It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, March 27, 2022
POSTMODERN COMMUNICATIONS 101
Vilnius station confronts Moscow-Kaliningrad train with images from war
Posters with Ukrainian war atrocities displayed in Vilnius railway station
Fri, March 25, 2022, 10:22 AM·2 min read By Andrius Sytas
VILNIUS (Reuters) - "Dear passengers of train no. 29, Moscow-Kaliningrad. Today, Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine. Do you support this?" an announcer repeats in Russian at Vilnius station while the service stops there.
Two dozen large pictures from the war in Ukraine, each with the same message, were put up on Friday morning on either side of the platform reserved for the Russian transit trains.
The trains, up to six per day, pause for around 10 minutes in Vilnius, capital of EU-member Lithuania, as they pass to and from Russia's Kaliningrad exclave - sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland - and cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg, via Belarus.
Under a two decade old agreement between Lithuania, Russia and the European Union, passengers are issued Lithuanian visas for the transit-only services, which are powered by a Lithuanian locomotive for the portion of the journey inside the country.
"As far as we know, Russians are shielded from what is happening in Ukraine. Here in Vilnius railway station, we have a possibility to show at least a small piece of what is happening," Mantas Dubauskas, a spokesperson for the state-owned Lithuanian railways, said.
"It's the least that we can do," he added. "Maybe we can change the minds of a very small number of passengers".
The pictures, provided by Ukrainian photographers, show the dead and injured, people grieving, destroyed buildings and bridges, and refugees with small children escaping the country.
Moscow calls its actions in Ukraine a "special military operation" to disarm its neighbour. The Kremlin says Russian forces have not targeted civilians.
Russia's parliament this month passed a law imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally "fake" news about the military.
Russian officials have said that false information has been spread by Russia's enemies such as the United States and its Western European allies in an attempt to sow discord among the Russian people.
There were no people seen at the windows of the train on Friday morning. No one disembarked from or joined the service as no tickets have been sold to and from the station for the Russian trains since the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. It was not known how many passengers were on the train.
Russian aircraft between Kaliningrad and Russia fly over the international waters of the Baltic Sea, prolonging the journey, after Lithuania and other EU countries banned them from their airspace in response to Russia's attack on Ukraine.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Alison Williams)
DOUBLE ENTENDRE
A filthy statue found in an English garden was a long-lost masterpiece worth up to $10.5 million
Alia Shoaib Sat, March 26, 2022 The long-lost statue by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova depicts Mary Magdalene in “a state of ecstasy.”
Christie's
A marble statue that sat in a garden for decades was identified as a long-lost work of an Italian master.
The 1822 sculpture by Antonio Canova depicts Mary Magdalene in "a state of ecstasy."
It is expected to sell for between $6.5 million to $10.5 million, said the auction house Christie's.
A marble statue that sat in a British garden for decades has been identified as a long-lost work of Italian sculptor Antonio Canova.
It will now be sold at auction house Christie's in London and is expected to sell for between $6.5 million to $10.5 million (£5 million to £8 million).
The statue, which Christie's says depicts Mary Magdalene in "a state of ecstasy," was bought by its current owners for $7,540 (£5,200) at a garden statuary auction in Sussex, England, 20 years ago.
The unnamed British couple is believed to have used the statue to decorate their garden, The Guardian reported.
Last year, it was identified as one of the last marble sculptures completed by Canova before his death in 1822, which had been commissioned by then British Prime Minister Lord Liverpool.
"It is a miracle that Antonio Canova's exceptional, long-lost masterpiece has been found, 200 years after its completion," Dr. Mario Guderzo, a leading Canova scholar, said in a Christie's press release. Related video: Artist injects liquid gold into textures resin artwork
"Scholars have searched for this work for decades, so the discovery is of fundamental importance for the history of collecting and the history of art."
In a letter to a friend in 1819, Canova described the sculpture depicting "Magdalene lying on the ground, almost fainting from her penitence's excessive pain."
Following the death of Lord Liverpool, the sculpture changed hands between several owners, and at some point, the attribution to Canova was lost.
"The re-discovery of the 'Recumbent Magdalene' brings to a conclusion a very particular story worthy of a novel, of a marble of significant historical value and great aesthetic beauty produced by Canova in the final years of his artistic activity," Guderzo said.
UK Shark House owner dismayed at getting protected status
A fibreglass sculpture known as the Headington Shark and originally called "Untitled 1986", by British sculptor John Buckley stands appearing to crash through the roof of a house in the Headington area of Oxford, England, on April 30, 2019. The 25-foot tall sculpture of a shark crashing through the roof of Magnus Henson-Heine’s house in Oxford, England, is now a protected landmark — and he’s not happy about it. Henson-Heine loves the installation, erected by his father and a local sculptor in 1986 as an anti-war, anti-nuke protest that remains relevant as bombs fall on Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear weapons. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)
DANICA KIRKA Fri, March 25, 2022, 1:24 PM·3 min read
LONDON (AP) — The 25-foot tall (7.6 meter) sculpture of a shark crashing through the roof of Magnus Hanson-Heine’s house in rural Oxford, England, is now a protected landmark — and he’s not happy about it.
Hanson-Heine loves the installation, erected by his father and a local sculptor in 1986 as an anti-war, anti-nuke protest that still remains relevant now as bombs fall on Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear weapons.
But he says the Oxford City Council ignored his father’s other message this week when it designated the structure a heritage site that makes a “special contribution” to the community. Bill Heine installed the shark without the approval of local officials because he didn’t think they should have the right to decide what art people see, and the council spent years trying to remove the sculpture.
“Using the planning apparatus to preserve a historical symbol of planning law defiance is absurd on the face of it,” Hanson-Heine, a quantum chemist, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Bill Heine, an American expat who studied law at the University of Oxford, got the idea for the sculpture after he heard U.S. warplanes fly over his house one night in April 1986. When he woke up the next morning, he learned that the planes had been on their way to bomb Tripoli in retaliation for Libyan sponsorship of terrorist attacks on U.S. troops.
The image of a shark crashing through the roof captured the shock civilians must feel when bombs smash into their homes, Magnus Hanson-Heine said. His father died in 2019.
Heine and his friend sculptor John Buckley built the great white out of fiberglass, then installed it on Aug. 9, the 41st anniversary of the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
The shark’s anti-war message is just as important today as Russian bombs fall on Ukraine, Henson-Heine said.
“That’s obviously something that the people in Ukraine are experiencing right now in very real time,” he said. “But certainly when there’s nuclear weapons on the stage, which has been through my entire life, that’s always a very real threat.”
But the sight of three-quarters of a great white shark sticking out of the roof of a row of brick houses on a quiet suburban street isn’t always a serious subject.
The shark house has its own website, which features photos of Bill Heine and Buckley sharing a glass of wine alongside the sculpture and a young passer-by in a pose that makes it look as if she’s eating the shark.
Hanson-Heine recently had it repainted to restore the blue-green shimmer to the shark’s hide — keeping it in tip-top shape.
He laughs when asked whether the shark's head can be found inside the house.
“I believe it was an urban myth for a while that it was poking above the toilet,'' he said. “But no.”
Russian state TV whistleblower: 'We were told war would be over in 2 weeks'
Russian journalists were told the invasion of Ukraine would be over in two weeks, a media whistleblower has revealed. (Getty)
Russian state journalists were told the invasion of Ukraine would be over in two weeks, according to a media whistleblower.
Speaking anonymously to ITV News, a journalist for the Russia 1 television channel said they were initially told the war would be over by 8 March, then they would be able to go back to their "normal work".
But a week after that date passed, Russian security chiefs admitted that the conflict was not going "as fast as we would like".
Russian invasion of Ukraine - territory believed to be controlled by Russia. (PA)
The journalist's comments come as Russian efforts to take Ukraine continue to stall, a month after the invasion.
Ukrainian forces are managing to hold off Russian troops, despite predictions of an early victory. (Reuters)
But the journalist said a week after 8 March came and went, Viktor Zolotov, a member of Russia’s national security council admitted that "not everything is going as fast as we would like".
The anonymous journalist is the latest media whistleblower to speak out.
In a high profile protest, journalist Marina Osvyannikovainterrupted a live broadcast carrying a placard that read "they are lying to you here".
In a video recorded prior to her protest, she said she was "ashamed" to be working for "Kremlin propaganda".
Nigerian Billionaire is Supplying Fertilizer to the World When Russia Can't
Angela Johnson Fri, March 25, 2022, Aliko Dangote
The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being felt around the world, including right here in the United States. Consumers are already feeling the pain of rising gas prices and a volatile stock market. And a fertilizer shortage may soon result in a global food crisis. But a Nigerian mogul is looking to seize the moment, providing a solution to the problem that offers new economic opportunities for his country.
Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote opened a $2.5 billion fertilizer plant outside of Lagos, the country’s largest city, on March 22. The 1,235-acre factory can produce three million metric tons of fertilizer per year, making it the largest plant in Africa and the second-largest in the world. Dangote also plans to open an oil refinery that produces 650,000 barrels per day, later this year.
Russia is a key supplier of the soil nutrients that are important to corn, soy, rice and wheat crops around the world. According to Trade Data Monitor and Bloomberg’s Green Markets, Russia “accounted for almost one-fifth of 2021 fertilizer exports.” But after the country’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, western countries have laid down tough economic sanctions, which have interrupted Russia’s ability to ship fertilizer around the world. The resulting domino effect has led to record-high global fertilizer prices. That could cause food shortages as farmers have to consider using less fertilizer for their crops and scaling back on the amount of land they use for planting. In the United States, the cost of fertilizer is expected to increase 12% this year, after rising 17% in 2021, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
As the world deals with the fertilizer crisis, countries are looking to Dangote to provide relief. He says the company already counts the United States, Brazil, and India as customers. “People are begging us to sell,” Dangote said. “We are very choosy who we sell this product to. The EU [is] trying to buy from us,” he added.
With a net worth of $14 billion (yes, that’s billion with a “b”), Dangote is Africa’s richest person and the 80th-richest person in the world. He is the founder of Dangote Cement, the largest cement producer in Africa. This latest business venture is only going to add to his massive wealth. But the billionaire has no problem spreading his fortune around. The Dangote Group is the second-largest employer in Nigeria after the federal government.
In addition to helping to supply much-needed fertilizer to support farmers around the world, Dangote considers his plant another tremendous opportunity to provide sustainable jobs to people in his country. “We are lucky to have this plant,” Dangote told CNN. “This can help a lot of African countries. The export market is a seller’s market. The plant is creating huge opportunities in the area of job creation, warehousing, transport and logistics. This will create significant wealth, reduce poverty, and help in securing the future of our nation.”
QUANTUM WAR
Atom-smashing CERN lab ratchets up measures against Russia
A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. CERN, the sprawling Geneva-area research center that houses the world’s largest atom smasher, is grappling with how to best join international action against Russia for its allegedly inhumane invasion of Ukraine without sacrificing science that serves humanity. A decision on the right balance to strike looms this week because CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is about to get running again after a more than three-year hiatus.
(Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File)
Fri, March 25, 2022, 12:24 PM·2 min read
GENEVA (AP) — The sprawling European science lab that houses the world’s largest atom smasher is taking new steps that will further limit its cooperation with Russian research institutes in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The CERN Council, the governing body of the Geneva-based lab with 23 member states, announced Friday that its scientists will suspend participation in all scientific committees in Russia and neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally that facilitated the Feb. 24 invasion.
CERN, the historic acronym for what is now the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had grappled with its response to the invasion because nearly 7% of its 18,000-odd researchers from around the world are linked to Russian institutions. On March 8, the council suspended new collaborations with Russia and stripped Russia of its observer status at the organization.
The issue of whether to further sanction Russia became pressing because the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is set to start its third-ever run next month.
The machine propels particles through an underground, 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of superconducting magnets in and around Geneva, generating science that can help elucidate mysteries like dark matter or the standard model of particle physics. Russian scientists have been involved in planning multiple experiments.
Under the new measures approved Friday, CERN will suspend all joint events with Russian institutes and pause considering any new candidates from Russia and Belarus to join the organization's staff.
The council also announced that it will suspend all collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an international grouping of 19 member nations based in Dubna, Russia. More than half of the members are former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, but they also include Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, North Korea, and Vietnam.
Ukrainians take on 'wall of propaganda' on Chinese social media
Sun, March 27, 2022
As Ukrainian forces fight on the front lines to halt Russia's military advance, another battle is taking place in Chinese cyberspace.
Ukrainians who can speak Mandarin are taking to Chinese social media platforms in an effort to provide information about the Russian invasion and win public support in China.
They are translating the latest developments in the war into Chinese, including information on casualties and analysis, and posting it on their accounts on popular social media networks like WeChat and Weibo.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
Roman Khivrenko, 32, said the information available in China - on social media platforms and in state media - was heavily influenced by Russia.
"We want to break down the wall of propaganda and show Chinese people what's going on in fact," said Khivrenko, who studied international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing. Roman Khivrenko has been posting updates on the situation in Ukraine to his Chinese social media accounts. Photo: WeChat alt=Roman Khivrenko has been posting updates on the situation in Ukraine to his Chinese social media accounts. Photo: WeChat>
China has refused to condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine, or to call it an invasion - a line closely followed by Chinese state media outlets.
Beijing has also touted humanitarian aid and called for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but has resisted pressure to use its leverage with close ally Moscow to push for an end to the war. And there is growing suspicion in the West that Beijing could help Moscow to get around sanctions and provide Russia with military equipment.
Ukrainian internet celebrity "Masha" is among those to join the information war on Chinese social media.
She has been posting videos on the situation in her hometown, Kostiantynivka, in the eastern region of Donetsk, where she joined her parents after leaving Kyiv.
"In my hometown, people need to hide in underground shelters when the air-raid sirens go off," Masha says in fluent Chinese in one video posted to Weibo, TikTok and Xigua Video.
"Not enough bread, all the banks have run out of cash ... but people can't buy food without cash. It looks like the place is quietly dying," she says. Masha's "war life" videos have racked up more than 1 million views. Photo: YouTube
Masha studied Chinese language and literature at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and spent nine months studying in China. Her "war life" videos have racked up more than 1 million views, and she now has over 600,000 followers.
Author, musician and artist Ivan Semasiuk, 42, is meanwhile contributing articles and documentaries - posted on social media platforms around the world in Chinese and other languages - in an effort to explain the histories of Ukraine and Russia.
According to analysts, Russia's attack has strengthened Ukraine's national identity, and prompted people to defend their country in different ways.
"The Russian invasion has had this overwhelming effect of consolidating the national identity of Ukrainians, it has stirred patriotism among the younger generations," said Eagle Yin, a research fellow at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies in Beijing.
That view was echoed by Hong Kong-based defence analyst Liang Guoliang, who said Russian President Vladimir Putin had underestimated the Ukrainian resistance, driven by national identity.
For Ukrainians like Khivrenko, part of that resistance is the fight against propaganda. He said they did not expect anything from Chinese people, but he hoped Beijing would "not support Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine".
Copyright (c) 2022. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
EU's biggest economy Germany blocked Russian coal ban, sources say
Trains are loaded with coal at Russia's largest Borodinsky
opencast colliery, owned by SUEK, near the Siberian town of Borodino
Fri, March 25, 2022 By Francesco Guarascio
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - In the early stages of sanctions drafting against Moscow, one idea gained traction in Brussels - a ban on the import of Russian coal - until the European Union's biggest economy Germany struck it down, two sources told Reuters.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, but was amassing troops, EU policymakers began in December to work on new sanctions and presented a first list of possible measures to EU countries in January.
It avoided most energy imports because of the EU's dependency on Russian fossil fuels, especially gas and oil.
But it included a ban on coal, two European diplomats familiar with the plan told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The aim was to show Moscow the EU was serious about energy sanctions, which are the most divisive because they directly hit the EU economy as well as the Kremlin, one of the officials said.
The measure would also have been in line with EU climate policy, which has long targeted coal as among the most polluting energy sources that must be phased out.
But Germany, the EU country most reliant on coal imported from Russia, objected, the officials said.
Germany's permanent representation to the EU, which directly handles negotiations on EU sanctions, declined to comment on the matter.
When a first round of sanctions was approved on Feb 24, the day Russia began the invasion it describes as a "special military operation", there was no sign of a coal ban.
It has also been absent from three successive rounds of EU sanctions that targeted Russian banks, oligarchs, steel and defence.
As the EU edges towards securing alternative energy supplies, including through a deal on U.S. gas, Germany could be shifting its position.
Germany's economy ministry Robert Habeck said on Friday that Berlin had reduced its dependence on Russian coal and hoped to cease all coal imports by the autumn..
EU leaders have also discussed a ban on Russian oil, but countries, including Germany, have criticised that idea too and opposition to halting Russian gas imports, which provide around 40% of EU needs, is even less popular, officials have said.
In 2020, Berlin was by far the EU's largest importer of coal from Moscow, especially thermal coal used to generate electricity, data from the EU think tank Bruegel based on statistics from Eurostat show.
The sources said that the idea for a coal ban was in its early stages when Germany blocked it. There had not been a formal document detailing import restrictions, but the issue had been made "crystal clear" to Germany, one source said.
In the bilateral talks that followed, Germany said it could not support that plan, the officials said.
"It was not a clear veto" from Berlin, one diplomat said, but "that was enough to keep it out of the proposed packages".
(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio @fraguarascio; editing by Barbara Lewis)
ALBRIGHT CHANNELS DAVID ICKE
'Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian.'
In the piece publishedin the New York Times on February 23,the day before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Albright recalled her first impressions of the new Russian leader after meeting him in 2000.
He had just taken over from Boris Yeltsin as Russia's leader, and was acting president. At the time, Albright was President Bill Clinton's secretary of state.
"Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin," recalled Albright.
"Flying home, I recorded my impressions. 'Putin is small and pale,' I wrote, 'so cold as to be almost reptilian.'"
Her notes also included the line that "Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness," appearing to foreshadow the invasion of Ukraine.
Aroused by Power: Why Madeleine Albright Was Not Right
by Binoy Kampmark / March 25th, 2022
When involved in war, those who feel like benefactors are bound to congratulate the gun toting initiators. If you so happen to be on the losing end, sentiments are rather different. Complicity and cause in murder come to mind.
The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in 1999, one that saw NATO attacks on Serbian civilian targets while aiding the forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It was a distinct backing of sides in a vicious, tribal conflict, where good might miraculously bubble up, winged by angels. Those angels never came.
Through her tenure in public office, Albright showed a distinct arousal for US military power. In 1992, she rounded on the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell for refusing to deploy US forces to Bosnia. “What’s the point of having this superb military machine you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Too many apologists have come out to explain why Albright was so adamant about the use of such force. Biographical details are cited: born in Czechoslovakia as Marie Jana Korbelová; of Jewish roots rinsed in the blood wine of Roman Catholicism. She fled with her family to Britain, eventually finding refuge in Notting Hill Gate. She went to school, spent time in air raid shelters, sang A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.
The NATO intervention – and this point was never lost on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reiterated it in his February address – took place without UN Security Council authorisation. For the law abiders and totemic worshipers of the UN Charter keen to get at Russia’s latest misconduct in Ukraine, this served to illustrate the fickleness of international law’s supporters. At a given moment, they are bound to turn tail, becoming might-is-right types. The persecuted, in time, can become persecutors.
NATO, in fact, became an alliance Albright wished to see expanded and fed, not trimmed and diminished. The historical role of Germany and Russia in central and eastern Europe became the rationale for expanding a neutralising alliance that would include previous “victim” countries. A weakened Moscow could be ignored. “We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement,” she told US Senators in 1997.
Paul Wilson, considering the Albright legacy, wrote in 2012 about the danger of following analogies in history to the letter. “Historical analogies are seductive and often treacherous. [Slobodan] Milošević was not Hitler and the Kosovar Liberation Army was not a champion of liberal democracy.”
In fact, the KLA was previously designated by the State Department to be a terrorist organisation. “The Kosovar Albanians,” wrote the regretful former UN Commander in Bosnia Major General Lewis MacKenzie in April 2003, “played us like a Stradivarius violin.” In his view, NATO and the international community had “subsidised and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being perpetrators of violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary.”
Such is the treacherous nature of the sort of perverse humanitarianism embraced by Albright and her colleagues. Such a policy, Alan J. Kuperman remarks with gloomy accuracy, “creates a moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky or fraudulent behaviour of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect against the backlash.”
One such encouraged individual, Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani, was all gushing over Albright’s legacy. “She gave us hope when we didn’t have it. She became our voice and our arm and when we had neither voice nor an arm ourselves. She felt our people’s pain because she had experienced herself persecution in childhood.”
The first female Secretary of State will also be linked with the Clinton Administration’s sanctions policy that killed numerous citizens and maimed the country of Iraq, only for it to then be invaded by the venal architects of regime toppling in the succeeding Bush Administration. This sickening episode sank any heroic notions of law and justice, showing that Albright was content using a wretched calculus on life and death when necessary.
On May 12, 1996, Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS program 60 Minutes about the impact of the sanctions that served to profitlessly kill hundreds of thousands. “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than have died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Then US Ambassador Albright did not flinch. “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
In September 2000, she was still crazed by the sanctions formula against Iraq, telling the United Nations in an absurd address that Baghdad had to be stood up to, being “against the United Nations authority and international law.” Meek acknowledgment was given to the fact that “the hardships faced by Iraq’s people” needed to be dealt with. What came first was “the integrity of this institution, our security, and international law.”
Albright could be sketchy on sanctions. In instances where Congress imposed automatic sanctions, Albright could express furious disagreement. When this happened to both India and Pakistan in 1998 in the aftermath of nuclear weapons testing, she could barely conceal her irritation on CNN’s Late Edition. “I think we must do something about it, because sanctions that have no flexibility, no waiver authority, are just blunt instruments. And diplomacy requires us to have some finesse.”
The hagiographic salutations have been many. One, from Caroline Kelly at CNN, is simply too much. Albright “championed the expansion of NATO, pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, sought to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, and championed human rights democracy across the globe.”
As Secretary of State, she presided in an administration of the world’s only surviving superpower, uncontained, unrestrained, dangerously optimistic. There was much hubris – all that strength, and lack of assuredness as to how to use it. The Cold War narrative and rivals were absent, and the Clinton Administration became a soap opera of scandal and indiscretion.
In her later years, she worried about the onset of authoritarianism, of power going to people’s heads, the inner tyrant unleashed in the playpen of international relations. She had much to complain about regarding Donald Trump, Putin and Brexit. In encouraging the loud return of the US to front and centre of international politics, she ignored its previous abuses, including some perpetrated by her office. When given such power, is it not axiomatic that corruption will follow?
The death of Madeleine Albright on Wednesday was the occasion for an outpouring of praise by the American political establishment and the corporate media, glorifying her role as the first female Secretary of State and covering up her close identification with some of the worst imperialist crimes of the 1990s—and today.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, center, gets briefing on the situation around the border between two Koreas from American Sgt. Tim Ingoldsby, left, during her visit to guard post Ouelletle in the border village of the Panmunjom, north of Seoul, Feb. 22, 1997. (AP Photo/Pool, File)
In the context of the ongoing claims that the US and NATO are leading a worldwide campaign against Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the celebration of Albright’s bloody record is a demonstration of grotesque hypocrisy. Albright was an advocate and apologist for much more brutal actions than any taken so far by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
Perhaps the most notorious episode in her career came in 1996, when she was asked on the CBS program “60 Minutes” about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children because of severe economic sanctions imposed on that country as part of an effort to undermine the regime of Saddam Hussein. More children had died in Iraq than in Hiroshima, interviewer Lesley Stahl said. “The price was worth it,” Albright responded.
It is noteworthy that none of the admiring obituaries of Albright which have appeared in the corporate media makes any mention of this comment or of Albright’s role in enforcing and promoting a policy that resulted in death on such a massive scale.
The colossal death toll among Iraqi children would be repeatedly cited by Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden as a reason for their shift from an alliance with the United States—during the US-backed guerrilla war against Soviet military forces in Afghanistan—to targeting the US for terrorist attacks on 9/11. The US massacre of innocents became the pretext for Al Qaeda’s.
This comment became a political black eye for the Clinton administration when it began a campaign at college campuses to build support for US airstrikes against Iraq in February 1998. A trio of top foreign policy officials, Secretary of State Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, traveled to Ohio State University, where they addressed a large and—they thought—thoroughly vetted audience.
Some dissenters challenged Albright, however. She was asked how she could justify US support for dictators like Suharto in Indonesia and Israeli repression of the Palestinians and then claim to be opposing Saddam Hussein on the basis of universal human rights concerns. Wasn’t this just a double standard, excusing the crimes of US allies while highlighting those of US targets?
Albright tried to beat down the critics, asking them, in typically McCarthyite fashion, why they were so concerned with the rights of Saddam Hussein. She was booed down by the crowd, which responded enthusiastically to the exposure of the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. That was the end of what had been dubbed, from the officials’ initials, the “ABC” tour. This episode was reported by the WSWS but is again not mentioned in any obituaries of Albright in the media.
Albright is most closely identified with US policy in the former Yugoslavia, which was dismembered under the pressure of German and US imperialism beginning in 1991, when Germany recognized the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia, followed by the German and American recognition of the secession of Bosnia.
Serbs, the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, were transformed overnight into persecuted minorities, particularly in Croatia and Bosnia. Tensions skyrocketed as the Stalinist bureaucrats in each republic transformed themselves rapidly into nationalistic demagogues and, ultimately, into fascistic advocates of “ethnic cleansing,” with the majority in each republic seeking to suppress or drive out those of the “wrong” ethnic background.
Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations, was a fervent advocate of US and UN intervention in the various civil wars that broke out within Yugoslavia. She initially was unsuccessful in convincing her colleagues in the Clinton White House and the Pentagon that US military forces should be deployed into the region, particularly air power.
In one notorious confrontation with General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she declared, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Ultimately the US did intervene with both air strikes and economic sanctions, forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and leaders of the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Dayton Accords, a tripartite division of Bosnia into zones dominated by Muslims, Croats and Serbs, under the supervision of a UN peacekeeping force.
In 1997, Clinton named Albright as Secretary of State for his second term in office. So right-wing and militaristic was her record that she was confirmed by a 99-0 vote in the Senate, a unanimous bipartisan vote which included such reactionaries as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and the arch-militarist John McCain.
One of Albright’s main priorities was the expansion of NATO, which admitted three former members of the Soviet Bloc, Poland, Hungary and Albright’s birthplace, the Czech Republic, in 1999. This was a brazen repudiation of undertakings Washington had given to Mikhail Gorbachev during the break-up of the Soviet Union, that NATO would not expand into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact.
When a new crisis erupted in Kosovo in 1999, with clashes between Albanians and Serbs, Albright spearheaded a campaign for military intervention, depicting the ethnic strife as a genocide directed by Milosevic, in what turned out to be a gross exaggeration. At a conference at Château de Rambouillet in France, she browbeat the Serb delegation with the threat of US-NATO bombing, while presenting an ultimatum that included accepting the right of 30,000 NATO troops to go anywhere in what remained of Yugoslavia, essentially turning the country into a colony of imperialism.
When the Serbs and Russians walked out, Albright proclaimed the Albanian delegates—drawn from the Kosovo Liberation Army, a gangster outfit linked to drug and organ trafficking—to be freedom fighters deserving international support. Within days, an intensive bombing campaign began which lasted 78 days and killed thousands.
The damage inflicted on major Yugoslav cities, particularly the capital Belgrade, was later estimated at more than $30 billion, which included more than 20,000 homes, many government buildings, dozens of hospitals and other health care facilities, and much of the country’s basic infrastructure—roads, bridges, water treatment and sewage facilities and airports.
Both in its savagery and its brazen violation of international law, the US-NATO attack on Serbia makes a mockery of present-day claims that Putin’s reactionary attack on Ukraine is an unprecedented breach of international norms that have prevailed in Europe since the end of World War II.
The imperialist powers dismembered a sovereign country, Yugoslavia, and redrew its borders, recognizing the independence of Kosovo—long a part of Serbia—and endorsing the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, first from Croatia, then from Bosnia, later from Kosovo. The unprovoked military assault on a major European city did not begin with Kiev in 2022 but in Belgrade in 1999 (to be followed by Donetsk in 2014, when Ukrainian forces shelled pro-Russian secessionists).
There is not space and time enough to explore every crime to which this “feminist icon” of American imperialism is linked. She was an adamant defender of bloodstained dictators aligned with the United States, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Suharto of Indonesia. While UN ambassador, she cast the US veto against any outside intervention to halt the genocide in Rwanda. As Secretary of State, she advocated American supremacy on a world scale, describing the United States as “the indispensable nation,” which had to be the focal point of all major global undertakings.
Albright was the product of a bipartisan foreign policy elite dedicated to the promotion of US imperialism’s world domination. Her father, after leaving Czechoslovakia following the Stalinist takeover, taught international relations at the University of Denver, where one of his graduate students was Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State for George W. Bush, and one of the principal architects of the Iraq War.
Albright herself studied at Wellesley and then Columbia University, where she took her Ph.D. under the tutelage of Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1976. When Brzezinski became Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor in 1977, he brought Albright with him to the National Security Council, where she was his liaison with Congress.
Independently wealthy through her marriage with publishing millionaire Joseph Albright, she became a top fundraiser for the Democratic Party and moved up in Democratic foreign policy circles, advising Carter, then presidential candidates Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992. It was Clinton who named her UN Ambassador in 1993 and Secretary of State in 1997.
After leaving the White House in 2001, she founded the Albright Stonebridge Group, a management consulting firm specializing in overseas risk assessments, and became the godmother of a slew of foreign policy operatives for future Democratic administrations. As columnist David Ignatius observed Thursday, “Albright’s proteges surround us. Wendy Sherman, her devoted colleague for decades, is Deputy Secretary of State, and nearly every member of the Biden administration foreign policy team can trace a lineage to Albright.”
Even more significantly, Albright became chair of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in 2001 and held that position until her death. The NDI is an arm of the capitalist state, CIA-financed to promote pro-imperialist political forces and to subvert any radical or oppositionist trend that might threaten US corporate interests in countries around the world.
In that capacity, Albright was deeply involved in every crime of the US military-intelligence apparatus in the first two decades of the 21st century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Ukraine. The celebration of her life and work by the corporate media, and by Democratic and Republican politicians alike, is a demonstration of the bipartisan consensus that anything goes, no matter how undemocratic and bloody, in the defense of the profits and worldwide global interests of the American financial aristocracy.
