Wagner Rebellion

It's the Olive Color Revolution of course, likely paid for with the $6.2 billion that recently surfaced in the Pentagon.

You might think Prigozhin would be less appetizing to the west than even Putin.  He wanted Putin to fight the war in Ukraine harder at every turn.  He founded a group to combat disinformation disparaging of Russia years ago.  But then, a few months ago, he suddenly changed his tune, calling the Special Military Operation fundamentally wrong using western talking points.  About that time, if not long before, Putin started paying attention.  The ongoing plan was to integrate Wagner troops into the regular Russian Military, making Prigozhin unimportant going forwards.  But just before that could happen, this...

It often seems the west believes that which can easily be bought, can keep being bought, though that very strategy has failed spectacularly many times before (say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein).

One thing is for sure, the US has hands on everything it can reach.

And it would have been better to never touch anything.

It didn't take much reading on Twitter for me to reach these conclusions.  And then I discovered the usual set of people I follow had been saying similar things, going back 14 hours or more.

Prigozhin is a restauranteur.  He is an oligarch but not a populist senator as Julius Caesar was.  It is not clear Prigozhin has any popular support at all, while Putins popularity has remained above 80%.

Actually, my first thought was not merely a bribe but blackmail had caused Prigozhin to flip.  He must no longer care about his own life, but someone else's.

Update:  Negotiations were concluded during the time I was writing this.

Now what we seem to have was not a Revolt but a Walk Out, and Management made some concessions.

Yet again, and in complete contrast to the misinformation laced false picture of Putin in the West, Putin's actions saved lives.  He acted with reason and compassion and not ego.

Military Alliances are the Cause of World Wars

Military Alliances are not good, or even neutral.  Military Alliances should be considered the greatest evil there is.  Military Alliances lie at the root of World War 1, World War 2*, and now World War 3. 

I remember learning this kind of thing in Junior High School,  it was called "MAIN": Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.  It was great to make a single word for this, as they are not separate things.  For example, one doesn't have Alliances without Militarism, and Alliances only operate effectively through Imperialism.  Alliances virtually always operate as a combination of Imperial states and Vassal states.  The Vassal states seek 'protection' and the Imperial states seek expansion.  They go hand in hand.  (There is actually no military form of 'protection' from war.  Foreign bases or even weapons are automatically international targets.  There is no greater strength than from weakness, and no greater weakness than from strength.  The safest man goes without weapons, and without need of them.)

In virtually every conflict, it is virtually impossible to determine who "is in the right."  Every "war crime" has a precedent, and every precedent has a precedent.    Who is in the wrong depends entirely on which facts are highlighted and which are excluded, including especially when to start counting.

(There's a fabulous cartoon which expresses this thought perfectly, showing two sides that look identical, but the 'terrorists' of one side are the 'freedom fighters' of the other, etc)

Every side to a conflict quickly convinces itself of its own righteousness, and the evil of the other side.

And so it now appears leaders and most subjects in the West believe that Russia is the most Evil of All for Invading Ukraine and starting this latest hot phase of World War 3.  It was wrong, they say, for Russia not to honor the 'sovereignty' of Ukraine to choose which alliance (ie, murderous gang) to be a part of.

But to do this, they must discredit US involvement in the Maidan Revolution.   If it is true, as I believe, that the US was involved in creating this Revolution, which was actually a Coup...how was that respecting 'Ukrainian Sovereignty.'

I prefer to go back much farther, to at least the beginning of when the US started protecting and funding 'Ukrainian Nationalists' (either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on your POV...and there's that Nationalism word too) at the end of World War 2.  That was an example of strategic meddling (ie warmongering) which the US has done continuously since that time if not long before.

Or one could even go back to the Russian Civil War, when the West also allied with Ukrainians to fight Russia.

There should be no doubt that the Hegemonic Western Empire, led by the USA since the end of World War 2, is the most Evil Empire the world has ever seen, and unarguably in this time frame.  The incredibly long list of coups and wars and people killed is almost mind boggling.  Just to list a few

Atomic Weapons used on Japan

Korean War

Vietnam War

Invasion of Panama

Invasion of Iraq

Invasion of Afghanistan

Destruction of Libya

War on Syria

Coup of Iran

Coup of Guatemala

Coup of Chile

Coup of Honduras

(I've seen 83 such successful regime change operations listed, and that's not counting all the unsuccessful ones, like the Tiananmen Square attempted Color Revolution, and the more recent attempted Color Revolution in Hong Kong.)

But US war cheerleaders like Lawrence Tribe or Timothy Snyder either ignore all this or bogusly explain it away.

Most often, what we get from western warmongers--virtually the entire establishment government, media, and corporations, as well as most but not all of the people--is de facto racism of the kind "Russians are brutal," or "Chinese have no concept of individual soul."  Not the least bit of self reflection or contextualization.  No thought of how, for example, the US conducted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or on what even more flimsy pretexts.

The latter set of imperial US invasions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria) were actually NATO wars, disproving the claim that NATO is a peace keeping alliance.

Furthermore, they involved non-aligned countries specifically because of their friendliness and geographic proximity to Russia!  In other words, as is also clear in official policy documents, the US has been Dominating the world, and doing so very much like a mob boss, by wiping out the friends of its potential rivals.  A particularly psychopathic mob boss like the world has never seen before.

When the friends and other countries adjacent to a rival are acquired, the next step is to fill them with bases pointing offensive weapons at Russia.

Whenever this cut too close to the bone, aggravating long settled Russian speaking peoples, Russia has tended to respond, eventually.  And so we come to Ukraine, which has regions which were part of Russia for hundreds of years, until recently, until the 1991 'dissolution' of USSR which was long sought and ultimately supported by the USA.  And that's very sensitive to Russia, because those regions filled with Russian speakers are very close to Moscow as well.

The right and peaceful thing to do is never ever meddle in the internal affairs of other countries.  And if that fails, never become involved in the wars of other countries.  The only country honorably worthy of fighting for is one's own (and perhaps not that one, either--if you think the other guys might run it better--by definition it is for the people of any country to decide how hard it is worth fighting for--states have no metaphysical 'right' to exist independent of the people within and affected by them).

The moment you are fighting for someone else's country, is the moment you have become part of an evil empire (if not the head of the snake).  

This is what happened in WW2.  In successfully destroying murderous imperialism in Europe--with the heavy lifting being done by USSR who was actually fighting for their own country, the US became the primary murderous empire of the world, virtually taking the place of Nazi Germany if not improving on it, just with a slightly different cast of villains, though starting with Communists, which were the first and primary villains of Nazis too!  (They mainly hated Jews because they associated ethnic Jews, like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin--who were actually atheists, with Communism.  It was Communism that was the root of all evil, as explained by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf.)

A good peacemaking person should be an apologist for foreign countries, contextualizing (context is a key part of the whole truth) their excesses, and a critic of one's own in an attempt to make it better (I explained the Ethics of this 2 years ago...which is the same as the ethics described by Jesus Christ...and in fact demanded by the 9th Commandment).  Highlighting the excesses of other countries (even if they didn't pale in comparison to one's own) is soft warmongering.

NATO is the root cause of World War 3 and it must be abolished.

Here is Glenn Greenwald making a similar point on Twitter/SystemUpdate.  (Sadly I'm not sure his really good tweets like this one get as many likes as his bad ones like I dissed yesterday, so I'm trying to help.  And no, I don't find that if someone gets some things right and other things wrong that means they are always wrong and I'm just not understanding fully.  Entropy itself predicts people will get some things right and other things wrong.)

*This is not the usual argument for WW2, although sometimes westerners mention specific agreements I'm not going to dwell on now.  But from fairly early on, behind the scenes, FDR was telling foreign leaders that he would find a way to give them US support.  He was telling them not to negotiate with Hitler.  Therefore, contrary to the usual description of WW2, as based on German aggression, it was primarily expanded by US offers of military help (aka Alliance).  As far as we know, it might have been settled by restoring a few small regions of German speaking peoples, which had been removed by the very unfair Treaty of Versailles, to German possession.  Ah, but states have rights, some would say, guaranteed by this or that, blah, blah.  The states, that is, that we created in our last victory or coup.

Coup is also what I consider the 1991 Soviet Union 'dissolution' as well--Yeltsin had help, and Gorbachev's effort to hold the SU together was thereby undermined.

The ground is littered by our dead corpses in the tens of millions and our toxic munitions and our toxic geopolitical legacies.  We would do best, and be lucky to just walk away from it all.  More and more is only the greater tragedy.

What is to keep the worst aggressors from keeping on aggressing?  Well, we should look ourselves in the mirror to answer that question.  The answer is, in the long run, it costs too much.

Finkelstein on the Pursuit of Truth

I liked the references to JS Mill anyway.

But I wonder about this.  When you have a TV 'circus,' you don't necessarily have truth seeking.  It's something more like entertainment and/or promotion, which can work in many ways, perhaps elevating that which should not be elevated.

In any live 'debate' (or even the sanitized kinds we have between political candidates), 95% depends on showmanship, not content.

Attorneys excel at high stakes showmanship with a limited time horizon, pulling on heartstrings more than reason, and argument by gotcha.  It's hard to argue about things involving numbers generally, and especially statistics, in such settings.  And with people who have insufficient knowledge to understand

how these things work.  Correct explanations, when they can be given, may take time not available, and audio video aids...perhaps even years of production like a science video, not to mention literature searching, simulation, and actual experimental research.

Scientists prefer lower visibility settings, such as reviewing other authors, or one-on-one meetings with considerable duration and continuity.

This follows in both cases from the nature of the truth issues at stake and how they are resolved.  In law an institutionally unbiased determination of guilt is sought, the guilty party can be expected to try to hide that (hence the use of gotcha--catching liars--who might then be suspected of lying about other things).  In science, an understanding of the fundamental nature of things is sought and no one has complete answers or knowledge.

Perhaps truth seeking ought to be continued on many levels, but mostly in writing where anyone can quickly see what has been said or take the time to formulate the best response without penalty for taking such time, or admitting lack of knowledge or uncertainty.

Finkelstein even mentions this speed issue, but only between fast speaking (like Hasan) and slow speaking (like Chomsky).  In reality, all speaking is a form of showmanship.  Truth seeking is better done when there is no penalty for pausing and seeking the best answer, not just one that comes from the top of the head.

In addition, any kind of 'debate' on TV is not won by presenting a good reasoned argument to an audience which hears the entire debate.  It's 'won' in the endless aftermath, the endless re-reporting in which the better crafted (often after the fact) sound bites win.  The ones that have just the right connections to power (and therefore are reported more) and resonances with the present mythologies of audiences they are presented to.

All of this is of course compounded by bad faith.  But of course our legal and political systems operate in this very real, where bad faith on all sides can be virtually presumed, but is never acknowledged, and often stressed only where rejoinder is impossible.  (Thus, corporate media loves to criticize government operations, but rarely corporate operations, many of whom are sponsors.)

It's no better in our supposedly representational bodies of legislative debate.  Those are best understood not as truth seeking but power-aligning.  Arguments backed by the most power and money are the ones that win, regardless of any connection to the truth in the arguments made about them.  We're accustomed to this kind of puffery in every settings...words are just tools of the trade of some con job.  (Speaking of which, I often wonder whether just that--words--was the beginning of the end of the human species.)

Given all this, it's a wonder we have a civilization that has persisted this long.  Our debate and politics are utterly broken, and all the more so on TV and Social Media.  I don't see much hope for the future.

*****

I also don't much like Finkelstein's endlessly poking us with his critique of Woke.  Sure, I too think it's ridiculous when there is a lot of time and attention given to pronouns, requiring everyone to identify with their chosen pronouns for example.  But the war on personal privacy now going on in Red States is pretty close to all on fascism.  People have rights to decide how to use their bodies.  And much of the anti-Woke in practice is about eliminating just that, what the Warren Court established as a Right to Privacy as in "leave us alone."

And I think the attacks on Peter Hotez are reprehensible, by people I sometimes respect like Glenn Greenwald and Dan Cohen.  Most of these attacks virtually presume an untruth, that vaccines are fundamentally bad medicine, rather than what they are, a matter of greater and lesser risks.  In the innumerate world of TV and Social Media debate, risks are buried below assumptions and allegations.

*****

Just learned of Brandini's Law: the amount of energy necessary to refute BS is an order of magnitude greater than to produce it.

Cornell West for President

I am enthusiastically switching my support to Cornell West for President!

Here is someone who is actually good in every way.

Norman Finkelstein has recently refuted the "spoiler" claim with regards to West.

I second that, and add that it's far too early to be worried about such things anyway, if the people are to have any voice, it is early like now.  Needless to say, the oligarchs are in early, they never stop.

 

The Complicated Wars in the former Yugoslavia

I was not very politically aware as the wars in Yugoslavia were happening.

Later, when I started learning that NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 with little justification, I had a hard time putting the pieces together.

One of the key things that was repeated in western media over and over was the Srebrenica Massacre.

Every time I said that NATO bombed Serbia without justification, friends would say "But what about the Srebrenica Massacre?  Sure, Serbs claimed that they were retaliating (against civilian casualties inflicted on Serbs by Bosniak soldiers under the command of Naser Orik).  But those claims were rejected as bad faith."

So I'd dutifully look up the Srebrenica Massacre, and AFAIK it actually happened.  So there's the justification, I thought many times.

But the problem is that the Srebrenica Massacre (and I'm not arguing about that in particular here) reputedly happened in 1995, and Belgrade was bombed in 1999.  

Well, better late than never, some might (and IIRC did) say.

But I was confused by the two different phases of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Srebrenica Massacre related to a struggle between Serbs and Bosniak Muslims.  Key people held responsible for the Srebrenica Massacre were Radovan Karadzic, a Serbian militant, and Ratko Mladic.  That part of the war was "settled" (if you could call it that) in 1995 with the Dayton Accords.  

The bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was over a similar but different conflict, between Serbia and Kosovo.

The NATO bombing was spurred by the "Racak Massacre" of 45 Kosovo Albanians.  This story is a bit murkier, because not only were far fewer 'civilians' involved, Racak was a center of KLA militant separatist activity, and Serbia maintained that all of those killed were KLA fighters, who had previously been involved in an ethnic cleansing of Serbs.

Furthermore, the NATO bombing could be seen as highly disproportionate to this particular claimed massacre.  It was said to have killed 1,500, which western sources allege to have included 1,000 serbian fighters and around 500 civilians.  (IIRC Serbian sources claim they were all civilians.)

But it seems the only massacre anyone I know ever remembers is the Srebrenica massacre.

This came back to mind when reading about the fact that after dying in a NATO prison, Milosevic was posthumously exonerated from crimes related to the wars in Yugoslavia, not just once but twice.

I stumbled upon that fact (which I had never heard before) while reading this article about how US backed jihadis in Yugoslavian war by Kit Klarenberg.

How RFK was assassinated

The story is told in the book by Lisa Pease, reviewed in the Washington Post in 2019.

It was an operation coordinated by Robert Maheu, a private spook who did work for the CIA and others, including Howard Hughes.  (CIA told Maheu to work for Hughes...though Maheu and Hughes never met in person, Maheu helped Hughes buy up Los Vegas hotels, for example.)

Someone who did work with Hughes in person believes that both Maheu and Hughes were involved in a plot to assassinate RFK.

Maheu often contracted with mobsters, and the people behind RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel included some of mobster employees.

The autopsy shows RFK was shot from behind, while Sirhan fired a gun in front.

It appears Sirhan was firing blanks according to witnesses.  His gun was never matched to any of the bullets found in Kennedy or the kitchen, one of which has gone missing.

Sirhan was a horse handler at a racetrack owned by a Maheu associated mobster, and according to his friends, Sirhan disappeared for about a month before the shooting occurred.  During this time he was probably being programmed and hypnotized by Maheu associates using CIA developed techniques.

Anyway Sirhan's role wasn't actually to kill Kennedy...he simply wasn't qualified for that...but to be the patsy, so the real assassins, the ones behind Kennedy, could escape (and witnesses saw people behind Kennedy quickly leaving after the shooting).  All Sirhan had to do was fire a gun with blanks on cue, which he did.  He does not remember firing a weapon at all.  He was in a deep hypnotic trance (which it appears to be easy for him even years later).  After he was arrested, he was not nervous at all, it was as if nothing had happened.

Sirhan's public defense attorney decided not to question any of the facts, but merely to give a mental health defense, which ultimately failed.

What was one likely motive of CIA, Maheu, and the mob?  They were afraid that if RFK became President, he'd be able to find out who actually killed his brother JFK.

Plus they didn't trust RFK on a lot of political matters...there was no love lost...just as with his brother.  And after prosecuting the mob for awhile, RFK certainly had enemies in the mob.

"Feminist" Zionism and Imperialism

One of Tony Greenstein's most popular articles ever:

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/01/feminist-silence-over-ahed-tamimi.html

Tony discusses the issue more completely in a follow-up:

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/02/ahed-tamimi-exposes-refusal-of-western.html

When "feminism" focuses entirely on "the Patriarchy" and ignores other forms of oppression, which are greater problems in the lives of most women in the world, it can become merely another form of capitalist or imperialist cheerleading.  (I have previously called this Feminist Imperialism.)

The correct view, which Communists have long promoted, is that of Intersectionality.  We all face different kinds of oppression, which include oppression by Capital, classism, racism, and sexism.  We must all work together to eliminate ALL forms of oppression.  That is the central goal of Communism: to eliminate all Oppression.  It is not surprising that anti-Communist capitalist and imperialist apologists masquerading as "feminists" argue something different.

Tony spells this out:

...many western feminists who understand their own oppression as women but fail to see the interconnections with the oppression of other women for whom gender oppression is not the totality of their oppression.  Today this is often called 'intersectionality'.  

Western feminism operates on the basis that there is an all-encompassing system of oppression called patriarchy, an  oppression of women by men.  By definition it fails to account for the division of women by class, race, ethnicity, colour etc. Women living under the heel of imperialism or colonialism are thus not only oppressed as women but as racial or ethnic minorities. 

For women such as Ahed Tamimi or her mother Nariman, the primary oppression they experience is not that from the males in their family circle but from Israeli soldiers, regardless of their sex. 

Who for example could doubt that for Rohinga women the experience of being driven out of Burma, often with Israeli arms, is more immediate than their relationships with men?  One is literally a matter of life and death.  Or for example that the primary experience of Jewish women in the camps of Nazi Germany was not the oppression of Jewish men but the Nazi state and its guards, regardless of their sex?  There is no evidence I have seen that female Nazi guards shared any sisterhood with Jewish women.

The relationship between feminism, racism and imperialism has been a vexed one for over 30 years.  When the issue of Zionism first manifested itself in the pages of Spare Rib, the magazine of Women's Liberation, at the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it split the editorial collective in two. An article ‘Women Speak Out Against Zionism’ caused an explosion of fury amongst Zionist feminists who asserted that support for the Palestinians and Lebanese was ‘anti-Semitism’ (shades of the Labour Party today!).

Counter Disinformation

Tim Hayward presents an excellent critique of Counter-Disinformation failures.

He believes Journalists and especially academics should take their responsibility towards due Epistemic Dilligence seriously (though he does not systematically define what that entails).  That means seriously attempting to find out what the truth actually is.

Instead it appears like much Counter Disinformation is merely the repetition of slurs, such as Assad Apologist or Useful Idiot.  Due epistemic dilligence is often replaced by referring to claims made by government officials or government websites.

Explicitly Coded Systems

I am coming more and more to oppose the use of anything but Explicitly Coded System (ECS) as opposed to trained systems like Neural Network AI in life threatening situations.

 With a trained system, you do not know what the parameters actually are.

Having ECS doesn't necessarily mean you know every ramification of every line of code.  You never do.  But it's possible to understand how and why things work in pretty great detail, as opposed to having a black box.

ECS includes 'knowledge based' AI systems as may be created with Lisp and Prolog.

Answers to some questions.

Are neural networks 'life'?  No!

Can neural networks produce art?  No, they produce patterns which are shaped and selected by human artists.

What are neural networks good for?  Pattern recognition and reproduction.  Not reasoning or selection.

Will AI solve our problems?  No, every new technology will only make our problems worse.*  Our problems stem from inconsistencies between the human spirit and its global apex predator role, hardened into human society and practices which necessitate explotiation and endless growth.  Only a revolution in spirit and society and practices can save us.  We must learn to live with less rather than endlessly try to create more.  Including especially less people and less occupation, decimation, and destruction of the habitats of other species (and most notably...the oceans).

(*A parallel to Brook's Law which says that 'adding manpower to a late project will only make it later.')

My belief is that advanced 'alien' forces are already 'here' (perhaps at some distance) and primarily to ensure we don't spread our defective spirit and practices further afield.  This is a prison, school, hospital, quarantine zone or something like that.  We are actively blocked from seeing them or other living forces in the universe so we cannot find this out ourselves and attempt to defeat it.  Given what we are, this would not be cruel or unwarranted.  I believe their aim is to save and then assimilate us into the pan galactic civilization, as they seek new experiences and knowledge, but they know it may take time and many catastrophic collapses for our species to be reformed sufficiently, and it might not happen at all.  Meanwhile, they continue to accumulate new experiences and knowledge in the process, making it a worthwhile endeavor in any case.

Plutocracy with Polls

Real Democracy might only be achieved with lotteries, as the Athenians did it.

That might lead to better communism too.

What we have in USA is a Plutocracy with Polls.  Rule by the moneyed elite is given a popular gloss.  The moneyed elite virtually control which candidates are available and which are selected, largely through media which is how most people learn about everything.  They control what the issues are, and which topics are avoided.  The moneyed elite and their supposedly private media work alongside state institutions, shaped by and for their behalf, such as law enforcement and Intelligence Services, which all work to maintain the status quo, with them on top.

The current system, in all its many manifestation (including education, work, and religion) reinforce the "There is no Alternative" mindset.

That is a key impediment.  It's ridiculous to call for 'Revolution!' when minds have been shaped to be so conservative, so opposed to the principles of Communism, so determined to be manipulated and exploited by the moneyed elite if perhaps slightly different ways than at present.

That means the key revolutionary task at this time is Education.  The time is ripe for it too.

RFK Jr is disappointing in many ways

Of course I knew about his history of peddling antivaxx pseudoscience, but was willing to overlook that because of his antiwar talk.  And most of this well written report is about that, but concedes that a position like mine might exist, that opposing war is currently the most important thing.

But there are many other reasons to be disappointed with Kennedy too.

My own feeling was that the moment I contributed $10 he started sounding worse.  So probably there won't be a second $10.

 UPDATE:

RFK Jr continues to defend Israel's Right to Exist, a bogus concept.  As long as that continues, no one can take his erstwhile anti-imperialism very seriously.

US Entry into World War II

Michael Tracy gives a very good telling of the story of how the US entered World War II.

I agree with his accounting and his conclusion completely, only that I would go much further.

This was not the 'one good war' we should honor and replicate in perpetuity.

It was a plunge into the US Empire of Lies and global barbarism which accelerated from there and have continued ever since, often with shocking repetitions.

No country, including the USA, should imagine itself as the moral Policeman of the World.  Such a thing isn't possible.  

The only justification for war is Self-Defense against a threat to the entire nation.

We Must Not Even Attempt to 'defend' other countries with the use of weapons, intelligence, force, sanctions, or confiscation.

Such attempts must always be understood as Global Imperialism and World War.