Gord's Notebook : 03/01/2022

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Reacting To PBS's Laughable Ukraine Coverage With Vijay Prashad Katie Halper Show

Journalist and historian Vijay Prashad (https://twitter.com/vijayprashad) almost can't believe how bad PBS's coverage of Ukraine is. (Full chat is available at https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon...)

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter (https://independentmediainstitute.org...). He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books (https://mayday.leftword.com/) and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (https://t.co/evQYuwZXRJ). He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China (http://en.rdcy.org/). He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2022

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Sunday, March 06, 2022

The Ukrainian Conflict and the Imperial World System - CounterPunch.org

" Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is undoubtedly illegal and immoral. From the point of view of Russian interests, it is also likely to prove a costly mistake. The primary question now, however, is what to do about this, and the answers presented thus far by those outraged by the invasion are dangerously counterproductive.

“Putin must be punished,” the Americans and Europeans insist. But the forms of punishment now being implemented – severe economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine – are designed to prolong the military struggle and to cripple the Russian economy, apparently on the theory that Russia’s discontented masses and oligarchs will then replace Putin with a leader more to the West’s liking. Pardon me, but this makes little sense. Prolonging the conflict will kill more Ukrainians and Russians, inspire their compatriots and loved ones to seek revenge. It may also bring the world close to nuclear war. Moreover, making a whole people suffer usually unites them against their adversary rather than turning them against their leader.

The array of punishments administered and proposed also indicate that many Westerners consider Putin analogous to Adolf Hitler and a return to the negotiating table the equivalent of Munich-style appeasement. But this betrays a profound misunderstanding of what drives the conflict and who the conflicting parties really are. Vladimir Putin is not an evil mastermind bent on world domination and the genocidal destruction of “inferior” races. He is the brutal leader of a once great empire playing the imperial game in a world of competitive empires. More brutal than Harry Truman in Korea, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, or George W. Bush in Iraq? Obviously not. Then why consider his bad character he primary cause of the struggle?

One reason seems clear. As conflict analysts recognize, it is common for each side in a violent struggle to consider the opponent’s malice and cruelty to be the conflict’s sole cause. “They are evil aggressors who choose to fight. We are virtuous defenders who fight because we have to.” This is exactly how the editors of the New York Times describe the war in Ukraine. They put it like this:

. . . none of the pretexts for war that Mr. Putin churned out in recent days and weeks contained much truth or any justification whatsoever for waging war on a weaker neighbor. This is a war of choice for all the wrong reasons, and Mr. Putin and his coterie are solely and fully responsible for every drop of Ukrainian – and Russian – blood, for every livelihood destroyed and for all the economic pain engendered by the conflict.[1]

I suppose that half a truth is better than no truth at all, and this is precisely half the truth. Putin didinvade Ukraine without being militarily attacked. Some of the reasons for war he offered (for example, the alleged non-existence of a Ukrainian nationality) were fabrications. Other reasons, such as the U.S./European refusal to halt the expansion of NATO, were quite true, but they do not justify bombing and killing innocent people.

Where the Times editorial goes off the tracks, however, is in asserting that the Russian leaders are “solely and fully” responsible for the violence engulfing Ukraine. In fact, they are one of the responsible parties, but only one. The causes of this struggle go far beyond Mr. Putin’s bad choices, and solving the problems that produced the conflict go far beyond punishing the Russians. The causes of this conflict are systemic, which means that others in addition to Putin and his cohorts must share responsibility for the current violence.

“Systemic” means that there is a system – a form of social organization supported by patterns of thought, speech, and behavior – that structures the relations between states and peoples involved in conflict. The word that best describes our current system is imperial. Four major empires currently compete for regional hegemony and global superiority. In order of economic and military power, they are the multinational blocs dominated by the United States, China, Europe, and Russia. Several up-and-coming regional powers like Turkey and Iran have also asserted their influence in imperial style, but the major players in the Ukraine crisis are the U.S., Europe, and Russia, with China a potential participant.