawal process.

Investors piled into Myanmar after the military relaxed its iron grip in 2011, paving the way for democratic reforms and economic liberalisation in the country of more than 50 million people.

They poured money into telecoms, infrastructure, manufacturing and construction projects, but the coup upended the democratic interlude and damaged the economy.

The pandemic and supply chain disruptions have also hit the country, with Kirin saying in its earnings report released Monday that Myanmar's beer market had shrunk by about 20 percent.

It said Myanmar Brewery's sales volumes had decreased by around 30 percent compared with the same period last year.

Japan's government is a major provider of economic assistance to Myanmar, and Tokyo has long-standing relations with the country's military.

After the coup it announced it would halt all new aid, though it stopped short of imposing individual sanctions on military and police commanders, as some other nations have.

Tokyo has repeatedly called for Suu Kyi's release and the restoration of democracy, and last year the country's foreign minister said dialogue with the junta was ongoing but warned all foreign aid could be halted if rights violations continued.

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M

Crypto Lending Firm BlockFi To Pay $100 Million To Settle U.S. SEC, State Charges

By Chris Prentice
02/14/22 

Representations of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, DogeCoin, Ripple, Litecoin are placed on PC motherboard in this illustration taken, June 29, 2021. 

 Photo: Reuters / Dado Ruvic

A subsidiary of crypto company BlockFi Inc has agreed to pay $100 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and 32 states to settle charges in connection with a retail crypto lending product the New Jersey company offered to nearly 600,000 investors, the SEC said on Monday.

The penalty includes $50 million to the state regulators and $50 million to the SEC, the largest ever fine the federal securities watchdog has levied on an issuer of crypto asset securities, it said.

BlockFi Lending LLC, the subsidiary, broke the rules by offering an interest-bearing lending product without registering with the SEC, the agency said.

BlockFi, which neither admitted nor denied the SEC's findings, has agreed to comply by offering an alternative product that will be registered with the SEC. The charges are lower than they might have been due to BlockFi's willingness to cooperate, the SEC said.


The charges come as U.S. regulators, worried about investor protections and systemic risks, are cracking down on the booming crypto industry by forcing companies in the space to comply with existing U.S. securities laws.

The SEC has heightened its scrutiny of crypto exchanges and lenders under Chair Gary Gensler, who has said wants to bring the digital asset sector within the existing regulatory framework. Crypto asset companies, meanwhile, say the existing rules are inappropriate.

From March 2019 to present, the firm offered and sold so-called BlockFi Interest Accounts, or BIAs, that allowed investors to lend crypto assets to BlockFi in exchange for a promise to provide a variable monthly interest payment, the SEC said.

The offering was a violation of securities laws because the company failed to register it with the SEC. BlockFi also broke rules by failing to register as an investment firm, the SEC said.

The firm also understated the risks associated with its lending activities by making false or misleading statements for more than two years that they were typically over-collaterized when the majority were not, the SEC said.

BlockFi will no longer offer the product to new investors in the United States. It will continue to service existing accounts but will not allow customers to add to those investments. It will comply with laws governing investment companies and will register a new product called a BlockFi yield.

Crypto lending products in particular have become an SEC target. In September, Coinbase Global Inc said the agency was threatening to sue if it went ahead with plans to offer a similar product.

The Slave Trade Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere

Formerly enslaved people in Cumberland Landing, Va., 1862.

Credit...Fotosearch/Getty Images

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist

NEW YORK TIMES

Feb. 12, 2022

In my Jan. 29 newsletter, I wrote a little about the development of the domestic slave trade in the United States, apropos of my Sunday Review story on the SlaveVoyages database and the effort to measure and quantify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That newsletter focused on the economics of slave-based cultivation and how it led inevitably to a surplus of enslaved people who could be sold at great profit after the United States ended its participation in the trans-Atlantic trade.

Because that particular story begins in the late 18th century, it takes the existence of chattel slavery for granted. But it occurred to me this week that it would be worth saying a little more about how the enslavement of Africans developed in the English colonies of the New World, if only to underscore the fact that a thorough grasp of this history must rest on the foundation of an objective analysis of class, labor and property relationships. I won’t hit every detail, but you will get the gist.

“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” wrote the Trinidadian historian and political scientist (and later politician) Eric Williams in his 1944 book “Capitalism and Slavery.” “Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”

Williams goes on to note that the first instance of slave trading and slave labor during the European colonization of the Americas involved Native people. “The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man’s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life.”

“The immediate successor of the Indian,” Williams continues, “was not the Negro but the poor white.” In the English colonies, most of these laborers were indentured servants. Some were “fleeing from the irksome restrictions of feudalism”; some were “Irishmen seeking freedom from the oppression of landlords and bishops”; others simply had a “burning desire for land” and an “ardent passion for independence.” Some were kidnapped by unscrupulous traders; others were convicts forced into servitude.

The conditions of servitude were bad to begin with, from the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to the difficult work on small farms and plantations. They became worse as servitude itself became a “property relation which asserted a control of varying extent, over the bodies and liberties of the person during service as if he were a thing.” Even still, as Williams points out, “The master at no time had absolute control over the person and liberty of his servant as he had over his slave” and “the conception of the servant as a piece of property never went beyond that of personal estate and never reached the stage of a chattel or real estate.”

Most important, a servant’s term of service could eventually come to an end. When it did, he often demanded land. That’s one reason the importation of white servants became politically untenable. It was also true that “the need of the plantations outstripped” the supply of servants. There were only so many convicts England could send, only so many people to kidnap, only so many who would willingly make the journey. African slavery, then, emerges within the context of the instability of white servitude.

“The Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man’s language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land,” Williams explains. “Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a cart-horse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone make slave labor possible. Finally, and this was the decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper.”

It was more cost effective, for merchants, to purchase captives from the Atlantic coast of Africa and ship them to sites in North America and the Caribbean: “The money which procured a white man’s services for ten years could buy a Negro for life.” For kidnappers, it was easier to steal an African man or woman than an English one. And the experiences of the servant trade informed the emerging slave trade: “Bristol, the center of the servant trade, became one of the centers of the slave trade. Capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”

“The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best,” Williams writes. The planter, he continues, “would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”

One thing I’d like you to consider, and this is something I will return to in the future, is the extent to which racial distinctions and racial divisions are rooted in relationships of class, labor and property, even when they take on a life and logic of their own. And if that’s true, I would like you to think about what that means for unraveling those divisions and distinctions, and consigning the ideology of “race” to the ash heap of history.
What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was on a supposedly “pro-worker” proposal from Senator Marco Rubio that does little more than give employers another avenue for union busting.

If an “employee involvement organization” cannot bargain and cannot negotiate and can be dissolved at any point by the employer, then what purpose does it serve other than to subvert union organizers and channel worker unrest into a front organization for management? The same goes for the nonvoting board representative. Without power to act, what does it matter that someone is permitted to watch and listen?

My Friday column was, yet again, on how the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans.

It is Congress, and not the Supreme Court, that has, over time, done more to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans. To do the same, the court has had to reverse its own work. As Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor of law at Harvard, has written, “As a matter of historical practice, the Court has wielded an antidemocratic influence on American law, one that has undermined federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of race, wealth, and status.”

Ukrainian Companies Interested in Building Afghan Railways

The Public Works Ministry said Ukrainian companies have shown an interest in investing in railways in Afghanistan.

Officials from the Ministry of Public Works (MoPW) have held talks with a technical team representing a number of Ukrainian companies about establishing railways in Afghanistan.

Although the ministry has not specifically said in which parts of the country the railways will be built, it said on Monday that a technical team of Ukrainian companies has come to Kabul and met with the ministry’s officials, having shown an interest in building railways in the country.

“The Ukrainian delegation had a meeting with the ministry’s leadership team. They discussed the transit of goods, enhancing the capacities of railways’ engineers, the security of the Mazar-Hairatan railway, and building railways,” Hamidullah Misbah, the spokesman of the ministry said.

Meanwhile, a number of economic analysts said connecting Afghanistan to other countries through railways will result in an increase of transit and trade.

“We should have railways in most of our provinces. Most of our borders (ports) should be connected through railways with the neighboring countries and from there with the world,” said Khairuddin Mayel, deputy head of Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Investment (ACCI).

According to the ACCI, by the extension of railways in the country, Afghanistan’s exports will increase and goods’ exports will become easy and quick.

“The extension of the railway is in the interest of the people of Afghanistan. We want our railway to extend. After sea shipping, railway is the cheapest and quickest means of transportation,” said Mohammad Yunus Momand, ACCI acting director.

Currently, Afghanistan is connected to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan through the Hairatan-Aqina railway in the north, and to Iran through the Khawaf-Herat railway in the west.

According to officials, efforts are underway to connect Afghanistan to South Asia via railway.

A UKRAINIAN SOCIOLOGIST EXPLAINS WHY EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT UKRAINE IS PROBABLY WRONG


A Ukrainian flag on Independence Square in Kiev on Feb. 21, 2016. - Protesters of the Radical Right Power organization pitched tents on the square and declared the "Third Maidan", demanding the resignation of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his government. 

Sergei Supinsky/AFP 

The Ukraine crisis is extremely complex and little understood. Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko explains the crisis’s origins, the fictions that surround it, and why war is still far from inevitable.

BY VOLODYMYR ISHCHENKO

FEBRUARY 11, 2022
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Feb. 10, 2022.
Interview by Branko Marcetic.

If you’ve relied on establishment media to follow the events in Ukraine these past eight years, then chances are what you know is wrong. Despite—or, more likely, because—the tumult in Ukraine has reared its head prominently in both US foreign policy and its domestic politics these past few years, the country’s history and its ongoing internal conflicts have been some of the most propagandized for Western audiences.

Dr. Volodymyr Ishchenko, a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies, has spent years writing about Ukrainian politics, the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and the messy intersection of protests, social movements, revolution, and nationalism. He recently spoke with Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic about what Western audiences need to understand about Ukraine and the ongoing international standoff over it.

BM: Why are Ukrainian officials and European governments taking such different stances on the question of the prospects for a Russian invasion than the United States and the UK?

VI: Russian coercive diplomacy and the military buildups are just one part of this, because there are also parallel diplomatic actions. Another part is this media campaign about the imminent invasion, which has its own autonomous logic, is driven by different interests, and should not be taken as an objective reflection of Russian actions. It also has this reinforcing, escalating character. The primary target of this campaign is probably not even Russia or Ukraine, but Germany, which is supposed to be closer to its NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies.


Some people comment now quite cynically, “Why not let the Russians invade Ukraine, and let’s make Ukraine another Afghanistan for Russia?”

Ukraine at first didn’t even notice this campaign in the Western media. It then tried to exploit the campaign by requesting more weapons and calling for preventive sanctions against Russia. It was only about two or three weeks ago that the Ukrainian government started to make very explicit statements that invasion is not really imminent, that we have been under Russian threat since 2014 and we’re used to this, and that according to their intelligence, this threat isn’t greater than it was in spring last year (during the earlier stage of the Russian buildup, which was done very publicly with very clear intentions).

This Western media campaign has had very material and negative consequences for the Ukrainian economy. The Ukrainian currency has started to be devalued, investors have started to leave—particularly in the Ukrainian real estate market—and the government has been quite scared that even without an actual invasion, the Ukrainian economy may get into quite serious trouble from this. But I wouldn’t take it as simply strategic deception.

BM: Why is Ukraine such an important country, both to Russia, and to the West and the United States?

VI: Economically, Ukraine is actually a big failure. If you look at the economic indicators, Ukraine is probably one of the very, very few countries in the world that has not reached its 1990 level of GDP per capita. There was a huge economic decline in the ’90s, and then Ukraine failed to grow like its Eastern European neighbors. We don’t live better than at the end of the Soviet Union, unlike Poland, for example, or even Russia or Belarus.

For Russia and for the United States, it’s a place through which natural gas is transported. There were some initiatives to have a three-party consortium: Russia as a supplier of gas, the European Union as consumer, and Ukraine as a transitory territory. These were torpedoed in the ’90s and 2000s, particularly by the Ukrainian side, and the result was that Russia just built several pipelines around Ukraine. The Nord Stream 2 is perhaps the most dangerous for Ukraine now, because it may make Ukrainian pipelines obsolete.

From a military point of view, Russia says that Ukraine may be important because if NATO starts to deploy offensive weapons, there are rockets that can reach Moscow in five minutes from Ukrainian territory. The Russian defensive strategy for centuries was expansion, in order to push its border as far west as possible, creating strategic depth, which led Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler’s invasions to fail—though contemporary wars are not waged in the same way as they were a half-century or two centuries ago.


For the United States, Ukraine is a potential hot spot against Russia. If Ukraine is creating tensions with Russia, it might weaken Russia and may deflect its resources, for example, in case of a Chinese escalation.

For the United States, Ukraine is a potential hot spot against Russia. If Ukraine is creating tensions with Russia, it might weaken Russia and may deflect its resources, for example, in case of a Chinese escalation. Some people comment now quite cynically, “Why not let the Russians invade Ukraine, and let’s make Ukraine another Afghanistan for Russia?” Russia would spend a lot of resources, it would be hit with sanctions—probably Nord Stream would also be under sanctions—and it’s not that clear for how long Russia would survive a major escalation in Ukraine. That might be a reason why this war [in the Donbass region] has been going on for such a long time: there’s no actual interest in stopping it. There were several opportunities to do so in 2019 and 2015, and the US government didn’t do as much as they could.

BM: What is the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, since the countries’ long and complicated history shapes so many of the political and cultural divisions of modern Ukraine?

VI: There’s nothing close to a consensus on this issue. Some people on the Left, such as some Ukrainian Marxists in the twentieth century, made the case that Ukraine was a Russian colony, and at least in the Russian Empire, it was exploited economically. That was a different story under the Soviet Union, when Ukraine was actually developed very quickly and ended up being one of the most developed parts of the country—one of the reasons why the post-Soviet crisis was so severe. Others would say that Ukraine was more like Scotland to England, and not even close to relations between Western metropoles and their colonies in Africa or Asia, or even between Russia and Central Asia, or Russia and Siberia.

For many Russians, Ukraine is part of their perception of the Russian nation. They simply could not imagine Russia without Ukraine. In the Russian Empire, there was this idea that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were three parts of the same people. And this narrative was recently reiterated by Vladimir Putin, in his article where he claimed Ukrainians and Russians are just one people, artificially divided.

This narrative has a long history in Russian imperial thought. From this perspective, you’d see relations between Ukraine and Russia as a competition of at least two nation-building projects. One would say Ukraine is not a part of Russia; Ukrainians are a separate people. This narrative is the most dominant in Ukraine right now. However, this nation-building project has not succeeded fully—despite three revolutions that had very strong nation-building content, which happened in 1990, 2004, and 2014. Another narrative would claim that Ukrainians are actually part of some bigger Eastern Slavic unity and this nation-building project wasn’t realized because of the weakness of modernization in the Russian Empire.

However, this discussion occupies just a small part of Ukrainian society, intellectuals especially. For regular Ukrainians, it’s not the salient question. According to polls conducted for the thirty years since Soviet independence, the questions of jobs, wages, and prices have been at the top, while identity, language, geopolitical relations, the EU, Russia, and NATO were always down the list of Ukrainian priorities.

BM: Some commentators say that because the far right hasn’t been very successful in post-Maidan elections, its role in the country is negligible. How true is this?

VI: The role of radical nationalists in Ukrainian politics is significant, via direct pressure on the government and dissemination of narratives. If you look at the actual policies that were taken by the post-Maidan government, you’ll see the program of radical nationalist parties, particularly decommunization, banning the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Ukrainianization, which means pushing the Russian language out of the Ukrainian public sphere. Many things that the far right campaigned on before Maidan were implemented by nominally non-far-right politicians.

Nationalist radicalization is very good compensation for the lack of any revolutionary changes after the revolution. If you start, for example, to change something in the ideological sphere—renaming streets, taking away any Soviet symbols from the country, removing Vladimir Lenin’s statues that were standing in many Ukrainian cities—you create an illusion of change without actually changing in the direction of the people’s aspirations.

Most of the relevant parties are actually electoral machines for specific patron-clientelistic networks. Ideologies are usually totally irrelevant. It’s not difficult to find politicians who have switched between completely opposite camps in Ukrainian politics several times during their careers.

The radical nationalist parties, by contrast, have ideology, they have motivated activists, and at this moment, they are probably the only parties in the real sense of the word “party.” They are the most organized, the most mobilized parts of the civil society, with the strongest street mobilization. After 2014, they also got the resources for violence: they got the opportunities to create affiliated armed units and a broad network of training centers, summer camps, sympathetic cafés, and magazines. This infrastructure perhaps doesn’t exist in any other European country. It looks more like 1930s far-right politics in Europe than contemporary European far-right politics—which doesn’t rely so much on paramilitary violence but is instead capable of winning quite a broad part of the electorate.

BM: What are some of the misunderstood or unknown aspects of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution that Western audiences may not be aware of?


Western officials supported the Maidan Revolution quite openly. For the EU at that moment, it was quite inspiring, because while the people in Greece were burning EU flags, people in Ukraine were waving them.

VI: In the West, what has become dominant is the narrative of professional NGOs, which were an important part of the uprising in 2014. But they definitely did not represent the whole diversity of this uprising and represented even less the diversity of this big country. In their narratives, this was a democratic, peaceful revolution against an authoritarian government led by Viktor Yanukovych, who is probably one of the very few rulers in the world to have been toppled by two revolutions.

This narrative of the professional NGOs and national-liberal intellectuals was taken up by the Western media and Western officials, partially because it’s what they wanted to hear. And Western officials supported the Maidan Revolution quite openly. For the EU at that moment, it was quite inspiring, because while the people in Greece were burning EU flags, people in Ukraine were waving them.

Fear of radical nationalists inspired the anti-Maidan protests in the southeastern parts of Ukraine. Russia decided to supply and, in a crucial moment, intervene and prevent the defeat of separatist rebels in the region. The result is that a part of Donbass, an eastern Ukrainian, heavily industrialized and urbanized region, is now under the control of so-called people’s republics that should be seen more or less as Russian puppet states.

BM: What are your hopes for how this crisis might be resolved?

VI: My hope is there will be a peaceful resolution to the crisis. We all need to hope that the Russians will not start a stupid invasion and they will not start to escalate, not only in Donbass but even further.

Any progress in the implementation of the Minsk accords—which are about how to integrate the pro-Russian separatist territories back into Ukraine—would certainly be helpful for de-escalation. Even though most Ukrainians are not happy about the Minsk accords—mostly because they have proven ineffective since 2015 and haven’t brought peace to Donbass, not that most Ukrainians find them inherently unacceptable—the actual protests against the Minsk accords were quite small and not really supported by the majority of Ukrainians.

But so far, Ukraine doesn’t want to accept Minsk. It finds different excuses not to do what it agreed to do together with France, Germany, and Russia. One of the reasons is the very explicit violent threats from nationalist civil society in Ukraine, which perceive Minsk as a capitulation for Ukraine. For the nationalists, Minsk means recognizing Ukraine’s political diversity—that dissenting Ukrainians are not simply zombified by Russian propaganda, and they are not national traitors; that they have very rational reasons not to agree with the nationalist narrative and have an alternative perception of Ukraine.

If the Ukrainian government were serious about implementing the accords, and not finding excuses by pointing to threats from the nationalists, they might ask for help from the West—for a very consolidated position from the United States and the EU in the accords’ quick implementation. It would certainly be helpful for the Ukrainian government and demotivate the nationalist part of civil society, especially those parts that are directly dependent on financial aid from the West.

While you are here, we want to make sure you

THERE’S STILL TIME FOR THE US TO AVOID A CATASTROPHIC WAR WITH RUSSIA IN UKRAINE

As we teeter on the precipice of war, more than 100 national and regional organizations have called on President Biden “to end the US role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia over Ukraine.”

BY NORMAN SOLOMON AND MEDEA BENJAMIN

FEBRUARY 12, 2022
A Ukrainian soldier is seen out of Svitlodarsk, Ukraine, on February 11, 2022. 

Photo by Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.


The White House claimed on Friday, Feb. 11 that attacks on Ukraine by Russian troops may be imminent, though Russian officials have denied these claims and denounced them as “dangerous lies.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has beseeched the US and NATO powers to not cause panic and further inflame tensions with Russia. With every passing hour, the world watches with trepidation as preparations for military conflict in Ukraine are made and Western media outlets loudly beat the drums of war. But it is not too late to avoid needless bloodshed—there is still time to avoid a catastrophic war with Russia in Ukraine.

More than 100 national and regional US organizations released a joint statement on Feb. 1 urging President Biden “to end the US role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia over Ukraine.” Following the release of that statement, RootsAction.org and Code Pink cosponsored a news conference on Feb. 2, during which speakers examined the crisis in Ukraine and forcefully articulated the need for the US to commit to diplomatic means for de-escalating the threat of war. With permission from the event organizers, The Real News Network is publishing the video of this news conference for our audience.

Speakers include: Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink; Jack F. Matlock Jr., former US Ambassador to Moscow; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director for The Nation and president of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord; Martin Fleck, program director for the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program, speaking as a representative for Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

 

OPINION | THE US IS REAPING WHAT IT SOWED IN UKRAINE
Will the prospect of a 21st-Century version of the Cuban Missile Crisis be enough to bring America’s irresponsible leaders to their senses and start unwinding the suicidal mess they have blundered into?

A Ukrainian serviceman patrols by a destroyed coal mine of Butovka at the front line with Russia-backed separatists not far from the town of Avdiivka, Donetsk region on Nov. 7, 2019. 

Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images

BY MEDEA BENJAMIN AND NICOLAS J.S. DAVIESFEBRUARY 2, 2022

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 31, 2022. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by US and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.

US allies do not all support the current US policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

Most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces.

“The Minsk Agreement hasn’t been applied by both sides,” Stegner explained, “and it just doesn’t make any sense to think that forcing up the military possibilities would make it better. Rather, I think it’s the hour of diplomacy.”

By contrast, most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of US military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time?

The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West’s political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the US-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia’s 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the US-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Viktor Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand.

The remaining members of parliament voted to form a new government, subverting the political transition and plans for a new election that Yanukovich had publicly agreed to the day before, after meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland.

The US role in managing the coup was exposed by a leaked 2014 audio recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt working on their plans, which included sidelining the European Union (“Fuck the EU,” as Nuland put it) and shoehorning in US protege Arseniy Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) as Prime Minister.

At the end of the call, Ambassador Pyatt told Nuland, “…we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.”

Nuland replied (verbatim), “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note, [Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [very quickly?], saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details?] to stick. So Biden’s willing.”

It has never been explained why two senior State Department officials who were plotting a regime change in Ukraine looked to Vice President Biden to “midwife this thing,” instead of to their own boss, Secretary of State John Kerry.

Now that the crisis over Ukraine has blown up with a vengeance during Biden’s first year as president, such unanswered questions about his role in the 2014 coup have become more urgent and troubling. And why did President Biden appoint Nuland to the #4 position at the State Department, despite (or was it because of?) her critical role in triggering the disintegration of Ukraine and an eight-year-long civil war that has so far killed at least 14,000 people?

Both of Nuland’s hand-picked puppets in Ukraine, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and President Poroshenko, were soon mired in corruption scandals. Yatsenyuk was forced to resign after two years and Poroshenko was outed in a tax evasion scandal revealed in the Panama Papers. Post-coup, war-torn Ukraine remains the poorest country in Europe, and one of the most corrupt.

The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for a civil war against its own people in Eastern Ukraine, so the post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the separatist People’s Republics. The infamous Azov Battalion drew its first recruits from the Right Sector militia and openly displays neo-Nazi symbols, yet it has kept receiving US arms and training, even after Congress explicitly cut off its US funding in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation bill.


Underlying all these tensions is NATO’s expansion through Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia, in violation of commitments Western officials made at the end of the Cold War.

In 2015, the Minsk and Normandy negotiations led to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a buffer zone around the separatist-held areas. Ukraine agreed to grant greater autonomy to Donetsk, Luhansk and other ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine, but it has failed to follow through on that.

A federal system, with some powers devolved to individual provinces or regions, could help to resolve the all-or-nothing power struggle between Ukrainian nationalists and Ukraine’s traditional ties to Russia that has dogged its politics since independence in 1991.

But the US and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The US coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of US and NATO military trainers.

Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

In October, Ukraine launched new attacks in Donbass. Russia, which still had about 100,000 troops stationed near Ukraine, responded with new troop movements and military exercises. US officials launched an information warfare campaign to frame Russia’s troop movements as an unprovoked threat to invade Ukraine, concealing their own role in fueling the threatened Ukrainian escalation that Russia is responding to. US propaganda has gone so far as to preemptively dismiss any actual new Ukrainian assault in the East as a Russian false-flag operation.

Underlying all these tensions is NATO’s expansion through Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia, in violation of commitments Western officials made at the end of the Cold War. The US and NATO’s refusal to acknowledge that they have violated those commitments or to negotiate a diplomatic resolution with the Russians is a central factor in the breakdown of US-Russian relations.


If the United States and NATO are not prepared to negotiate new disarmament treaties, remove US missiles from countries bordering Russia, and dial back NATO expansion, Russian officials say they will have no option but to respond with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

While US officials and corporate media are scaring the pants off Americans and Europeans with tales of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials are warning that US-Russian relations are close to the breaking point. If the United States and NATO are not prepared to negotiate new disarmament treaties, remove US missiles from countries bordering Russia, and dial back NATO expansion, Russian officials say they will have no option but to respond with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

This expression may not refer to an invasion of Ukraine, as most Western commentators have assumed, but to a broader strategy that could include actions that hit much closer to home for Western leaders.

For example, Russia could place short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad (between Lithuania and Poland), within range of European capitals; it could establish military bases in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other friendly countries; and it could deploy submarines armed with hypersonic nuclear missiles to the Western Atlantic, from where they could destroy Washington, DC in a matter of minutes.

It has long been a common refrain among American activists to point to the 800 or so US military bases all over the world and ask, “How would Americans like it if Russia or China built military bases in Mexico or Cuba?” Well, we may be about to find out.

Hypersonic nuclear missiles off the US East Coast would put the United States in a similar position to that in which NATO has placed the Russians. China could adopt a similar strategy in the Pacific to respond to US military bases and deployments around its coast.

So the revived Cold War that US officials and corporate media hacks have been mindlessly cheering on could very quickly turn into one in which the United States would find itself just as encircled and endangered as its enemies.

Will the prospect of such a 21st Century Cuban Missile Crisis be enough to bring America’s irresponsible leaders to their senses and back to the negotiating table, to start unwinding the suicidal mess they have blundered into? We certainly hope so.

Biden is rooting for Russia to invade Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard says

The former US congresswoman suggests US and NATO want Moscow to attack so they can impose “draconian” sanctions and enrich the military-industrial complex

Tulsi Gabbard (right) is shown sitting next to Joe Biden in January 2020, while both were campaigning in South Carolina for the Democrat presidential nomination. © Getty Images / Sean Rayford

President Joe Biden and his NATO allies could easily prevent war in Ukraine but would rather see Russia invade their ally to justify harsh sanctions against Moscow and spur a money-making cold war, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said on Friday in a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson.  

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran who ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, made her comments as Biden’s administration and US media outlets continued to hype a possibly “imminent” Russian attack on Ukraine. “It cements this cold war in place,” she said in the interview.

The US and its allies could prevent an armed conflict by pledging that Ukraine won’t be allowed to join NATO, Gabbard said. It’s “highly, highly unlikely” that Kiev will ever be approved as a NATO member, so refusing to promise what’s already a reality shows that leaders of the alliance don’t want peace, the Hawaii Democrat added.

The military-industrial complex is the one that benefits from this. They clearly control the Biden administration. Warmongers on both sides of Washington have been drumming up these tensions.

Russia last December sent security proposals to Washington – among them, blocking Ukraine from NATO membership – but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the alliance will maintain its open door policy.

“Why are we in this position then, if the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day?” Gabbard asked. “And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.”

An invasion of Ukraine would give Biden a “clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people,” Gabbard said. The result would be “locking in a new cold war.”

“The military-industrial complex starts to make a ton more money than they have been in fighting Al-Qaeda or making weapons for Al-Qaeda,” Gabbard said. “And who pays the price? The American people pay the price, the Ukrainian people pay the price, the Russian people pay the price. It undermines our own national security, but the military-industrial complex that controls so many of our politicians wins, and they run to the bank.”

The US has denied purposely arming radical Islamists, but researchers have reported cases of sophisticated American weaponry falling into the hands of fighters linked to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

bard has been a prominent voice against America’s wars and regime change interventions. US media outlets have been largely dismissive of her arguments; the Daily Beast called her latest comments “Tulsi’s twisted theory.”

The ex-lawmaker earlier this week said “warmongers” have argued that the US must protect Ukraine as a democracy – all while supporting such anti-democratic actions in Kiev as shutting down critical TV stations and imprisoning an opposition party leader. On Friday, she pointed out that US leaders haven’t even made a case as to why the American people should want Ukraine to join NATO.

“I have a hard time seeing how President Biden or anyone can say with an honest face, ‘We are defending democracy,’” Gabbard told Carlson. “And the reason is because our own government has publicly supported these authoritarian actions by the Ukrainian president in shutting down their own political opposition … This sounds familiar to some of the things that unfortunately, we're seeing play out right here at home.”

Russia has denied that it intends to attack Ukraine, while the White House said on Friday that an invasion could begin “at any time.” Western countries have been accusing Russia of amassing troops and military hardware dangerously close to Ukraine’s borders since last fall. Moscow has denied making threats to Kiev and blamed the West for the escalation in tensions.