Cynicism and Stupidity on the Frontiers of NATO

 

I hate cynicism and stupidity. I hate cretins who parade their stupidity and low, incompetent, ignorant, chauvinist thought and thinking around as though they were profound somehow. One of the reasons I will always have time for Peter Sloterdijk, the philosopher, for whatever his other intellectual failings, is his incisive diagnosis and ruthless assault on cynical reason, the basic operating system of the modern cynical cretin.

 

I can think of no finer example of such stupidity and cynicism, such cynical, cretinous reason, than the sneering, posturing resolution, spearheaded by the United States and passed yesterday at the United Nations, A/ES-11/L.7 “Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” I want to tell you about this resolution because I think it is exemplary of the total falsification of recent history going on right now, not to mention the absolute orgy of historical revisionism and effectively holocaust denial which has accompanied it.

 

This resolution purports to emphasize the need to – quote “reach, as soon as possible, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine in line with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

 

But that is not what the US promoted resolution does, because of a cynicism, because of a stupidity. What cynicism, what stupidity? It is that the resolution expresses its “commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters.” Why is this stupid, you might ask, why is that cynical?

 

It is stupid and cynical for two reasons, first the General, and then the Particular:

 

(1) The notion of the United States relying on and promoting itself as the champion of the notion of the inviolable sanctity of the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of other nations is absurd and offensive. Maintaining this charade requires the compulsory adoption of the memory of a goldfish. The US posturing as the champion of these principles is absolutely farcical beyond farcical given the overwhelming and habitual violations of these principles by the United States itself, even just in the past twenty years.

 

The United States, a barely 250 year old genocidal settler-colonial state, whose land was obtained entirely and unambiguously by primitive accumulation by dispossession – that is, theft, plunder and violence – is going to lecture and hector the world on the sacred principles of territorial non-intervention. Okay. . .

 

The United States which twenty years ago illegally invaded Iraq and which has occupied it, on again off again for the past twenty years, is going to get up on its high horse about the sacred inviolability of sovereignty and internationally recognized borders, is it? Three years ago Iraq’s democratically elected and sovereign parliament voted 170-0 to expel US troops! How did the US respond? By telling the Iraqis that if they expelled US troops the US would destroy their central bank and leave them worse off that the worst days of the war! That United States, now, is going to herald itself as the champion of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of poor, mistreated peripheral states.

 

The United States which operates a network of totally illegal unilateral economic sanctions to coerce less affluent states, that United States is going to ride in on its mighty tiny high high horse as the deliverer of the weak and vulnerable?

 

The United States of the drone war over the skies of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen. The United States which killed 500,000 Iraqis and which displaced tens of millions of others. Which raided Afghanistan for its resources and left it a desicated heap in the hands of same Taliban they had 'liberated' it from. That United States is going to hector and lecture from the pulpit on the subject of respecting the sovereignty of other nations, is it?

 

Incredible. Cynical for those who manufacture such heinous, insidious codswallop, and stupid on the part of those why buy it. It is hypocrisy incarnate, the Great Satan chiding and scolding, and a passive audience applauding the irrational spectacle. As China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted this week:

 

"The US is the No.1 violator of sovereignty and interferer in the internal affairs of other countries. Since the end of WWII, the US has sought to subvert 50+ foreign governments, interfered in elections in 30+ countries & attempted assassination on 50+ foreign leaders."

 

And (2) – the second reason why this position being promoted by the US and its vassal states is stupid and cynical – is that one of the many particular egregious violations of sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of other states by the United States over the past twenty years was the illegal and totally undemocratic coup d'état which the United States orchestrated in Ukraine in 2014.

 

I’m going to read to you an excerpt from a piece by the Marxist Socialist Historian and Ecologist John Bellamy-Foster, written last year. If you have the time I encourage you to read it for yourself, it is called “The US Proxy War in Ukraine.” I think this piece is important, very important, because I view Mr Bellamy-Foster as the kind of deep, substantive, historically grounded thinker which the cretins and ghouls, spooks, plutes, NeoCons and chauvinists are trying to drown out and censor right now. His piece is a properly historical-materialist analysis of the present conflict and its antecedents. In this piece, Bellamy-Foster writes:

 

"The proxy war started in 2014 when the Maidan coup, engineered by the United States, took place in Ukraine, removing the democratically elected president, and putting ultra-nationalists largely in control. The immediate result though was that Ukraine began to break apart. Crimea had been an independent, autonomous state from 1991 to 1995. In 1995 Ukraine illegally tore up the Crimean Constitution and annexed it against its will. The Crimean people didn’t consider themselves part of Ukraine, and were largely Russian speaking, with deep cultural connections to Russia. When the coup occurred, with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in control, the Crimean population wanted out. Russia gave them an opportunity with a referendum to stay in the Ukraine or join with Russia. They chose the latter. However, in the eastern Ukraine the primarily Russian population was subjected to repression by ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Kyiv forces. Russophobia and extreme repression of the Russian-speaking populations in the East set in—with the infamous case of the forty people blown up in a public building by neo-Nazis associated with the Azov Battalion. Originally there were a number of breakaway republics. Two survived in the Donbass region, with dominant Russian-speaking populations: the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

 

A civil war thus emerged in Ukraine between Kyiv in the West and Donbass in the East. But it was also a proxy war with the U.S./NATO supporting Kyiv and Russia supporting Donbass. The civil war started right after the coup, when the Russian language was basically outlawed, so that individuals could get fined for speaking Russian in a store. It was an attack on the Russian language and culture and a violent repression of the populations in the eastern parts of the Ukraine.

 

Initially, there were about 14,000 lives lost in the civil war. And these casualties were in the eastern part of the country, with something like 2.5 million refugees pouring into Russia. The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 led to a ceasefire, mediated by France and Germany, and supported by the United Nations Security Council. In these agreements the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics were given autonomous status within Ukraine. But Kyiv broke the Minsk agreements again and again, continuing to attack the breakaway republics in Donbass."

 

One really has to be serious here, an illegal and undemocratic coup is the single most violent and consequential violations of sovereignty which can possibly occur, it is the absolute seizure of political authority. In 2014 the US orchestrated the illegal deposing of the duly elected President of Ukraine, who was from the eastern regions now in question, and the installation of an extreme right-wing, ethnonationalist, white supremacist government.

 

Imagine, I really want you to imagine, if by means of foreign funding, support and coordination, the Ottawa Convoy protesters had managed to depose Trudeau and assume dictatorial control of the government and its entire state machinery. They immediately abrogate all our Constitutional obligations towards indigenous peoples, and begin a campaign of racist terror as state policy. Imagine then that the peripheries of Canada object, and say ‘no, we want nothing to do with this criminal, illegal regime which has sprung up and been recognized by foreign saboteurs.’ Would the international community campaign passionately for and insist upon maintaining such a nightmare government’s “territorial integrity?” That is what is being proposed here. Insisting on the ‘territorial integrity’ of Ukraine means forcing the eastern regions to live under an illegal coup government which came into existence as a result of a US orchestrated coup in 2014 and which immediately proceeded to ban Russian as a language, bomb predominantly Russian cities which ceased to recognize them as a Government, and ethnically persecute the Russian speaking and culturally Russian minority in the east.

 

After the 2014 coup it was a primitive accumulation goldrush for the United States in terms of buying up Ukrainian resource industry and assets on the cheap. It was a deluge of shitty American failsons on a profiteering crusade. That is really what the issue with Hunter Biden is, for example – not the coked up gun and dick pics on his laptom – but that he was sent along with so many other McKinsey caste losers to hover up resources in the aftermath of a coup orchestrated, in part, by his father.

 

Ignoring this, trying to edit out or obscure the last decade of Ukraine’s history and its primary causes, doesn’t actually contribute to the promotion or achievement of peace at all. There is so many lies and falsehoods, such a suffocating cloud of amnesia going on right now regarding the now decade-long war in Ukraine. The US started this war in 2014 with an illegal and undemocratic coup, it should end with a peace agreement, but that won't come from one-sided Western jingoism.

 

Because of these two reason, because the United States promoting itself as the champion of the inviolable sanctity of the sovereignty of states is absurd, and because the US has specifically and overwhelmingly been interfering with Ukraine and Russia’s sovereignty for the past ten years, the United Nations General Assembly resolution promoted by the United States is stupid and cynical, a product of cretins, for cretins.

 

That is why it is stupid and cynical, stupid on the part of those who uncritically believe it, and cynical on the part of those who don’t, but say so because they profit by saying so, because while the US calls their resolution “Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine” – its actual effect is the opposite of that, to retrench positions and mischaracterize one another in a belligerent and warlike way. The US is saying ‘peace’ when, for all practical purposes, they mean ‘war.’ This is THE MOST GROTESQUE CYNICISM! And Joe Biden, and Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, Chrysia Freeland and Victoria Nuland are all THE MOST GROTESQUE CYNICS! To try to warp the meaning of Peace to mean more war, expanded war, exacerbated war, more arms transfers, more arms production, profits for Raytheon, profits for Lockheed Martin – ‘MAKE PEACE, MAKE A BUCK FOR NORTHROP GRUMMAN AND GENERAL DYNAMICS!’ - that’s not peace, that’s war.

 

Yesterday on the CBC they had on a figure from the “Canadian Centre for Global Affairs.” It is hardly the first time they’ve had someone from the CCGA on the air to intone on foreign affairs. Murray Brewster, currently enthusiastically promoting the war from the Kiev forces frontlines, has had the CBC publish literally hundreds, literally hundreds, of articles over the years advocating for increased military expenditure where the only cited source is a figure from the Canadian Centre for Global Affairs. Do you think that in any of Murray’s articles, or on TV yesterday, they ever informed the audience that the Canadian Center for Global Affairs is funded by, among others, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, the Department of National Defence and Lockheed Martin? No, of course not, in spite of having been specifically told to do so by an otherwise completely toothless CBC Ombudsman, Jack Nagler.

 

This war is stupid and cynical. There are those who are manufacturing and selling the war, which is cynical, and there are those who are passively consuming the war, as spectators, which is stupid.

 

We are being sold this war by those who profit by its prolongation and exacerbation, and they are selling it and promoting it falsely under the banner of ‘peace.’

 

That is the most cynical lie, and its promoters not only manufacture this lie, but manufacture the stupidity in the populace necessary for them to passively receive this lie. They blight out basic truths, like that the US orchestrated an illegal and undemocratic coup in 2014, like that the US is one of the most predatory and insane forces on the planet today, that they regularly and habitually violate and warp the sovereignty, independence and integrity of other nations for their own narrow gain, they obscure these truths from view, demonize them, stigmatize them, censor them.

 

This is more than just kulturkampf, the military-political wings of the richest imperial states, whose weapons and resource industries profit by the prolongation and exacerbation of the war, have a direct strategic and financial impetus to criminalize inconvenient speech and expression.

 

Consent is being manufactured for catastrophic, clash of civilizations, absolute war. If you oppose it, or criticize it in any way, you are informed you are the minority and should be quiet. DON'T! Speak out against this madness now. Oppose the war! Oppose Western intervention! Oppose this proxy war. This is a border dispute. The post-coup Kiev regime abused and ethnically oppressed the eastern regions for eight years, in contravention of the peace agreements which they signed and agreed to. There is no reason why this conflict cannot be resolved by means of a negotiated peaceful settlement. Oppose this garbage proxy war. Oppose this war. Oppose the war in Ukraine. Oppose the US using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia. Oppose its prolongation and exacerbation. Oppose weapons transfers. Fight against the spiraling out of control of yet another garbage, propagandized US proxy war. Oppose this war. Oppose this garbage US proxy war. Oppose its mystification, oppose the lie that this war began in 2022, as opposed to in 2014 when the US orchestrated an illegal coup. Oppose weapons transfers. Oppose the exacerbation and prolongation of the war by profiteers.

 

Having relied on the authority of John Bellamy-Foster I’m going to end with some of his words. He said of the present moment:

 

“All of this is a lot to be absorbed in a short time. But I think it’s important to understand the two prongs of the U.S./NATO imperial grand strategy in order to understand why the Kremlin considers itself threatened, and why it acted as it did, and why this proxy war is so dangerous for the world as a whole. What we should keep in mind right now is that all of this maneuvering for absolute world supremacy has brought to us to the brink of a global thermonuclear war and global omnicide. The only answer is to create a massive world movement for peace, ecology, and socialism."

 

Thank you, love and solidarity for everyone who’s made it out to support real, actual peace today.

 

The Wages of the Spectacle – Panegyric for Sy Hersh

 

Does the Spectacle mandate that you be a passive Spectator? No, in fact the Spectacle invites intervention, it just invites a multiplicity of wrong interventions, based on deficient, distorted information. And in this way one remains a Spectator to the Situation, even while active, in being unable to actually change or substantively inflect upon the Situation. The Spectacle alternately invites Spectatorship, on the one hand, and incorrect, deluded, or mystified intervention, on the other, and in this way the Spectacle perpetuates itself with us inside it. What is it that the Spectacle is meant to obscure, or make impossible? Lucid, concerted, knowing intervention into the Situation. The more historically situated and contextualized the intervention, the more the Spectacle seeks to demonize, stigmatize, and exclude it. Why? Because lucid, historically situated knowledge of the Situation threatens to diagnose and oppose the Spectacle in a way that knowledge gained by mere naive sense – that is, the empiricism accrued by a subject naively developing within a contemporary Capital-Nation-State – cannot.

 

One shouldn’t be paralyzed by the fear of wrong intervention into not acting, not speaking, especially when it is vital and necessary to do so, but at the same time one should be cognizant that the Spectacle invites, and rewards, stupid, ill-informed acts and speech. We are suffocated and bamboozled by an overproliferation and over-amplification of insipid, cretinous acts, and insipid, cretinous speech, and it does not threaten the Spectacle to inadvertently perpetuate that low, shallow thought. This, incidentally, is the phenomenon most specifically diagnosed in Gilles Châtelet’s exemplary text To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies tr Robin MacKay (London: Urbanomic, 2014).

 

For whose benefit is the Spectacle? It is tempting to say ‘for the owning class, of course.’ But that isn’t true, or isn’t complete at any rate. The Spectacle exists to perpetuate a number of anachronistic and obsolete categories, including the owning class of the richest imperialist states, the bureaucracy of their respective states, as well as diffusely the bigots and hatemongers of society as they misdirect the anger which ought to be directed towards the first two categories onto the heads of the marginalized and the vulnerable. The Spectacle deflects responsibility for the actual, it invents pseudo-villains and pseudo-cures, it is a reality denying and reality distorting machine.

 

For every imperialist owning class of the richest imperialist states there are chauvinist popularizers of reaction, bloviating balding, frustrated white men who view their exclusion of other voices as a noble self-sacrifice to keep the partisan, activist mob at bay. Those who envision themselves as the last intellectual bastion of sanity in a world gone mad. Jordan Peterson in the West is a prominent example, but perhaps the paradigmatic example is France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy, Nouveaux Philosophes. Whether on television or in print, these popularizers of reaction are small-minded self-involved chauvinist tyrants and charlatans, mashing together mismatched concepts in an effort to bamboozle the public. Gilles Deleuze was asked once, "what do you think of the "new philosophers,"" and he responded "nothing, I think that their thought is worthless." He says they use concepts which are "coarse as a hollow tooth. . . grotesque melanges, superficial dualisms: the law and the rebel, power and the angel." And, secondarily, Deleuze says, "the weaker the content of the thought, the more important the thinker becomes, the more the subject of enunciation asserts its importance in relation to the empty utterances." There is an omnipresent generalized appeal to authority. Between these two procedures, the superficial and erroneous use of shallow concepts, and the generalized appeal to authority, the 'New Philosophers' "sabotage work." The Spectacle promotes and rewards stupidity, it disproportionately platforms and amplifies it, precisely because the overwhelming majority of means of communication are privately owned mouthpieces, and the few that are not are nonetheless

 

The Spectacle requires the promotion of stupidity and the censorship of knowledge. This is particularly apparent in the case of Julian Assange, where from Assange we now know about the American treatment of prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay, civilian murders by American troops in Iraq, and the expansion of the drone-war throughout the middle-east, but particularly in Yemen, and because of these revelations, the US has Assange kept in captivity by UK authorities, in abominable conditions, pending the resolution of his legal appeals process. For the Crime of revealing true information to the international public, the United States is individually persecuting Assange. But it is also true, in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn, a politician, Steven Donziger, a lawyer, and Seymour Hersh, a journalist. Each of these figures was subject to relentless, erroneous, unjustified character assassination precisely because they had exposed the Spectacle to historically grounded knowledge about the Situation. In the case of Corbyn it was knowledge to the effect that society is unequally structured to benefit a tiny ruling class at the expense of a dispossessed and impoverished underclass. In the case of Mr Donziger, it was that Chevron had severely ecologically degraded key portions of the Amazon river basin. And in the case of Sy Hersh it is, most recently, that the United States committed infrastructural terrorism against the Nordstream2 Pipeline in order to compel Germany and the EU into greater compliance with its world hegemonic project.

 

The case of Hersh is particularly enlightening. In our shallow, superficial discourse in the West today, there is very little in the way of the weighing of speech and thought. Because of the profusion of superficial, puff thought among the kept televisual lackeys in the most affluent imperialist states, the contending thought is never subject to real verification, that is thoroughgoing scrutiny. Rather contentions and allegations simply drift across our screens, this outlet says this, that outlet says that, and they say it until whatever phenomenon or personages has drifted from the memory of the public whose brains they have turned to mush.

 

For the liberal bobble-heads in the West, anything which doesn’t accord with the prescribed NATO/Atlantic-Council version of “the truth” is labelled “disinformation,” or “a Kremlin-and-or-Chinese talking point” effectively irrespective of its empirical validity. They have said this with respect to the precipitous and provocative encroachment of NATO against Russia, they have said it with respect to the US orchestrated coup in Ukraine in 2014, as they say it with respect to the reasonable expectations of the signatories of the Minsk Peace Accords. But saying this about one of the most decorated and interrogative journalists of a generation is more difficult. When an American liberal today denigrates Seymour Hersh, to try to deny the allegations he has recently made with respect to the United States having bombed the Nordstream 2 pipeline, they oppose themselves to a figure which revealed US perpetrated massacres in Vietnam, the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, and the RAT-line in Syria, by which America armed Al-Qaeda proxies through intermediaries in Turkey in what was later revealed to have been a 1 Billion dollar CIA project named Timber Sycamore.

 

The Spectacle tolerates incredible, almost unimaginable amounts of both insipid, empty speech, as well as false speech which promotes erroneous action and the perpetuation of the Spectacle. What it cannot countenance is truth, digested, historically grounded and contextualized truth, and its expression is demonized, stigmatized and reviled from by the Spectacle, and in particular the privately owned means of communication in the richest imperialist states, and their atrophied, emaciated public institutions of expression, if any. In this way, what the Spectacle and its technocratic institutions, the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab in particular, decry as “disinformation” is, more often than not, information. And what they promote as information is chauvinist, imperialist disinformation. The promotion of this present conflict in the West requires the strict policing of an almost incredible shortfall of even recent historical knowledge, the demonization and stigmatization of even basic inferences from the actual Situation.

What Peace in Ukraine Requires

 

I – Peace in Ukraine is Possible and Desirable

 

Contrary to the increasingly belligerent, jackbooted chorus in the West, peace in Ukraine is both possible and desirable. It is only a tiny, predatory minority, the owning classes in the richest Imperialist states, who desire and promote the prolongation and exacerbation of this decade long conflict. This war can end in a peaceful, negotiated settlement, and should end that way, and it cannot arrive at that destination, as the jingo chauvinists in the West maintain, by inflaming the belligerents and flooding the conflict with advanced weaponry. Tens of thousands on both sides have already perished in this war, it is senseless, stupid, irrational and repulsive that the conflict be allowed to continue. Peace in Ukraine today requires three things: (1) An Immediate Ceasefire; (2) Intervention by a Broad Array of Non-Aligned Parties; and (3) The Direct Participation of the Proximate Aggrieved Parties.

 

II – Peace in Ukraine Requires (1) an Immediate Ceasefire, (2) Intervention by Non-Aligned States, and (3) Direct Participation of the Aggrieved Parties

 

(1) An Immediate Ceasefire

 

There are those in the West who have come to promote the carnage of the war in Ukraine as a holy and inviolable necessity. All manner of advanced death-dealing machines must be flooded to Ukraine without delay. Fatheaded bloviating men who pontificate how glorious it is for others’ children to die in this flesh devouring permanent war economy zone. Ukrainian forces are beating up children to send them to the front lines to get atomized within hours. Is the same thing not occurring in Russia? To a lesser extent, yes, it is, where mobilization of a semi-reserve professional elite within Russian society is being met with resentment by that affected professional caste that the lower ranks of Russian society ought to be conscripted. Nevertheless the problem is more acute on the Ukrainian side, where Ukrainian fighting bodies are starting to be used up as a total resource. There exists a human life-extinguishing zone, and both sides revile from it, as well they should.

 

Russia has largely been able to outsource the last few months of the war to a Private Military Contractor, Wagner Group. Between international hires and redemptive prison labour, Wagner has effectively fought the battle of Bakhmut/Artemvisk for the past six months, and all of Ukraine’s resources have been tied up in retaining this territory. But why outsource the ‘Special Military Operation’? Was it to abandon it to private hands in hopes that they could better manage the affair than the Russian Federal Assembly? No. This was to buy Russia time. Time for Uralvagonzavod to ramp up production of T-90Ms and Armatas. Time to fortify the entire Novorossiya territory with massive military earthworks making the territory easier to defend. Russia has liberated the regions it came to liberate, the Donestsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, and the land bridge to Crimea, and has spent the past six month retrenching these positions against Kiev/NATO incursion. Moreover it has spent the past six months planning out and supplying itself for its next offensive phase of the war, gradually making its way up along the east bank of the Dnipro river, “liberating” larger cities like Kharkov or Dnipropetrovsk before marching on Kiev in earnest.

 

I put “liberating” here in scare-quotes. Why? Because unlike the liberation of the regions which Kiev had been making war on for the past eight years, Donetsk and Luhansk, cities further into the territorial body of Ukraine demonstrably do not want to be part of Russia. That does not change the hard power fact that Russia can do this if it chooses to, progressing slowly through siege warfare to the ultimate defeat of Ukraine as a State.

 

But our ‘military experts’ here in the West disagree. They say that the NATO countries can procure or produce sufficient munitions and military hardware to prosecute a prolonged military campaign. They say that they can get these arms to Ukraine, and that Ukraine ought to keep fighting. Their progressively losing territory, and bodies, is merely a short term shortfall which will be made up for in deliveries of the most death-dealing of contemporary armaments, F-16s, Typhoons, Leopards, Abrams, HIMARS, MANPADS, weapons with which Kiev might strike deep into Russian territory. If there is a death-dealing machine, it has all been promised to Zelensky and associates.

 

So each side is not exhausted and is in effect spoiling for a prolonged, bloody, intractable fight. The foreign policy blob of Washington and its associated vassal states is committed to perpetual subsidization of weaponry for Ukraine, while Russia, aggrieved not only by NATO expansion, not only by the coup which the US perpetrated on Ukraine in 2014, but the eight year long civil war against the eastern regions, is committed to these regions’ liberation from oppression by and terrorism from the US proxy regime in Kiev.

 

Indeed none other than that venerable American State-Thought machine the RAND Corporation recently identified this as the aporia of "Mutual Optimisim About the Course of the War" as the primary and overriding "Impediment to Ending the Conflict." The RAND Corporation report found that

 

"Both Sides believe that their relative power, and thus ability to prevail, will improve over time. The centrality of Western assistance to Ukraine's war effort, and the uncertainty about the future of that assistance, has led Moscow and Kyiv to different conclusions about which of the two will gain the upper hand over time. The conflict is therefore not resolving the information problem in the way that the literature leads us to expect; both sides have grounds for optimism about the possibility of making gains by continuing to fight. Historically this kind of mutual optimism has made wars difficult to end."

 

What is being proposed, and indeed promoted, is at least a months long, if not years long, or decades long campaign of war between the US and NATO, one side, and Russia on the other, in which hundreds of thousands of troops, to say nothing of civilian casualties, will die. Initially with predominantly the bodies of the proxy state in Kiev, but who is to say that would remain the case? Presently troops are withdrawn from the Kiev proxy state to be trained in Western states on advanced armaments, and there are already calls to supplement Kiev’s troops with Western troops. How easily we might stumble across that Rubicon over the coming months of unparalleled carnage and destruction?

 

It does not have to be this way. It does not have to be that hundreds of thousands of young lives, full lives, actual lives, have to be mulched up by great hulking war apparatuses in a slow, churning cacophony of exploded munitions. There must be a peace, there must be a peace process, and an equitable and rational assessment of how to reconcile the opposing local populations. There must be an immediate ceasefire. Nor, for that matter does it have to be the case that thousands of lives are lost today along the eastern front of the war. In the battle for Bakhmut/Artemvisk the average life-span for a Ukrainian conscript is 4 hours. It is consuming thousands of lives per day. Blown to bits like so much gore in a reality that is, frankly, unimaginable in its horror.

 

(2) Intervention by a Broad Array of Non-Aligned Parties

 

Intervention by a broad array of neutral and unaligned parties. Anyone who is actively transferring weapons and armaments to the conflict are disqualified. This would mean that neutral third countries like China, Brazil and India would mediate the conflict. And, of course, one would already hear the pained cries from the Western warkhawks that ‘China is not neutral!’ Except they are, at least insofar as this conflict goes. China could end this conflict tomorrow with a single swift deployment of manpower and equipment, it could directly and reliably supply military hardware to Russia which could end this conflict in a matter of weeks, with the result being the total military defeat of the regime in Kiev and its forcible depoliticization, and yet it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Because, reliable China, that repository of technocratic rectitude, condemns the unilateral violation of sovereign territory. It has condemned Russia for the invasion of February 2022. Nevertheless, while for the active belligerents against Russia right now, the US, the EU, UK, and Canada, the inquiry ends here, for the unaligned countries it does not. Why, they ask has this situation arisen? Why did Russia feel compelled to invade Ukraine? The unaligned countries refuse to endorse and support either Russia, or indeed Kiev, because they know that no one in the story of this conflict is innocent, and that all of the active belligerents are responsible for its genesis. They know that the overwhelming majority of the world, the labouring masses of the world, have nothing to gain, nothing to profit from this war at all. They know that those who promote the exacerbation and prolongation of this war most loudly do in fact have a financial stake in its exacerbation and prolongation. This is what makes them singularly qualified to intervene, because they refuse to merely choose between the binary narratives of the conflict as manichean good versus evil narratives.

 

The corollary is that belligerents to this conflict, with both Russia and the United States first among them, ought to play as little of a directing role as possible. The belligerence within the United States towards Russia is no less than the belligerence which exists towards the United States in Russia, and no more justified or rational. Indeed it has been revealed this month by veteran Journalist Sy Hersh that it was the United States which surreptitiously destroyed several of the Nordstream 2 pipelines. The US is not merely supplying material to Kiev, it is an active belligerent in the conflict.

 

(3) The Direct Participation of the Proximate Aggrieved Parties

 

If there is to be a meaningful and durable peace, it has to be the peace of the local populations who have been aggrieved by the exacerbation of the situation by the broader powers and belligerents. Since 2014, the state in Kiev has been at war with the two breakaway republics in the eastern regions, the People’s Republic of Donetsk, and the People’s Republic of Luhansk. It is between these parties, Kiev on the one side, and the self-declared republics in the eastern regions, as well as Crimea, including along the landbridge to Crimea, that peace has to be made. Russia has interests in such negotiation, as do the US and its immediate vassal states, but if there is to be a peace, it will have to be between the erstwhile state of Ukraine and the regions in the east which no longer wish to remain in Ukraine.

 

Crimea immediately voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia after the 2014 coup, which was immediately, of course, recognized by Russia. The West disputes and denigrates this vote, as it does every international plebecite which demonstrates popular contempt for the United States, but it is nonetheless the case that an overwhelming majority of Crimea turned out to vote, and voted to leave immediately. These other two republics of the eastern regions, however, were stranded within the asserted territory of the Kiev regime. It has to be remembered what a traumatic, provocative event the 2014 Maidan coup was – the duly elected President of Ukraine, elected predominantly by the eastern regions, as politically opposed to the parties favoured by the west of Ukraine, was removed from office in an undemocratic coup. The eastern regions, the People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk, ceased to recognize the state in Kiev as a legitimate political authority. It is precisely because of the civil war which arose as a result of the US orchestrated coup of 2014 that the US proxy regime in Kiev was compelled to sign the Minsk peace agreements, which pledged that Kiev would (a) withdraw militarily from the eastern regions, (b) recognize the territorial autonomy of the eastern regions, and (c) implement economic development for the eastern regions. Of course Kiev did none of these things, and rather continued to degrade conditions of life for the eastern regions. In 2014, Petro Poroshenko, the mad racist chocolate baron who initially assumed power in the post-coup regime in Kiev, declared that “We will have jobs, they will not. We will have pensions, they will not. We will have support of children and pensioners, they will not. Our children will go to kindergartens and schools, theirs will be sitting in cellars.” This was the policy pursued for the following eight years, and continued under Vlodimir Zelensky, though he ran on a platform of doing otherwise.

 

Last month a pro-Ukrainian reporter was was bothering an older lady from an eastern city still under the control of Kiev. She said to this lady 'the Day of Ukrainian Unity is this Weekend.' The lady shrugs and says, 'I don't know.' The pro-Ukrainian reporter insists: "Unity of Ukraine is not important in your opinion?" And the lady thinks to herself and then says "Why Ukrainians? The whole world is for peace. So that people are kind." And the pro-Ukrainian reporter insists "but we're at war and need to unite to win against the Russians." The lady appears visibly annoyed, she doesn't want to have the argument, she says 'I don't know, I'm not into politics." And the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "war is politics?" And the lady says "yes, politics of course." So the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "politics of what country?" and the lady says "all countries, America's, Ukraine's, Russia's." And here the pro-Ukrainian reporter insists: "Who is the aggressor? Who started the war?" And the lady says, without a moment's hestitation, "Ukraine." Incredulous, the pro-Ukrainian reporter says "Ukraine started the war?" and the lady says "yes." The pro-Ukrainian reporter asks "against whom did Ukraine start the war?" and the lady says "2014 against its own people." Again, incredulous, the pro-Ukraine reporter says "Ukraine attacked itself?" and the lady, again, without hesitation, says "yes. Whose people are in the Donbas?"

 

There exists a population within Ukraine for whom Zelensky, fighting this war with perpetual and indiscriminate Western assistance is a hero, a champion for freedom and democracy, and, at the same time, there exists a population within the disputed eastern regions for whom Zelensky is a pathetic idiot, who is waging a war in total contravention of his central election promise to end and resolve the then eight year long civil war, and who is selling himself, and Ukraine, to the Americans, at the expense of Ukrainian bodies. This latter population is specifically targeted for reprisal by the proxy regime in Kiev, silenced, censored, banned from Parliament, arbitrarily arrested and tortured. If there is to be a meaningful peace, both those who are culturally Ukrainian and those who are culturally Russian, those on both sides of the now decade-long civil war, must have a prominent and central position in the negotiations. Not Kiev on one side and Russia on the other, nor Russia on one side and the US on the other, but rather Kiev on one side and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk on the other.

 

These are the parties between whom peace has to be made. Bracket aside the territorial distribution question. Prior to the US orchestrated coup of 2014, it remained possible for culturally Russian and culturally Ukrainian populations to live together in peace within the eastern regions. As a result of the precipitous increase in hostilities, as a result of the 2014 coup, and as a result of the eight years of civil war perpetrated by Kiev against the eastern regions thereafter, that is no longer possible. A peace settlement has to be realistic about what can be achieved in terms of healing the wounds which have accumulated over the past decade as a result of this conflict. It needs to put these parties into dialogue with one another while finding a way to, for the immediate future, keep them apart within an intelligent and rational territorial distribution.

 

III – Rage Against the Demonization and Denigration of Peace

 

Those who oppose the cessation of hostilities often purport to be working in the ultimate interests of peace. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made this claim, for example, on January 5, 2023, stating that: “Weapons are – in fact – the way to peace.” This is a dangerous, cynical lie, the purpose of which is to legitimate NATO military expenditure and expand the territory of accumulation and extraction by the US and its immediate vassal states.

 

In the Western countries calls for peace, for a negotiated end to the war, are demonized, denigrated and censored by the mouthpieces of the owning class, the privately owned means of communication. The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The Economist, the Atlantic, all promote the prolongation and exacerbation of this war, and alternately stigmatize or ignore calls for the war to end. Basic, true information is labelled ‘disinformation’ by the lapdogs of the US State Department, the Atlantic Council and their associated personages.

 

In opposition to this stultified heap, which monologically preaches the merit in perpetual subsidization of a US proxy state to conquer territory it never controlled in the first place, calls must grow to end this irrational proxy war. The Western public must demand an immediate end to the carnage, an immediate ceasefire, the abolition of the Bakhmut meat-blender, they must demand that peace negotiations be directed and led by non-aligned parties, and that the US and Russia be recognized as active belligerents who must themselves make peace, and the public must demand a peace process which really and substantively heals the wounds of the last ten years of civil war and great power struggle.