Die Zeit:

Annalena Baerbock kündigt schärfere Sanktionen gegen Russland an

It’s April 3.

Владимир Высоцкий

Sergey Karaganov: For 25 years, people like myself have been saying that if Nato and Western alliances expand beyond certain red lines, especially into Ukraine, there will be a war. I envisioned that scenario as far back as 1997. In 2008 President Putin said that if Ukraine’s membership of the alliance became a possibility then there will be no Ukraine. He was not listened to. So the first objective is to end Nato’s expansion. Two other objectives have been added: one is the demilitarisation of Ukraine; the other is denazification, because there are people in the Russian government concerned with the rise of ultra-nationalism in Ukraine to the extent that they think it is beginning to resemble Germany in the 1930s. There is also an aim to free the Donbas republics of eight years of constant bombardment.

There was also a strong belief that war with Ukraine was inevitable – maybe three or four years from now – which could well have taken place on Russian territory itself. So probably the Kremlin decided that if you have to fight, let’s fight on somebody else’s territory, the territory of a neighbour and a brother country, once a part of the Russian Empire. But the real war is against the Western expansion.

…

I don’t know what the outcome of this war will be, but I think it will involve the partition of Ukraine, one way or another. Hopefully there would still be something called Ukraine left at the end. But Russia cannot afford to “lose”, so we need a kind of a victory. And if there is a sense that we are losing the war, then I think there is a definite possibility of escalation. This war is a kind of proxy war between the West and the rest – Russia being, as it has been in history, the pinnacle of “the rest” – for a future world order. The stakes of the Russian elite are very high – for them it is an existential war.

…

I don’t know whether Ukraine will survive, because it has a very limited, if any, history of statehood, and it doesn’t have a state-building elite. Maybe something will grow from below, but it’s an open question… We shall see… This war – or military operation; however you call it – will decide. Maybe the Ukrainian nation will be born: I will be happy if Ukrainians have an effective, viable government – unlike the situation during the last 30 years. They were the absolute losers after the Soviet Union, because of their lack of a state-building elite.

…

Bruno Maçães: Do you think the US is benefiting from this war?

Sergey Karaganov: At this juncture, yes, because the big losers are, in addition to Ukraine, Europe, especially if it continues with this mysterious zest for independence from Russian energy. But China is clearly the victor of this whole affair… I think the biggest loser will be Ukraine; a loser will be Russia; a great loser will be Europe; the United States will lose somewhat, but still it could very well survive as a huge island over the ocean; and the big victor is China.

…

Bruno Maçães: Do you think this is a moment of supreme danger for Russia?

Sergey Karaganov: I would say yes, this is an existential war. If we do not win, somehow, then I think we will have all kinds of unforeseen political repercussions which are much worse than at the beginning of the 1990s. But I believe that we will avoid that, first, because Russia will win, whatever that victory means, and second, because we have a strong and tough regime, so in any event, or if the worst happens, it will not be the dissolution of the country or collapse. I think it will be closer to a harsh authoritarian regime than to the dissolution of the country. But still, defeat is unthinkable.

…

Bruno Maçães: How do you feel personally? Do you feel tormented by what is happening?

Sergey Karaganov: We all feel like we are part of a huge event in history, and it’s not just about war in Ukraine; it’s about the final crash of the international system that was created after the Second World War and then, in a different way, was recreated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, we are witnessing the collapse of an economic system – of the world economic system – globalisation in this form is finished. Whatever we have had in the past is gone. And out of this we have a build-up of many crises that, because of Covid-19, we pretended did not exist. For two years, the pandemic replaced decision-making. Covid was bad enough, but now everybody has forgotten about Covid and we can see that everything is collapsing. Personally, I’m tremendously saddened. I worked for the creation of a viable and fair system. But I am part of Russia, so I only wish that we win, whatever that means.

…

So the West will never recuperate, but it doesn’t matter if it dies: Western civilisation has brought all of us great benefits, but now people like myself and others are questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation. I think geopolitically the West will experience ups and downs. Maybe the shocks we are experiencing could bring back the better qualities of Western civilisation, and we will again see people like Roosevelt, Churchill, Adenauer, de Gaulle and Brandt back in office. But continuous shocks will of course also mean that democracy in its present form in most European countries will not survive, because under circumstances of great tension, democracies always wither away or become autocratic. These changes are inevitable.

Hedges on Substack:

I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.

Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us?

Ω Ω Ω

Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship.  Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.

Ω Ω Ω

This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don’t know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen,” Hannah Arendt warned. “What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Brian Garvey, CounterPunch:

Beyond the immediate suffering, events taking place right now in Eastern Europe will have an impact on peace issues and defense policy for years to come. Woefully, the peace movement in the United States, limited in its influence already, has been unable to unite around a message to oppose calls for more militarization.

Spiegel:

SZ:

Bisher gibt es keine Belege dafür, dass der Vater selbst in die fragwürdigen Geschäfte involviert war oder davon wusste. Joe Biden machte stets geltend, er beschäftige sich nicht mit den Geschäften seiner Familienmitglieder. Angesichts des großen Werts, den er auf enge Familienbande legt, ist das zumindest bemerkenswert.

This is the last paragraph in the article. I find the FAZ, SZ and Spiegel writers are often very, very funny.

Alexander Zevin, New Left Review:

This bravado extends to the culture industry at large, where signs abound of a moment akin to that which followed 9/11, when renaming French Fries occupied the dead time between Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. Then as now, to set the attack in context was to excuse it; and there is the rush to do something, which takes a certain pride in not having thought through the consequences.

Ω Ω Ω

The result is somewhere between war as the health of the state and war as self-care – with ballerinas, pianists, painters and scientists disinvited from fellowships or shows, against blue and yellow banners and emojis, at no cost to Americans doing it. Warner Brothers will deny Russian teenagers Batman, Twitch will stop paying them to play video games online, Facebook will allow some users to call for their deaths.

Ω Ω Ω

The largest cohort – the DSA and Squad left, writers for Jacobin, Dissent, Jewish Currents, The Intercept, and other smaller publications – lies somewhere in between. Their positions differ only by degree and nuance from the State Department line: against broad sanctions, most also object to pouring arms into Ukraine. But their stance is basically defensive, trumpeting their condemnation of Russia rather than criticising Biden or NATO, in part to pre-empt accusations of ‘tankiness’. DSA’s initial statement was meandering and vague, though Democrats lined up to disavow it anyway. AOC, whose star it helped to launch, issued a communiqué a few days later, topping off a denunciation of ‘Putin and his oligarchs’ by insisting that ‘any military action must take place with Congressional approval’. As a rallying cry, this one – in effect, ‘no war of annihilation without congressional approval’ – leaves something to be desired.

Ω Ω Ω

Within days, Washington rolled out measures to induce a socioeconomic crisis of ordinary savers and earners, while leaving the rich relatively unscathed. ‘We are going to cause the collapse of the Russian economy’, explained France’s finance minister, matter-of-factly. Closer readings of books by two architects of the modern sanctions regime, Juan Zarate under Bush and Richard Nephew under Obama, might have cleared up some illusions about their purpose. Iranification is the order of the day, not sanctions with a social democratic twist.

Intelligentny is a multi-faceted adjective my mother likes to use to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, plus a certain view of the world that allows an alternative. The Commissar, who yelled at my mother for breaking a military rule, was obviously not intelligentny. The head of the hospital, who colluded with her in rule-breaking, certainly was.

—Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 138.

Daniel Ellsberg, il Fatto Quotidiano:

I didn’t want to spend my life in prison, but when it came to risking that to have a chance to shorten a war that was killing hundreds of thousands, ultimately several million people, then the price for one person of losing his freedom or even dying seemed a very natural step to take. I had been trained after all in the military, essentially during peacetime, as a marine, but then in Vietnam I used that training to walk with troops, and see the war up close. You see physical courage on all hands, it’s routine. But in peacetime, civilians aim not to take any risk at all, to their career, to their access, to their livelihood. Often the same people who risked their lives and bodies in combat. The example of young Americans who were going to prison to make the strongest protest they could against the war, and spent years in prison to say that the war was wrong – without their example, I must say, I probably would not have thought of doing what I did, which did expose me to prison. But with their example, it was easy.

The people who went to prison were not, on the whole, total pacifists, in the sense that they objected to all wars. They objected to this wrongful, imperial war.

Ω Ω Ω

In general, in foreign policy, he [Biden] has not shown anything progressive or favorable. In domestic policy, in many ways he has acted better than almost anyone expected, but on foreign policy, there is nothing to be said for him: it’s the same as Obama’s, which was not good, and pretty much the same as Trump’s.

Ω Ω Ω

So these governments are extremely vindictive about the idea of their guilty secrets [coming out], evidence of their crimes, their lies, their breaking treaties. They don’t want those to come out, because the public might make a fuss about it. Actually when it does get out, very unhappily, I have to say, nothing much does usually happen. I can’t say that it does have the effect that I wish it did, revealing the truth. People kind of accept it and go along. Nevertheless, there is a chance that it will help, and where enormous numbers of lives are involved, it’s worth the price, and the risk.

Ω Ω Ω

This is a government that we know conducts aggressive wars, criminal aggressive wars, as in Iraq, absolutely, clear-cut aggression, and has very, very little concern for the people of those areas, as they are showing in Afghanistan, right now. It’s shocking that they are subjecting the Afghans now, punitively, to a regime of hunger and cold, in keeping their funds frozen, showing how little concern they have ever had for the Afghan people, as they showed for 20 years, bombing them, with drones and raids and all that. In short: it’s a government that needs to be exposed, and it won’t be very much if…if Julian’s case is a real turning point here, then we will essentially have a press like that of Stalin’s Russia.

Ellsberg is quoted here saying the Biden administration’s prosecution of Julian Assange is „outrageous“, a word which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as meaning „shocking and morally unacceptable“.

I have been reading and admiring Ellsberg since the Pentagon Papers were first being excerpted, and appreciated this interview with il Fatto Quotidiano.

Given his experience and observations of government treatment of whistleblowers like himself, Assange, Vanunu, and others, however, „outrageous“ is not an appropriate word to use. As Ellsberg says, „these governments are extremely vindictive about the idea of their guilty secrets [coming out], evidence of their crimes“. US and other government treatment of whistleblowers has been consistent through the five decades since the Pentagon Papers. Katharine Gun, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden were all prosecuted, neither the US nor UK ever in any remote fashion apologized for government crimes. As Ellsberg says in this interview about leaked evidence of government crimes „when it does get out, very unhappily, I have to say, nothing much does usually happen. I can’t say that it does have the effect that I wish it did, revealing the truth. People kind of accept it and go along.“ The Biden administration’s current actions are not „shocking“ – they are the morally unacceptable norm.