Detail of the cover of ‘Scoop’ by Evelyn Waugh

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People who dare to call themselves anti-fascists are still supporting the Banderite regime

by RICHARD STEINHARDT

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, a journalist is assigned to a foreign country where nothing much is happening of any geopolitical interest. Rather than report the uneventful reality, he invents a fictional conflict and begins writing about it. Influential but uninformed figures in London, New York, Washington, Paris, and Berlin take his reports at face value, failing to verify their accuracy. They act on the journalist’s manufactured narrative and their reactions eventually generate a violent conflict, giving the journalist something real to write about.

A similar process is now at work in modern disinformation campaigns. Experts based in Langley, Vauxhall, and elsewhere craft stories about corruption, abuse of power, and bloody murder, often starting from a few grains of truth. The stories are farmed out to the mainstream media which then amplify them forming them into a wall of sound and electronic and printed words. Simultaneously, the same security services finance NGOs and media outlets that espouse press freedom in the countries they target. These outlets then adopt regime change narratives, and spread them, helping to generate protests on the basis of real problems and real divisions in society. Today, these intelligence operations are known as “colour revolutions.” The list of successful and unsuccessful colour revolutions and/or CIA backed coups is rather long: recent and relatively recent events in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Serbia, Georgia, Thailand, Moldova, Romania, Armenia, Belarus, Kirghizstan, Lebanon, Myanmar, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Taiwan, Bahrain, Egypt, Venezuela, Bolivia, Slovenia and Macedonia come to mind.

There is little point in wrestling over which Ukrainian leader was more corrupt, Poroshenko, the “chocolate king,” Tymoshenko, or the ousted Yanukovych. If you wrestle with pigs you get dirty. In an increasingly Orwellian landscape, few people in the western metropolises of capitalism truly understand what is happening. In the spirit of Scoop and Orwell a powerful, interwoven, and carefully crafted story of ‘unaccountable’ Russian aggression and conquest against a smaller nation is told and retold. The media conducts daily “hate sessions” so that people who have never studied the history of Ukraine or Russia, and who have little or no understanding of the region, allow themselves to believe in the textured, elaborately woven lies.

The same tactics are used for another geopolitical imperial project: not the Ukraine project, but the Israeli project, which was initiated by the British as long ago as 1917. The Balfour Declaration expressed support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. After the Second World War when the British were occupying Palestine they helped establish a Jewish state. It would be settled by Europeans with strong links to the metropolis, empowered by a irrefutable narrative of victimhood; the Israeli state could act as an enforcer, threat, and guarantor in the Middle East for the British…and later for the Americans.

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We see the signs of these imperial colonial allegiances today in Britain. Israeli genocidalists are welcomed into Downing Street, armaments are exported to Israel to assist in the massacre of Palestinians, and police deployed to suppress demonstrations against the Israeli genocide. Flights depart from UK bases to overfly Gaza and aid the Israeli military with intelligence. Israeli security services inform their British counterparts on whom to deplatform and whom to arrest in the UK.

The empire operates on these two main fronts at the moment, Ukraine and Israel, (though it also threatens to engage in Taiwan and has begun attacking Venezuela). It is no coincidence that Israel fully supports Ukraine and Ukraine fully supports Israel. Yet, in a strange schizophrenic fit, those leftists who are outraged by what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, by its assassinations in Qatar, Lebanon, and Iran, and by Israel’s fanatical bellicosity (all supported to the hilt by Western weaponry and intelligence) are the same people who uncritically support the Banderite inspired nationalists in Ukraine; actual Nazis during World War II.

These same self styled ‘leftists’ are too lazy to understand that the 2014 coup in Kyiv was supported and catalysed by the United States, too lazy to read history, and too uncaring to understand realpolitik. Huge expansion of NATO east inevitably led to confrontation with the Russian Federation.

Anyone with a smidgeon of understanding knew that moving NATO to Russia’s borders would result in military confrontation, especially given the fact that for eight years, Ukrainian forces shelled Donbas, killing 14,000 civilians, and implemented policies aligned with a fascist philosophy: banning the Russian language and sanctioning atrocities; in Odessa in the trade union building 46 opponents of the regime were burned alive by fascist elements (or jumped to their deaths) . In these circumstances, the Russians were almost forced to intervene. Understanding this, in 2016 I wrote two articles warning of a Russian Response.

People who dare to call themselves anti-fascists and socialists still support the corrupt Ukrainian Banderite regime, despite the fact that Zelensky was put in place by a billionaire, Kolomoyskyi, and supported by British state (whose agents fondly imagine themselves to be the real movers and shakers in the Great Game). The self-styled progressives in the USA and Europe support Zelensky despite the fact that he has now pilfered over a billion dollars, bought companies and yachts. Zelensky has literally profited from the death of 1.7 million Ukrainians and he still wants to keep the slaughter going.

The cognitive dissonance became incredibly intense in Canada, to whence many members of the Ukrainian nationalist/fascist diaspora fled after World War II. To the world’s horror, the entire Canadian parliament stood up to applaud a former SS officer. Out of willful ignorance and intellectual cowardice, so-called leftists support Ukrainian nationalists, even though the mercenaries who flock to Ukraine are nearly all from the ultra-right. All of this is swept under the carpet.

People who should know better virtue-signal their opposition to Russia. One must ask: why are they against Russia? The answer lies in an understandable antipathy to the social conservatism and recidivist nationalism of the regime governing the Russian Federation. But so called ‘Russophobia’ is also the result of a long-term psychological operation. The cases of the Skripals and Navalny were fabrications, as was the ‘Russian’ assassination of Litvinenko before them. Think of all the gangster movies featuring evil Russians. We know that Hollywood is funded partly by U.S. security agencies, who would like to mold perceptions. Even groups like Pussy Riot were more marketing confections than an authentic rebellion.

Why do people fall for false narratives?

Noam Chomsky explained why. In his book, Language and Problems of Knowledge, he distinguishes between what he calls Plato’s Problem and Orwell’s Problem. Plato’s Problem asks how we acquire language; how, from a mess of noise, our brains formulate grammatical competence. There must be innate structure. Orwell’s Problem is political: how is it that when so much evidence is available, people still do not know the truth about what’s happening?

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Ironically, the truth about the dire situation of Ukraine is available from a close reading of some sections of the mainstream media, and a more realistic understanding of the war on the ground from a survey of Ukrainian news outlets. Good analysis comes from some Western geopolitical analysts and war experts. But many of those people have now been sidelined. Their reputations have been tarnished. Mainstream American academics like John Mearsheimer and Geoffrey Sachs, are labeled ‘Putin Puppets’ and discarded, and diplomats like Craig Murray and journalists like Jonathan Cook are never published or broadcast outside of the alternative media.

The truth is, if one does not understand what’s happening, it is because one simply does not want to know. Ostriches with their heads in the sand shouldn’t have strong opinions on what is happening above ground. If one is too lazy to study the situation properly using a variety of sources, one should keep quiet instead of parroting off-the-peg, imperialist, wish-fulfilment fantasies; for example, the fantasy about carving up Russia for lebensraum, the fantasy described in that Rand Corporation Report from 2019 which has the title: Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground

So what is the current situation?

1.7 million Ukrainians have died. Perhaps double that have been wounded. Up to 10 million have fled what was already the most corrupt country in Europe. Now Ukraine is even more corrupt with billions for weapons swilling around. Women, the infirm and elderly are being dragged into the meat grinder to slow down the Russian advance, and it isn’t working. 300,000 Russians have died, 60,000 of them from the Wagner Organisation in Bakhmut. The Russian Federation has mobilised well over a million people and is advancing on all fronts. 700,000 soldiers are actively involved in the Special Military Operation. The Russian Federation has reliable, battle-tested weaponry, more advanced than anything NATO has: hypersonic missiles like the Avangard, the Kinzhal, the Oreshnik, Sarmat, cruise missiles, artillery, complete air superiority, drones galore and submarines with the Zircon and the nuclear powered Poseidon torpedo. The Oreshnik alone is a weapon that could wipe out every government, security, and military centre in London, without recourse to nuclear warheads. The Oreshnik is now in mass production.

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To the extent that they can, the disinformation experts in Europe and the USA take facts and mirror them back contra factually: ‘Oh no, it’s the Russian Federation that is haemorrhaging men. The Russian Federation attacks civilians. Oh no, the Russian Federation’s economy is on its last legs. The Russian Federation’s advance has bogged down.’ Who do these propagandists think they are kidding? Are they managing to kid you?

The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation now have an incredibly close and burgeoning relationship in all spheres from the economy and trade to cultural exchanges. China buys Russian oil, gas, and minerals, and supplies Russia with a whole range of advanced manufactured products. Western sanctions are useless. Russia has also allied with Iran and India and Brazil and is the driving force behind the BRICS organisation, which is now economically stronger in GDP terms than the G7 and contains the majority of the world’s population.

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It is in this context that Macron, Starmer, and Merz are sabre-rattling, hoping perhaps to turn Poland into another Ukraine in order to degrade Russia, hoping to lure the United States into direct confrontation with the Russian Federation. NATO continues to provoke conflict directly on the Russian Federation’s borders: in Moldavia, Romania, Georgia and Azerbaijan

But over the past three years, the economies of Western countries have not converted to war economies. They have not begun to mass-produce weapons like the Russian Federation. Instead it is the U.S.A’s weapon stocks that have been depleted, not the Russian Federation’s. Europe’s economy as a whole has been degraded without the cheap oil and gas from Russia; NATO’s military capacity has been degraded after so many of its weapons have been destroyed in Ukraine. Mercenaries coming from Ukraine supporting countries have died in droves on the battlefield and are secreted back without fanfare.

And while pursuing the Ukrainian Project, the West is also pursues the Israeli Project. Yet our seemingly ‘intelligent’ left wing cannot see any resemblance between the Banderites and the Zionists—they support the latter while condemning the former. It is as if the media has performed a lobotomy on the educated British bourgeois.

While unelected leaders like Ursula von der Leyen and elected, but deeply unpopular, figures like Starmer (the least popular prime minister in British history), Macron (the least popular French president except, perhaps, for Pétain), and Merz (deeply unpopular in Germany) attempt to provoke war, we know for sure it is a bluff. Where are all the recruitment posters? Where is the economic retooling for war? Where is the draft in the USA or UK?

There is, however, one caveat: U.S. and UK intelligence gathering and monitoring is better than that of Russia and China. One frightening scenario is that in their desperation, unable to win a conventional war, unable to handle economic rivalry, and unable to accept the loss of dominance, NATO might attempt a first strike against Moscow and Beijing. The West might conceivably get the jump on Beijing and Moscow in this scenario.

To do this, they would first have to win the confidence of the Russians and Chinese only to betray them, as Trump did with the Iranians (when he negotiated while planning a decapitation strike) or with Hamas, when negotiations were followed by assassinations in Qatar. The suspicion is that Trump would negotiate with the Russians and meanwhile attempt a decapitation strike.

In response, Medvedev has reminded the West: “Don’t forget, we have the Dead Hand.” Should such an attempt at a first strike occur, Russia’s nuclear arsenal—which is larger than that of the U.S.—will be triggered, and the West will be wiped out.

Garry Kasparov, that chess Grandmaster, may be working with British intelligence, but the strategically minded chess players in Moscow and the encircling Go players in Beijing are now winning the Great Game. The poker players in Washington are about to have their bluff called.

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But what do you think? You who have not bothered to update your views, not bothered to read history, you who hold your nose and support Ukrainian fascism? What will you say when this scenario inevitably plays out? Sometime after Christmas, Ukraine will collapse, a Russian-friendly government will take power, and the denazification will begin in earnest. More than two million Ukrainians will have died thanks to the stupidity and greed of the West.

At that moment, you on the left, what will you say? “Oh, I was wrong. Two million Ukrainians died! How was I to know? The Telegraph said it was the other way around.”

Indeed, how were you to know? All the while Ukrainians were dying for a Western hegemony that ruled out the possibility of Ukrainian neutrality, you were too busy posturing and virtue-signalling about Palestine to find out about what was really happening in Ukraine.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.