Saturday, April 23, 2022

                                            April 23, 2022

 

 

 MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Illusion of Liberal Democracy—America’s Long Record of Destruction Continues



Friends,

In a recent issue of Chronicles Magazine (March/April 2022) my friend Paul Gottfried, Editor-in-Chief, writes about the perilous condition of genuine liberty in modern Germany (“Germany, Harbinger of the Abyss,” pp. 6-8). Germany has become, in numerous ways, the most authoritarian, controlled, and “woke” country in all of Europe. And each successive new restriction on personal or corporate expression, each new statute limiting not only what one can say or write in public, but what one can even think in private, is done in the name of “protecting our [German] democracy.”

As Paul points out—and has documented in several detailed studies, including most recently his volume, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (Cornell University, 2021)—this is not something that occurred over night, or even over the past couple decades. It began actually with German defeat in the Second World War in 1945 and the subsequent implementation of the Marshall Plan and the explicit and wide-ranging “denazification” and purification in occupied Germany of everything that smacked or hinted not just of “fascism,” but of anything that honored or “glorified” German tradition and heritage.

As neoconservative writer Alan Bloom once so aptly expressed it (in his The Closing of the American Mind): “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” We Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”  

But that imposition of “freedom and equality” which Bloom glowingly describes is in actuality but a series of steps and actions that have occurred over the past seventy years, an enduring and constant process—a “long march,” to appropriate a phrase applied to the Communist Chinese Revolution of Chairman Ma0—that began with innocent-sounding promises and goals, but progressively has become more and more oppressive and destructive of our historic institutions and true liberty.

But always in the name of advancing—and then defending—"our democracy”: the same phrase that a Nancy Pelosi or any of a number of prominent American politicians, both Democrat and Republican, employ so frequently these days. Think here of Senators Lindsey Graham and Ben Sasse, and their enthusiasm to inject American boys into every forlorn desert or jungle civil war around the world, or most recently into Ukraine, in a conflict that should not involve us one tittle.

Most of us, upon reflection, can recall events over the past three decades, sometimes watershed moments, when “defending our democracy” has meant sending American boys into various armed “police actions” and “interventions”:

--Into Yugoslavia, which resulted in the creation of the state of Kosovo—the ancient homeland of Serbians—now an Islamist state in the heart of Europe, protected by NATO, which native Serbs have been forcibly driven out of, killed, or made refugees in their own country;

--Into Somalia, where war lords reigned in the streets of its capital, Mogadishu, and Americans became choice targets—the war lords continue to reign supreme;

--Into Iraq, in search of weapons of mass destruction that the bumbling George W. Bush and Colin Powell solemnly told us were there, but weren’t. And then the attempt to create a liberal democracy out of warring factions, ending up with the most radical Muslim group (Sh’ia) in charge and hundreds of thousands of native Christians either murdered or as refugees from a land which had been their home since Apostolic times;

--Into Libya, where American actions to remove and assassinate the once-dangerous dictator, Mu’ammar Al-Gaddafi (2011), resulted in a far worse situation in that country with rival tribes and factions engaged in constant violence and civil war…and hundreds of thousands of emigrants headed for Italy and southern Europe;

--Into Syria, where the late globalist Senator John McCain demanded American intervention to support “free and democratic Syrians” and in an attempt to give the Russians a bloody nose, only to discover that McCain’s (and our) allies were the real terrorists and Islamists, guilty of massacres and “war crimes” against native Syrian Christians who almost unanimously supported President Bashar al-Assad. Those “war crimes” will most likely never be prosecuted, because those extremists were “on our side”;

--Into Afghanistan, ostensibly to find and either kill or arrest Osama bin Laden, who, with Al-Qaeda, was held responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  But where the original mission soon developed into a disastrous twenty-year civil war, underwritten by billions of dollars in American support, with several thousand Americans dead and wounded, and 176,000 Afghanis killed: 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police and at least 52,893 opposition fighters, not to mention the millions of refugees and displaced persons. Of course, American military occupation was accompanied by the accustomed pilgrimage of wide-eyed “advisors,” instructors in how to “set up a democratic state,” zealous social justice warriors and “woke” evangelists determined to create a liberal bastion in that country, all to naught in a matter of a few tragic days in August 2021.

And now, apparently not learning a thing from these previous disasters—indeed, studiously ignoring them—the Neoconservatives and their journals (e.g., National Review, Wall Street Journal) and their think tanks, the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties, a solid phalanx of Leftists (now suddenly all in for war!), and the near-unanimity of the media are pushing once again to get us into violent conflict, this time in Ukraine. Indeed, already the permanent American foreign policy establishment—the heart of the global Deep State—is urging greatly increased intervention...how far will this go? Voices on both the establishment left and right have thrown caution to the wind. Senator Graham and a goodly number of politicos want a no-fly zone and perhaps boots on the ground.

With its mostly obedient minions in NATO and the European Union, the Biden administration and leading apparatchiks in both political parties now in fact seek to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, and their motives are becoming ever so clear as that conflict drags on. Indeed, what is happening in that corner of Eastern Europe has become for the United States and its subservient allies a real proxy war, a fact now noted by certain Russian commentators who see the deepening American/NATO involvement as a kind of actual beginning of World War III.

Of the various objectives in the Ukrainian conflict—among them a constant source of new profitable contracts for arms dealers; shifting American attention away from the enlargement of the Federal government and its control over our lives at home; diversion from the real border crisis along the Rio Grande River; and the so-called “defense of liberal democracy” in a country (Ukraine) which by no means is a “democracy”—a major, perhaps overriding  motive is this: to bleed Russia dry and potentially secure “regime change” in Moscow (another “color revolution”).

A quick overview of the leftist and neoconservative media (there is little difference between them on Ukraine), the articles and reports from its most prominent “opinion” shapers, clearly illustrates this—that’s one thing the literati amongst them cannot hide. Indeed, in their hysteria for more war they are quite open about it. 

Russia and also Hungary (to a lesser extent because it is smaller and less important geostrategically) stand in the way of completing the great “global reset” in Europe, and the consolidation of that interlocking managerial world complex which has been in the planning since before the creation of the United Nations after World War II, indeed in the febrile thoughts of definable globalists since Colonel Edward House during the Wilson presidency.

Early in his tenure as Russian president Vladimir Putin, like Boris Yeltsin before him, made efforts to join a greater, all-inclusive Europe, even going so far as sounding out the possibility of some form of NATO association. Despite Secretary Jim Baker’s promise (during the George H. W. Bush administration) to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not advance even “one inch” eastward in the post-Communist years, it did just that. And every attempt at Russian cooperation—and its desire to be a partner—was rebuffed. Instead, a succession of hostile “color revolutions” on its borders from Tbilisi, Georgia (2008), to Kiev, Ukraine (February 2014), greeted Moscow.

But more than that. Rebuffed in his efforts to establish a certain parity and understanding with the West, President Putin (after 2000) fell back on his country’s long history and traditions, specifically its cultural and religious heritage. Instead of slavishly copying the West as it plunged deeper into the morass of cultural, racial and sexual decadence, and what amounted to a rejection of its Christian heritage, Russia (like Hungary under Viktor Orban) opted for a different course, a trajectory based profoundly in the ancient faith of the Russian people and an effort to bring together various strands of Russian history into a usable past on which to base its future.

Whether staunch Russian action in defending the traditional family and one man/one woman marriage, or its restrictions of LGBTQ activity in Russian schools, or its public exaltation of and support for Russian Orthodox Christianity, none of these directions since the early 2000s endeared President Putin and the Russians to the managerial elites in the West. And, perhaps more importantly, Russia refused to go along with the globalist “reset”—that was not and is not the kind of cooperation that Moscow was looking for.

So, now, the increasingly evident goal is to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine as much as possible, and potentially provoke regime change in Moscow. And the poor Ukrainian populace in this protracted struggle are the victims, not just of the Russian invasion, but of the callous managerial bureaucrats in their expensive sinecures and walled-off estates in Washington and Brussels and Geneva. Those elites will only see the approved images projected by the Mainstream Media of the war crimes which in fact they have fomented (but are largely blamed on the Russians)…and they will, most likely, never have to pay a price for their actions.

But there will be justice. As in so many other situations, historically, it may not be in this world, but in the next.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

                                               April 12, 2022

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

WAR CRIMES and PROPAGANDA in UKRAINE



Friends,

It seems that each day brings news from the Ukrainian National Police or Ukrainian information ministry of new, and increasingly more gruesome, barbarism in the ongoing conflict with Russia. Assembled for greater effect under the rubric of “war crimes,” these unverified charges now include a supposed chemical attack in the besieged city of Mariupol by the Russian army (reminiscent of the largely debunked accusations made against the Russian-supported government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria a few years back). The charge, on the face of it, should raise suspicions, coming as it does from the “[l]eader of the Azov volunteer regiment Andriy Biletsky [who] said that three people in Mariupol have suffered ‘poisoning by warfare chemicals, but without catastrophic consequences’.”

The Azov Battalion is highly controversial due to its celebration of Nazi ideology and it history of using human shields, its terror against civilians, and its fabricated stories of war crimes, including the Mariupol Theater bombing. But even the Wall Street Journal ran with the story: “Ukrainian authorities are still investigating allegations by Ukrainian forces that they came under a Russian chemical attack in Mariupol….”

Of course, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesman, jumped in: "We cannot confirm at this time and will continue to monitor the situation closely. These reports, if true, are deeply concerning and reflective of concerns that we have had about Russia's potential to use a variety of riot-control agents, including tear gas mixed with chemical agents, in Ukraine." Bolder still was the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss who vowed  “to hold Putin and his regime to account"—assuming, of course, that the accounts are true.

But already the storyline is shaped; and the propaganda image is set in the public mind no matter what eventually may emerge: this is just the latest in a string of “war crimes” committed at the behest of that re-incarnation of Adolf Hitler in the Kremlin. No doubt is permitted, no contrary view allowed, lest the dissenter be labeled a “Putin apologist” or “engaged in treason” (e.g., the comments of Mitt Romney about Tulsi Gabbard).

In this conflict the skillful use of propaganda—visual images, video, “personal horror stories”—is a very effective means employed by Ukraine to mold public opinion, transmitted without much if any skepticism by a receptive Western media very eager to do the bidding of Kiev.

Just yesterday (April 11) came the horrifying news that a railway station in the far eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk (largely inhabited by Russians) was hit by missiles, with dozens of dead and perhaps hundreds of casualties. The Ukrainians immediately claimed that the Russians did it. I don't know if you have noticed, but thus far this "war crime" has gotten far less play in the American media than the purported massacre at Bucha.

I wondered why.

Then, it became vividly apparent: First, the missiles used to destroy the station were  Ukrainian Tochka-U ballistic missiles (the photos that the Ukrainian information ministry shared with the world press clearly indicate that—see the photo above and the article below). The Russians do not have and do not use that kind of projectile.  Then, Ukrainian sources crossed what I believe to be a "bridge too far": written on one of the missile husks is the inscription: "For the children" (in Cyrillic).

Now, I realize during war time military men can do all sorts of stupid things. But when the whole world and the near-unanimity of the media seem to be against you, why would you—Russia—compound that impression with something so idiotic and counterproductive as a slogan on a missile remnant which literally drips with--shouts of--"war crime"?

Would it have anything to do with the latest demand for more weaponry, additional resources to keep this war going on? Or, the pledge by President Biden at a recent summit with NATO and EU leaders (on March 24) that “[W]e will respond if he uses it [chemical weaponry]…in kind,” not specifying exactly what that response might be.

It seems that each time Volodymyr Zelensky desires more and deeper Western involvement, more Western resources and material, a "war crime" just happens.  Coincidence or staged?

I believe one can question the Russian invasion, but hopefully understand why it happened and why President Putin and the Russians sincerely believed that they had no real option but to undertake the present incursion. As scholars such as Professors John Mearsheimer and John Sakwa (e.g., The Putin Paradox, 2020), and Council for the National Interest Executive Director Philip Giraldi have described in some detail, after twenty years of constant aggressive actions by NATO and the US aimed at Russia, the Russians were between a wall and a hard place. The increased attacks on and persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbass region (14,000 deaths since February 2014), the real Ukrainian threat to re-acquire and use nuclear weapons, the stepped-up American and NATO involvement both on the ground and in the government in Kiev, and real possibility of Ukraine joining NATO—these actions reached a crescendo in the weeks and months leading up the February 24 military action.

I think it is historically evident that the EU/NATO powers actually wanted this conflict as their greater aim in this bloody conflict is regime change in Moscow. And to do that they have to bleed Russia dry in a protracted conflict. Thus, the constant infusion of weaponry and finances into Ukraine. Would not such action qualify as real—and potentially extremely perilous—co-belligerency?

I have written previously that the concern of our establishment leaders is not actually the poor ravaged Ukrainian people. Rather, their goal is a "color revolution" in Moscow, even if it costs the life of every Ukrainian to achieve that objective.

There is or should be enough doubt and skepticism out there to cause us to pause and carefully consider what is occurring, whose purposes it serves, and what the objective really is.

It has been said that "the first casualty in war time is truth."  And that has not changed since the ancients. And, despite the hysteria of the American media, it remains true today.

With that truism in mind, I pass on one of the best, one of the more convincing reports on just what did occur at the railway station in Kramatorsk.

More Fake News: Ukrainian Claims Station Bombing By Russians. Ukrainian “Bodies” Can’t Keep Still

https://www.globalresearch.ca/railway-station-bombing-ukrainian-forces-usa-admits-fake-news-ukrainian-bodies-cant-keep-still/5777157

By Rodney Atkinson Global Research, April 11, 2022


It appears there was a false flag attack by Ukrainian forces on their own people at the railway station in Kramatorsk. While a BBC report shows quite clearly that the missile was a Tochka used only by the Ukrainian side a BBC television report said the missile used “was of a type used by the Russians” – the exact opposite of the truth, as their own image showed. Even President Zelensky confirmed it was a Tochka missile which hit the Kramatorsk railway station killing some 50 people waiting to be evacuated. This BBC report confirms with this image in their report that this was the missile:

 

 


It is quite clear that it is NOT a Russian used Iskander missile – pictured below. Note the Russian used missile has no fins on the bottom end.

 


The Russian military said that it had pinpointed the location from which the missile had allegedly been launched. According to defence officials, it came from the town of Dobropole, which is located southwest of Kramatorsk and has been under the control of Ukrainian forces. The Russian forces have almost total control of the airspace and have tracked missiles and ground forces during this war so this tracking report is credible. The attack on Kramatorsk also closely resembles another missile strike that killed 17 people in the city of Donetsk in mid-March. (see Freenations post about that missile attack).

 

The Russian Ministry of Defence said that the Tochka U missile, is a weapon system that “only Ukrainian forces use.” The local Donetsk militia, which consider Kramatorsk as part of the Donetsk People’s Republic, claimed the missile was a Tochka U of the Ukrainian forces. Its leadership said Ukraine has a long record of deploying the weapon system that neither Russia nor the DPR forces use. The following numbered Tochka missiles were used on Donetsk and Luhansk by Ukrainian forces in February and now again in April:

 

§  SH91565 strike on Alchevsk LNR, 2nd Feb. 2015

 

§  SH91566 -ii- Logvinovo DNR 13th Feb 2015

 

§  SH91579 -ii- Kramatorsk railway station 8th April 2022

 

Below are the images of the three missiles:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Never has there been a more blatant “virtual” war for propaganda purposes with Ukraine employing actors to pose as wounded and dead.

Here Ukrainian “body bag actors” just can’t keep still for the propaganda shots.

 

7 examples of fake news are given in this link including the use of images from video games and a Star Wars film! Recently we have had American Governmental and press admitting using totally unverified incidents as propaganda. They refer to them as “narratives”.[….]

 

There have been no wars from which either side has escaped accusations of “war crimes”. The Allies fought a just war against Nazi Germany and fascist Europe between 1939 and 1945 but many accused them of war crimes for disproportionately bombing cities. All soldiers are in danger of vicious responses in the heat of battle but there is a difference between that and conscious cruelty, targeting civilians, torturing or killing prisoners, using civilians as human shields and of course setting up false flag attacks on your own side to pretend the enemy was responsible. All these seem to be features of at least the Ukrainian side of this conflict.

The trouble with efficient lies and propaganda is that they whip up fanatical hatred and cause war crimes. They also give the Ukrainians in this case the false belief that they are “winning the war” and instead of coming to terms at the peace conferences, commit themselves to more bloodshedThere is no more sickening sight as the slaughter continues than Boris Johnson telling President Zelensky not to compromise with Russia. There is nothing more dangerous than believing your own propaganda and applying to the real war the dangerous myths of the virtual propaganda war.

Friday, April 8, 2022

                                              April 8, 2022 



MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Bucha Massacre in Ukraine and the Search for Truth



Friends,

The images—the videos—are horrifying and not for the squeamish. There splashed across the TV screens by NBC, Fox News, and the totality of American media are what is called “definite proof” of Russian war crimes, perhaps even “genocide.” We are told retreating Russian army troops brutally executed civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs, as their units departed the Kievan suburb of Bucha.

That is the unquestioned assumption which we are asked to believe. And the entirety of our establishment media, without exception, posits this “massacre” as fact and the work of those depraved Russians, under orders from that evil Vladimir Putin, holed up in the dark recesses of the Kremlin. No doubts, no questions are permitted, and certainly no dissent from this now-standard story line, lest the questioner be immediately labeled a “Putin stooge” or “engaging in treason.” Rather, journalists across the board, from MSNBC to NBC to Fox, to online scribblers for The Washington Post and The New York Times now outdo each other in speculating what mechanisms are (or will be) in place to eventually try Putin for his manifest criminality (perhaps in the Hague by the International Criminal Tribunal, like what happened to former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2002?). The unanimity of America’s political class, Republicans often outdoing Democrats in their unbridled rage, demands stepped-up action, more billions for sophisticated weapons systems (which are no longer “defensive”), maybe a “no-fly zone” or even troops on the ground, in other words World War III. And the Biden White House has joined the chorus in suggesting that “there must be some accounting for war crimes,” if a bit less frenzied.

Yet, there are voices, not many but some of which are substantial, that raise troubling questions about the most recent “war crimes” narrative, whether at Bucha or even more recently, the train station at Kramatorsk.

First, there is former Ambassador Jack Matlock, America’s last representative in the old Soviet Union before it collapsed in 1991, for the administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush. A longtime career diplomat and expert on Russian history and politics, in an interview on CNN (which appears to have been subsequently scrubbed) Matlock cautioned viewers: “Firstly, we don’t know exactly what really happened in Bucha, and secondly, there is no evidence that Moscow is to blame.”

The Russian government (via spokesman Dmitri Peskov), Foreign Minister (Sergei Lavrov), and the Ministry of Defense have all strongly denied the accusation and requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council and a full forensic investigation by a neutral party.

As investigative journalist, Ian Davis, reported in OffGuardian (April 7, 2022):

“…further investigation is certainly necessary. This appeared to be the position of the Russian government who, having strenuously denied the Bucha allegations, requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to discuss the matter. For some reason, the UK government blocked Russia’s request.

“Initially it appeared that the US-led NATO alliance were less eager to discuss the evidence. However, acting as the president nation of the Security Council, the UK’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, then announced that the UK would convene a session to discuss Bucha on the 5th.

Prior to examining any of the evidence, and relying solely upon videos provided by the Ukrainians, Woodward [then] stated that the footage was evidence of war-crimes. This had in no way been established. No one knew what they were evidence of. Woodward clearly implicated Russia and predetermined the outcome of the discussions, so there wasn’t really any point in holding them.”

As Davis adds: “There is no doubt that they [the Russians] have killed many Ukrainian citizens [many of whom were armed]. However…unless Russian commanders lost control of their troops in Bucha, the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, following an agreed withdrawal and their identification as non-combatants, makes no sense either from a military or propaganda perspective. It serves only to undermine the peace negotiations…prolonging the conflict is in the US-led NATO alliance’s interests, not Russia’s.”

That is the same question I have. If you are commanding Russian forces—if you are sitting in the Kremlin—and surely understand the immense value of international opinion and the very real history of Ukrainian disinformation (as in the case of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital bombing) and the use by the Western media of what is essentially propaganda, why would you commit such an atrocity in full and plain view, with bodies of men strewn almost symmetrically down a main street in the town [cf. the aerial photo at the beginning of this essay]?

It makes no sense. Even in the massacre in the Katyn Forest (1940), the Soviets buried the evidence of the NKVD murder of some 22,000 Polish officers and national elite. The discovery of the shallow mass graves by invading Germans in 1941 was essentially hushed up—“canceled” news, if you will—by the Americans and British, despite attempts by a few intrepid researchers. Indeed, it was only after the fall of Soviet Communism that the truth was completely unearthed for all to see. Ironically, it was President Vladimir Putin who finally and fully corrected the historical record:

“On 4 February 2010, the [then] Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to attend a Katyn memorial service in April. The visit took place on 7 April 2010, when Tusk and Putin together commemorated the 70th anniversary of the massacre. Before the visit, the 2007 film Katyń was shown on Russian state television for the first time. The Moscow Times commented that the film's premiere in Russia was likely a result of Putin's intervention.

There are far too many questions surrounding Bucha and what happened there for a quick, summary judgment as to guilt. That should govern our “chattering class” and our politicians, but it doesn’t. Yes, the images are horrifying, but all the information—the videos, the pictures—we see on our television sets and read about in our establishment press is uniformly, if not hysterically, from one viewpoint.

One of the best-informed commentaries on Bucha and what happened there (and likely will happen again) is by noted former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, Scott Ritter, who served as a former UN arms inspector for implementing the INF Treaty, and also on General Norman Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War.

I pass it on here:

The truth about Bucha is out there, but perhaps too inconvenient to be discovered

https://www.sott.net/article/466314-The-truth-about-Bucha-is-out-there-but-perhaps-too-inconvenient-to-be-discovered

Scott Ritter  Mon, 04 Apr 2022

"In war, truth is the first casualty." This quote has been attributed to Aeschylus, a 6th BCE Greek tragedian noted for his "copious use of imagery, mythic allusion, grand language, wordplay and riddles." It is only fitting, therefore, that the man who first gave word to the concept of modern-day war-time propaganda would see his quote come to life in the present-day Ukraine. The Kiev government and their Western information warfare advisers may have coopted all of Aeschylus' playwright devices to craft a modern-day tragedy in the Ukrainian town of Bucha that exemplifies the notion of the lie as not just a byproduct, but also a weapon of war.

The main source of the Bucha tragedy reports is a videotape, taken by the Ukrainian National Police, of one of their convoys driving through a street in the town. A dozen or so corpses litter the roadway, many of them appearing to have been bound. This video has gone viral, producing a pandemic of anguish and anger that has swept over much of the world, capturing the attention of heads of state and the head of the Catholic Church alike, resulting in a tidal wave of condemnation and outrage directed at Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The cause-and-effect relationship between the video and the global backlash is clear - the former could not exist without the latter.

One of the first lessons of objectivity is to slow things down to make sure that fact is not obscured by emotion. The Bucha videotape is disturbing. The video has been released in its present form, it appears, with the express intent of producing a visceral "shock and awe" moment for the viewer. If this was indeed the case, then those who released it - the Ukrainian National Police - have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. Or that of their advisors, as the case may be.

The linkage between the dead and the Russian military was established immediately, without any fact-based data to back it up, and subsequently echoed in all forms of media - mainstream and social alike. Anyone who dared question the established "Russia did it" narrative was shouted down and belittled as a "Russian shill," or worse.

That these conclusions are the byproduct of mass hysteria is beside the point - why seek to be objective when the narrative fits every stereotype that had been carefully assembled beforehand by the same people parroting the Bucha story today. Social "preconditioning" of an audience unused to critical thinking is an essential step in getting this audience to accept at face value anything that is put before it, regardless of how egregiously the facts of the story strain credulity. And let's be clear - the Ukrainian narrative of the events in Bucha seems to stretch credibility.

The chronology of the narrative produces the first red flag that the story being peddled by Ukraine, and echoed in the West, is not what it seems. It is established fact that Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30. Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that the town was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials. At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia. The videotape in question was released by Ukrainian authorities on April 2; it is not certain if the video had been taken earlier, or on that day. What is certain is that the images shown in the video differed sharply from the narrative initially portrayed by the mayor.

For its part, Russia has vehemently denied the allegations, and 
has requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss what the Russian Foreign Ministry has called the "criminal provocations by Ukrainian soldiers and radicals" in Bucha. The presidency of the Security Council is held by Great Britain, and the British mission to the UN has denied the Russian request, stating that a discussion on Ukraine currently scheduled for Tuesday, April 4 would serve as a forum for any discussion about Bucha.

One would think that the Security Council, which has shown a readiness in the past to meet on short notice to discuss the events coming out of Ukraine, would seek to accommodate Russia's request on a matter of such importance. The goal of the British, however, does not appear to be the rapid search for truth and justice, but rather to buy time to allow the political fallout from the alleged massacre in Bucha to develop further.

One example of this tactic manifesting itself is the reaction of US President Joe Biden. "You saw what happened in Bucha," 
he explained in comments to reporters, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin "is a war criminal." Biden took advantage of the Bucha crisis to advocate for the delivery of more weaponry to Ukraine. "We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight," he said. "And we have to gather all the detail so this can be an actual - have a war crimes trial."

All this from the president of a country which has refused to recognise the International Criminal Court. For reasons which should be obvious to anyone willing to apply some critical thought.

Fortunately for President Biden and the Ukrainian government, the British chief prosecutor of the court, Karim Khan, 
announced in early March 2022 that he had launched an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. Given the high profile of the Bucha allegations, one would imagine that Khan has dispatched a forensics team to take control of the crime scene and oversee autopsies on the victims to establish the time of death, mechanism of death, and whether the victims had died where they were allegedly found, or if their bodies had been moved there from another location.

Khan would also be empowered to conduct interviews with the Ukrainian National Police, who have a history of close relations with members of the Ukrainian far right, including the infamous Azov Battalion. Of particular interest would be any investigation into orders given to the police regarding the treatment of those Ukrainian civilians deemed to have collaborated with the Russian military during its occupation of Bucha.

The results of such an investigation would more than likely conflict with the narrative being pursued by the Ukrainian government and echoed in the West by compliant media outlets and politicians alike. This is the prime reason why Khan is not currently on the ground in Bucha. One can assume that if and when Khan is eventually given access to evidence about the Bucha killings, it will have been manipulated by the Ukrainian National Police to such an extent that disproving the allegations will be virtually impossible.

The truth about what happened in Bucha is out there, waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, that truth appears to be inconvenient for those in a position to pursue it aggressively through a forensics-based, on-site investigation. If it so happens that it eventually emerges that the Ukrainian National Police murdered Ukrainian civilians for the crime of allegedly collaborating with the Russians during their brief occupation of Bucha, and the forces of international law are brought to bear against the true perpetrators of that crime, any true pursuit of justice would have to include both the US and UK governments as witting co-conspirators in any crime charged.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

  July 3, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey   The Real Meaning of July 4th and the Heresy of Lincolnian Interpretation            ...