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.
No comments:
Post a Comment