Saturday 23rd of November 2024
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WE CANNOT FOSTER PEACE BY BECOMING WARRIORS — Vladimir Leonisky (cousin)

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace.

 

Peace Is More Than War’s Absence, and New Research Explains How to Build It

A new project measures ways to promote positive social relations among groups

BY PETER T. COLEMAN, ALLEGRA CHEN-CARREL & VINCENT HANS MICHAEL STUEBER

 

Unfortunately, our current ability to find these peaceful mechanisms is woefully inadequate. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and its complement the Positive Peace Index (PPI) rank 163 nations annually and are currently the leading measures of peacefulness. The GPI, launched in 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), was designed to measure negative peace, or the absence of violence, destructive conflict, and war. But peace is more than not fighting. The PPI, launched in 2009, was supposed to recognize this and track positive peace, or the promotion of peacefulness through positive interactions like civility, cooperation and care.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peace-is-more-than-wars-absence-and-new-research-explains-how-to-build-it/

 

GUS: THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2021... NOTE THAT UKRAINE IS MENTIONED BECAUSE THE KIEV NAZI REGIME (SINCE 2014) HAD BEEN TRYING TO DESTROY THE RUSSIANS (UKRAINIAN RUSSIANS) IN THE DONBASS WHO SOUGHT AUTONOMY AWAY FROM THE GALICIAN BANDERIST FASCISTS RULING KIEV. EVEN AT THE TIME, THE WESTERN MEDIA CALLED THEM FASCIST NAZIS... NOR THEY ARE CALLED "FREEDOM FIGHTERS"... THEY ARE STILL NAZIS. THE AMERICAN EMPIRE HAS BEEN TRYING TO DESTROY RUSSIA SINCE 1917. THINK ABOUT THIS.

THE HUMAN SPECIES IS A DANGEROUS SPECIES. OUR FRIENDS ARE DANGEROUS. OUR ENEMIES ARE DESIGNATED RATHER THAN REAL. WAR IS PEACE... PEACE ISN'T PROFITABLE... THE TOP DOG (THE AMERICAN EMPIRE) IS VICIOUS... WE ONLY GET FED WHEN WE FIGHT ALONG THIS DEVIOUS RABID DOG THAT WILL ALLOW US A BONE...

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE NEEDS TO BE READ WITH THIS IN MIND:

 

The end of US primacy: facing Australia’s existential security question    By Mike Gilligan 

Nothing Australia does – with or without AUKUS – will make any difference to the collective capacity to either deter or defeat China in the next decade, which is the time frame that counts. That means the only prudent choice for Australia’s military strategy is to prepare to defend ourselves from major powers such as China without American support” – Hugh White.

It’s time to talk frankly about Australia’s defence. As a nation we are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Let’s face it, Australian Governments deceiving their people on the nation’s defence policy has been the norm for long periods.

Over the ninety years since World War 2 only two official documents have profoundly shaped Australia’s security policy. The first was the ANZUS Treaty of 1953. Presented falsely at the time, and ever thereafter, as a security guarantee for Australia, it has served America’s interests repeatedly to our cost. ANZUS as an obligation-free, manipulative tool settled firmly in the hands of the United States’ global strategists from the outset.

The second document was Australia’s fledgling White Paper on defence in 1976. It followed our chastening experience in the Vietnam war and President Nixon’s Guam doctrine. It rendered the Treaty a subsidiary influence, as our government proclaimed self- reliant defence as the way ahead for Australia’s security planning. Embraced bi-partisanly, it was a rare, honest and competent attempt at giving material weight to our independent nationhood. In effect, White Paper 1976 confirmed the hollowness of ANZUS and the deliberate misrepresentation by PM Menzies of its security benefits for Australia right from the start. Today ANZUS is a mere political symbol, exploited vicariously on each side.

Self-reliance in the direct defence of Australia has been officially the centrepiece of defence policy since 1976. Numerous governments, white papers and reviews have followed, with not one explicitly articulating a departure from that central objective. But egregious and sustained deception of Australians set in about 2010.

When President Obama was invited to Australia and the Gillard government announced that henceforth US marines would be rotated through Australia, our self- reliance was effectively shredded, certainly in America’s mind. Thereafter, militarily containment of China to within the “first island chain” in the western Pacific has become the top priority of US security planning and programs. Explained in Pentagon reports to Congress in detail. Into which Australia is being integrated. More American basing here has unfolded for long range strike and interdiction against China, alongside deep integration of Australia’s intelligence assets, sensors and forces generally into the US posture for that conflict, energetically pursued since the Force Posture Agreement of 2015.

No government has been honest with Australians at any time over this period of Australia’s calculated absorption into America’s war machinery against China. Explaining eye-watering defence spending hikes for China-purposed acquisitions and operations, Defence Minister Marles mumbles phrases like “impactful projection”, as our Navy is reshaped by a US Admiral. Before that PM Morrison talked of “meaningful impact” while committing Australians to hundreds of billions of dollars for a few nuclear- powered submarines, of extremely modest operational influence against China in its waters. Australia’s defence commentariat, academia and mainstream media have genuflected to these obfuscations, with pomposity. Many have a financial incentive which reinforces the absence of intellect to inquire.

Thankfully, an exception has emerged to this shabby commentariat of “security experts”. An article by Professor Hugh White (one of two worth reading, alongside Sam Roggeveen) in The Saturday Paper (April 27, no. 497) has cut through the confusion.

Australia has a choice of two strategies
White finds that the “2024 National Defence Strategy” recently promulgated by Defence Minister Marles “fails just as badly as its lamentable predecessors, and for the same basic reasons. It cannot decide what kind of threat China really poses, nor make the hard choices about how to respond. China of today constitutes a new, and unprecedented, element in Asia’s strategic system. Yet how exactly does it pose a threat to Australia’s security? There is no chance of working out an effective response to China’s rise unless we can answer that question clearly”.

The reality is Australia will never reach a credible, coherent response to Asia’s strategic transformation until we make a clear choice.

Do we support Washington to sustain US primacy in Asia – doing whatever we can to help America win the contest with China and preserve the US-led order in our region. That means building forces to support America in a US–China war.” To which our contribution could only be very marginal against that of US’s north Asia allies, and degraded by our strategic separation.

“Or do we prepare to defend ourselves when US primacy has passed, building forces designed to defend ourselves independently in the longer term against a major power such as China?”

The first choice is the path Australia now is on – supporting America’s objectives against China wholeheartedly – with our money, people and national assets – at the expense of our direct national defence. In continuing to be absorbed into US strategy our own homeland defence will be severely degraded. America will increasingly demand that we pursue its interests, with ever greater claim on the national budget. We are forever tied into whatever fate America throws our way. Australia’s nationhood is limited at US discretion. The chief risk is that America will be unsuccessful against China and withdraw from the region. But only after immense struggle and pervasive damage regionally and to Australia itself and its people. This risk has a searing US domestic political component overlaid on a daunting military ambition to diminish China. Australia would be left with the regional aftermath, largely alone, exposed diplomatically, economically and devastated militarily.

The consequences of failure from following America into conflict with China are pre-eminent, even fatal, for Australia.

Our other strategy is to take a step back, to concentrate on what we had been doing successfully to America’s delight then – creating unique defences for independently defending our homeland. We know this challenge. We would again have full discretion in our relations, able to deal diplomatically as ourself and with our region genuinely as part of it. Able to freely embrace the richness of opportunity our region offers. And we can be confident that with focussed investment our defences will ensure any opponent reflects deeply before attacking our territory.

A notable risk to Australia in overtly reclaiming our self- reliance arises in the short term – from the US, that it would seek to overturn our independence politically, fluent as it is in such actions. Only recently US chief diplomat Blinken observed “If you are not at the table, you are on it”.

White sums it up: “The reality is Australia will never reach a credible, coherent response to Asia’s strategic transformation until we make a clear choice. Do we support Washington to sustain US primacy in Asia, or do we prepare to defend ourselves when US primacy has passed?”

It is too late now for the US and its allies to preserve the old regional military balance against the massive shift in wealth and power to China and the relentless growth in its air and naval capabilities.

Nothing Australia does – with or without AUKUS – will make any difference to the collective capacity to either deter or defeat China in the next decade, which is the time frame that counts. That means the only prudent choice for Australia’s military strategy is to prepare to defend ourselves from major powers such as China without American support.”

And, simply, it is not sane to assist America, with its record, in destroying our region. Yet, like circus dogs, our military are directed to provoke China in the South China Sea until conflict is confected.

What will it take? The Albanese government is already half way there. Our foreign policy seeks a multipolar Asia which is at “equilibrium”. This is a far cry from America’s determination that its hegemony should prevail globally.

Australia’s defence policy, evidenced in Marles’ troubled activity, is utterly dissonant with what should be the nation’s overarching security policy determinant.

Australia hasn’t needed a leader so badly for eighty years, since John Curtin recognised that Australia itself was at dire risk. And acted.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-end-of-us-primacy-facing-australias-existential-security-question/

 

WE NEED A LEADER FOR PEACE....

 

WE NEED JULIAN ASSANGE.... 

 

distorted truth....

 

Grotesque claims: Students revolt against Western media misinformation     By Jeremy Webb

 

Heralded as the largest this century, the pro-Palestinian student demonstrations in the US and globally are putting into stark relief the systemic failure of Western media and Governments to accurately and responsibly report on the Gaza conflict. As they did during the Vietnam war years, it is students who have refused to accept the way in which the Gaza war is portrayed by mainstream media.

This distortion is no aberration: it’s testament to the global influence of the Jewish lobby unique in its reach throughout the Western world and unique in the way it has so effectively infiltrated the arteries of national politics and media of so many countries. No surprise then that the lobby has had so much success in inverting the debate away from the slaughter of 35,000 Palestinians to the issue of antisemitism by so branding any criticism of Israel.

Skilfully, the lobby has steered much of the reporting on the Ivy League pro-Palestinian student uprising to whether demonstrating students are being antisemitic in their actions and utterances and to the putting of Jewish students’ safety at risk. Equally so in Australia. Witness The Australian’s front page headline of May 4: “Moral leadership in absentia: chancellors refuse to condemn campus antisemitism”.

Of course this conflation of distractions is where the Jewish lobby plays best by creating an alternative narrative over the treatment and status of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel. The lobby’s diligence and success is most apparent from leaked memos to the New York Times journalists from the paper’s management telling them how to describe the Gaza war. Revealed by the online US blog ‘Intercept’, they advise them to greatly restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. As one anonymous employee noted “ …these are unique standards applied to violence perpetrated by Israel. Readers have noticed and I understand their frustration.”

Incredibly journalists are told to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land and only use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases“. More prescriptively journalists are told not to use the world Palestine in datelines, routine text or headlines, except in very rare cases such as when the United Nations General Assembly elevated Palestine to a non-member observer state, or references to historic Palestine. Also to be avoided is the term “refugee camps” to describe the location of displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. As such the guidelines on references to Palestine and refugee camps run counter to norms established by the United Nations and international humanitarian law (the UN recognises 8 refugee camps in Gaza).

An analysis by The Intercept found that by November 24 last year, the New York Times described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” 53 times but those of Palestinians just once at a time when their death toll had reached 15,000. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1.

Students to their credit clearly do not rely on the distorted feed of the mainstream press and similar distortions of politicians fearful of an electoral backlash. They understand that Palestinians being refugees means they have been dispossessed of their land and that therefore October 7 is anything but an isolated event but one which flowed from previous massive injustices.

Such historical perspectives are few in the US media being displaced by whether the student demonstrations are breeding antisemitism and endangering the safety of Jewish students. With some 23% of students at Columbia University Jewish (compared to 2.4% of the US population) such issues are raising the ire of the Jewish business community – who have been in the habit of giving multi, multi-million dollar donations to Ivy League universities. That is being used as leverage on university administrations put an end to the demonstrations. Far too many column inches are therefore being devoted to debating whether freedom of speech is at risk as university administrations buckle under pressure and send in the troops to clear pro-Palestinian encampments.

Judith Butler the well know US philosopher and Berkeley professor takes some Umbridge at the sophistry of the Western media on these issues. In a recent interview she notes that where calling for an end of genocide against Palestinians is understood as making Jewish students feel unsafe, that means that the issue of the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by them. “It’s as if they are being threatened with harm when, in fact, the opposition to the genocide in Gaza is quite explicitly an opposition to doing harm and killing numerous people who are huddled in Rafah looking for safety.

So for an utterance that opposes the genocide in Gaza to suddenly make a Jewish student feel unsafe — because that Jewish student identifies with Zionism or with the state of Israel — is a grotesque claim in the sense that that student is safe.

That student is having to hear something that might be deeply disturbing and sometimes antisemitic . But …..what counts as antisemitic has so expanded beyond the limits of its established definitions that, unfortunately, the call for justice in Palestine is registered by some as nothing more than antisemitism.”

The US Congress has equally been part of the diversion away and inversion of the issues surrounding Palestine. In its eager examination of allegations of antisemitism at Ivy League universities it has demanded that Harvard University turn over documents regarding its response to what is seen as campus antisemitism. That is being regarded as an attempt by Republicans to clip the wings of ‘left leaning elitist universities’. In turn this has filled yet more distracted space on whether such actions pose a threat to freedom of speech.

Neither Democrats or Republicans have seen fit to refocus on the core issues raised by students and Congressionally investigate to what extent Israel is involved in war crimes, is deliberately starving millions of Palestinians and is deliberately taking steps to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. In Australia the state of debate is no further advanced with no parliamentary move to so investigate. Perhaps the parallels of the dispossession of the frontier wars and the creation of the state of Israel are too close for comfort.

So starving Palestinian refugees in the living hell of Rafah might well wonder – as do demonstrating students – when this preoccupation over antisemitic slurs, the safety of Jewish students and threats to free speech will subside allowing their plight to finally take main stage in the Western mainstream media.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-students-revolt-against-western-media/

 

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history-less....

You cannot understand a conflict without understanding its history. That’s why historical context is routinely suppressed by corporate media, such as in the Palestinian-Israel conflict and the war between Russia and Ukraine. They don’t want you to understand.

For establishment journalists, the violence in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023 and in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.  

Understanding the Palestinian conflict from 1948 forward, and the Ukraine war from the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the start of the civil war completely changes one’s perception. 

So establishment media suppresses this history because it’s a perception they don’t want you to have. It goes against its agenda to promote Western foreign policies, rather than reporting on them. 

In 1956, Moshe Dayan, then chief of the Israeli general staff, looked into both the recent past and to today to warn: 

“What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. … We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. . . . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.” 

Dayan understood the indispensability of historical context, even when it pointed to his own side’s guilt. 

It’s a history of the still ongoing process of the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Arabs by Israel, in the face of the foundational myth of a land without people for a people without a land. It’s a history understood by student protestors across the U.S., which is why the state and the media want them silenced. 

We have published numerous articles on the history of the Palestinian conflict and last year we ran a timeline that explained the war in Ukraine in a completely different way from what Western governments and media are telling us.  

History is an invaluable part of Consortium News‘ reporting. Please contribute today to CN‘s Spring Fund Drive to help us to continue providing rare but essential historical context.    

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/06/history-is-indispensable-to-journalism/

 

 

 

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revisionisming....

 

 

Zelensky invited to the 80th anniversary, not Russia, why? There were indeed Ukrainians in Normandy in June 44 but on which side?

 

by Patrice Gibertie

 

On April 16, the Liberation mission at the Ministry of the Armed Forces announced its intention to invite Russia to the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings, “so that the importance of the commitment and sacrifices of the Soviet peoples, as well as their contribution to the victory of 1945, are honored".

We knew Vladimir Putin [was] persona non grata. Ultimately, the entire Russian delegation was banned from the international ceremony organized on June 6 in Normandy to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The Élysée announced this Thursday, May 30, that it had decided not to issue an invitation [to Russia]...

Why?

World War II left around 60 million people dead worldwide. The belligerent hardest hit was thus Russia, with 21 [27 cliamed by Russia] million dead (10% of its population), which played a vital role on the Eastern Front to liberate Europe from the Nazis.

The choice not to invite Russia is a shame. And that of celebrating Zelensky and Ukraine?

[some] Ukrainians fought against the Nazis, others unfortunately were Nazis like Bandera.

I am not scandalized by Zelensky's presence but by the choice, at the same time, to ban Russia's presence.

This is REVISIONISM because Zelensky did not dissociate himself from Bandera!

The Poles are much more dignified than Macronie:

• https://www.euractiv.fr/lukraine-sindigne-des-demandes-dexcuses-de-la-pologne-au-sujet-du-massacre-de-volhynie

An oversight taints the support that mainstream Western media have provided since 2014 to Ukrainian leaders in their face-to-face with Moscow: kyiv's promotion of revisionist memory policies and the indulgence of the authorities towards neo-Nazis who displayed in public spaces.

After the Maidan [Nazi] revolt [promoted by the USA], the start of the civil war in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko promulgated the “decommunization laws” in May 2015. They punish the promotion of communist ideas, ban Soviet symbols and elevate them to the rank of “fighters for independence" anti-Semitic groups that collaborated with the Nazis: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose militias participated in the extermination of the Jews, and its military branch, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible among other things for the massacre of a hundred thousand Poles.

Both now benefit from a national tribute on October 14. And every January 1, in kyiv, a torchlight march honors the memory of Stepan Bandera, leader of these two organizations and collaborator of the Third Reich. This pleasant picture would be incomplete without mentioning the integration into the army, in May 2014, of the Azov battalion, a neo-Nazi militia which borrows its emblem from the SS Das Reich division.

Between January 1 and February 15, 2022, of the 152 articles mentioning Ukraine published in Le Monde (including 14 unrelated to the current conflict), 5 included the word “Nazi”. Two evoke the fascistic inclination of certain nationalists, but only to point out that Moscow is exploiting the situation (February 8 and 11, 2022). Another recounted the participation of Ukrainian militias in the genocide of the Jews, but it is… a review of a work on the history of the Second World War (January 21, 2022). The inventory of columns Figaro leads to the same result: 171 articles mention Ukraine (18 unrelated to the international situation), 8 of which include the word “Nazi”. One reports on a book on the extermination of Jews in Europe and of course cites Ukraine. None report on facts usually deemed intolerable by the press. But which, because they take place in a country allied with the West against Russia, this time pass without hindrance [to] the moral sieve of journalists.

• https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/03/RIMBERT/64441

https://en.reseauinternational.net/zelensky-invite-au-80eme-anniversaire-pas-la-russie-pourquoi-il-y-avait-bien-des-ukrainiens-en-normandie-en-juin-44-mais-de-quel-cote/

 

RECENT DOCUMENTED REVELATIONS PROVIDE INSIGHT (WHICH WAS KNOWN BUT NOT "OFFICIAL") INTO:

— STALIN AND HITLER HAD MADE A PACT OF NON-AGGRESSION

— STALIN AT THE TIME THOUGHT THAT THE RUSSIAN MILITARY WAS TOO WEAK TO FIGHT THE GERMANS

— THE AMERICANS SECRETLY PUSHED HITLER TO FIGHT THE RUSSIANS NONETHELESS

—— FIRST TO DESTROY RUSSIA AS PER THE AMERICAN DREAM SINCE 1917

—— OPEN ANOTHER FRONT THAT WOULD WEAKEN GERMANY BY DIVIDING ITS ATTENTION

— THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA, DESPITE FIGHTING THE GERMANS, LOVED THE NAZIS...

—— MANY NAZIS WERE SPIRITED OUT OF EUROPE TO SAFE HAVENS IN THE USA, CANADA AND AUSTRALIA.

—— THE NAZIS CAUGHT BY RUSSIA FACED TRIBUNALS AND PUNISHMENT

—— THE NUREMBERG TRIALS WERE ONLY SHOWCASES AGAINST THE KOMMANDANTUR

—— BANDERA WAS USED AS AN AMERICAN ASSET TO FIGHT RUSSIA DURING THE COLD WAR

—— BANDERA WAS KILLED BY RUSSIA IN 1959 IN MUNICH

— THE AMERICAN EMPIRE STILL WANTS TO DESTROY RUSSIA

—— UKRAINE WAS SET UP AS A TRAP BY AMERICA TO THIS END FROM THE 1990s ONWARDS

— ZELENSKY ADMIRES BANDERA

— THE WORLD IS POISED ON THE EDGE OF NUCLEAR WAR - WW3

—— THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS PRODDING PUTIN TO START IT.

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

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