By John Feffer / Tom Dispatch
In its attempt to swallow Ukraine whole, Russia has so far managed to bite off only the eastern Donbas region and a portion of its southern coast. The rest of the country remains independent, with its capital Kyiv intact.
No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.
This might seem like an ordinary territorial dispute between predator and prey. Ukraine’s central location between east and west, however, turns it into a potentially world-historical conflict like the Battle of Tours when the Christian Franks turned back the surging Ummayad army of Muslims in 732 AD or the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1975.
The pivotal nature of the current war seems obvious. Ukraine has for some time wanted to join western institutions like the European Union. Russia prefers to absorb Ukraine into its russkiy mir (Russian world). However, this tug of war over the dividing line between East and West isn’t a simple recapitulation of the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly has no interest in reconstituting the Soviet Union, much less in sending his troops westward into Poland or Germany, while the United States isn’t wielding Ukraine as a proxy to fight the Kremlin. Both superpowers have far more circumscribed aims.
Nonetheless, the war has oversized implications. What at first glance seems like a spatial conflict is also a temporal one. Ukraine has the great misfortune to straddle the fault line between a twentieth century of failed industrial strategies and a possible twenty-first century reorganization of society along clean-energy lines.
In the worst-case scenario, Ukraine could simply be absorbed into the world’s largest petro-state. Or the two sides could find themselves in a punishing stalemate that cuts off the world’s hungriest from vast stores of grain and continues to distract the international community from pushing forward with an urgently needed reduction of carbon emissions. Only a decisive defeat of Putinism — with its toxic mix of despotism, corruption, right-wing nationalism, and devil-may-care extractivism — would offer the world some sliver of hope when it comes to restoring some measure of planetary balance.
Ukraine is fighting for its territory and, ultimately, its survival. The West has come to its aid in defense of international law. But the stakes in this conflict are far more consequential than that.
Once upon a time, Vladimir Putin was a conventional Russian politician. Like many of his predecessors, he enjoyed a complicated ménage à trois with democracy (the boring spouse) and despotism (his true love). He toggled between confrontation and cooperation with the West. Not a nationalist, he presided over a multiethnic federation; not a populist, he didn’t care much about playing to the masses; not an imperialist, he deployed brutal but limited force to keep Russia from spinning apart.
He also understood the limits of Russian power. In the 1990s, his country had suffered a precipitous decline in its economic fortune, so he worked hard to rebuild state power on what lay beneath his feet. Russia, after all, is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, its second-largest oil producer, and its third-largest coal exporter. Even his efforts to prevent regions from slipping away from the Russian sphere of influence were initially constrained. In 2008, for instance, he didn’t try to take over neighboring Georgia, just force a stalemate that brought two breakaway regions into the Russian sphere of influence.
Meanwhile, Putin pursued strategies aimed at weakening his perceived adversaries. He ratcheted up cyberattacks in the Baltics, expanded maritime provocations in the Black Sea, advanced aggressive territorial claims in the Arctic, and supported right-wing nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini to undermine the unity of the European Union. In 2016, he even attempted to further polarize American politics via dirty tricks in support of Donald Trump.
Always sensitive to challenges to his own power, Putin watched with increasing concern as “color revolutions” spread through parts of the former Soviet Union — from Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2005) to Belarus (2006) and Moldova (2009). Around the time of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, he began shifting domestically to a nationalism that prioritized the interests of ethnic Russians, while cracking down ferociously on dissent and ramping up attacks on critics abroad. An intensifying sense of paranoia led him to rely on an ever-smaller circle of advisors, ever less likely to contradict him or offer him bad news.
In the early 2020s, facing disappointment abroad, Putin effectively gave up on preserving even a semblance of good relations with the United States or the European Union. Except for Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the European far right had proven a complete disappointment, while his fair-weather friend Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election. Worse yet, European countries seemed determined to meet their Paris climate accord commitments, which sooner or later would mean radically reducing their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
In contrast to China’s eagerness to stay on good terms with the United States and Europe, Putin’s Russia began turning its back on centuries of “westernizing” impulses to embrace its Slavic history and traditions. Like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and India’s Narendra Modi, Putin decided that the only ideology that ultimately mattered was nationalism, in his case a particularly virulent, anti-liberal form of it.
All of this means that Putin will pursue his aims in Ukraine regardless of the long-term impact on relations with the West. He’s clearly convinced that political polarization, economic sclerosis, and a wavering security commitment to that embattled country will eventually force Western powers to accommodate a more assertive Russia.
He might not be wrong.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the West has never seemed more unified. Even previously neutral Finland and Sweden have lined up to join NATO, while the United States and much of Europe have largely agreed when it comes to sanctions against Russia.
Still, all is not well in the West. In the United States, where Trumpism continues to metastasize within the Republican Party, 64% of Americans are convinced that democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” according to a January NPR/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, in a surprising Alliance of Democracies Foundation poll last year, 44% of respondents in 53 countries rated the United States, a self-proclaimed beacon of liberty, as a greater threat to democracy than either China (38%) or Russia (28%).
In Europe, the far right continues to challenge the democratic foundations of the continent. Uber-Christian Viktor Orbán recently won his fourth term as Hungary’s prime minister; the super-conservative Law and Justice Party is firmly at the helm in Poland; the anti-immigrant, Euroskeptical Swiss People’s Party remains the most significant force in that country’s parliament; and the top three far-right political parties in Italy together attract nearly 50% in public opinion polls.
Meanwhile, the global economy, still on neo-liberal autopilot, has jumped out of the pandemic frying pan into the fires of stagflation. With stock markets heading into bear territory and a global recession looming, the World Bank recently cut its 4.1% growth forecast for 2022 to 2.9%. The Biden administration’s perceived failure to address inflation may deliver Congress to Republican extremists this November and social democratic leaders throughout Europe may pay a similar political price for record-high Eurozone inflation.
Admittedly, the continued military dominance of the United States and its NATO allies would seem to refute all rumors of the decline of the West. In reality, though, the West’s military record hasn’t been much better than Russia’s performance in Ukraine. In August 2021, the United States ignominiously withdrew its forces from its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the Taliban surged back to power. This year, France pulled its troops from Mali after a decade-long failure to defeat al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants. Western-backed forces failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad in Syria or prevent a horrific civil war from enveloping Libya. All the trillions of dollars devoted to achieving “full-spectrum dominance” couldn’t produce enduring success in Iraq or Somalia, wipe out terrorist factions throughout Africa, or effect regime change in North Korea or Cuba.
Despite its overwhelming military and economic power, the West no longer seems to be on the same upward trajectory as after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back in the 1990s, Eastern Europe and even parts of the former Soviet Union signed up to join NATO and the European Union. Russia under Boris Yeltsin inked a partnership agreement with NATO, while both Japan and South Korea were interested in pursuing a proposed global version of that security alliance.
Today, however, the West seems increasingly irrelevant outside its own borders. China, love it or hate it, has rebuilt its Sinocentric sphere in Asia, while becoming the most important economic player in the Global South. It’s even established alternative global financial institutions that, one day, might replace the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Turkey has turned its back on the European Union (and vice versa) and Latin America is heading in a more independent direction. Consider it a sign of the times that, when the call went out to sanction Russia, most of the non-Western world ignored it.
The foundations of the West are indeed increasingly unstable. Democracy is no longer, as scholar Francis Fukuyama imagined it in the late 1980s, the inevitable trajectory of world history. The global economy, while spawning inexcusable inequality and being upended by the recent pandemic, is exhausting the resource base of the planet. Both right-wing extremism and garden-variety nationalism are eroding the freedoms that safeguard liberal society. It’s no surprise, then, that Putin believes a divided West will ultimately accede to his aggression.
There’s never a good time for war.
But hostilities have flared in Ukraine just as the world was supposed to be accelerating its transition to a clean-energy future. In another three years, carbon emissions must hit their peak and, in the next eight years, countries must cut their carbon emissions by half if there’s any hope of meeting the goals of the Paris climate accord by 2050. Even before the current war, the most comprehensive estimate put the rise in global temperature at a potentially disastrous 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century (nearly twice the 1.5 degree goal of that agreement).
The war in Ukraine is propelling the world full tilt in the opposite direction. China and India are, in fact, increasing their use of coal, the worst possible fossil fuel in terms of carbon emissions. Europe is desperate to replace Russian oil and natural gas and countries like Greece are now considering increasing their own production of dirty energy. In a similar fashion, the United States is once again boosting oil and gas production, releasing supplies from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and hoping to persuade oil-producing nations to pump yet more of their product into global markets.
With its invasion, in other words, Russia has helped to derail the world’s already faltering effort at decarbonization. Although last fall Putin committed his country to a net-zero carbon policy by 2060, phasing out fossil fuels now would be economic suicide given that he’s done so little to diversify the economy. And despite international sanctions, Russia has been making a killing with fossil-fuel sales, raking in a record $97 billion in the first 100 days of battle.
All of this could suggest, of course, that Vladimir Putin represents the last gasp of the failed petropolitics of the twentieth century. But don’t count him out yet. He might also be the harbinger of a future in which technologically sophisticated politicians continue to pursue their narrow political and regional aims, making it ever less possible for the world to survive climate change.
Ukraine is where Putin is making his stand. As for Putinism itself — how long it lasts, how persuasive it proves to be for other countries — much depends on China.
After Putin’s invasion, Beijing could have given full-throated support to its ally, promised to buy all the fossil fuels Western sanctions left stranded, provided military equipment to buoy the faltering Russian offensive, and severed its own ties with Europe and the United States. Beijing could have broken with international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF in favor of the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, its own multinational organizations. In this way, Ukraine could have turned into a genuine proxy war between East and West.
Instead, China has been playing both sides. Unhappy with Putin’s unpredictable moves, including the invasion, which have disrupted China’s economic expansion, it’s also been disturbed by the sanctions against Russia that similarly cramp its style. Beijing isn’t yet strong enough to challenge the hegemony of the dollar and it also remains dependent on Russian fossil fuels. Now the planet’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has been building a tremendous amount of renewable energy infrastructure. Its wind sector generated nearly 30% more power in 2021 than the year before and its solar sector increased by nearly 15%. Still, because of a growing appetite for energy, its overall dependence on coal and natural gas has hardly been reduced.
Reliant as it is on Russian energy imports, China won’t yet pull the plug on Putinism, but Washington could help push Beijing in that direction. It was once a dream of the Obama administration to partner with the world’s second-largest economy on clean energy projects. Instead of focusing as it has on myriad ways to contain China, the Biden administration could offer it a green version of an older proposal to create a Sino-American economic duopoly, this time focused on making the global economy sustainable in the process. The two countries could join Europe in advancing a Global Green Deal.
In recent months, President Biden has been willing to entertain the previously unthinkable by mending fences with Venezuela and Saudi Arabia in order to flood global markets with yet more oil and so reduce soaring prices at the pump. Talk about twentieth-century mindsets. Instead, it’s time for Washington to consider an eco-détente with Beijing that would, among other things, drive a stake through the heart of Putinism, safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, and stop the planet from burning to a crisp.
Otherwise, we know how this unhappy meal will end — as a Last Supper for humanity.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy, Songlands, has only recently been published. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.
“while the United States isn’t wielding Ukraine as a proxy to fight the Kremlin”
Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . .
Oh good god, Russia has NOT made any attempt to “swallow Ukraine whole.”
The fall of empire is well underway. Russia may end up not need much help at all. Or NATO led by Washington may go full Kubrick, in which case none of it will matter any more. One thing for sure, as long as the United States and NATO remain an existential threat, Russia and China will be joined at the hip….or more accurately, have each others back. The enemy of my enemy is my friend…..
“…while the United States isn’t wielding Ukraine as a proxy to fight the Kremlin.”
“In the worst-case scenario, Ukraine could simply be absorbed into the world’s largest petro-state.”
You mean the US? (Whose oil production in 2021 was 10% higher than Russia’s: 11 million bpd vs 10 million)
“In reality, though, the West’s military record hasn’t been much better than Russia’s performance in Ukraine.”
Except Russia is winning in Ukraine. The last time the US won a land war was against who? Grenada? Panama?
“Instead of focusing as it has on myriad ways to contain China, the Biden administration could offer it a green version of an older proposal to create a Sino-American economic duopoly…”
It could offer, but it won’t, and what would be in it for China? The US cannot be trusted to keep to any treaties it signs (JCPOA being a significant recent example; there are many more). And even if it could, China is economically ascendant, the US is rapidly declining, the economic war against Russia (far more important than the ground war in Ukraine) being simply the latest nail in its coffin.
MR.Feiffer is -like most so called progressives- actually Regressive regarding all things Ukraine and most specifically the Nazi Regime that America supports in Ukraine since the Maidan coup of 2014.
Putin is Vlad the Nazi Impaler and Russia is freeing the Russian speaking Ukraine from the tyranny of Nazism Nuland/Kagan style. Soon all of the north shore of the Black Sea from Kharkiv to Transnistria will be re-incorporated into the Russian federation and Uncle Scam will be crying and whining just like Mr Feiffer. Wake up and listen to the many truthtellers on Ukraine Which excludes the entire western CIA/Media.
Thursday 23 June 2022 Mr. Feffer appears to be yet another Putin basher. He seems to have little understanding of the historical context that provoked this current conflict in Ukraine. And I do not see how anyone can, at this point, say that Ukraine is a sovereign state~~it has not had that pleasure since 2014, when the self-entitled neocon Victoria Nuland helped promote a coup against the duly elected leader of Ukraine. Enter the Nazis and the appropriation of Ukraine as a proxy state, in order for the USA/NATO/EU axis to initiate a war against Russia. All this slop about Russia wanting to inhale Ukrainian territory is distinctly incorrect. That was not the original intention, as Putin stated very clearly to the Western axis that continued to treat him in an appallingly dismissive way. To the West’s economic discomfort, which could have been foreseen, if that very axis had leaders and diplomats that were one-tenth as intelligent as Mr. Putin and Mr. Lavrov.
It is very disappointing to see such vulgar US war propaganda appear on Scheerpost. If one wishes to read the lies cranked out by the dozens by the US lie machine, there are better sources for that – Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
This writer should be advised that it is the US which routinely violates international law. In fact, by its promulgation of its phony “Rules-Based International Order”, the US has explicitly rejected international law. The war in Ukraine is a US proxy war against Russia, started by the US with its overthrow of the democratically elected government in 2014. Following the installation of an illegitimate puppet government, the US/Ukrainian government proceeded to murder thousands (13,000 to 14,000 is the estimate) of Ukrainian citizens who refused to recognize the illegitimate government. This continued for eight years. Early this year the US/Ukrainian government amassed troops on the Donbass contact line for the purpose of beginning a full scale invasion of the Donbass for the purpose of continuing the genocide of the dissenters. That plan was foiled by the beginning of Russia’s special operation and was a principal reason for the timing of it.
We should not take this article seriously. In fact, we should all get a bit of a laugh at the fact that the author stills clings to the thoroughly discredited Russiagate fraud perpetrated by the Democratic Party.
Please, no more writing by this writer. It is a waste of time to read a regurgitation of Washington propaganda which is only taken seriously in the US and UK.
“No one knows how this meal will end.”
Leave it to an elite to use this analogy. Meal? Is that what the Nazi Ukraine is? A meal?
Then, alas, there is something very consisten with these chosen writers, for sure, in their bedroom slippers at their “think” tanks and so-called “knowledge” cess pools.
Leave it to Tom and Bob to play this deadly ignorant game.
Ties to Open Society and Democratc Socialists of America says it all about Feffer. Bought and sold.
Zelensky’s main sponsor, Ihor Kolomoïsky, who lives in Geneva where he has luxurious offices overlooking the harbour, is not the least of these oligarchs who profit from the prevailing corruption: on 5 March 2021, Anthony Blinken, who probably had no choice, announced that the State Department had frozen his assets and banned him from the United States because of “involvement in significant corruption“. It is true that Kolomoysky was accused of embezzling $5.5 billion from the state-owned Privatbank. Coincidentally, the good Ihor was also the main shareholder of the oil holding company Burisma, which employed Joe Biden’s son Hunter for a modest compensation of $50,000 a month and which is now under investigation by the Delaware prosecutor. A wise precaution: Kolomoisky, who has become persona non grata in Israel and is a refugee in Georgia according to some witnesses, is not likely to appear on the stand.
This is the same Kolomoïsky, who was a key figure in Ukraine’s progress, and who made Zelensky’s entire career as an actor and who is implicated in the Pandora Papers affair revealed by the press in October 2021. These papers revealed that since 2012, the TV channel 1+1 belonging to the sulphurous oligarch had paid no less than 40 million dollars to its star Zelensky and that the latter, shortly before being elected president and with the help of his close guard of Kryvyi Rih – the two Shefir brothers, one of whom is the author of Zelensky’s scripts and the other the head of the State Security Service, and the producer and owner of their joint production company Kvartal 95 – had prudently transferred considerable sums to offshore accounts opened in his wife’s name, while acquiring three undeclared flats in London for the sum of $7.5 million.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article217403.html
This is what happens when you are seriously ignorant of facts. He seems to know what Mr. Putin is thinking which should prompt Mr. Putin to ask this fellow what he’s thinking. Complete nonsense!
What a disappointing read from Scheerpost. As others have already noted the repeated falsehoods (Russiagate) and baseless claims (Russia wants to swallow Ukraine) and others, I won’t waste the time addressing them either.
I will only say that it is apparent that this writer, in stating a narrative that overlaps much with that of Washington and its mouthpieces, seems oblivious to (or else, dishonestly chooses to ignore) much of the actual history of this conflict- the context in which it emerged, the pleas and warnings not only by Russia but of many seasoned U.S. officers from military, Intel and Diplomatic corps alike, and that of Russia-expert western scholars; and the actions of the U.S. since 2014 at least.
My advice to the writer: please don’t write about things that you know so little about, especially if you want to persuade those who’ve taken the time to become informed.
Tom Dispatch is a now sadly Pro Nazi source for Regressives. I urge Robert Scheer to monitor and reject many Former progressives who now appear on organs Like the late great Tom Dispatch
Thanks for all the intelligent and accurate recitations of Material facts. It gives this old lawyer hope for Scheerpost and the
Great progressive whose name it bears!
John Feffer wants to be the new Christopher Hitchens, but I doubt he has the wit for it.
Yet another disappointing anti-Russian diatribe filled with unsupported claims such as that “Putin” (never Russia, just the man, naturally) has his sights on swallowing up all of Ukraine (egads! is Europe next?) rather than pursuing simple goals that he and many other Russians have explained patiently and repeatedly to those few who would listen.
More gibberish about how Putin has gone off the deep end, which is pretty insulting to the rest of the Russian government not to mention the Russian people. I guess they are too stupid and weak or cowardly to stand up to him. Amazing how one frail and deluded man can hold a nation of 160 million at bay.
In Feffer’s imagination, he knows not only what Russia, aka Putin, thinks and wants, but what China, aka Xi, also thinks and wants. And what’s possible for each. And because he thinks that we, too, are ignorant peasants eager to swallow any nonsense he spews, he’s here to straighten us out.
Faux leftists are worse than right wing zealots. They have an emetic effect on me. And the sad thing is that Feffer, before he departed reality for the hermetic world of his own inflated ego, once wrote rationally and somewhat objectively. No more.
“All of this means that Putin will pursue his aims in Ukraine regardless of the long-term impact on relations with the West. He’s clearly convinced that political polarization, economic sclerosis, and a wavering security commitment to that embattled country will eventually force Western powers to accommodate a more assertive Russia.”
Who will conclude this story with a worthy ending? Should all humans live a long slow suicide? Or should we continue to nurture the ways of survival? Talents we have committed to the no longer useful heap because the great manipulators are trapped in their own egos.
Fill the void with loving what we love. The breathing of true things. The children who need our care and who will be stronger for it. Forget punishment for their mistakes and fill them up with beautiful ideas. Encourage their art, their humour. Let them eat ice cream. Let them laugh. Who knows what the future will bring?
Where this saga began: In an apparent effort to overturn the 2016 campaign, Democrats claimed “Russian interference.” After four years, and numerous investigations (including the multi-million dollar Mueller investigation), no evidence of Russian interference was found. Nevertheless, Dems had whipped up that familiar American zeal for war. The volume of that zeal was enough to bring China and Russia together, resolving their conflicts in view of this potential threat – the US. They are prepared.
Where the saga went: Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union, has been an independent nation since 1991. This would (obviously) not be the case if Russia had opposed it. Ukraine’s conflict has been between Ukrainians – those who want to align with the West vs. those who want to maintain their alliance with Russia. Zelensky took power in 2019, with much US support, and this conflict was turned into a crisis. Months later, Biden took power, eager to exploit this crisis. And here we are.
Just look at the deliberate and disingenuous either/or Aristotelian logic of this piece. Anyone not in full agreement with the view this writer is representing is on the side of evil: Putin and world-wide eco-catastrophe! Therefore any nuanced argument, such as presenting the facts of recent history, is by definition pro-Putin.
Simple. Just assert exclusive rights to the term “progressive.” As if this were the same as what it once meant; anti-establishment left. When now it refers to the liberal intellectual elite who serve to justify the neo-lib and neo-con Dems in power.
Then tie political scare terms in with the greatest global terror, irreversible ecological devastation. Which of course would be the fault of Putin, designated as what my 94 year old mom calls “the boogeyman of the month.”
Never mind that the insatiable appetite for oil in the west is the driver. Or that the US has long ignored carbon goals. The current D admin may talk about eco issues, but what they actually do is more about pleasing their corporate sponsors than concern for the future. But pointing out any of that would mean Putin might not be the sole bad guy, and that would be…yes, defense of evil.
As for China and that vague wish for an alliance based on sustainability: if we in the US can’t even get that done at home, how would it ever morph into some global panacea? Not to mention that Russia, China, India, Brazil, and other countries talk to each other. Why would any of them believe that salvation must come from western imperialists?
Another factor seldom mentioned. Most of Europe may seem obsequious towards the US. But the EEU must know that a unipolar US implies domination over their econ system, too. Since the US is convinced of its own exceptionalism, innate goodness, and invincible power, the US would never see that Europeans may not consider their interests as identical. What would the Europeans do if a China-Russia led Eurasian center is successful? But then I guess even to consider such things is, again, to align with evil.
This guy is living in a dream world Has he heard of BRICS. a growing organization whose membership have in one fashion or another have been on the receiving end the of US “shock and awe” approach to resolving , what it considers, untenable behavior.
I stopped after the total lie in the first paragraph. Shame on Scheerpost for publishing lies like this.
Let me shout from my rooftop in endorsement of all those who have mobilised in solidarity here in rebuffing the entirely disingenuous and ignorant remarks posted by this neo-liberal imperial exceptionalist who thinks he can get away with contaminating this discussion with his hubristic worldview. What is going to be very painful for the hegemon is the fact that any International Rules Based Order will not be determined by the criminals in Washington and London, but rather, will be a new paradigm set by the BRICS alliance together with any remnants of humanity within the West who have not yet completely lost their minds. Have a nice life !
@bernie holland Wow, and I thought that I was upset about this propaganda!
It is a mystery how this garbage appeared on SP. What happened, Robert?
I am saddened that Scheerpost and Tom Dispatch post garbage like this, but I must say that I’m astonished at the quality of the comments I see on this site.
I may stop reading the articles and just read the comments.
@Bob Dobbs On some sites, the comments provide better information than the articles or columns. But Scheerpost has some good articles and columns, I wouldn’t stop reading all of them.
Another uninformed, poorly read supporter of Western American Imperialism. Thank you to all who have called out his utter ignorance of history and the current geopolitical situation.
Really! America’s benevolence and Russia’s rascality are what you are attempting to highlight? Either you’re unaware of the suffering of millions of people in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Pakistan and Afghanistan (I can go on, but I hope you get the point), or you are attempting the same agenda setting as the mass media of spreading false narratives and manufacturing consent. Even a grade 5 student in a Sub-Saharan country will tell you it’s a proxy war to benefit the American oligarchs. I am surprised that you were allowed to share space with someone like Chris Hedges, a man of great integrity and intellect.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Notify me of follow-up comments by email.
Notify me of new posts by email.
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.