Tag: Ukraine

20 Principles for Making Sense of the Ukraine War

It’s easy for any of us to lose our way in “the fog of war.” I’m sure you agree. After all, most of us aren’t experts in matters Ukrainian. What do we know?

One way of dealing with such mystification is to remember some elementary principles and truisms that apply to all cases of international conflict including Ukraine and far beyond.

Let me review 20 of them. See if these help:

  1. The United States (not Russia, China, or ISIS) is the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence.” Martin Luther King made that identification. By all measures (including weapons sales, “defense” budgets and involvement in ongoing wars), it remains true today. This realization might be enough to raise suspicions about “our” government’s position on Ukraine.
  2. Might does not make right. A military force powerful enough to impose its will on weaker opponents is no indication of who’s right. This, of course applies to the United States as well as to Russia.
  3. International laws should never be disobeyed. This principle the United States applies to its enemies (such as Russia in the Ukraine) but rarely to itself.
  4. Wars are illegal unless they follow UN protocols. Please note that nearly every (if not all) of the myriad “American” wars since the end of the Second Inter-capitalist war have been illegal according to this standard.
  5. Everyone is equal before the law. Obviously,, legal double standards are morally repugnant. For instance, the United States can’t deny the authority of the World Court when it’s invoked against itself and then turn around and invoke its authority against an “enemy” like Putin.
  6. It is not logically permitted to lecture others to “Do as I say, not as I do.” In other words, law breakers lose moral authority to lecture others about the virtue of law abidingness. Every child can grasp this rule.
  7. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The U.S. cannot condemn Vladimir Putin for his actions in Ukraine, when it’s doing and has done worse things in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.
  8. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the United States can invoke its “Monroe Doctrine” to protect its Latin American “backyard,” a similar right must be extended to Russia and its perceived need for a buffer zone around its borders.
  9. The one who delivers the first punch can’t prevent a counterpunch by claiming “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” I’ve even heard State Department officials adopt this defense when U.S. crimes are compared to those of designated enemies.  [“Well, are you telling me that two wrongs make a right?” (Please don’t hit me back!)]
  10. “Whataboutism” should be cultivated. It’s simply the informed art of making connections. That’s what I’m trying to do with this piece.
  11. Without making connections, the world cannot be understood. We lurch from one crisis to another with no ability to understand.
  12. Borders, nationality, and race are creations of the elite to control the rest of us. Imperialists have used these fictions throughout the history of colonialism. All three, borders, superstitions about national allegiance and the illusion of race have been used to divide, conquer, and rule — to know whom to bomb, to collect taxes, and create captive workforces forbidden to cross imaginary lines to better their lives. (To illustrate, imagine if there were no enforceable border line between Russia and Ukraine. How would Putin know whom to attack? Would there even be a Putin?}
  13. Cultivate a long memory. This is another way of expressing the truism that those who forget history are bound to repeat its errors as we’re seeing with the coalescing dangers of yet another European war.
  14. Follow the money. Because NATO requires its members to increase their “defense” expenditures, the military-industrial complex benefits from each additional affiliate. Could that be a factor in the campaign to increase NATO’s membership — including in Ukraine?
  15. Follow the oil. Decommissioning the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Europe means new markets for U.S. liquified natural gas. Hmm. . ..
  16. The CIA, the U.S. government, and the media which unquestioningly report their claims cannot be trusted. After all, CIA boss, Mike Pompeo admitted “We lie, we cheat, we steal all the time. In fact, we take entire courses. . ..” (See below, point # 20.)
  17. If the U.S. favors a national leader, he’s probably a puppet or subservient client. This applies to U.S. creations such as Venezuela’s Juan Guaido and (on this principle) like Volodymyr Zelenskyy
  18. If the U.S. opposes a national leader, he’s usually doing something right. The leader in question is probably somehow interfering with U.S. claims to world hegemony. Certainly Putin is doing that.
  19. Non-white lives matter too – just as much as Europeans’ or Americans’. Again, it’s amazing how we’re led to clutch our pearls at the sight of thousands of Europeans (“who look and live like us”) as victims of war and as refugees while ignoring the far higher number of refugees and war casualties “we” produce every day among black and brown people.
  20. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Another Great Man (remember him?) tried to say that but failed. I wonder why he didn’t seem to understand. Do we?

Can you think of other applicable principles? If so, please share them.

A Ukrainian Ash Wednesday: Give Up Chauvinism, Borders, and War for Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of prayer and penance that prepares the so-called Christian world for Easter (April 17th).

Lent should be especially welcome this year when would-be followers of Yeshua have somehow been caught up in a faith-contradictory fever of war.

In traditional terms Lenten “penance” is the English translation of the theological term metanoia. It refers to a change of heart and mind; it’s connected “conversion” and “reformation.”

More specifically, metanoia is about atonement in the sense of at-one-ment. That means acceptance of the spiritual reality that all human beings represent a single entity.

In the eyes of Life’s Great Spirit, there are no Americans, Russians, Chinese, or Africans. All of us are even more than brothers and sisters. In the great scheme of things, there is actually no distinction between us. There are no valid borders – not between Russia and Ukraine, not even between the U.S. and Mexico.

That’s the meaning of Yeshua’s injunction: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Our neighbors (even if they live in Russia or Ukraine) are ourselves.” That’s what Paul meant when he said that in the Great Mother’s order, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” (Galatians 3:28). There is really only one of us here.

You see, missing from the entire debate about the war in Ukraine and about U.S. policy everywhere has been faith, diplomacy and compromise in place of the reigning machismo, self-assertion, militarism, refusal to give in (e.g., about Ukraine’s admission to NATO) and belief in American or Russian “exceptionalism.”

So, this Lent, how about embracing at-one-ment and giving up chauvinism? During the war in Ukraine, the continued U.S. occupation of Syria, its genocidal bombing of Yemen and Somalia, its famine-inducing sanctions of Afghanistan, and its illegal support of Israel’s apartheid system, it’s time for American Christians to embrace the viewpoint of Yeshua and Paul. Only that can save us now.

It’s high time to leave behind the ethnocentrism, jingoism, and warmongering our government, the arms industry, and the mainstream media would have us faithlessly endorse. It’s time to give up chauvinism for Lent.

And that’s hard, isn’t it? It’s difficult because it entails admission of our own responsibility for strife in the world rather than blaming fictional others. They’re “fictional” because in the eyes of our Mother, there are no “others” to blame. You and I – “Americans” – are 100% responsible for the disastrous state of the planet. Again, there is no one else to accuse.

So, if we’re thinking about what to “give up for Lent,” how about giving up chauvinism, jingoism, militarism, and war?

Join the peace movement founded not on a spirit of “Don’t Look Up,” but on determination to spend the next 40 days looking within and changing the ugliness and bringing to light the loveliness we see there.

20 reasons why the U.S. & NATO are ultimately responsible for the crisis in Ukraine.

Despite what you might read in the mainstream press, the United States and NATO, not Putin, are the ones ultimately responsible for the crisis in Ukraine. More specifically, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has consistently provoked Russia by:

  1. Repeatedly interfering in Russian elections and internal politics from Boris Yeltsin on
  2. Resulting in the shocking U.S.-sponsored theft (by privatization) of the Russian people’s communal property by oligarchs and the Russian mafia
  3. Ignoring Russian sensitivities about the geostrategic importance of Ukraine in Russian history. (Russia has twice been invaded by its European enemies using Ukraine as their entry point.)
  4. Discounting Russia’s concerns about the ideological ties of Ukraine’s current leadership (including that of its army) to Nazi collaborators during World War II
  5. Breaking the promise of George H.W. Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move NATO “one inch closer to Russia” than its position in 1990
  6. But instead incorporating into NATO countries of the former Soviet Union often extremely close to the Russian border
  7. Constantly entertaining the possibility of extending NATO membership even to Ukraine against Russia’s demands to the contrary
  8. Refusing to put in writing a promise not to do so
  9. In this way blocking diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine crisis
  10. And also hypocritically denying to Russia the same rights the U.S. claims (via its Monroe Doctrine) to be free from international threats in its own “backyard”
  11. Engineering a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 to replace the neutral (towards Russia) and democratically elected president of Ukraine (Viktor Yanukovych) with a far right rabidly anti-Russian U.S. client (Petro Poroshenko)
  12. Who then surrounded himself with anti-Russian, often neo-Nazi advisors, and cabinet members who are internationally recognized as constituting one of the most corrupt governments in the world
  13. Selecting the leaders of Ukraine by American fiat rather than by democratic processes
  14. Thus, making Ukraine a quasi-U.S. neo-colony right on Russia’s border
  15. And giving rise to an anti-coup, anti-corruption, anti-NATO rebellion on the part of constitutional democrats and anti-fascists centered in Ukraine’s pro-Russian Donbas region
  16.  Which over the last seven years has been subject to shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces costing over 14,000 mostly civilian lives
  17. Ignoring the provisions of the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements between Russia and Ukraine calling for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the Donbas front line, release of prisoners of war, and constitutional reform extending self-government to certain areas of Donbas, while restoring to the Ukrainian government control of its national borders
  18. Pouring weapons of mass destruction into Ukraine
  19. Countenancing (by not denouncing) Ukraine’s threat to seek installation of nuclear armaments on its territory
  20. While constantly proposing harsh sanctions on Russia as if it alone were responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.

None of this is to say that Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is justified. Like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, it is clearly a violation of international law.

The claim here, however, is that Putin was provoked into his act of aggression by NATO led by the United States. The provocations benefit the U.S. not only in terms of discrediting Russia as a regional power, but of providing European markets for U.S. liquified natural gas (after sanctions deprive Russia of its own natural gas markets in Europe). The crisis also creates huge profits for U.S. arms manufacturers along with persuasive rationales for increased Pentagon budgets. As well, the entire fiasco promises to raise (at least temporarily) President Biden’s abysmal poll numbers.

As a final note, there is good reason to believe that the United States would long ago have adopted military measures similar to Putin’s had it experienced comparable acts of aggression for instance on its border with Mexico.

Imagine the response of “our” government had Russia or China sponsored a coup d’état replacing a Mexican government neutral or friendly to the U.S. with a virulently anti-American puppet regime. Imagine further if Russia or China had armed that hostile government to the teeth and shelled mercilessly Mexican citizens friendly to the United States. History (such as that of United States throughout Latin America during the 1980s) tells us that such action would never be tolerated. It would predictably result in American military operations dwarfing those of Russian forces in Ukraine.

So don’t believe what the mainstream media is telling you about Ukraine. Putin has his reasons and is no worse than our own country’s leaders. This is yet another tragedy created by the country Martin Luther King described as the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world.