Will There Be Cluster Bombs On Your Beach This 4th Of July?

Times of India published surveillance camera footage of Sevastopol under attack June 23.

As we accelerate toward war across the globe, a decade of hostilities around the Black Sea heated up considerably last month as beachgoers in Crimea fled cluster bombs supplied by the U.S. and delivered by Ukraine. There were 150+ casualties and five fatalities, including children.

A child killed by Israel on the beach in Gaza in 2020. Tell me again how this started on Oct 7?

This is comparable to civilians on Gaza's beaches being killed with munitions supplied by the U.S. and delivered by Israel. My country is indeed the arsenal of the world. Ka-ching!

Also parallel are the red lines being crossed with impunity.

The Biden administration's fake red lines for Israel are like the Minsk negotiations: a stalling technique intended to usher in the next round of escalated violence.

Putin has warned that striking inside Russian territories with NATO supplied weapons is grounds for escalation. Then again, he and other Russian officials warned for years that continuing to shell civilians in the Donbas was crossing a line that would, and did, bring a military response.

Crimea is of course highly desirable due to its ports and access to shipping through to the Mediterranean. In 2014 the CIA-sponsored coup in Ukraine led to plans for the U.S. Navy to establish itself there, kicking the Russians out. Since the Black Sea is in their backyard, not ours, Russia annexed Crimea and held a referendum which indicated 97% of voters wanted to  join Russia.

Both the Ukrainian, Israeli, and U.S. militaries exhibit another parallel -- recruitment is lagging, and the morale of those already in uniform is dismal. 

In Ukraine citizens are press ganged, literally, into the military.

And in the U.S. the National Defense Authorization Act setting terms for the next fiscal year's Pentagon budget provides for automatic registration for the draft of not only young men but, in a significant escalation in the Senate version, young women. 

Photo credit: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images, Huffpost

And in Israel, a nation that has long expected everyone except ultra orthodox Jews to enlist, removal of the exemption on the basis of religion by their Supreme Court has led to widespread rioting. As seen above, their brethren in New York City appear to feel the same way.

This holiday weekend the U.S. celebrates its "independence" with displays of militarized patriotism and fireworks that terrorize veterans suffering from battle-related PTSD. Many U.S.ians will head to beaches where they'll frolic in the waves oblivious to the genocide they're funding in Gaza. If they know the U.S. is sending weapons to Ukraine that have been banned worldwide for humanitarian reasons -- cluster bombs go on killing and maiming civilians, often children, for years after they've been scattered -- they will likely ignore it. 

Happy 4th of July! Is it World War III yet?

What's Wrong About Public-Private Partnerships?

Aside from the fact that public-private partnership is a euphemism for fascism (or, as Mussolini preferred, corporatism) what is wrong about this structure of taxpayer-funded quasi- government? Public-private partnerships are all the rage these days e.g. the State of Maine just created a Space Corporation to enable private profits based on public infrastructure, and Ukraine relies heavily on Elon Musk's Starlink network for the communications needed to conduct its war on Russian-speaking Ukrainians. 

Or at least it has until now.

Word on Twitter is that Ukraine asked Elon to hook them up in Crimea but he declined, citing the heightened risk of nuclear war following Ukraine's terror attack on the Kerch Bridge linking Crimea and Russia.

I seldom agree with Elon "We-will-coup-whoever-we-want" Musk and have always wondered about that "we" in his infamous statement. But I have to admit in this case he's spot on. Nuclear war is something to be actively avoided, and calling for a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia should be job #1 right now.

Given the fact that the UK (most likely with U.S. encouragement) actively halted peace talks in Turkey back in April, one could be forgiven for thinking we're safer in Elon's hands.

But this is really only the case because our national government was long since captured by corporate interests. President Biden called in reps from the big weapons manufacturers to make plans about arming Ukraine, and then Congress handed taxpayers the bill for $17,000,000,000. Some of that went to pay Starlink.

Of course Twitter is awash with accounts calling Musk a traitor, a Putin puppet, and lots more unsavory names for taking this position.

They've identified what the problem is with public-private partnerships: use of public resources to advance private agendas. 

This is routinely viewed as a good thing by those who think capitalism is the official religion of the U.S., and that adherence to its profit agenda is equivalent to patriotism.

It's the same kind of twisted thinking that fails to count military emissions when reckoning with how to address climate crisis. Somehow the planet's atmosphere is assumed to be patriotic. As if politics dictates to science.

Billionaires can take their ball and go home if they decide they don't like the way the partnership is going. And calling them unpatriotic is just about the only leverage the public has.

What About Putin?

Recently I noted that an interesting aspect of opposing war with Russia in Europe as compared with opposing U.S.-supported wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Yemen is hearing from numerous liberal Democrats that are extremely in favor of this war and irate that I am not.

Yesterday I came under attack by two liberal Democrat-types (both of whom happen to be older female academics) because I am insufficiently moved by warmongering propaganda offered up on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and other corporate media.

This is a common theme of my days.

In the false binary where if Republicans are bad then Democrats must be good because there are always only two choices, if I'm against NATO I must therefore be in favor of Putin. As the avatar of Catherine the Great's imperial ambitions in one case (what the what?) when I was castigated for sharing a Facebook memory of a talk about Crimea three years ago organized by friends of mine.

I shared this memory with the comment: "Bruce has been paying attention to NATO encroachment on Ukraine for a while now."

Here's the pushback:

For weeks I've been hounded with gotcha questions from a certain Twitter account. "What are your views on WWII?" was one of her more absurd questions. Was I supposed to answer in tweets? 

I suggested that this person could read this blog and search for terms like "WWII" to read my essays on the subject. But I don't think she is actually interested in doing that.

Yesterday's gotcha question:

Since I've been on the receiving end of these gotcha questions for weeks, I'm clear that the subtext is that I appear to be favoring the kind of appeasement that scholars of WWII think led to Hitler's Germany expanding its territory without much opposition.

I'm not going to concede that Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler no matter how many gotcha questions I am asked.

When I was a young history major the essential question in this field was, How did the German people let the Nazis take over their country?

As I've noted in this blog many times, since the unfortunate events of 9/11 it is horrifyingly clear how that happened -- because we're living through it. Information control is an essential part of the military takeover of a society, well along in the case of the U.S. in 2022.

The U.S. imperial project has hundreds (some say 800, depending on how you define "military base") of military installations in other countries. It has invaded and occupied numerous countries, and coup'd or regime changed a long list of others. Its leading space entrepreneur, a man who is deeply embedded in U.S. programs to militarize space, has tweeted "We'll coup anyone we want" in reference to toppling democratically elected governments to gain access to their mineral reserves.

"NATO expansion in Europe"  Source: Counterfire.org

Or just take a look at NATO and how it has been used to expand U.S. imperial ambitions steadily since its inception.

There are some salient facts about the current crisis that those jumping on the bandwagon to demonize Putin either don't know about or tend to forget.

#1 is expressed well here by Nina Beety, an anti-nuclear activist and academic who is able to see past the corporate media narrative of "Putin Bad" that we are all supposed to adhere to:

The 2015 Minsk-2 agreement required dialogue between Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kiev, which Kiev has refused to do, and all foreign actors were to withdraw personnel and equipment from Ukraine, which the U.S., UK, and Poland have refused to do [emphasis mine]. 

Instead, 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers, U.S., UK, and Polish personnel and increasing amounts of weaponry are massing near the communities of eastern Ukraine, reportedly preparing to attack, in violation of Minsk. 

#2 can be found by perusing George Washington University's National Security Archives website. Their 2017 article on this topic begins:

 U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu). 

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. 

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”...

The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.” 

#3 is a fact that few know about but which I haven't been able to get out of my head since I heard it shared on an antiwar organizing call last week: after the 2014 coup, the U.S. intended to put a naval base in Crimea. This led to a vote on whether or not the people favored annexation by Russia and, in a landslide, they did.

A local resident rescues a dog from a fire in a house destroyed in the Ukrainian armed forces' air attack on the village of Luganskaya on July 2, 2014 (RIA Novosti/Valeriy Melnikov) © RIA Novosti  source: Russia Today video

#4 is an example of so-called "facts on the ground" which are easily documented but which the corporate press in the U.S. steadfastly refuse to report: Ukraine has been shelling civilians in the Donbass region -- i.e. on their border with Russia -- for years and has killed around 14,000 and injured many others.

But, yeah, Putin bad. All you need to know. Get back to work or playing wordle. 

You'll need to look up when WWIII begins with another land war in Europe. At that point, probably the only salient fact left will be that the Russian Federation has pledged no first use of nukes, while the U.S. has adamantly refused to promise the same security measures to preserve life on the planet.

There's an old Russian saying that in really sophisticated propaganda, even its opposite is not true. 

So if "Putin bad" is not true, maybe "Putin good" is not true either. 

That said, I would appreciate it if my critics would stop imposing their false binary on me.