Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation about China?

by Vijay Prashad / August 11th, 2022

Wang Bingxiu of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.

As the US legislative leader Nancy Pelosi swept into Taipei, people around the world held their breath. Her visit was an act of provocation. In December 1978, the US government – following a United Nations General Assembly decision in 1971 – recognised the People’s Republic of China, setting aside its previous treaty obligations to Taiwan. Despite this, US President Jimmy Carter signed the Taiwan Relations Act (1979), which allowed US officials to maintain intimate contact with Taiwan, including through the sale of weapons. This decision is noteworthy as Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 to 1987, requiring a regular weapons supplier.

Pelosi’s journey to Taipei was part of the US’s ongoing provocation of China. This campaign includes former President Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, former President Donald Trump’s ‘trade war’, the creation of security partnerships, the Quad and AUKUS, and the gradual transformation of NATO into an instrument against China. This agenda continues with President Joe Biden’s assessment that China must be weakened since it is the ‘only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge’ to the US-dominated world system.

China did not use its military power to prevent Pelosi and other US congressional leaders from travelling to Taipei. But, when they left, the Chinese government announced that it would halt eight key areas of cooperation with the US, including cancelling military exchanges and suspending civil cooperation on a range of issues, such as climate change. That is what Pelosi’s trip accomplished: more confrontation, less cooperation.

Indeed, anyone who stands for greater cooperation with China is vilified in the Western media as well as in Western-allied media from the Global South as an ‘agent’ of China or a promoter of ‘disinformation’. I responded to some of these allegations in South Africa’s The Sunday Times on 7 August 2022. The remainder of this newsletter reproduces that article.

Ghazi Ahmet (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China), Muqam, 1984.

A new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity. The general malady that ensues is a deep suspicion and hatred of China, not just of its current leadership or even the Chinese political system, but hatred of the entire country and of Chinese civilisation – hatred of just about anything to do with China.

This madness has made it impossible to have an adult conversation about China. Words and phrases such as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘genocide’ are thrown around with no care to ascertain facts. China is a country of 1.4 billion people, an ancient civilisation that suffered, as much of the Global South did, a century of humiliation, in this case from the British-inflicted Opium Wars (which began in 1839) until the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when leader Mao Zedong deliberately announced that the Chinese people had stood up. Since then, Chinese society has been deeply transformed by utilising its social wealth to address the age-old problems of hunger, illiteracy, despondency, and patriarchy. As with all social experiments, there have been great problems, but these are to be expected from any collective human action. Rather than seeing China for both its successes and contradictions, this madness of our times seeks to reduce China to an Orientalist caricature – an authoritarian state with a genocidal agenda that seeks global domination.

This madness has a definite point of origin in the United States, whose ruling elites are greatly threatened by the advances of the Chinese people – particularly in robotics, telecommunications, high-speed rail, and computer technology. These advances pose an existential threat to the advantages long enjoyed by Western corporations, who have benefited from centuries of colonialism and the straitjacket of intellectual property laws. Fear of its own fragility and the integration of Europe into Eurasian economic developments has led the West to launch an information war against China.

This ideological tidal wave is overwhelming our ability to have serious, balanced conversations about China’s role in the world. Western countries with a long history of brutal colonialism in Africa, for instance, now regularly decry what they call Chinese colonialism in Africa without any acknowledgment of their own past or the entrenched French and US military presence across the continent. Accusations of ‘genocide’ are always directed at the darker peoples of the world – whether in Darfur or in Xinjiang – but never at the US, whose illegal war on Iraq alone resulted in the deaths of over a million people. The International Criminal Court, steeped in Eurocentrism, indicts one African leader after another for crimes against humanity but has never indicted a Western leader for their endless wars of aggression.

Dedron (Tibet Autonomous Region, China), Untitled, 2013.

The fog of this New Cold War is enveloping us today. Recently, in the Daily Maverick and the Mail & Guardian, I was accused of promoting ‘Chinese and Russian propaganda’ and having close links to the Chinese party-state. What is the basis of these claims?

Firstly, elements in Western intelligence attempt to brand any dissent against the Western assault on China as disinformation and propaganda. For instance, my December 2021 report from Uganda debunked the false claim that a Chinese loan to the country sought to take over its only international airport as part of a malicious ‘debt trap project’ – a narrative that has also been repeatedly debunked by leading US scholars. Through conversations with Ugandan government officials and public statements by Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija, I found, however, that the deal was poorly understood by the state but that there was no question of the seizure of Entebbe International Airport. Despite the fact that Bloomberg’s entire story on this loan was built on a lie, they were not tarred with the slur of ‘carrying water for Washington’. That is the power of the information war.

Secondly, there is a claim about my alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party based on the simple fact that I engage with Chinese intellectuals and have an unpaid post at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, a prominent think tank based in Beijing. Yet, many of the South African publications that have made these outrageous claims are principally funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Soros took the name of his foundation from Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), in which Popper developed the principle of ‘unlimited tolerance’. Popper argued for maximum dialogue and that opinions against one’s own should be countered ‘by rational argument’. Where are the rational arguments here, in a smear campaign that says dialogue with Chinese intellectuals is somehow off-limits but conversation with US government officials is perfectly acceptable? What level of civilisational apartheid is being produced here, where liberals in South Africa are promoting a ‘clash of civilisations’ rather than a ‘dialogue between civilisations’?

Countries in the Global South can learn a great deal from China’s experiments with socialism. Its eradication of extreme poverty during the pandemic – an accomplishment celebrated by the United Nations – can teach us how to tackle similar obstinate facts in our own countries (which is why Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced a detailed study about the techniques that China employed to achieve this feat). No country in the world is perfect, and none is above criticism. But to develop a paranoid attitude towards one country and to attempt to isolate it is socially dangerous. Walls need to be knocked down, not built up. The US is provoking a conflict due to its own anxieties about China’s economic advances: we should not be drawn in as useful idiots. We need to have an adult conversation about China, not one imposed upon us by powerful interests that are not our own.

Yang Guangqi of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.

My article in The Sunday Times does not address all the issues that swirl around the US-China conflict. However, it is an invitation to a dialogue. If you have any thoughts on these issues, please email me.FacebookTwitter

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities

by Binoy Kampmark / August 10th, 2022

Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering.  Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency.

In 1924, the French novelist and future statesman André Malraux, proved himself one of Europe’s greatest adventurers in making off with a ton of sacred stones from Angkor Wat.  It is estimated that 20 statutes were taken.  Malraux, along with his wife Clara and collaborator Louis Chevasson, were subsequently apprehended for their pinching efforts on the order of George Groslier, founding director of the National Museum of Cambodia.  According to the culturally eclectic Groslier, Malraux deserved the title of le petit voleur (the little thief) for such brazen exploits.

The assortment of crises from the 1960s to the 1990s also did their fair share in creating conditions of instability.  Where genocide, unrest and a collapse of social order unfolds, plunderers thrive.  Archaeological sites offered rich pickings to looters, often in collaboration with local military authorities. The pilfered items would then be taken to the Cambodia-Thailand border and taken to Thai brokers.

With the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, things worsened further.  Hundreds of temples were left vulnerable, rich prey to opportunistic authorities and rapacious individuals.  Over the course of November and December 1998, the 12th-century temple of Banteay Chhmar fell prey to a raid that saw some 500 square feet of bas-relief hacked into pieces and transported.  Antiquities expert Claude Jacques considered it “a case study for looting, every kind of looting, big and small.”

With such a record of extensive, relentless theft, any return of antiquities is bound to be seen as a squiggle upon paper – hardly an achievement.  But the recent return from the United States of 30 looted items, including bronze and stone statues of Hindu and Buddhist deities, was a positive note in a field otherwise marked by disappointments.  It is, at the very least, a modest addition to other repatriations that have begun to take place from various collections and auction houses.

The system of recovery and repatriation is never easy.  Museums are often reluctant to part with goods obtained in questionable circumstances.  The larger the museum’s collections, the less innocent its administrators tend to be.  Stolen artefacts pack and fill museums globally, and the trend is unlikely to change.

In the case of the 30 items of concern here, they had been procured by the object itchy Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok dealer also known as Pakpong Kriangsak and gifted in the art of forging documents to conceal the way the various samples had been obtained.  Along the way, this Malraux-like incarnation, an “adventurer scholar”, had also become an authority on Cambodian art, co-writing three books on Khmer antiquities with scholar Emma Bunker.

In 1951, he settled in Thailand and proceeded to concoct fabulous stories of innocent acquisition.  In 2010, Latchford gave the Bangkok Post a taste of his storytelling, spinning a horrendous fib by claiming that “most of the pieces he has come across have been found and dug up by farmers in fields.”  The enterprising Latchford, for his deceptive labours, managed to acquire a collection of Khmer Empire antiquities so vast it constituted the largest outside Cambodia itself.

Along the way, a number of trusts were also set up in tax havens to further complicate problems of ownership.  The establishment of the Jersey-domiciled trusts was a direct response to interest shown by US authorities in Latchford’s empire of ill-gotten gains.

In fact, Latchford’s activities had interested the US Department of Justice for some years, and was charged in 2019 with wire fraud conspiracy and various crimes related to the sale of looted Cambodian antiquities through creating false provenance documents and falsifying shipping documents and invoices.  His death in 2020 terminated the proceedings against him.

On this occasion, a number of private collectors and various US museums succumbed to three civil forfeiture claims made by Manhattan-based federal prosecutor Damian Williams in the Southern District of New York.  In November 2021, Williams, in filing a civil complaint against a museum in Denver, Colorado, noted how Latchford had “papered over the problematic provenance of Cambodian antiquities with falsehoods, in the process successfully placing stolen goods in the permanent collection of an American museum.”

According to the press release from the US Department of Justice, the stolen items had been obtained by “an organized looting network” and duly sold by Latchford.  They included “a 10th century sculpture of Skanda on a Peacock and a monumental 10th century sculpture of Ganesha, both looted from the ancient Khmer capital Koh Ker.”

Williams, reflecting on the 30 returned artefacts, was basking in some glory.  “Today, we celebrate the return of Cambodia’s cultural heritage to the Cambodian people, and reaffirm our commitment to reducing the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities.”

Ricky J. Patel, Acting Special-Agent-in-Charge of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), also added his bit, noting that HIS New York’s dedicated Cultural Property, Arts and Antiquities Unit had worked “alongside our government partners, hunted down leads, examined origin, reviewed financial records, and conducted dozens of interviews to find and recover these pieces we are returning today.”

The HSI unit in question is advertised as an elite gathering of 10,400 employees comprising 6,800 special agents located in 225 cities across the United States and 86 overseas locations across 55 countries.

Such efforts deserve some lowkey cheer.  Other culprits are getting off rather easily in this whole affair.  The success of Latchford and his ilk must, in the end, be based on a degree of connivance and understanding from those who received his stolen goods.  He had attained sufficient notoriety as far back as the early 1970s, when he began supplying a UK auction house with looted Khmer antiquities.  Even amateurs mildly interested in Cambodian artefacts would have been familiar that anything coming out of the country should have been subjected to glares of suspicion.

Tess Davis, director of the Antiquities Coalition, is blunt about the implications of this.  “If I were a museum curator, I would check every Cambodian piece acquired after 1965 just to be safe; that’s how prolific [Latchford] was.”  New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one institution that has admitted to doing so, “reviewing the pieces that came [into its] collection via Latchford and his associates”.

Ironically, the relinquished antiquities will also be displayed in a museum – in this case, the National Museum of Cambodia, located in Phnom Penh.  When they do feature, it will be worth noting where they were to begin with, unmolested in shrouded, jungled history, only to be tampered with by warriors in search of moneyed glory.FacebookTwitterReddit

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

A Story of Russia

by Kim Petersen / August 11th, 2022

Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without sufficient knowledge of Russian history.

— Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, p 268

The conflict among nations in Ukraine and the breakaway Donbass oblasts/republics has been magnified in western monopoly media since Russia backed up its security demands. To the extent that people want to ascertain the verisimilitude of media information, people ought to become familiar with the region, its peoples, and the history. With this intention and with an open mind to a viewpoint counter to my orientation (I am decidedly of a socialist orientation, but, I trust, with allegiance to verifiable evidence), I read The Story of Russia (Metropolitan Books, 2022) by the bourgeois historian Orlando Figes.

Thus, it did not surprise me that on page 1, Figes opines, “Vladimir Putin… managed to look bored. He seemed to want the ceremony to be done as soon as possible.” On page 2, “Putin looked uncomfortable.” In the introduction more bias is evident; Figes writes of “the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea,” (p 2) “the ‘putsch’ in Kiev, as the Kremlin called the Maidan uprising,” (p 4) “history writing in Russia, since its beginning in medieval chronicles, has been intertwined in mythical ideas,” (p 5) and Putin’s “authoritarian regime.” (p 6) In contemporary understanding, regime is pejorative for a totalitarian/autocratic government.

In the second chapter, “Origins,” Figes says that Putin asserts “the old imperial myth that the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarussians were historically one people.” In succeeding chapters, The Story of Russia runs through the intercourse between myriad groups of peoples, the Vikings, Finns, Mongols, Khazars, Turks, Arabs, Germans, French, etc that have intermixed knowledge, languages, cultures, religious beliefs, and commerce with Slavs. Russia has been conquered and has conquered others many times.

Figes lays out an eminently comprehensible historical sequence that led to rule by a revered tsardom with its concomitant corruption along with an exploited and impoverished peasant class. Traditionally, tsarist Russia leaned favorably toward western Europe which did not have the same favorable inclination toward Russia. This changed with Catherine the Great who envisioned Russian greatness stemming from a southern orientation. (p 127)

Serfdom would be identified as holding Russia back in wars and competition with the West. (p 154) The tsar would, when forced, in due course relinquish some powers, such as the establishment of zemstvos (self-government in Russian provinces), but eventually the corruption of the autocratic tsarist class would lead to a revolution that violently deposed the Romanovs. (For a dramatization of the history, see the Netflix series The Last Czars.)

Post-revolution, the Bolsheviks (Majoritarians) emerged victorious over the Mensheviks (Minoritarians). Figes writes that the tsar continued afterwards in “Soviet cults of the Leader.” (p 191)

Whereas Lenin, in his cult, appeared as a human god or saint, a sacred guide for the Party orphaned by his death, the cult of Stalin portrayed him as a tsar, the ‘little-father tsar’ or tsar-batiushka of folklore … (p 225)

Unfortunately, The Story of Russia suffers from being replete with many unsubstantiated claims, rumors, and opinions. One would expect that a book written by a professor of history who specializes in Russia would source most pertinent information, especially information that is debatable. For example, Figes writes of “Nikolai Yezhov, an unscrupulous henchman, who fed Stalin’s paranoid fears.” (p 229) Maybe this is so, but what is his source for a scrupulous reader to scrutinize in order to confirm or deny this? During the Great Terror, Figes writes that in 1937, “1,500 Soviet citizens were shot on average every day…” (p 232) Elsewhere, he relates that the Gulag population reached 2 million prisoners in 1952. (p 250) There is no sourcing to evaluate this information.

Figes is derisory of Joseph Stalin and Russian militarism during World War II:

There was almost no limit to the number of lives that the Stalinist regime was willing to expend to achieve its military goals…. Only by this ruthless disregard for human life can we explain the shocking losses of the Red Army — around 12 million soldiers killed between 1941 and 1945…

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev fares no better in Figes’ estimation:

Khrushchev’s erratic leadership, his tendency to act on intuition and then attack his critics, his meddling in affairs where he lacked expertise, and his dangerous confrontation with the USA in the Cuban Missile Crisis …

It is written as if the confrontation was entirely provoked from the Soviet side, that the John Kennedy administration was not dangerously confronting the Soviet Union. Unmentioned is that, since 1959, the US had had nuclear missiles deployed in Turkiye which bordered the USSR.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was “a grey and mediocre functionary” (p 253) who “had more practical than intellectual capacities.” (p 254)

The Soviet Union would collapse on President Mikhail Gorbachev’s watch. Boris Yeltsin’s ascent to the Russian presidency would coincide with the political demise of Gorbachev; however, Yeltsin would personify the Peter Principle. He was completely out-of-his-depth. Figes asks, “How can we explain the failure of democracy under Yeltsin, and the reemergence of dictatorship under Putin’s leadership?” (p 268) Figes explains that under Yeltsin, the people called the system a “shitocracy.” (p 270) Was this solely due to Russian incompetence? There is scant attribution to the role played by western nations and institutions such as the IMF that advised Yeltsin’s team to apply the shock therapy of neoliberalism (a “social disaster” says Figes, p 269) that helped precipitate the downfall of Yeltsin and pave the way for a new face and new direction.

Figes writes that Vladimir Putin became the successor to Yeltsin by agreeing to protect Yeltsin and his family from their corruption. (p 271) Putin is also accused of corruption; Figes footnotes harsh Putin critic Masha Gessen’s book The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) as substantiation. As testament to her analytical prowess, Gessen predicted in her book’s epilogue, “Putin’s bubble will burst.” Yet in July 2022, Putin still enjoys immense popularity in Russia.

Figes likens Putin to a grand prince where Russian oligarchs are “totally dependent on his will” much as the boyar clans were reliant upon the royal court in Russia. (p 54)

According to Figes, Putin’s Russia is a managed democracy where electoral results are determined beforehand.

The author criticizes laws he identifies as protecting an ahistorical image of Russia; for example, a law requiring foreign-funded NGOs to register as a “Foreign Agent.” (p 278) Not mentioned is that the US has its own Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (FIRA in Canada) and that NGOs are cited as instigators behind so-called color revolutions.

Figes further criticizes Putin for weaponizing the memory of war against foreign powers. Here a bias of Figes stands out by referring to a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany (commonly referred to as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. (p 279) Is Figes unaware that the West collaborated with Nazi Germany? In his book The Myth of the Good War, historian Jacques Pauwels told of European elitists’s support for fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism, (p 42, 47) which was also true in the US. (p 53)

Figes also takes issue with Putin for comparing “Ukraine’s nationalists to collaborators with the Nazis in the war.” (p 279) The evidence of Nazism in Ukraine is so prolific that one must be either ignorant or purposefully blind:

• “Inside A White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine,” Time
• “Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine: NEWSNIGHT,” BBC
• “Canada’s meeting with Ukraine’s self-professed Nazi paramilitary,” CityNews
• “‘Captive Nations’: From Nazi trope and CIA meme to Cold-War trump card,” COAT.ca

Azov Battalion fighters with Nazi flag (WikiCommons)

Not being a professional historian, I will focus on Figes’s rendering of contemporary history, which seems particularly disputable on factual and logical grounds.

1. As stated, Figes pooh poohs the “Ukraine-Nazi myth” (p 298): “The Kremlin’s Russian media outlets consistently referred to the interim Ukrainian government as a ‘junta’, backed by ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘fascists’, an obvious propaganda tactic …. They [the Kremlin] staged protests against the new authorities in Kiev…” (p 290)

This is a one-sided presentation. According to the World Socialist Web Site:

The background and implications of the 2014 far-right coup in Kiev, which overthrew the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, is critical for understanding the current Ukraine-Russia war. This coup was openly supported by US and European imperialism and implemented primarily by far-right shock troops such as the Right Sector and the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party.

Salon wrote of US machinations:

When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia, the State Department threw a tantrum.

Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.

2. “the Kremlin launched a new Crimean War…. At the end of February [2014], Russian special forces occupied the peninsula, … oversaw a hurried referendum … in which 97 per cent of the people voted for reunion with Russia.” (p 290-291)

Figes paints the expression of self-determinism in sinister language, but Figes doth protest too much, as he admits, “Even with a properly conducted plebiscite [in Crimea] the same decision would have been reached with a large majority.” (p 291) Since the Russians were so welcomed by Crimeans, this basically refutes Figes’s claim of a military occupation.

3. “The warring parties failed to find agreement on the Minsk II Accords…” (p 291)

From Wikipedia, the signatories are listed as:

1. Separatist’s leaders Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky
2. Swiss diplomat and OSCE representative Heidi Tagliavini
3. Former president of Ukraine and Ukrainian representative Leonid Kuchma
4. Russian Ambassador to Ukraine and Russian representative Mikhail Zurabov

4. Regarding Putin’s identification of NATO bases in Ukraine as a security threat, Figes writes, “From a western point of view this seemed mad and paranoid. NATO, after all, was a defensive alliance and had no reason to attack Russia.” (p 293)

To paint NATO, after all, as a purely “defensive alliance” is disingenuous. Did NATO attack ex-Yugoslavia in self-defense? Guised as a European-Canada-US alliance was Libya a threat to NATO? With all due respect to the people of Afghanistan, was a country largely populated by sandal-wearing goat herders with a Kalashnikov rifle strapped over one shoulder a threat to NATO?

Conversely, does the history of myriad western interventions not point to a potential threat for Russia?

5. Figes claims the invasion of Ukraine has revealed that the “Russian army, it turned out, was not as good as people thought.” (p 296) “Putin, it was said, was hoping to announce a victory … on 9 May, Victory Day…” (p 297) It was said? Who said this? Figes applies his military analysis and reaches the same conclusion as another non-professional military analyst Noam Chomsky. They both equate the prowess of the Russian military to the duration of the military engagement.

6. Figes writes of a mass-based opposition led by Alexei Navalny. (p 299) Yet this “mass-based opposition” leader, as Figes describes Navalny, is without any party members in the Russian State Duma.

7. “The Russians carried out a number of atrocities in towns such as Bucha…” (p 296)

Concerning the massacre in Bucha, Drago Bosnic, an independent geopolitical and military analyst, wrote:

The Ukrainian side claims Russian troops killed at least 412 people, while so-called ‘independent’ sources state there were 50 victims. The peculiar claims were completely unsupported by any actual official investigation by any neutral side. The Kiev regime and their Western sponsors flatly refused to allow an international investigation, while any claims contrary to the official narrative were immediately suppressed.

Why prevent an investigation that one claims should reveal war crimes perpetrated by the enemy? (Yes, US president Biden in a televised message tells Russian citizens: “You are not our enemy.” Biden expresses his scorn for the “war killer” Putin.)

Former US Marines intelligence officer Scott Ritter — who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — names the culprit behind the Bucha massacre: Ukrainian national police murdered Ukrainians.

Without exception, without exception all of the data points to the Ukrainian national police carrying out a cleansing operation on April 1st that targeted pro-Russian collaborators and what they called saboteurs. And when we say cleansing operation, it means killing them. There is a video where a member of this national police unit asked permission to shoot people who aren’t wearing the blue armband, and he was given permission to fire.”

The US has the satellite images of this says Ritter, who emphatically states:

The US knows exactly what happened, but the US is not in the business of telling the truth. They are in the business of promulgating Ukrainian lies, and this lie was to create a narrative of Russia as a genocidal state trying to massacre innocent Ukrainian civilians. That is not what happened. The evidence is clear. If we took this to trial today Judge, I could guarantee you that I’d be able to make a very strong circumstantial case that this crime was committed by the Ukrainian national police and that they’d have nothing to defend with.

Months afterward, Ritter remains firmly convinced that Ukraine was behind the massacre of its own people in Bucha (start watching video at 1:33:50):

All the forensic data points to the absolute incontrovertible fact that Ukrainian security services carried out crimes against pro-Russian elements of the population of Bucha in late March, early April of 2022…. I will debate anybody, anytime, anywhere, on any platform, hell, I’ll travel to Ukraine to do it in front of the Ukrainian parliament if they want. I am not running away from these facts.

Ritter has thrown down a figurative glove. Will Figes pick it up? Ritter looks at the evidence, does his research, and applies logic in reaching a conclusion. Too often, when evidence is demanded, Figes comes up wanting.

Figes has made many claims and predictions, if the presence of Nazis breaks through the monopoly media censorship and propaganda, if Russia defeats Ukraine (and it already has according to Ritter), then what does that signify about Figes and his historical scholarship?

Given all this, it is argued that The Story of Russia is, more accurately, A Story of Russia, a story according to Orlando Figes. As for what the history of Russia is, that is something to be discovered by curious and discerning readers and researchers.FacebookTwitter

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen. Read other articles by Kim.

With God on Our Side?

by Ariel Gold / August 13th, 2022

On Sunday, August 7th — the day that Jews around the world celebrated Tisha bAv, the traditional day of mourning for the disasters that have occurred throughout Jewish history—the state of Israel brutally slaughtered at least 44 people, including 15 children in the besieged Gaza Strip. Beyond the horrible irony of this massacre, it is difficult for me not to see it as part of a much larger global Holy War.

Not in the sense of the Crusades of history or American and European fears of Islamic Jihad. We don’t have a name yet for this Holy War but its variants stretch far beyond Gaza into the American heartland. We refuse to recognize it because it would require us to look in the mirror. It is a Holy War based on fantasies of power and “chosenness.” Most troubling of all is how these fears and fantasies are grounded in a poisonous distortion of sacred scripture and religious tradition.

As a veteran peace activist, person of Jewish faith, and the former co-director of CODEPINK, I’ve spent most of my life working to end U.S. wars and militarism and for freedom and justice for Palestinians. As I begin my tenure as the executive director of our nation’s oldest interfaith peace and justice organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA [FOR-USA], the dimensions of this Holy War are impossible to ignore.

Closer to home, the ideological underpinnings of this conflict were on display just last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, TX, where Hungarian autocrat Prime Minister Victor Orban, who rails against race mixing, same-sex relationships, advocating instead for “Christian Democracy” was the opening speaker.

After the 2020 election, right-wing pro-Trump activists planned and carried out a series of so-called “Jericho Marches” to invoke the bloody biblical story of the siege of Jericho as a call to action to keep Trump in office. As January 6 neared, Proud Boys members could be seen praying near the Washington monument, comparing the “sacrifice” they were preparing to make to the crucifixion of Christ. The next evening, they rampaged through town attacking African-American churches and other houses where Black Lives Matter signs were displayed. Tennessee pastor Greg Locke praised the Proud Boys and lauded America as “the last bastion of Christian freedom.”

On January 6 itself, the Jericho Marchers traveled with shofars (Jewish ritual instruments, made from rams’ horns evoking freedom, holiness, and a call to be in the service of God) and American flags to Washington D.C.

The fusing of violence with a blasphemous interpretation of Christianity in the United States has roots in the concept of Christian duty that animated the era of lynchings. Today it takes the form of simple marketing copy. Florida-based gun manufacturer, Spike’s Tactical, markets AR-15 style rifles with Psalm 144:1 — “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”— emblazoned on them.

The weapon used in the mass murder of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, TX was manufactured by the Georgia-based Daniel Defense, whose social media that day included a picture of a toddler with a rifle in his lap and the text of Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

The U.S. far-right movement trends older but U.S. neo-Nazi groups are making strong efforts to recruit youth. The Israeli ultranationalist movement, however, already contains a large number of teenagers.

On the morning of July 20, the Israeli front of this Holy War saw thousands of largely young, Jewish extremists belonging to the Nachala settler movement flock to seven uninhabited sites in the Occupied West Bank. With religious fringes dangling from their waists, blue and white flags in their hands, and M16 rifles slung across their backs, they set up tents and makeshift kitchens and yeshivas. One outpost even included a bouncy castle and cotton candy machine.

They were praised as “inspired,” “dedicated,” and “wonderful,” by Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and criticized by the ultra-religious Jewish-Israeli Hilltop Youth movement for not being militant enough. Israeli soldiers and police ultimately dismantled the encampments but the Nachala group has pledged to return and rebuild. That is neither surprising — they claim the Jewish people “were promised the Land of Israel in the Bible” — nor is it an idle threat given the history of horrific settler attacks.

Regardless of your political or religious outlook or how deep the divisions among us currently are, I have to believe that all people of conscience are sickened by this perversion of sacred texts to justify a White and Christian Supremacy, or, in Israel’s case, Jewish Supremacy.

In the spirit of those members and leaders of FOR-USA who preceded me—Martin Luther King Jr, A.J. Muste, Jane Addams, and more — it is time to engage the full moral force of our combined faith traditions in condemning these forms of supremacy and violence that co-opt and pervert religious scripture. It is time to say clearly and unequivocally that the manipulation of the divine in the service of lethal political goals and human rights abuses, whether orchestrated by Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu fundamentalists is unconscionable.

As an interfaith peace and justice organization, FOR-USA believes that this message must be spread through houses of worship across the country.  In memory of Dr. King’s voice telling us that “It’s not the violence of the few that scares me, it’s the silence of the many,” we call on faith leaders and congregants from every faith tradition and political persuasion to break their silence on this distortion of the divine and do what communities of faith do best: preach, pray and pay attention.

• We implore them to preach from the pulpit about the God of peace, love, justice, and mercy.
• We ask them to pray for healing and reconciliation amidst great division and to use their institutional religious platforms and influence to call for freedom and safety; from lifting Israel’s strangling blockade of Gaza to no longer sending US police to trainings sponsored by weapons manufacturers.
• We need them to pay attention to where the spirit is moving amongst us and to call out this obvious deformation of the sacred wherever it occurs and to respond to a world of violence in the only logical way possible, with love and nonviolence.Facebook

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Ariel Gold stepped into her current role as the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the U.S.’s oldest peace and justice organization, on August 1, 2022. Prior to that, she was the national co-director of the anti-war group CODEPINK, where she specialized in campaigns for Palestinian rights. She is a member of Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, NY where she resides and has been a longtime active member of Jewish Voice for Peace. Read other articles by Ariel.

The military application of the Internet of Things will lead to breakthroughs in Network-Centric Warfare.



August 13, 2022 

Can the Military Harness the Internet of Things’ True Potential?
by Abdul Moiz Khan


In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Defense put forward a new military doctrine called Network-Centric Warfare (NCW). The objective was to integrate emerging tactics, techniques, and procedures to bolster the warfighting capabilities of the military. To achieve this end, transforming information into combat power is critical. The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to all those devices that are today connected to the internet and are sharing and collecting data. Real-time data collection and its analysis with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the main feature of IoT. Thus, the military application of IoT can be a breakthrough moment for Network-Centric Warfare.

Network-Centric Warfare’s doctrine seeks the integration of three domains: the physical domain, where events took place and operations are conducted; the information domain, where data is transmitted and stored; and the cognitive domain, where data is processed and analyzed. D.S. Alberts and other experts on the subject defined Network-Centric Warfare as “an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision-makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-synchronization. In essence, NCW translates information superiority into combat power by effectively linking knowledgeable entities in the battlespace.” This military doctrine ignited a revolution in military affairs.

NCW brings many advantages to the table. It improves situational awareness at every level of the command structure. This in turn increases the speed of execution, as even the smallest tactical unit possesses the information. It can reduce collateral damage during a battle. At the logistical level, NCW can provide real-time data about the need for material supplies and can coordinate effectively to streamline the supply chains. It also helps in formulating joint force structures because of the real-time information sharing from tactical and strategic levels and a better communication channel that enhances the abilities of command and control structures.

An example of NCW in action is Operation Iraqi Freedom, undertaken by the United States and its allies. Despite being numerically weaker, the United States and its allies trampled the Iraqi forces with the help of its technologically advanced weapons and warfare systems. Prior information of important military targets through satellites and GPS combined with sensor-shooter integration increased the precision of weapons. Also, instant communication, along with GPS and laser targeting, provided the option of calling airstrikes at precise locations at a moment’s notice by the ground forces. K-Web, or knowledge wall, was one of the most important components of this war. It was a large screen display panel that had information about each warfighting and support unit. It was used effectively for planning, briefing, and executing plans by accumulating all the possible data. These are just some of the systems that changed the whole idea of warfare and unleashed the power of technology.

However, there are a few shortcomings with NCW that need to be addressed to further harness the potential of this revolution in military affairs. One shortcoming is that it is resource intensive. It is not easy to procure, and its research and design can take years. Another major shortcoming is that conventional systems lack automation. A huge chunk of data is collected in real-time during a conflict from different sources. However, many data integration systems rely on manual data entry systems. Similarly, processing this huge swath of data manually is a hurdle. This is where IoT will come into play. It is cost-effective and automated, which will make it a valuable component of NCW military systems.

In this “information age,” technological advancements are shaping the world at a very fast pace. IoT has an impact on every aspect of human life, as it is a network of physical devices that can be in any form, including home appliances, smart gears, actuators, and software for connectivity and data exchange. The number of IoT devices is increasing day by day as more devices are being connected to the internet. At the end of 2021, the total number of active IoT devices was estimated to be around 12.2 billion, more than the total human population.

IoT is being utilized in all spheres of life, from medical to the military. In the domain of the military, it is deployed for combat purposes, including Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR); in fire control systems, delivering devastating firepower; in security systems based on facial, or iris, or fingerprint or radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology; in training and simulation exercises; and electronic warfare.

The utilization of IoT for NCW can be very beneficial for the latter. IoT systems are far cheaper than the traditional systems that were used for real-time data collection. Situation awareness is one of the central aspects of NCW. For this, real-time data is collected, shared, and reprocessed at the same time to gather information and formulate strategy. IoT devices are not only cheaper but also more efficient. The IoT systems collect real-time data about the systems themselves, submeter data, and environmental data. The second utility IoT systems have is automation. They can collect, share, and reprocess large swaths of data without human help. This will have two advantages for NCW. First, large amounts of data will be reprocessed quickly, thus decreasing the response time and increasing efficacy. Second, it will decrease the human burden and free people for other tasks.

IoT is an advanced technology, and with the revolution in military affairs, it will have a far-reaching impact on the battlefield. It has solved a few shortcomings of NCW and augmented many of its capabilities, thus increasing its efficacy. With the speed at which Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom took place two decades ago, we can envisage what the future has in store.

Abdul Moiz Khan works as a Research Officer at the Center of International Strategic Studies (CISS), Islamabad. He tweets at @kmoizsays.

Image: DVIDS.

A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire

by William Manson / August 13th, 2022

Much is to be learned from the political correspondence of such Roman luminaries as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, among many others.  Here I am restricting myself to a Gestapo-like bureaucrat, Pliny the Younger (61-113 C.E.), imperial governor of Bithynia province (now part of Turkey) under the divinely mandated autocracy of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 C.E.).

In his numerous letters seeking orders from the emperor, Pliny repeatedly pledges his obeisant loyalty.  But his tone, which seems curiously modern to me, is that of a pragmatic administrator merely seeking clarification of official policy regarding treatment of a small but possibly disloyal, subversive cult.  Here is a high-level governor, entirely indifferent to any considerations of morality, writing in the matter-of-fact, legalistic style we have come to expect from present-day war planners and intelligence agency heads.  New religious cults posed a possible threat of disloyalty to the emperor, whose rule itself is sanctified by the official State religion.

An eccentric, secretive cult known as Christians had become a concern, and Pliny simply requests orders as to how to deal with them:

I do not know…whether it is the mere name of Christian which is punishable, even if innocent of crime, or rather the crimes associated with the name…. I have asked them in person if they are Christians, and if they admit it, I repeat the question a second or third time, with a warning of the punishment awaiting them.  If they persist, I order them to be led away to execution.

On the other hand, after “enhanced interrogation,” many suspects said they had long ceased to be Christians, and, as proof, made offerings to Trajan’s statue and invocations to the official gods.  Christians had been in the habit of gathering to study the Gospels and share a meal afterwards.  But Pliny reports to the emperor that “they had in fact given up this practice since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies.  This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses… I have postponed any further examination and hastened to consult you.”

Although the “wretched cult” has “infected” both citizens and non-citizens in innumerable towns and villages, Pliny assures the emperor that it is being gradually suppressed, one indication being that:

People have begun to throng the temples which had been almost entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it [italics mine].

Entirely pragmatic and focused solely on policy which would strengthen the empire, Pliny the Younger strikingly prefigures the modern “fascist” official.  Devoid of independent principles or even ordinary compassion, he furthers his governmental status through carefully consulting with, and carrying out, the edicts of his superior, the absolute ruler.

We can easily discern the lineaments of the very modern-day tactics of intimidating, torturing and even executing without trial supposed “subversives” and suspected “terrorists” (Guantanamo, CIA renditions and black-sites, executions by drone without trial–ad nauseam).

• Note: all direct quotations are from: Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh, Oxford World Classics, 2009.Facebook

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William Manson is the author of The Psychodynamics of Culture (Greenwood Press). Read other articles by William.