© AFP 2015 / ANATOLII BOIKO
The longer and bigger the war in Ukraine becomes, the more lucrative it becomes for US politicians and big business, says Alexandr Khrolenko, a columnist for the RIA Novosti information agency.
The pro-independence militia in the Donbas are in the process of liberating new territories. The encirclement of a large group of Ukrainian forces numbering in the thousands is taking place around the city of Debaltseve; a narrow gap in the front there is soon set to be eliminated. And nevertheless the war will continue, and for a long time, because even in the limited Donbas format, it will result in profits for American corporations.
Over the course of two weeks, according to data released by the hacker organization ‘CyberBerkut,’ the Ukrainian armed forces suffered over 1,000 fatalities and more than 100 of their tanks were destroyed, with dozens of soldiers and officers surrendering to the militia. These days, the US needs Ukrainian casualties.
Kiev is being forced into a war. On January 24, US Vice President Joe Biden discussed the situation in Donbas with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The pair condemned the violence and expressed their conviction that “the costs for Russia will continue to rise” for its alleged aggressive actions against Ukraine.
The possible [new] victims and the idea of Ukraine being responsible for the conflict are not even being considered; Poroshenko was given a carte blanche and an indulgence. Shortly thereafter, the Verkhovna Rada officially declared that Russia is an aggressor nation, as if this was another step toward the direction of a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
Ukraine and the European Union serve as subordinate instruments of US foreign policy. The Europeans are being pushed headfirst toward war. On January 28 in Washington, US Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland urged NATO to deploy command posts and to create rapid-reaction forces to its eastern members. “We must install command and control centers in all six frontline states as soon as possible,” Nuland noted. She explained that “NATO is a defensive alliance,” and that “our goal is deterrence of aggression,” but “if that fails we have to be ready.” In other words, she’s asking NATO to be ready to stage preemptive attacks. Europeans are being convinced of the need for war with Russia, setting them up for the next advance on Moscow and beyond.
[…]
We have seen how large scale military defeats have forced Ukraine to the peace talks table [in Minsk], following which Kiev saves up its strength, and once again throws its troops into the Donbas region. This can continue on for a long time.
However, the lack of fighting spirit and the degradation of the Ukrainian economy will sooner or later have the potential to turn thousands of Ukrainian radicals, now with combat experience, toward a new Maidan. At that point, Poroshenko can be saved only by the direct (military) intervention of the European Union and the United States. In the heart of Europe, on the borderline separating two worlds, each of them nuclear-armed, the flames of war continue to grow.
Full article at: Sputnik International
Related: Obama openly admits ‘brokering power transition’ in Ukraine
The historic leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro sent a message to the Federation of University Students on the occasion of an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of his admission to the University of Havana.
Since the times of ancient Greece, during almost 3,000 years, the Greeks, without going very far, were brilliant in almost all activities: physics, mathematics, philosophy, architecture, art, science, politics, astronomy and other branches of human knowledge. Greece, however, was a land in which slaves did the most difficult work in fields and cities, while the oligarchy devoted itself to writing and philosophizing. The first utopia was written precisely for them.
Observe carefully the realities of this well-known, globalized and very poorly shared planet Earth, on which we know every vital resource is distributed in accordance with historical factors: some with much less than they need, others with so much they don’t know what to do with it. Now amidst great threats and dangers of war, chaos reigns in the distribution of financial resources and social production. The world’s population has grown, between 1800 and 2015, from one to seven billion inhabitants. Can this population increment be accommodated, in this way, over the next 100 years, and food, health, water and housing needs met, regardless of whatever scientific advances are made?
[…]
Many friends of Cuba know of the Cuban people’s exemplary conduct, and I will explain to them, in a few words, my essential position.
I do not trust the policy of the United States, nor have I exchanged one word with them, though this does not in any way signify a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts or threats of war. Defending peace is the duty of all. Any negotiated, peaceful solution to the problems between the United States and peoples, or any people of Latin America, which does not imply force or the use of force, must be addressed in accordance with international principles and norms.
We will always defend cooperation and friendship with all of the world’s peoples, and with those of our political adversaries. This is what we are demanding for all.
The President of Cuba has taken pertinent steps in accordance with his prerogatives and faculties conceded by the National Assembly and the Communist Party of Cuba.
The grave dangers which today threaten humanity must yield to norms which are compatible with human dignity. No country can be denied such a right.
In this spirit I have struggled, and will continue to struggle, to my last breath.
Read the full article at Granma
By Chris Hedges
“American Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.
The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
“Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy answers.
“That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.”
The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.”
The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”
The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”
There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.
“The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”
Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.
Read the full article at: Truthdig
Say hello to Jaanika Merilo, Ukraine’s new Advisor on foreign investments, improvement of business climate, coordination of international programs and more.
The new minister for economy, Mr. Abromavičius, knows that the country is in fact bankrupt. “To expect that we are going to produce real as opposed to declarative incentive programs is unrealistic,” he declared. In other words, the new Ukrainian budget is nothing but a piece of paper. But without this piece of paper there will be no new money from the European Bank and the IMF.
The first steps he has taken so far are controversial.
On January 5, the new minister for economy appointed former Estonian Jaanika Merilo—a young dark-haired beauty—as his advisor on foreign investments, improvement of business climate in Ukraine, coordination of international programs and so on. Directly after her appointment, the young lady put online not her resume or a program for Ukrainian financial stabilization but a series of candid shots that display her long legs, plump lips and prominent cleavage.
Full story at: New York Observer | More photos at: АНТИКОР
Related: Distortions, lies and omissions: The New York Times won’t tell you the real story behind Ukraine
CITIZENFOUR is a real life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Poitras had already been working on a film about surveillance for two years when Snowden contacted her, using the name “CITIZENFOUR,” in January 2013. He reached out to her because he knew she had long been a target of government surveillance, stopped at airports numerous times, and had refused to be intimidated. When Snowden revealed he was a high-level analyst driven to expose the massive surveillance of Americans by the NSA, Poitras persuaded him to let her film.
CITIZENFOUR places you in the room with Poitras, Greenwald, and Snowden as they attempt to manage the media storm raging outside, forced to make quick decisions that will impact their lives and all of those around them.
CITIZENFOUR not only shows you the dangers of governmental surveillance—it makes you feel them. After seeing the film, you will never think the same way about your phone, email, credit card, web browser, or profile, ever again.
Watch the full documentary at LeakSource
This video came from the tiny town of Kirovskoye in Donbass, which is located almost directly on the front line between the Ukrainian Army and Donetsk Republic. Kirovskoye is controlled by Donetsk militias and has been shelled repeatedly. The mine “Komsomolets of Donbass” is located on the outskirts of the town, and Ukrainian Army shells the mine systematically – but the people of Kirovskoye haven’t lost their spirit or sense of humor.
With the beginning of a new year they finally decided to show the whole world proof of Russian military presence in Donbass… In their own special way. Thus, now you know — there ARE Russian tanks in Donbass!
Source: Russia Insider
In 2003, a top security expert told filmmaker Michael Moore, ‘there is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you’. But why was Moore a target? Had he published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?
The problem had begun in the first week of the 2003 Iraq war when Moore’s film ‘Bowling For Columbine’ won the Oscar for best documentary. At the March 23 Academy Awards ceremony, Moore told a global audience:
‘I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts: we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you! And anytime you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up! Thank you very much.’
About halfway through these remarks, Moore reports, ‘all hell broke loose’. On arriving home from the ceremony, he found three truckloads of horse manure dumped waist-high in his driveway. That night, Moore witnessed for himself the extent to which US corporate journalism defends the right to offend:
‘…as I flipped between the channels, I listened to one pundit after another question my sanity, criticise my speech, and say, over and over, in essence: “I don’t know what got into him!” “He sure won’t have an easy time in this town after that stunt!” “Who does he think will make another movie with him now?” “Talk about career suicide!” After an hour of this, I turned off the TV and went online – where there was more of the same, only worse – from all over America.’
This is the reality of respect for free speech in the United States. If, on Oscar night, he had held up a cartoon depicting President Bush naked on all fours, buttocks raised to a pornographic filmmaker, would Moore still be alive today?
Full article at Media Lens
Who are the so-called terrorism experts? In the wake of the Paris attacks, the corporate media has once again flooded its news programs with pundits claiming authority on terrorism, foreign policy and world events. We discuss the growing and questionable field of “terrorism experts” with three guests: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept; Lisa Stampnitzky, social studies lecturer at Harvard University and author of “Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism'”; and Luc Mathieu, foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération.
On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin, discusses the lack of media coverage of the massacre of as many as 2,000 people in the town of Baga by Boko Haram militants. Abby then goes over the most outrageous responses to the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and why the clash of civilizations mentality when it comes to these type of acts is so misleading. Abby then speaks with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges, about the roots of the attacks in France and the relationship between global events and the rise of radicalization.
Seems like the world leaders didn’t actually “lead” the Unity March in Paris, but rather conducted a photo op in an empty, guarded street to polish their own ragged image (Reuters/Phillippe Wojazer).
The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.
We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.
The 5 million North Africans in France are not considered French by the French. And when they go back to Algiers, Tangier or Tunis, where perhaps they were born and briefly lived, they are treated as alien outcasts. Caught between two worlds, they drift, as the two brothers did, into aimlessness, petty crime and drugs.
The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. French high school students must be taught about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but these same students read almost nothing in their textbooks about the widespread French atrocities, including a death toll among Algerians that some sources set at more than 1 million, in the Algerian war for independence against colonial France. French law bans the public wearing of the burqa, a body covering for women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a full veil that has a small slit for the eyes. Women who wear these in public can be arrested, fined the equivalent of about $200 and forced to carry out community service. France banned rallies in support of the Palestinians last summer when Israel was carrying out daily airstrikes in Gaza that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard.
Full article at Truthdig
Against the Grain 