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Posts Tagged ‘USSR’

You Support Ukraine’s Independence? Then You Support Secession.

Posted by M. C. on April 30, 2022

But even if they were allowed a vote, the Ukrainians understood what antisecessionist Americans refuse to admit: cultural minority groups that are out of favor with the central government’s elites have a better chance at true self-determination through secession rather than unity and democracy. Although Ukraine was the most important non-Russian component of the USSR, it was nonetheless in the minority. At the time, Ukrainian separatists believed Russian ethnics would dominate politics within a post-Soviet democracy. They were probably right.

https://mises.org/wire/you-support-ukraines-independence-then-you-support-secession

Ryan McMaken

By now, it should be abundantly clear to all that the official US regime narrative on Ukraine is that one is supposed to be in favor of Ukrainian political independence. That is, we’re supposed to support the idea that Ukraine is a separate state that is politically independent from the Russian state. By extension, of course, the idea that Ukraine is a sovereign state also implies it is separate from all other states as well.

But how did Ukraine get that way? States, of course, don’t appear out of nowhere. They generally come into being through one of two ways, or a combination of both. States can be formed out of two or more smaller states through a process of conquest or voluntary union. And states can result when a part of a state secedes to form its own state.

In the case of Ukraine, it is a state that was created out of a piece of the Soviet Union thirty years ago. This occurred via secession. Indeed, Ukraine was part of a remarkable trend toward decentralization and secession that occurred in the early 1990s. These secession movements, of course, were opposed by the “legitimate” central government in place at the time.

Put another way, to “stand with Ukraine” today is to “stand with secession.” But don’t expect to hear it phrased this way on MSNBC or at the New York Times. No, the “s word” is still a no-no in political discourse in America. Also a no-no is to advocate for the process that brought about Ukrainian secession: to hold an election—against the central government’s wishes—as to whether a region will secede.

The Ukrainians did that, and today we’re supposed to cheer that and accept that election’s outcome. Many American pundits even believe it’s worth fighting a war over. But to suggest something similar for a region of the United States? Well, we’re told that’s just plain wrong.

Ukraine Formed Out of Secession

The modern Ukrainian state was necessarily born out of secession because the Ukrainian state was not always separate nor sovereign. The history of Ukraine is a long history of various territories and polities that were, over time, incorporated into the Russian Empire beginning in the seventeenth century. What we now know as Ukraine more or less only came into being in the late nineteenth century. But then it was subject to the Russian czar and (later) to the Soviet Communists. Consolidated, sovereign Ukraine came into being only in December 1991, when a referendum was held and a majority of the voters voted for independence.

Ukraine soon after enjoyed both de facto and de jure independence because the Soviet State was too weak to do anything about it. Ukraine was not alone. By late 1991, the Baltic states had already declared independence, in moves that were opposed by the Soviet state and deemed illegal. A total of fifteen new states were carved out of the Soviet Union during this time. Secessionism extended beyond even the USSR, with Slovenia declaring independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. In 1993, Czechs and Slovakians both seceded from their state, dissolving Czechoslovakia altogether.

[Read More: “Nationalism as National Liberation: Lessons from the End of the Cold War” by Ryan McMaken]

It is instructive to note that the United States regime and American pundits generally opposed these secession movements. Washington was late to recognize and accept the independence of the Baltic states. This was in spite of the fact the US had never even officially recognized the Soviet Union’s annexation of the states after the Second World War.

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1991: When America Tried to Keep Ukraine in the USSR

Posted by M. C. on April 29, 2022

Indeed, in the case of Ukraine, President George H.W. Bush even traveled to Kyiv in 1990 to lecture the Ukrainians about the dangers of seeking independence from Moscow, while decrying the supposed nationalist threat.

https://mises.org/wire/1991-when-america-tried-keep-ukraine-ussr

Ryan McMaken

The US government today likes to pretend that it is the perennial champion of political independence for countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain. What is often forgotten, however, is that in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington opposed independence for Soviet republics like Ukraine and the Baltic states.

In fact, the Bush administration openly supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together rather than allow the USSR to decentralize into smaller states. The US regime and its supporters in the press took the position that nationalism—not Soviet despotism—was the real problem for the people of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Indeed, in the case of Ukraine, President George H.W. Bush even traveled to Kyiv in 1990 to lecture the Ukrainians about the dangers of seeking independence from Moscow, while decrying the supposed nationalist threat.

Today, nationalism is still a favorite bogeyman among Washington establishment mouthpieces. These outlets routinely opine on the dangers of French nationalism, Hungarian nationalism, and Russian nationalism. One often sees the term nationalism applied in ways designed to make the term distasteful, as in “white nationalism.”

When nationalism is convenient for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its European freeloaders, on the other hand, we are told that nationalism is a force for good. Thus, the US regime and mainstream media generally pretend that Ukrainian nationalism—and even Ukrainian white nationalism—either don’t exist or are to be praised.

In 1991, however, the US had not yet decided that it paid to actively promote nationalism—so long as it is anti-Russian nationalism. Thus, in those days, we find the US regime siding with Moscow in efforts to stifle or discourage local nationalist efforts to break with the old Soviet state. The way it played out is an interesting case study in both Bush administration bumbling and in the US’s foreign policy before the advent of unipolar American liberal hegemony. 

The Antinationalist Context

In the late 1980s, it was already apparent that the Soviet Union was beginning to lose its grip on many parts of the enormous polity that was the USSR. Restive nationalists within the Soviet Union were beginning to assert local control. For example, by 1989, ethnic Armenians and Azeris were already embroiled in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh that continues to this day. Deadly ethnic violence flared, but Moscow, in its weakened state, put off taking action. Yet, in January 1990, Moscow did act in what is known in Azerbaijan today as “Black January.” Soviet tanks rolled into the Caspian Sea port city of Baku and killed as many as 150 Azeris—many of them civilians: “The ostensible aim of the intervention was to stop Azeri massacres of Armenians, but the real goal was to prevent the Azerbaijani Popular Front from taking power.”1 The Popular Front was the chief political arm of anti-Moscow nationalism in Azerbaijan, and its leader stated, ”The goal is to drive out the army, liquidate the [Moscow-controlled] Azerbaijani Communist Party, establish a democratic parliament.”

Yet instead of Washington pundits instructing Americans to announce “I stand with Azerbaijan,” we were told the real threat was nationalism. As Doyle McManus wrote at the Los Angeles Times in 1990: “An ancient specter is haunting Europe: untamed nationalism…. From Baku to Berlin, as the Soviet Bloc has disintegrated, ethnic conflicts that once seemed part of the past have suddenly returned to life.” These old nationalistic impulses, one official from the State Department averred, are “dangerous ghosts” from Europe’s past. Arch establishment foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinki was on hand to claim that ethnic tensions could lead to “geopolitical anarchy.” Bush administration officials were “worried” that smaller national groups might replace the Soviet Union. At the time, it was not uncommon to hear that nationalism in Europe would bring about a situation similar to that which supposedly caused World War I. As one “senior Bush advisor” said, “It’s 1914 all over again.”

So, when the Soviet tanks showed up to crush a potential coup that might free some Soviet subjects from Moscow’s yoke, the feeling in Washington was one of relief rather than dismay at Moscow’s aggression. Washington was clinging to the idea that the answer to nationalism was to ensure the continued existence of—as Murray Rothbard put it—”a single, overriding government agency with a monopoly force to settle disputes by coercion.” That agency was the USSR. 

The US Against Independence for Ukraine and the Baltics

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On Roosevelt and Stalin: What Revisionist Historians Want Us to Forget — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on September 19, 2020

Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program was a major factor in Russia’s salvation. The list of goods that Roosevelt committed to send to the Soviet Union was astounding. It included shipments every month of 400 planes, 500 tanks, 5,000 cars, 10,000 trucks and huge quantities of anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft guns, diesel generators, field telephones, radios, motorcycles, wheat, flour, sugar, 200,000 pairs of boots, 500,000 pairs of surgical gloves and 15,000 amputation saws. By the end of October 1941, ships were carrying 100 bombers, 100 fighter planes, 166 tanks all with spare parts and ammunition, plus 5,500 trucks. (5)

The siege of Moscow lasted from Oct 1941 to Jan 1942, it would claim 926,000 Soviet lives before it ended.

The Soviet Union was receiving supplies from the U.S., but it was taking the full brunt of the Wehrmacht army on their own.

According to WWII historian and authority on Nazi Germany Gerhard Weinberg, the German military’s own figures show that ten thousand Russian prisoners of war were shot or killed by hunger and disease EVERY SINGLE DAY for the first seven months of the war.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/18/on-roosevelt-and-stalin-what-revisionist-historians-want-us-to-forget/

Cynthia Chung

“Madman, thou errest. I say, there is no darkness but ignorance”

– William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

There is a very real attempt to rewrite history as we speak. A history that is at the root of what organises our world today, for it is understood that who controls the past, will have control over our present and our future.

This attempt to rewrite history is of the most paramount significance because it is what is used today to shape who we regard as a “friend” and who we regard as a “foe.” Thus who controls the “narrative” of history, will also control who we see ourselves “aligned” with.

There is a consequence to this which can only lead to further disunity, to further conflict, to further war. It can only be remedied when the past is finally acknowledged.

There is still time to change this dreadful course.

A Meeting of Minds

The Tehran conference (Nov 28 – Dec 1, 1943) was the first time that Roosevelt and Stalin met in person. It was a historic meeting of the two most important leaders of the Allies that would shape the outcome of WWII.

Roosevelt had been trying to set up a meeting for more than a year, the meeting was of utmost importance because it would allow the two leaders to begin a basis for a solid “trust” to be formed, essential to not only winning the war but for maintaining a stable peace afterwards.

Over four years into WII had passed, and the level of distrust, fear and hatred for the Soviets was still prevalent in the political and military circles within the United States.

This was especially the case within the State Department career officers who were against FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, and thus antagonism to him and his policies were pervasive (1). When Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor on foreign policy during WWII, was sent to Europe to check in on the foreign service, he had found many U.S. embassies and legations still displaying the portrait of Herbert Hoover on their walls instead of FDR.

George Keenan, best known as the author of the Cold War strategy of “containment,” was among many of similar fibre, who opposed FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union, stating: “We should have no relationship at all with them…Never- neither then nor at any later date- did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.”

The Foreign Services’ anti-Soviet attitude ran so deep that most were against aid to Russia even after Hitler had invaded, despite the Soviets losing more lives against the Nazis in the first few months than all of Europe combined.

Churchill himself made it no secret that he wanted to make sure Germany would emerge from the war strong enough to counterbalance Russia in Europe (strong… but as he sought to soothingly explain not dangerous).

However, Roosevelt would be the first to recognize that the ever growing barbarism of Hitler was much more dangerous than these foreign intelligence circles were estimating, and that Russia was an imperative ally, in fact the only ally, that could ensure its defeat.

The Tehran conference was a great success in collaborative strategy to win the war, but more importantly, it was a great diplomatic success that would begin one of the most important alliances to have ever occurred in modern history.

The Truth Behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

In 1936, Stalin had predicted how German aggression would break out upon the world:

“History shows that when any state intends to make war against another state…it begins to seek frontiers across which it can reach the frontiers of the state it wants to attack…I do not know precisely what frontiers Germany may adapt to her aims, but I think she will find people willing to ‘lend’ her a frontier.”

These statements were made before the Munich Agreement which was just that, a “lending of a frontier.”

On March 18th 1939 at Stalin’s direction Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, proposed that France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Romania and Turkey join together at a conference to draw up a treaty to stop Hitler. Chamberlain was strongly against the idea, writing to a friend: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives.” (2)

On April 14th 1939, Lord Halifax, British Foreign Minister said that Britain would not extend an alliance to Russia in case Germany were to attack. Russia was clearly being told to go at it alone.

On April 16th 1939, Stalin had Litvinov propose to Sir William Seeds the British ambassador, that Russia, France and Britain make a pact that would bind their three countries to declare war on Germany if they or any nation between the Baltic and the Mediterranean were attacked.

Great Britain and France refused.

The Munich Betrayal had already been signed Sept 30th 1938, where Britain had “allowed” Hitler’s annexation of the German speaking territory of Czechoslovakia, as if it were a British colony that it could do with as it wished.

In addition, the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements, through BoE Governor Montague Norman, allowed for the direct transfer of 5.6 million pounds worth of gold to Hitler that was owned by the Bank of Czechoslovakia.

And lastly, that Prescott Bush on behalf of Union Banking was caught funding Hitler before and during WWII and on Oct 20th, 1942 had its bank assets seized under the “U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act.”

Despite all of this, it is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that has been selected by “historians” to go down in history as a deep stain on the moral character and true “face” of the Soviet Union. Confirmation that the Russians should never be trusted, for they would side with whoever wielded the greatest power, no matter the ideologies held.

This could not be further from the truth, and is in fact a gross disregard of the responsibility that Great Britain and France held in creating such a desperate situation for the Soviet Union. They had left her destitute because they wanted to see her destroyed.

Stalin was under no illusion. He knew that it was an impossibility for the USSR to coexist with a Nazi Germany, specifically because the existence of the Slavic people was considered unacceptable to the latter. Hitler, who described this belief in detail in his Mein Kampf, made no secret that he thought the Slavic people an inferior race and that after his conquest he planned to turn Russia and Poland into slave nations. Hitler would boast “The conflict [in the east] will be different from the conflict in the west.” The people of the west were to be subdued, the people of the east were to be annihilated.

Poland’s foreign minister Josef Beck who controlled foreign policy was strongly pro-German, and was adamant that Germany would never invade Poland. Some say Beck was a Nazi agent. It is curious that his son Anthony would in fact find after his father’s death, among his possessions an entire album filled with photos of Beck posing with Nazi generals and various officials of the Nazi government elite. (3)

Poland’s refusal to strategise a defense put the Soviet Union in an understandably difficult situation, since Poland shared a border with them. If Poland were to be invaded it would be used as a launching pad to attack the USSR, which had happened numerous times in the recent past, including during WWI.

Despite the fact that Poland would have absolutely no ability to defend itself in the case of a German invasion, Lord Halifax used as his excuse for putting off serious negotiations with the USSR that it was due to Josef Beck’s refusal to allow Russian soldiers to enter Poland, even if it were to drive back a Nazi army…who wanted to exterminate the Polish race as Hitler explicitly stated repeatedly. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of Two Minds – Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression

Posted by M. C. on October 24, 2019

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/US-suppression-repression10-19.html?fullweb=1

Charles Hugh Smith

We’re all against “fake news,” right? Until your content is deemed “fake news” in a “fake news” indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse.

When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don’t even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as “pravda” (truth), even as their limbic system’s BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force.

Inflation is a good example. The official (i.e. propaganda) inflation rate is increasingly detached from the real-world declines in the purchasing power of the bottom 80%, yet the jabbering talking heads on TV repeat the “low inflation” story with such conviction that the dissonance between the “official narrative” and the real world must be “our fault”–a classic technique of brainwashing.

To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation’s GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it’s a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%).

Then there’s education, which includes the $1.4 trillion borrowed by student debt-serfs–which is only part of the tsunami of cash gushing into the coffers of the higher-education cartel. Yet education & communication (which presumably includes the Internet / mobile telephone service cartel’s soaring prices) is another tiny sliver of the CPI, just 6.6%, a bit more than fun-and-games recreation.

As for housing costs, former Soviet apparatchiks must be high-fiving the Federal agencies for their inventive confusion of reality with magical made-up “statistics.” To estimate housing costs, the federal agency in charge of ginning up a low inflation number asks homeowners to guess what their house would rent for, were it being rented–what’s known as equivalent rent.

Wait a minute–don’t we have actual sales data for houses, and actual rent data? Yes we do, but those are verboten because they reflect skyrocketing inflation in housing costs, which is not allowed. So we use some fake guessing-game numbers, and the corporate media dutifully delivers the “pravda” that inflation is 1.6% annually–basically signal noise, while in the real world (as measured by the Chapwood Index) is running between 9% and 13% annually. How the Chapwood Index is calculated)

As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they’re told is “pravda” by the media reaches extremes, the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda, shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee.

(Clearly, the CIA’s agitprop sector mastered the Soviet templates and has been applying what they learned to the domestic populace. By all means, start by brainwashing the home audience so they don’t catch on that the “news” is a Truman Show simulation.)

In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia which drew on his years working in Russian television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian broadcasting “became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time.”

Now, he’s written a penetrating follow-up, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family’s story — unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny — with a present in which truth scarcely appears to matter.

“During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free,” he writes. “Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power.”

(source)

“Facts” are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how “official facts” are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative–that inflation is so low it’s basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree.

This is the reality as inflation has eaten up wages’ purchasing power: Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class Wages stalled but costs haven’t, so people increasingly rent or finance what their parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level.

We’re all against “fake news,” right? Until your content is deemed “fake news” in a “fake news” indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse. This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the “approved narratives” was labeled “fake news” in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos’ propaganda mouthpiece, The washington Post. (Who’s your daddy, WP “journalists”?)

Meanwhile, back in reality, the primary source of data here on oftwominds.com is 1) the Federal Reserve data base (FRED) 2) IRS data and 3) content and charts posted by the cream of the U.S. corporate media Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the “approved narratives” and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation’s most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi…)

In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as “commentators” would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the “most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize” individuals in the nation welcomed as “experts” who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem)

What if every employee in the corporate media who was paid (or coerced) by the FBI, NSA, CIA etc. had to wear a large colorful badge that read, “owned by the FBI/CIA”? Would that change our view of the validity of the “approved narratives”?

Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression, where your views are welcome as long as they parrot “approved narratives” and the corporate-state’s orthodoxies. “Facts” are only welcome if they lend credence to the “approved narratives” and orthodoxies.

For example, corporate earnings are rising. Never mind estimates were slashed, that was buried in footnotes a month ago. What matters is Corporate America will once again “beat estimates” by a penny, or a nickel, or gasp, oh the wonderment, by a dime, on earnings that were slashed by a dollar when “nobody was looking.” Meanwhile, back in reality, the bottom 95% have been losing ground for two decades. But don’t say anything, you’ll be guilty of “fake news.”

 

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Why I Am Voting For Donald Trump And Not A Third Obama Administration

Posted by M. C. on August 15, 2016

As the USSR collapsed, part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s agreement to dissolve the Warsaw Pact hinged upon the US pledge not to enlarge NATO. Thanks to Clinton I, Bush II and Obama NATO is up to Russia’s border.

Obama’s trillion dollar nuclear upgrade plan is an in-your-Russian-face challenge. New adjustable yield nukes are being touted as a way to make nuclear first strikes acceptable. Advanced nukes, anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe and sailing warships up to Russian shores are a directive- Do what you are told or prepare to glow in the dark.

Russia and China for some strange reason resist being part of this plan. They want to be the main player in their own neighborhoods. What gall!

Wall Street Hillary is the neocons high priestess of ‘Boss of the world at any cost’ theology.

Kosovo, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan: War is the only ‘diplomatic’ tool Clinton knows. War machine money green is the only color she knows.

Fred Reed said this ‘There are three kinds of stupid-Stupid, really-really stupid and war with Russia’.

Donald Trump acknowledges Russia is an effective partner in fighting ISIS. Trump says Russia could be a friend and trading partner. Then there is ‘the thing that is not said’, Russia as an ally in counterbalancing China. Read the rest of this entry »

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