Day: June 20, 2015

by William Skink

The false narrative about the dire situation in Ukraine took a very strange turn today, as reported by Sputnik news. For some reason, the direct beneficiary of the 2014 coup, Poroshenko, is asking Ukraine’s Constitutional Court to declare the ousting of Yanukovych as unconstitutional. From the link:

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the country’s constitutional court, asking the court to recognize the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as illegitimate.

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional,” Poroshenko said in a court statement published on the website of the Ukrainian constitutional court.

The current Ukrainian president said the law violates the constitution, according to which the President of Ukraine is protected by law and his title remains with him forever. He also added that by enacting the law in February of 2014, the parliament of Ukraine undermined the constitution.

Curious. Perhaps Porky isn’t feeling the kind of job security he was hoping for, post-coup. Even if that were the case, this move still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What’s going on here?

That’s a question the American populace isn’t well equipped to answer, considering most think the situation in Ukraine is a Russian-instigated conflagration. And they think that because news sources like the New York Times are seen as always credible, while a source like RT is seen as pure propaganda. In an interview about the rush to a new cold war, Robert Parry touches on the danger of these perceptions about media sources:

The American propaganda barrage has not at all swayed the Russian people and government. Of course, the U.S. says they are all being propagandized by Russia Today and other Russian networks. Frankly, one can argue with some ways some things have been reported by RT or other Russian sources, but they have been doing a more accurate, on-the-ground job than the U.S. press corps has been.

You can point to a number of egregious major mistakes made by the major US news organizations. The New York Times went along with a bogus photograph from spring 2014 supposedly showing Russian troops in Ukraine. It turned out that some of the photographs were misrepresented and did not show what they were supposed to show. They [the Times writers] were forced to retract that.

You can point to factual errors on both sides, but it’s not something where the U.S., as the New York Times tries to present it, is perfect and hasn’t presented anything improperly, while the Russian media are all lies and propaganda. It’s not true. But it’s getting to the point where you cannot be a reasonable person, or look at things objectively, because you are pushed into taking sides.

That’s where journalism is a very dangerous thing – especially here. There was a lot of dangerous reporting during the cold war that in some cases pushed the two sides into dangerous confrontations. That can happen again. We were lucky to escape the 60’s without a nuclear war. Now we are rushing ourselves back into something that William Polk, a writer and former diplomat of the Kennedy administration, has called a possible Cuban missile crisis in reverse. This time we’re the ones pushing our military forces onto the Russian border, rather than the Russians putting missiles onto a place like Cuba. We know how Americans reacted to that. Now the Russians are facing something very similar.

To highlight this, here is the New York Times reporting that the U.S. is poised to put heavy weaponry in East Europe:

RIGA, Latvia — In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries, American and allied officials say.

The proposal, if approved, would represent the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States has stationed heavy military equipment in the newer NATO member nations in Eastern Europe that had once been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have caused alarm and prompted new military planning in NATO capitals.

It would be the most prominent of a series of moves the United States and NATO have taken to bolster forces in the region and send a clear message of resolve to allies and to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, that the United States would defend the alliance’s members closest to the Russian frontier.

This is insane. As the summer heats up, let’s hope the new Cold War doesn’t go hot as well.

by William Skink

Another terrible tragedy. Another round of hand-wringing over guns. What motivated this killer? Why won’t the media call it terrorism? What is wrong with this country?

President Obama had some words worth considering:

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We do not have all the facts, but we do know, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” the president said, bringing up the seeming proliferation of armed violence in the country. “Now is time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency, and it is in our power to do something about it.”

These tragedies become political Rorschach tests. Guns, race, mental illness, the Confederate flag. These aspects will be endlessly discussed for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and then we’ll move on. What won’t be discussed is the fact America uses violence across the globe to achieve its political goals.

Innocent life is casually extinguished all the time via US-sanctioned drone terrorism. The American war in Iraq killed over a million people. America uses violence to get what it wants, spreading death and misery wherever “our interests” intersect with the lives of foreign people in foreign lands. We, as Americans, so easily degrade the lives of people in far-flung countries, collectively shrugging our shoulders at the casualties, it really shouldn’t be all that shocking when our violent culture produces a mass-killer like Dylann Roof.

But we won’t talk about that. We won’t acknowledge the reality that American foreign policy encompasses some of the worst methods of terrorism in existence today.

While we discuss this domestic tragedy, our Saudi pals continue to pummel Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s “war” only exacerbates the hell America has wrought in Yemen. Last April, Rolling Stone took a look at how Obama’s terrorist drone program is causing PTSD:

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Call Dylann Roof a terrorist if it makes you feel better. Write opinion pieces about fatal gaps in Montana’s background check laws if you want to score some political points. Pass laws banning the Confederate flag if you think that will make any difference.

Personally, I don’t think it will. America came to be through the violence of manifest destiny. We built this nation on slavery and genocide. To get at the root of what America is in 2015 will require accounting for the entirety of our violent history.