Putin intends to undermine NATO – Jt. Chiefs Chairman Dempsey
RT | June 7, 2015
Russia is seeking to “discredit and eventually undermine” NATO, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in an interview published shortly after President Vladimir Putin said only a madman would think of Russia as a threat to NATO.
“I can’t tell you, as we sit here today, precisely what Putin and Russia intend to do,” Dempsey said in the interview to the Wall Street Journal. “They have demonstrated some behaviors outside the international order that clearly indicate that they are willing to push beyond what most of the nations with whom we deal consider to be international norms.”
Dempsey also called on the NATO allies to “harden against the subversive activities Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use.”
“We have the conventional threat posed by Russia’s conventional forces,” the Pentagon chief said.
“[Putin and Russia] have demonstrated some capabilities with long-range aviation and with their nuclear forces that are clearly intended to signal the nations in Europe and us of their willingness to consider all the instruments of military power,” Dempsey said.
The comments come shortly after the release of an interview with Vladimir Putin where he has warned against taking the West’s “Russian aggression” scaremongering seriously.
“I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO,” Putin said. “I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia. They just want to play the role of front-line countries that should receive some supplementary military, economic, financial or some other aid.”
The Russian president invited journalists to compare the global military presence of Russia, on one hand, and that of the US and NATO, and draw their own conclusions.
“We have dismantled our bases in various regions of the world, including Cuba, Vietnam, and so on,” Putin said. “I invite you to publish a world map in your newspaper and to mark all the US military bases on it. You will see the difference.”
Dempsey listed “capabilities that do threaten security in Europe” mentioning among them Russia’s being “very adept in the media space of propaganda.”
In April, Secretary of State John Kerry asked US lawmakers for more money for propaganda and “democracy promotion” programs around the world, having directly referred to RT’s growing influence. RT’s budget for 2015 is 13.85 billion rubles (some $277 million, according to the current exchange rate). By contrast, the US government media receives $721 million.
Among other threats Dempsey mentioned is Russia’s “ability to conduct snap exercises with conventional forces that can coerce or at least threaten borders.” The remark comes as military exercises close to Russian borders are being conducted on a non-stop basis.
The latest example is a major US-led exercise BALTOPS in the Baltic Sea, which began June 5. Around 50 vessels from 17 countries, involving overall 5,600 troops, are taking part in these war-games that are set to last 15 days, to show off NATO’s ability to protect the region.
In mid-May, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the alliance is going to increase its activity at its eastern borders, with more air and sea patrols, amid non-stop exercises.
Trinity 70 Years On… the Nuclear Horror Still Haunts
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture | 06.06.2015
America’s New Mexico state saw the birth of nuclear weapons 70 years ago at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first ever atomic explosion occurred. That was on July 16, 1945. Less than one month later, the bomb was dropped on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiping out some 200,000 lives in an instant.
Now the American state is grappling with the sinister problem of trying to bury seven decades of nuclear waste from America’s military-industrial complex. In many ways, the horror of nuclear weaponry still haunts the very place where it was first unleashed.
US federal and state politicians are planning to make New Mexico the permanent burial site for highly radioactive waste materials that up to now have been kept in temporary storage at other locations across the country, such as at Hanford in northwest Washington state where the nation’s main facility for producing plutonium and uranium for nuclear weapons is located.
There is, to be sure, strong opposition among various community groups and activists, who deplore the plans to scale up New Mexico’s nuclear-waste dumping. They point to an already heavy burden of environmental and public health toxicity in NM that includes not only fallout from the original Trinity test site, but also from Los Alamos Laboratories where the atomic bomb was conceived under the Manhattan Project during the 1940s, as well as from scores of uranium-ore mines, and an existing low-level nuclear waste site.
But the anti-dumping campaigners are up against the formidable US military-industrial complex and what they call a «genocidal ideology» in the east coast Washington political establishment. If plans go ahead, as seems likely, New Mexico will become the sole depository for the most dangerous of all radioactive waste in the US.
Randy Martin is one of the community campaigners trying to prevent the scaling up of nuclear-waste dumping in NM. He has been an activist on the issue for over 30 years. Some of his family relatives who had farms near the Gnome site – another disastrous nuclear-explosion test area hatched on the backs of natives and locals – succumbed to cancers and other diseases, which he believes were caused by the subsequent radioactive fallout. He reckons that thousands of people in New Mexico have been affected by inter-generational nuclear contamination.
«The trouble is that New Mexico has been enslaved to the military-industrial complex», says Martin. «Our relationship to the industry is from the cradle to the grave. This is where nuclear weapons technology was created and tested, and now we are being left with the task of burying its toxic waste».
One of the biggest advocates for the expanded waste facility in New Mexico is Republican state governor Susana Martinez. Martinez is touted to have ambitions of becoming a future vice-president in the White House. The plan is to take in high-level spent radioactive materials from all over the country, including fuel rods and bomb cores, in an expansion of an already existing low-level waste site located at Carlsbad – about 200 km from the Trinity site.
Advocates for the expansion of nuclear-waste dumping in New Mexico appear to have a strong suite of arguments in their favour. The state is one of the poorest in the whole of the US; therefore the development beckons jobs and a boost to local government coffers. There is also a onerous psychological pressure on communities to be «patriotic» in helping to serve the nation’s military. Moreover, since the Second World War, New Mexico has become so entwined with the US military that it seems extremely difficult to live without it.
The state hosts the biggest weapons testing and training sites in the whole country at the White Sands Missile Range covering 8,300 sq. km of desert at the foot of the San Andreas Mountains. The vast area encompasses the Trinity test site. There are also numerous other military bases dotted all over the state. Consequently, much of the civilian sector, even if it is not formally connected to the military, has a preponderant economic dependence on it. The argument that whatever is good for the military is good for New Mexico is a hard one to rebut. That makes it difficult for communities to oppose the plan to accept military nuclear waste even if there is an apprehension about contamination risk. Many livelihoods are at stake by not accommodating the Pentagon.
Indeed campaigners say there is a sinister, but subtle, social atmosphere that pervades the state, whereby open criticism of the environmental and public health impacts from the Pentagon’s activities is frowned upon. That creates a climate of conformity and self-censorship. Jobs and contracts can be lost on a sly say-so.
Furthermore, there is a dearth of official data on the fallout from nuclear activity in New Mexico. Incredible as it might seem, it was only last year that the federal government finally launched a comprehensive epidemiological study into the possible health impact of the Trinity atomic test – some 70 years after it took place. So up to now, no-one was too sure how deleterious that explosion was to local populations, although there is ample anecdotal evidence of high rates of cancer and other environmental impacts.
That lack of impact-data makes it difficult to mount an effective campaign against the latest plans to scale up nuclear dumping.
However, there are warning signs. Last year, there was a serious radioactive leak at the existing waste site at Carlsbad, which resulted in contamination of some dozen workers at the plant. Yet the same facility is now being lined up to take in much greater quantities of higher-level spent radioactive material. The new waste is to be stored in vast underground caverns mined from the salt-rock terrain.
Advocates for the site claim that the geology provides a safe natural deposit. But given that the waste material represents a toxic lifespan of thousands of years it is a worrying assumption that leaks will not occur from future geological events. The New Mexico waste site lies perilously above the Delaware Basin that serves as the only fresh-water source for communities in the region and is a tributary to the Rio Grande River, which outflows to the Gulf of Mexico, potentially affecting millions of lives all along the US-Mexican border.
Campaigners against nuclear-waste dumping point out that the Soviet authorities acted with much greater alacrity to the fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster compared with their American counterparts over New Mexico’s decades-old concerns. Following Chernobyl, medical surveys were carried out to assess human health impacts, and the then Soviet government enacted compensation payments to victims and families. In contrast, the US federal government has tended to suppress investigations into the legacy of nuclear activity in New Mexico, and has been reluctant to provide financial compensation for those allegedly affected by it. The pervasive dominant role of the US military in the state tends to further suppress any public criticism and calls for accountability.
The historical background of colonial conquest is another telling factor. New Mexico was long considered by the Washington establishment as backward «Indian territories». The modern state of New Mexico was only formed in 1912. Prior to that it was known simply as «The Territories» – a vast borderless hinterland populated by native American tribes. The Apache Wars were being waged by the newly formed United States up to the late 1800s – only 70 years before the Trinity test explosion occurred in 1945. During those wars, the Apache tribes were among the last native Americans to be conquered in brutal campaigns of extermination.
It is no coincidence then that the «worthless deserts and conquered people» of New Mexico would be later selected by the Washington establishment as the test site for the first atomic weapon. It must be recalled that even the scientists of the Manhattan Project were not sure whether the nuclear explosion would result in a catastrophic atmospheric reaction within New Mexico and surrounding US states.
Randy Martin, the campaigner, says that horrific atomic experiment at the Trinity site in 1945 was born out of the «genocidal mentality» that the Washington government retained from the earlier conquest of native American tribes.
«That genocidal mentality persists to this day», says Martin. «The United States government and its military-industrial complex unleashed the horror of nuclear weapons in this part of the country because they saw it as a conquered territory containing conquered people. Today, the Washington establishment and its ilk still view New Mexico as a place where they think nuclear problems can be buried and forgotten».
Under the Obama administration, the Pentagon has received a budget of over $350 billion to upgrade the US arsenal of nuclear weapons over the next decade. Some observers have discerned that this nuclear resurgence under Obama is emblematic of a new Cold War with Russia and other perceived global rivals. Notwithstanding the facts that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 in part supposedly for nuclear disarmament, and that the US is obligated to totally disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that was signed 40 years ago.
Under Washington’s renewed nuclear arms quest, Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico has been assigned to replace plutonium cores in nuclear weapons with new fission devices. That inevitably means much greater volumes of nuclear waste will be dumped in the deserts of New Mexico.
Seventy years after Trinity, New Mexico is still being used in a pernicious nuclear experiment by the Pentagon. The toxic waste might be buried underground, but the horror lives on.
Arms companies are making money by taking over UK schools
By Andrew Smith | Open Democracy | June 2, 2015
Corporations have already established a growing foothold in many UK schools, but the idea of Europe’s biggest arms company running a school still seems like something out of an Orwellian nightmare.
However, it may be about to happen in Barrow, Cumbria, where BAE Systems is on the verge of taking over the faltering Furness Academy. The proposal is currently going through due diligence before being opened to a consultation with stakeholders, parents and staff, where it is expected to be supported. If it is agreed, BAE will become the school’s sole sponsor later this year. They will also take responsibility for the ‘strategic direction’ of the school.
Education isn’t just about grades, it’s also about promoting values, informing perspectives and expanding minds. Could a weapons manufacturer ever act in the best interests of school children? How can a company that profits from international hostility ever be trusted to teach about areas like conflict resolution or the human cost of war?
BAE has a shameful, inglorious history of corruption and deals with dictators. It has been the subject of investigations across a number of countries and was fined $400 million in the US for bribery. It has also sold weapons to human rights abusers and dubious regimes across the world, including Saudi Arabia, Libya, Bahrain and Egypt.
Despite all of the ramifications for education, the move has been welcomed by local MP John Woodcock, who greeted it as a “really exciting” development. Furness Academy’s acting head called it “a fantastic opportunity.”
Arms companies and schools
If education is a public good, should it be given away to big business? Arms companies already spend a lot of time and resources on infiltrating schools and trying to influence the curriculum.
One way they are doing this is through their marketing and promotional materials. Raytheon, an arms company that has been linked to the production of bombs used against Gaza last summer, hosts competitions for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) students. Similarly, fighter jet manufacturer Boeing works with schools to design mock military planes and BAE runs a schools “ambassador” program, with the stated objective of improving its “corporate reputation at both a local and national level.”
Things will get worse this September, with the opening of a number of institutions that are directly tied to arms companies. These include South Wiltshire University Technical College, which will teach science and engineering to 14-18 year olds “in the context of the defence industries.” Its ‘sponsors’ include Chemring, which has been linked to the use of tear gas in Hong Kong and Egypt, and QinetiQ, which has applied for arms export licences to sell weapons to countries including Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Israel.
Although these arms companies are described as ‘sponsors’, their roles will include “helping to construct the curriculum”, allowing them to build “close links with students who will be potential future employees.”
The end goal for these companies is not to help produce an educated, questioning cohort of young people, it is to normalise their business practices and influence potentially impressionable young minds, while making a profit.
The militarisation of classrooms
All of this represents a worrying expansion of militarism into our schools, but it’s not the first sign of it. Forces Watch estimates that around 900,000 young people come into contact with the armed forces every year through their schools.
A disproportionate number of these students are those from disadvantaged backgrounds, which is where many of the resources are targeted. Some of this is done through recruitment fairs, and some through the government’s own ‘military ethos‘ programme, which brings military veterans into schools to “build character, resilience and grit in their pupils.”
The military also provides free ‘support and resources‘ for schools; these include promotional materials for classrooms and Armed Forces Day assembly plans for children as young as seven.
In simple terms the military wants to transform our schools into a recruitment ground. This is acknowledged by the head of army recruitment, who described army careers advisers as “skilled salesmen”, saying: “It starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an air show and thinking, ‘That looks great.’ From then the army is trying to build interest by drip, drip, drip.”
As Turkish academic Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu has said: “Schools provide fertile ground for militarism: there is a captive audience, a comprehensive mandate, a hierarchical structure and a clear power differential between students and professionals.”
Groups such as Veterans for Peace and the Peace Education Network do crucial and invaluable work in promoting peace and non-violence in schools and countering the growth of youth militarisation by offering an alternative to the army’s pro-military messages. But neither has anywhere near the same level of access and support that is enjoyed by the armed forces or the arms industry.
What kind of education do we want?
Central to the debate is the wider question of what kind of values we want in our education system and what kind of future we want for young people.
Arms manufacturers would not commit to these kinds of programmes if it wasn’t profitable to do so. These companies may pay lip-service to encouraging critical thinking and promoting positive learning outcomes, but their shareholders will always be the main beneficiaries of any arrangement.
This kind of involvement gives them a chance to gloss over the human rights abuses they facilitate and to present themselves as legitimate businesses. It also gives them direct access to potential future employees and allows them to influence young people’s decisions and direction.
Schools are fundamental to our society. They are meant to be safer places for learning and should not be sold hotbeds for militarism and corporations. They exist to educate children and young people and to develop their ideas and understanding of the world. They should not be allowed to become training grounds for arms companies and those that profit from war.
MoD sought sensitive children’s data for possible recruitment drive
RT | June 6, 2015
The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has been blocked from accessing highly sensitive data on school students, including how rich their parents are and their academic record, which they sought to better inform them of military career opportunities.
The MoD made a request to the National Pupil Database (NPD) last year, according to the magazine Schools Week.
A spokesman for the MoD insisted to Schools Week that the request was an “error” made by someone “outside the Army’s recruitment branch.”
However, Forces Watch, a campaign group that scrutinizes recruitment in the military, said the fact that the request had been denied showed “how inappropriate the MoD’s use of the data was.”
The information the MoD was trying to get hold of is not easy to access; it is labeled Tier 1 and includes school children’s most personal details.
As well as ethnicity and address, the database includes descriptions of pupils’ academic records and special educational needs, as well as how often they were absent from school and if they receive free school meals, an indication of how wealthy their parents are.
Applying to the NPD for such information is a complex and time consuming process. An applicant must answer 20 security questions and enter encryption details into their computer. For Tier 1 data, applicants must say exactly why they need this information and why they are unable to use less sensitive information.
A final decision on whether information will be released is made by senior Department of Education (DfE) staff on the Data Management Advisory Panel.
The news that the MoD had made a request surfaced after all NPD requests were released under transparency laws. Since 2012, only 9 out 460 requests have been refused.
“We only disclose information from the NPD for the purpose of conducting research and analysis that will promote the education or well-being of children in England,” A DfE spokesperson said.
While the MoD said that the request was an “error,” the release from the NPD listed the reason for their request.
[The request was] “To determine if we can use targeted messaging to better inform young people of the career opportunities open to them in the Army (Regular and Reserve) so that their decisions about seeking a full or part time job are better informed,” according to the transparency release.
However an MoD spokesperson insisted that the request was not in line with army’s recruitment policy.
“We can confirm that a request was made in error to the DfE for access to elements of the NPD by an individual who worked outside the Army’s recruitment branch. This is not in line with Army policy and the request has been halted,” they said.
However, Owen Everett from Forces Watch said that the army is struggling to recruit new soldiers.
“That the MoD have now attempted to obtain this vast database of school students’ personal data in an attempt to improve Army recruitment, at a time when Army recruitment continues to be struggling, and when the armed forces policy of recruiting 16 and 17 year-olds is shortly to be challenged in a judicial review, is no coincidence,” he said.
Everrett also pointed out that many teenagers from poorer backgrounds and less wealthy areas of the country end up joining the army because they have no other prospects of full time employment and are, thus, particularly overrepresented in the infantry. In Afghanistan infantry soldiers had a far greater risk of being killed and injured in action.
Israel, Saudi Arabia hold secret meetings on Iran: Report
Anwar Majed Eshki, a former top adviser to the Saudi government (R), and Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shook hands during the Jun 4, 2015 meeting in Washington.
Press TV – June 5, 2015
A report has revealed that representatives from Israel and Saudi Arabia have secretly met five times since the beginning of last year to discuss their positions against Iran.
The five bilateral meetings were held over the last 17 months in India, Italy, and the Czech Republic, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
The outlet cited one participant, Shimon Shapira, a retired Israeli general, as saying, “We discovered we have the same problems and same challenges and some of the same answers.”
Also on Thursday, well-known former Saudi and Israeli officials attended a rare meeting of the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
The event saw Anwar Majed Eshki, a former top adviser to the Saudi government, and Dore Gold joining former Israeli ambassador close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Riyadh and Tel Aviv both oppose, what they call, the expansion of Iran’s regional influence and have not refused in the past to show fierce opposition to the potential of a final agreement between world powers and Tehran on the Islamic Republic‘s peaceful nuclear energy program.
The two sides also share alliance with the United States and opposition – emerging in the form of an overt bloody aggression on the part of Riyadh – to the Houthi Ansarullah movement of Yemen.
On May 23, a London-based paper reported that Israel had offered to provide the technology used in its Iron Dome missile system against rockets from Yemen, with the proposal being sent via American diplomats during a meeting in the Jordanian capital of Amman.
Russia’s law on undesirable foreign NGOs and the ethics of international activism
By Aleksandar JOKIC | Oriental Review | June 5, 2015
The decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to sign a bill that allows “authorities to prosecute foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or firms designated as ‘undesirable’ on national security grounds” is bound to receive a hostile reception in the West. Already Amnesty International declared that the new law will “snatch away the space for dissenting views and independent civil society activism,” while Human Rights Watch more hysterically stated that the law aims at “squeezing the very life out of Russian civil society,” and the State Department harshly characterized it in a characteristically over the top fashion “as a further example of the Russian government’s growing crackdown on independent voices and intentional steps to isolate the Russian people from the world.”
Dramatic statements aside, we may want to ask, quite separately from the case with this Russian law, what could be considered as proper boundaries for engagement by international activists. In other words, the increasing power of NGOs in the post-Cold War period, manifest in their ever mounting number in operation and handling of ever more substantial quantities of money, raises questions about the roles and responsibilities of these new global, non-state actors. In particular, there is the question of developing an ethics of international activism that would facilitate moral assessments of the endeavors by agents operating in countries other than their own.
Elsewhere I have argued in favor of developing an ethics of international activism, which involved a process of formulating a series of constraints on what would constitute morally permissible agency in the context that includes delivering services abroad, directly or indirectly. In elaborating these ethical constraints I relied on the concept of “force multiplier.” The content of this idea and its official applications have explanatory importance in considering the correlation between post-Cold War phenomenal growth in the number of international NGOs and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole, unchallenged super-power ushering in the new “unipolar” world.
The fully developed proposal for an “ethics of international activism” consists of four constraints on morally permissible international activism: (C1) The Professionalism Constraint; (C2); The Integrity Constraint; (C3) The Respect for Sovereignty Constraint; and (C4) The Humility Constraint. As soon as these constraints are understood and correctly analyzed, an overarching principle emerges helping us realize that local activism must enjoy normative primacy (in all three normative spheres: moral, legal, and political) over international activism. At the same time, this gives us an idea of how to conceive of what could constitute legitimate international activism, that is one that respects the primacy of local activism.
Before introducing in a bit greater detail the elements of this ethics of international activism let us define “international activists” as altruists attracted by causes that originate in foreign lands. By calling them “altruists” I do not intend to prejudge the actions of international activists as necessarily morally good; I simply mean to indicate that they are ostensibly acting out of concern for the welfare of others, in this case those others are foreigners. We can make further progress in delineating more exactly who the “international activists” are by making more precise this notion of “causes that originate in foreign lands.” Most frequently those causes are expressed in terms of global protection, and respect for human rights. Thus, Amnesty International defines itself as a “global movement” of people “campaigning for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all,” while Human Rights Watch claims that it “works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the cause of human rights for all.”
We can achieve additional clarity by realizing that governments can also show interest in those same causes expressed in terms of human rights, but we would not count government administrators, operating in their official capacities, among “international activists”. Thus, The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the U.S. government, states that “protecting human rights around the world [is] central to U.S. foreign policy,” yet we would not consider State Department officials “international activists”. This is why organizations that want to count as groupings of international activists are quick to assert their independence. Consequently, international activists are not meant to be government officials, ideologues, corporate lobbyists, or missionaries on behalf of any religion; in fact, international activists are supposed to operate independently of any government, ideology, corporation, and religion. In the first instance, this then poses strong constraints on how to construe an ethics of international activism starting with The Professionalism Constraints:
(C1) It is considered morally impermissible for international activists to act on behalf of any government, ideology, corporation, or religion.
It stands to reason that if a person is genuinely motivated by the welfare of others from a country other than her own, then she must not be acting on behalf of her (or any other) government, should not promote any ideology (be it political, economic or otherwise), nor proselytize in favor of a religion. Thus, for example, international activists must not propagate in favor of a regime change in a country where such policy is pursued by, say, the U.S. government; they must not engage in promoting the economic ideology of free market and privatization in, say, a country with the socialist economic system (or any other); or attempt to convert, say, local Muslim population to Christianity.
In order to introduce the second constraint the notion of force multiplier must be introduced; it is a military term, defined as follows in The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military:
A capability that, when added to and employed by a combat force, significantly increases the combat potential of that force and thus enhances the probability of successful mission accomplishment.
It is not difficult to document that this military term is widely used by U.S. officials, including a Democratic U.S. President, right wing think tankers, various academics, and even international activists themselves, suggesting that the Western NGOs do and should serve as force multipliers for U.S. armed forces in the variety of theaters of operations where the latter are continuously active. This, however, stands in direct opposition to the definitional component of “international activism” as agency that stems from concern for the welfare of others in foreign countries. The integrity of their actions is threatened if international activists operate in concert with U.S. armed forces or for the sake of U.S. government while ostensibly engaged to address basic needs of less fortunate humans in other countries. Consequently, an explicit moral constraint—The Integrity Constraint—defining the way international activists can satisfy the requirements of minimal integrity of their actions is necessary:
(C2) It is considered morally impermissible for international activists to serve as force multipliers for U.S. (or any other) armed forces or U.S. (or any other) government.
It is perhaps clear that The Integrity Constraint is already implied by The Professionalism Constraint. However, given the aggressive push by the U.S. officials to employ international activists as force multipliers, the impact of the phenomenon of revolving doors between government service and positions within human rights organizations, and the apparent happy acquiescence by many international activists to their newly given (post-Cold War) role, it is important to make The Integrity Constraint explicit.
Once human rights become indistinguishable from official political ideology, once human rights culture is usurped by the dominant powers, and once the argument for human rights is turned into an apologia for the imperial project by the sole super power while this transformation is not protested but supported by international activists in the Western countries, this gives us a clear sense of international activists serving as force multipliers or being “belligerent altruists”. However, the tension captured by this term must be resolved, and this brings us to the next constraint on the morally permissible character of international activism. In order to accomplish this we must remove the belligerent character of the post-Cold War practice by human rights organizations. We must counsel a return to the human rights discourse that respects sovereignty of nation states and permits at most “soft” intervention while opposing all attempts at decriminalizing aggression (through “humanitarian intervention,” R2P, “war on terrorism,” or similar constructs) and making sure that activists are not aiding and abetting aggression under any circumstances. This could be called Respect for Sovereignty Constraint:
(C3) It is considered morally impermissible for international activists to disrespect sovereignty, aid and abet aggression, and engage in anything beyond “soft” intervention.
To advance further with our goal of developing an ethics of international activism that would facilitate moral assessments of their endeavors we may engage in moral phenomenology of international activism. Moral phenomenology is the study of the experiential aspects of moral life. By investigating “what it is like” to undergo mental states that instantiate phenomenal properties when, say, judging that one “must engage” we might be able to formulate further moral constraints that can guide our moral evaluation of what international activists do. The idea is that the construction of constraints on moral permissibility of acting qua international activist can be aided via compelling phenomenological descriptions of specific experiential episodes.
By paying attention to moral phenomenology of activism a picture emerges according to which, for the activist, given the axiological nature of the cause for which she is fighting, all that is required to set her on the right path is that she be sincere and firm in her decision. Are there no obstacles to getting the purpose right, to honing in on what is unquestionably the right goal to make personal sacrifices for? What could be the source of such infallible knowledge or the experience that appears as if one is in the possession of it? These are appropriate questions! For, the activist possesses not only a firm conviction that the cause is right, but also a persuasion that no consideration could possibly put it in question. The position is tantamount to a person who has all the answers in advance, with no need to engage in the search for evidence. It is a position that readily presents answers, while the procedure that supplied them remains forever hidden, unexplored, and insignificant. Does this, therefore, mean that it isn’t, strictly speaking, important what will really be achieved (as in the saying “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”), but that whatever is accomplished is good enough—in the sense of being sufficient and not open to moral assessment other than automatic praise? Put differently, since the activist’s motivation procures the act’s rightness and its goodness, does this mean that there is no possible question to be raised here? Or, that no argumentation of any kind is required or possible in this case? The last remark indicates an ideological character of the situation—we are trading in a context wherein reasons do not function in their customary fashion, or not at all. This appears to make activism akin to ideology.
This discovered link between international activism and disposition to uncritical adoption of ideology indicates that the principal danger international activists face is their vulnerability to co-option by big powers through usurpation of the main (ideological) tenets that define sumum bonum on behalf of which they activate. In light of The Professionalism Constraint international activists are morally required to prevent such co-option and usurpation, but the ideological nature of activism substantially reduces the resistance capacity by activists in this respect. Hence, it should not be surprising that they end up converted into force multipliers with such ease. However, there is a defense available to them that could enhance their integrity and consists in the practice of humility. If activists avoid the attitude of epistemic arrogance with respect to the normative value of the cause they act to support, if they refuse to take their own comfort and conviction regarding the value of their cause as a sure mark of its unquestionable validity, they may have a way of protecting the moral purity of their engagement. This takes us to the final constraint in this exercise, to The Humility Constraint:
(C4) It is considered morally impermissible for international activists to take the strength of their conviction as a sufficient condition for the validity of their endeavor.
In light of the moral constraints, C1-C4, the overwhelmingly negative assessment of contemporary Western international activism is painfully obvious. If so, the question emerges, what must morally speaking be done about it? This question would have to be answered both from the perspective of the activists and those who find themselves on the receiving end of these would-be-good-but-bad-Samaritans.
From the perspective of the Western activists we should advise the following. Just as the old American saying goes that “all politics is local” so all activism should be local. In fact, the overarching duty for any activist-minded Westerner may be to go local, and thus deprive the imperialist project of an important body of force multipliers. On the other hand, if activities and projects by international activists hailing from the West cannot be deemed morally permissible, this should have legal consequences in the rest of the world: all countries outside the Empire, particularly countries targeted by international activists as potential theaters of their operations, ought to criminalize activities by international activists and “human rights organizations” on their territory when not in solidarity or in support of local movements. Paradoxically, the justification for this criminalization is grounded precisely in the real concern for the human rights of the inhabitants from those countries.
A clarification is in order at this point. When I state that all activism should be local this is not meant to preclude legitimate international activism. What I mean is to insist on the primacy of local activism in the sense that all international activism must recognize this primacy, and hence reduce itself to a supporting role. In short, the legitimate international activism engages in solidarity and support of pre-existing local movements. Recognizing this primacy of the local aspect of activism can be seen as the main condition of legitimacy for any international activism.
Gene Sharp was the mastermind of the disastrous regime change techniques which led to drastic fall in living standards and factual failures of states in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Ukraine
The conceptual apparatus and normative framework developed here can assist in diagnosing in a precise way what is wrong (morally speaking) with the Western “strategic non-violent action” and the projection of the so called “soft power”. In short, this design that uses non-violence as a form of warfare adopted by foreign policy makers in the U.S. who orchestrated various “color revolutions,” “Arab spring,” etc. must be deemed morally impermissible as it violates all four constraints developed and defended here and because it feigns respect for the primacy of local activism: while it is the local people that participate in a non-violent movement directed against their government, the movement itself is envisaged, funded, and its “local” leaders are trained by foreign organizations.
Returning now to the Russian law on the undesirable foreign NGOs, rather than quickly dismissing it as an assault on dissent, civil society or anything else we could avoid drama and hysteria by using the conceptual apparatus offered here in order to assess whether the response to international activism is excessive or legitimate, which at the same time gives us a very precise sense of what is rightly “undesirable”. To the extent that foreign NGOs violate the provision of the primacy of the local activism and the four moral constraints, issuing restrictions in the form of legal means may be entirely justified and defensible. In fact, this is a practice that would in all probability be justified the world over, in particular in what I like to call the “once developing world” (before they become victims of imposed neoliberal economic models) where the Western human rights organizations have been operating in total impunity.
Aleksandar Jokic is Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. This article is based on his essay “Go Local: Morality and International Activism” Ethics & Global Politics Vol. 6, No. 1, 2013; pp. 39-62.
US Deployment of Missiles in Europe May Lead to Russia’s Exit From INF
Sputnik – 05.06.2015
Russia is fully complying with commitments made under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) and does not want to withdraw from it, Viktor Ozerov, the Chairman of the Federation Council on Defense and Security, told RIA Novosti.
However, if the United States decides to put its missiles in Eastern Europe, Russia will seriously consider pulling out of the agreement, Ozerov said.
Earlier, AP reported that the Obama Administration plans to deploy land-based missiles in Eastern Europe that “could pre-emptively destroy the Russian weapons” in response to Moscow’s alleged violation of the INF treaty.
If Washington deploys its missiles in Eastern Europe, its objective wouldn’t be to target sites in the Middle East, but to fire at Russia from a close distance, Ozerov said, adding that in this case Russia will have to respond with force.
“Russia has enough strength and means for an adequate response — starting from the withdrawal from the INF treaty and deploying “Iskanders” (short-range ballistic missile system, also known by its NATO reporting name SS-26 Stone) along our Western borders,” Ozerov told RIA Novosti.
The Chairman of the Defense Committee stressed that Russia is fully complying with the INF treaty, and although Washington says Moscow violated the agreement in the past, it was not able to provide factual evidence of that.
As long as the United States sticks to its commitments under the treaty, Russia is willing to respect the agreement as well, Ozerov said, adding that it’s pointless to blackmail Russia by threatening to deploy missiles in Eastern Europe. Instead, it is a much better idea to try to find a partnership-based agreement with Russia.
The INF treaty was signed between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987. The agreement eliminates all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with intermediate range, between 500 and 5,000 km (300 — 3,400 miles).
In recent years, both the United States and Russia accused each other of violating terms of the treaty. In 2012, Washington accused Moscow of violating the agreement by allegedly launching a cruise missile from an “Iskander” missile system. However, the US government was not able to provide any factual evidence of their claim. Russia, on the other hand, said US drones were also a violation of the treaty.
See also:
US Might Add Missiles to Its Military Buildup in Europe to Counter Russia
Russia Will Respond to NATO’s Missile Defense Buildup in Europe – General
Kiev to allow foreign armed forces in Ukraine, incl. ‘potential carriers of nukes’
RT | June 5, 2015
The Ukrainian parliament has adopted amendments to state law allowing “admission of the armed forces of other states on the territory of Ukraine.” The possible hosting of foreign weapons of mass destruction is also mentioned in the documents.
Amendments to Ukrainian law were adopted on Thursday by the Verkhovna Rada, receiving a majority of 240 votes (the required minimum being 226). The bill was submitted to the parliament in May by PM Arseny Yatsenyuk. It focuses on the provision of “international peacekeeping and security” assistance to Ukraine at its request.
Peacekeeping missions are to be deployed “on the basis of decision of the UN and/or the EU,” the bill published on the parliament’s official website says.
Previously, the presence of any international military forces on the territory of Ukraine not specifically sanctioned by state law was only possible by adopting a special law initiated by the president. Implementation of the new amendments “will create necessary conditions for deployment on the territory of Ukraine international peacekeeping and security” missions without the need for additional legal authorization, the explanatory note to the draft bill said.
The presence of such armed forces in Ukraine “should ensure an early normalization of situation” in Donbass, the note added, saying that they would help “restore law and order and life, constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens” in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
In a comparative table, published among the accompanying documents to the bill, “potential carriers of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction are permitted under international agreement with Ukraine for short-term accommodation,” with Kiev providing proper control during the period that such forces were stationed there.
Implementation of the law “will not require additional expenditures from the State Budget of Ukraine,” its documents say.
The previous law also required that the length of time temporary peacekeeping forces were to be deployed in Ukraine be stipulated, while the new amendments allow an indefinite period, long enough “to achieve the goal of the stay.”
A separate amendment banned the presence of “armed forces of states that unleash military aggression against Ukraine.” This appears to be a clear reference to the Rada’s January statement calling Russia an “aggressor” – although the body has been reluctant to approve a legally binding law saying exactly that.
Moscow denies being part of the conflict, stressing that Kiev is fighting a civil war with eastern Ukrainians, not Russian forces. The Kremlin has consistently and adamantly denied any presence of Russian troops or hardware in eastern Ukraine, pointing out that there is no evidence proving otherwise.
With violence in south-eastern Ukraine on the rise again, it is “very important to avoid any actions or steps that provoke escalation of tension,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, as quoted by RIA Novosti. Saying that there is “no shortage” of provocative actions from Kiev’s side, Peskov said the main point is “to concentrate on implementation of [Minsk] agreements.” “This is what Moscow expects the most,” he added.
The new bill on international peacekeeping missions in Ukraine contradicts the Minsk agreements, Russian State Duma MP Leonid Slutsky said. “Minsk-2 did not provide for peacekeepers in resolution of the national conflict,” Slutsky said, as quoted by TASS.
The new legal act is “doomed for inaction,” a member of the Russian Duma’s defense committee, Franz Klintsevich, said, adding that the bill is “pure PR and propaganda.” “I cannot simulate a situation in which the United Nations will vote to deploy international military to Ukraine,” Klintsevich told journalists, as cited by RIA Novosti.
The Lugansk People’s Republic’s envoy to the so-called Contact Group on Ukraine in Minsk, Vladislav Dainego, commented that the law was adopted to “justify the presence” of foreign military that are “already operating in Ukraine.” “There are some 20,000 [troops], primarily from Hungary and Poland,” Dainego claimed when speaking to Interfax, adding that the status of those forces was unclear.
Kiev came up with the initiative to employ peacekeeping missions in Donbass earlier this year. Moscow has insisted that deployment of such forces in Ukraine would be relevant only after all points of the Minsk agreement have been fully implemented, and only if both sides of the conflict – Kiev and the rebel republics – agree to the measure.
Read more:
Deployment of peacekeepers should be agreed with both sides of Ukrainian conflict – Lavrov
‘Stick to Minsk deal’: Russia slams Ukraine idea for EU peacekeepers
Reformatting Ukraine is on the agenda
By Vitaly LEYBIN| Oriental Review | June 3, 2015
Russia – The latest horrible ceasefire violations in Donbass by the Kiev’s regime are likely intended to demonstrate the “inefficiency” of the OSCE mission to its Western patrons and are evidence of Ukraine’s attempts to circumvent the jurisdiction of the Minsk truce co-brokered by Russia, Germany, and France.
Indeed, Minsk-2 is very inconvenient for Poroshenko, because it documents for the first time the need for direct dialog between Kiev and the Donbass. And they need to discuss more than just war and peace, because in fact there are a whole range of issues that must be resolved politically, such as the format for local elections, as well as constitutional reform and economic recovery in Ukraine. Minsk-2 undermines the power structure in Ukraine, which after Maidan has been built around nationalist and military mobilization and the persecution of political opponents. There’s a good reason why President Poroshenko immediately tried to disavow the agreement as soon as he returned from Minsk. In March 2015 the Verkhovna Rada passed an amendment to the law on the special status of the districts controlled by Donetsk and Luhansk (in violation of the spirit of the Minsk agreement), rather than adopting a new law as Angela Merkel had asked Poroshenko to do. These actions, as well as others that undercut the foundations of the truce, are causing extreme irritation in Berlin and Paris.
It is already clear that Poroshenko’s regime is incapable of negotiating. The two Minsk agreements – dating from Sept. 5 and Feb. 12 – would never have been reached had Kiev not suffered military defeats. As soon as Petro Poroshenko won the election on May 25, 2014, Russia and the EU leaders offered to open a dialog with the Donbass militia. At that time there had been no mass casualties or widespread public acrimony. It seemed that Poroshenko, who had been elected to office (albeit without the voters of the Donbass), was capable of listening to the urgings of the leaders in Europe and Russia and begin a peace process. At least his campaign platform offered some hope of that. However, pressure from US officials forced Poroshenko to embrace a military solution. On May 26, 2014, for the first time since WWII, Donetsk was subjected to an air raid, the Donetsk airport was bombed, civilians were killed, and a real war began.
By late August, Ukraine had suffered a crushing defeat on all fronts and in all directions, and Poroshenko, finding himself trapped in a hopeless situation in which the militia threatened to advance further west, had to hastily sign the Minsk Protocol on Sept. 5, in which the parties agreed to pull back from the zone of engagement. That offered the hope that a political process of reconciliation could begin. But instead Kiev took an extremely harsh stance: a de facto economic blockade of the Donbass began; banks closed; public institutions, schools, and hospitals shut down; the payment of pensions and salaries to state employees was suspended; and later – entry to the Donbass was limited to holders of residential passes, in essence creating an internal border. Unable to win on the battlefield, Kiev declared war on the people of the Donbass in order to deprive the militia of popular support. That culminated in yet another fiasco: Ukraine lost Debaltsevo and other territories.
Autonomy or independence? That depends on Kiev.
The most important step in the establishment of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics was the election in November 2014. That election was not recognized by Kiev or the EU, but played a huge role in establishing a legitimate government in those republics. In spite of Kiev’s economic blockade and the constant threat of renewed hostilities, it resulted in an undeniable improvement in the humanitarian situation. Even as hostilities raged, behind the front lines peaceful civilian life continued, infrastructure was restored, doctors were able to save lives, children attended school, and many businesses reopened. Regular payment of pensions and public subsidies has begun again, but in order to accomplish this, a new system of social support had to be built from scratch. Due to the lack of cash in hryvnia (the Ukrainian currency) a multicurrency system was introduced, and pensions are already being paid in rubles. Direct economic ties between companies in Donetsk and Russia have been revived. Taxes have also been collected from those businesses, and the republics now have actual budgets, and although they have not been formally approved due to the uncertainty of the revenue base, those budgets serve as guidelines for estimating bare-bones expenditures. A clear and transparent system has been put together for distributing humanitarian aid. Humanitarian convoys are arriving from the Russian Ministry of Emergency Management, and community organizations are also doing their bit, including Donbass Fraternity Fund, Dr. Elizaveta Glinka’s Fair Aid Foundation, and many others. Throughout the war some local charities in, such as Compassion (Dobrota), have continued their work in Donetsk. In every town, no matter how tiny, volunteers have been laboring selflessly.
The more Kiev drags its feet on any political resolution or recognition of special rights for the areas under the control of the governments in the republics, the worse its chances to maintain its current borders. Ukraine will never be stable until she agrees to change. If Ukraine continues to insist on the status quo and persists in pursuing a military solution to the conflict, she will continue to lose ground.
A range of emotions are being experienced in the republics. It is clear that neither the militia nor the majority of the population can envision any sort of future life with Kiev: too much blood has been spilled and Kiev has brought too much suffering to the people of the Donbass – in addition to bombings, humiliation, and the economic blockade.
Nevertheless, Ukraine still has the potential to devise a more nuanced policy than just their extremely nationalistic current plan. This was clearly evident during the elections for the Verkhovna Rada on Oct. 26, 2014. The opposition Bloc even won in Dnepropetrovsk (where nationalist patrols are stationed on every street corner and government leverage coupled with street gangs worked to thwart any opposition movement), not to mention the cities of Zaporozhye and Kharkov. Certainly not all the credit for that success was due to Opposition Bloc itself – which barely waged any sort of political campaign at all – but could rather be chalked up to the public, who voted against the government and against the war. The turnout in Odessa (39.5%), the lowest seen since the end of the Soviet Union, was virtually an act of popular sabotage against “the outsiders’ elections.”
Ongoing protests in Kiev against Yatsenyuk government and Ukraine’s National Bank are not covered much by the intl media
The potential for protest is huge, because Ukraine has no desire to be the country that the nationalists have envisioned. Every day of peace means new and difficult questions for the Ukrainian government: the population sees the results of the “reforms,” the economy is languishing, social payments are shrinking, prices are rising, political repression is everywhere, political opponents are being murdered, and the bodies of soldiers who died in the Donbass are being shipped home to every district in the country.
The law prohibiting Soviet symbols and the ban on the memory of the Great Patriotic War, the glorification of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – therein lies the path to the further destruction of their own country. And that’s not coming from Russia, but from the Ukrainian people. Most Ukrainians will not tolerate such a policy or such a government.
The problem lies in the immaturity of the Ukrainian political elite. For over 23 years of the country’s independence, that elite has been fixated on dividing and redividing the country’s resources, in the end always shifting the political blame onto outside factions: sometimes pointing the finger at Moscow, and currently – at the West. They have not yet learned how to be responsible for their own state. Now they follow the lead of the US, crippling their own country.
The big game
A lasting peace in the Donbass is achievable only if Europe and Russia can reach an agreement. It is impossible to imagine Poroshenko – or even less Prime Minister Yatsenyuk – behaving in a constructive manner, if Europe and Russia do not coerce them into working for peace.
With all the problems of the past year, it is clear that France and Germany trust Russia far more than their Ukrainian protégés. They can recognize the issues on which “the Russians cannot be trusted” – and the matters on which they can. But those are fixed, clearly defined questions – because Russia does not change her position minute by minute. But all bets are off when it comes to the politicians in Kiev. They might promise to lay down their arms or adopt a law on special status, and then completely flip-flop after a telephone call with Washington.
Of course Europe has phobias and fears of “Russian expansion,” but those are more common among the talking heads and the press, while the leaders and diplomats understand that “expansion” is the very essence of international politics. The European Union itself pursues an active policy of “partnership,” and in recent decades has also been expanding, while Russia is doing no more than attempting to safeguard her room to maneuver economically. Europeans understand that Russia would not have taken steps to reunify with Crimea and support the Donbass if the West had not provoked the conflict. After many incidents of the most cynical violence aimed at seizing and retaining power over the last year, it is reasonable to assume that the shootings on Maidan were the responsibility of those forces that took power in Ukraine in February 2014. All this is an example of very dirty politics. No matter how indignant the Europeans might be in public, they understand that Russia could not remain on the sidelines.
And that would not be because of any imaginary “imperial ambitions” or in order to merely seize territory. Russia’s most important and closest neighbor had entered into a period of disintegration and civil war after a coup d’etat. Forces had assumed power that did not shy away from overt violence – ideological, cultural, repressive, and military – against their own people. The problem was not Ukraine’s “European” path, but the bluff – the West was never planning to spend its resources on the economic development of a foreign country, much less help her integrate into European organizations. The result of Maidan could mean nothing but chaos in Ukraine. And until this chaos is overcome, Russia will not remain on the sidelines.
Publication is based on a frontpage article recently released by the Russian Expert journal. Text adapted and translated by ORIENTAL REVIEW.
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From the Archives
The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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