October 5, 2022

Bulletin 311: Break the spell, denounce growing U.S. war

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Previously: Bulletin 310: Speak up! We urge you to take up the call for peace in Ukraine, Sep 25, 2022

Dear friends and colleagues --

This is the first of two Bulletins we will send today or tomorrow at the latest. The second will provide some important news bits from the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.

Ten days ago we urged everyone to take up a public call for peace in Ukraine, by whatever means happen to be available. We said it was an emergency.

Given subsequent events --

• the referenda in the four former Ukrainian provinces, which overwhelmingly voted to (re)join Russia;
• the ratification of that status in the Duma on Monday and the final signature of Putin today, which makes attacks on those provinces a more serious provocation under Russian law (while also presenting what could become negotiated, peaceful boundaries);
• the partial mobilization of Russian military reserves (300,000 reservists, of which more than 200,000 are already now in training);
• Vladimir Putin's remarkable speech laying out the Russian perspective on this conflict and its context in the broadest terms, without a doubt one of the most important speeches given by any political leader in decades; and, last but far from least,
• the brazen sabotage of both Nord Stream pipelines, which could carry relatively plentiful and cheap Russian natural gas to Europe --

given all these, your public speech and actions to end the U.S. and NATO war against Russia are more urgent and  important than ever. We hope you will mobilize to provide an anti-war voice however you can. You can start small and expand your efforts if you can. The important thing is to start.

Before going on, it is important to say that attacks on major energy infrastructure, in this case shutting down these pipelines for years or possibly permanently, are acts of war. These attacks were directed against not only Russia but against Europe, which is harmed much more than Russia, and especially against Germany (see the prescient "The U.S. Is Winning Its War On Europe's Industries And People" and "The War On Germany Just Entered Its Hot Phase" by Bernhard at the Moon of Alabama; "Omerta in the Gangster War" by Diane Johnstone; Michael Hudson's pre-war article, "America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies;" Pepe Escobar, "Germany and EU have been handed over a declaration of war"; "The Timing of the Pipeline Attack," Joe Lauria; "It’s Only A ‘Conspiracy Theory’ When It Accuses The US Government," Caitlin Johnstone). As these and other open-source analyses show, the evidence is overwhelming that these attacks were conducted or coordinated by the United States.

These articles are really very good and we urge you to read them. Trying to summarize them here would be a waste of time and we couldn't do justice to them.

The developing European economic crisis created by the loss of affordable natural gas and the affordable, dispatchable electricity it can and does generate is already harming thousands of businesses and millions of people. People will die from this. How many will die no one knows, although we can guess they will not be the benighted political elites who are slavishly following the U.S. lead on all things Russia and Ukraine.

As Scott Ritter apparently said (h/t Steve Starr; we didn't listen), this attack was "premeditated murder." Bizarrely, and revealingly, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called these attacks a "tremendous opportunity."

I would like to say that the full import of the above events will become clear over the months and years ahead, but I am not confident our society will be able to reconstitute the ability to find shared, reasonably-accurate understandings of any of these or any major historical events. We may be past that now.

Blinken's "opportunity" will be a catastrophe for millions of people. For the perpetrating nation -- the USA -- there will be hell to pay, one way or another. The political consequences will be severe. In this White House, incompetence and moral turpitude are joined. This is the most dangerous and reckless administration in modern American history.

Like many of you we are also struggling to speak clearly in the face of these events, a challenge compounded by the confusion we see among many of our liberal friends.

The fact is, we are witnessing and participating in changes so abrupt as to be a kind of discontinuity in history, necessitating radical changes in our own perspectives. Not everyone is able or willing to do this. What comes next will not repeat what we have experienced in our lifetimes up to now. It won't even rhyme. Incipient decline in the world's fossil fuel supplies and uneven, contested access to them, the resulting economic declines and collapses, and the climate crisis these same fossil fuels have created with its own sequeallae, will combine to make sure our history going forward will be nothing like the world we are now leaving.

The destruction of these pipelines assures for now that Europe will remain dependent on the U.S., rather than the Eurasian "heartland" (Mackinder). It is unclear whether U.S. leaders understand the limitations on natural gas production and transport from the U.S. Globally, oil is even more limiting, production having peaked in late 2018.

Meanwhile propaganda "floods the zone." There is no time to rebut all the lies carried in the news that most people take in willy-nilly in every day, which now infest the body politic like so many intestinal worms. As a country, the U.S. is temporarily past reason; pain will be our vermicide. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people in this country and others are working in the propaganda industry and its censorship accompaniment. Few of us have the time or inclination to explore how fundamentally we are being misled. And it's very hard -- psychologically, socially, and professionally -- for most people to absorb the shocks attendant on such exploration.

***

While there is a lot of exaggeration and projection going on in the West about the risks of the Ukraine war going nuclear, that risk is alas very real.

We believe the risk of nuclear war is currently higher than at any time since at least 1983 (the "Able Archer" exercise). For now, Western narratives are projecting U.S. nuclear doctrines onto Russia. Scott Ritter:

     NATO and Ukraine both believe that the Russian forces, even after receiving the 300,000 mobilized troops, will not be able to defeat Ukraine. This inability to achieve the desired objectives, they believe, will compel Russia to resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons on Ukrainian targets in order to break the will to resist on the part of the Zelensky government.
     The reality, however, is that Russian nuclear doctrine does not allow for such a scenario. Indeed, there are only two conditions where Russian nuclear doctrine permits the employment of nuclear weapons.

1. “[I]n response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies,” the 2020 Russian Nuclear Posture document states, or
2. “in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”

     U.S. nuclear posture, however, does allow it.
     “[T]he United States will maintain the range of flexible nuclear capabilities,” the 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) declared, “needed to ensure that nuclear or non-nuclear aggression against the United States, allies, and partners will fail to achieve its objectives and carry with it the credible risk of intolerable consequences for potential adversaries now and in the future.”
     It should be noted that the 2018 NPR was promulgated during the administration of President Donald Trump. Although the Biden administration initiated the NPR process in September 2021, it has yet to publish an updated document.
     By ignoring stated Russian nuclear policy, and instead mirror-imaging U.S. nuclear policy onto Russian behavior, the U.S., NATO and Ukraine are setting themselves — and the world — up for disaster.
     Indeed, using a hypothetical Russian tactical nuclear attack on Ukraine as a working assumption, the Biden administration has developed a range of non-nuclear options in response, including — according to Newsweek — a “decapitation” strike targeting Russian leadership, to include President Vladimir Putin.

Right now, there is a patchy, thin veneer of deniability about the NATO forces operating out of uniform in Ukraine, the U.S. and NATO surveillance assets providing targeting information for Ukrainian long-range artillery, and some of the NATO-originated munitions involved in these strikes. As of today, more so than yesterday, last week, or at any prior point in this conflict, these NATO assets are being used to target the Russian homeland, as Russian popular opinion and Russian law see it.

You will have seen, I hope, the especially brilliant article by Caitlin Johnstone: "This Would Be A Wise Stopping Point For This War."

For the U.S. and NATO this is a war of choice -- an aggressive war, in other words, which international law condemns. No U.S. or European country has any vital security interest in which country these four provinces are part of. Neither the U.S. nor any NATO state is militarily threatened by the conflict in Ukraine, except to the extent they involve themselves. Fortunately, thus far Russia has taken no military actions against NATO countries or NATO assets outside Ukraine, despite the central roles of NATO personnel, equipment, targeting, and propaganda in this war.

This is a war the U.S. and NATO have sought and provoked, one which NATO countries are now working hard to continue and intensify. The goal of the U.S. and its NATO helpers is to defeat Russia and break its sovereignty, thereby expanding (and preventing the collapse of) the U.S.-led "rules-based international order," i.e. its empire.

In other words, should the Biden White House and its followers be successful in their war aims, Russia's criteria for the use of nuclear weapons will be triggered.

Ukraine is a convenient place for the kinetic part of this war because of its location, its weak (and now entirely absent) democracy, its non-NATO status, and its Russia-hating neo-Nazi formations, nurtured by the CIA going all the way back to World War II. The U.S. and NATO have groomed Ukraine, its rulers, and its military for their present anti-Russian role over the past decade, overlooking eight years of atrocities by Ukrainian paramilitary and government forces in the Donbas.

Most Western governments and commentators are mistaking Russian restraint for weakness (for alternative views see for example William Schryver's blog, Larry Johnson's blog, Douglas MacGregor's writings and interviews). Now that the four breakaway regions are part of Russia (the exact boundaries have yet to be determined, giving negotiators something to work with), attacks on them will be treated as what Russia says they are: attacks on the Russian motherland. After today, what Ukraine and the West say is not relevant. Yet the U.S. and allied governments are egging on Ukraine to make those attacks, again in hopes of overextending and defeating Russia. Those hopes are vain and will only result in escalation of the war and more suffering in Ukraine, at the very minimum.

Russia has conventional escalation dominance in this theater, without resorting to nuclear weapons. But for how long will Russia refrain from targeting the NATO assets being used to direct fire against its citizens and military forces? And what then? If NATO faces utter defeat in Ukraine -- which Russia could arrange, if it declared war -- what would NATO do? Sink the Russian Black Sea fleet? Attack harder and deeper into Russia itself? And then what happens?

Meanwhile the Biden Administration and most of Congress believe Russia is weak and can be broken. They believe their expanding war against Russia is a noble, Churchillian endeavor, instead of an impeachable reckless, aggressive war with negative benefit to the U.S. and especially to Europe.

A majority of U.S. citizens do not agree with the White House. Popular support for the war in the U.S. was waning even before Ukraine's four eastern provinces voted to become independent (two already had, in 2014) and b) rejoin Russia (the accession treaties were ratified yesterday by the Duma). In a different poll a couple of weeks earlier, a majority of U.S. citizens opposed more American military involvement around the world and want the Biden administration to prioritize domestic issues. As repeated Gallup polling shows -- across years, actually -- Americans are strongly focused on domestic, especially economic, issues. Simply put, U.S. elites are a lot more interested in who controls which provinces of Ukraine and the U.S. war against Russia than U.S. citizens are.

Much depends on the appearance of antiwar actors and voices which can articulate the idiocy of U.S. policies vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine. The greater the terrifying silence, the more important our actions and voices are.

We mustn't think that an "antiwar movement" would look anything like prior movements in all its political values or in its modes of operation. It may not look like a movement, and it may be based primarily on the political right, in the U.S. as well as Europe. Everybody needs to get out of their political comfort zones and develop what Thomas Frank called "ideological tolerance." Real diversity, in other words.

***

But what public speech and actions are called for, toward what end?

Given the dominance of propaganda, misdirection, and our resulting collective confusion, we again urge, very simply, that all interested parties in the West focus on ENDING THE WAR. Forget the blame -- forget all the rest for now.

That is the opposite of intensifying and expanding the war, which is what the Biden Administration and Congress are doing.

At the moment, most liberals are supporting this expansion. Much depends on the few who act to break the spell, which otherwise would be total.

Those of us who seek peace should demand that the administration stop shipping weapons, stop supplying battlefield intelligence, stop sending "volunteers" and mercenaries -- stop all of it. If we want to stop the killing, stop sending people to kill and be killed. Stop training killers.

Ending this war is, conceptually, a lot simpler than many people think.

Many will ask, what about Russia? Isn't Russia the aggressor here? Isn't Putin evil? This is part of the misdirection. These are not the right questions. Set them aside. The right question is: do we want peace rather than nuclear war, and what are we willing to do about it?

Many say Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "unprovoked." Aside from being factually way wrong, Caitlin Johnstone eloquently points out that the false narrative that this war was “unprovoked” prevents peace.

We need to keep our eye on the ball. Educate yourself (quickly), and oppose the war. We aren't going to offer cookie-cutter options. They aren't effective. Everyone's situation is different. Your heart will find a way.

Thank you all for your labors in ending this war and for the gift of your attention,

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group