Author: pelshvalen (Page 9 of 40)

Harnessing history to politics, part II

08.05.2023 / pelshvalen

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis.

Causes of grain shortage

Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the collectivisation campaign led to confusion and chaos. This is the view held by, among others, R.W. Davies and St. Wheatcroft. This is, incidentally, also the view held by the current government in Moscow.

Others give preference to environmental circumstances as causal factors. Mark B. Tauger is probably the main proponent in the West of such views.

Tauger writes that the famine was primarily a consequence of a number of natural circumstances during the period 1931–32 that were not referred to in official statistics at the time (Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization“, p. 112). A drought ravaged the land in 1931, whereas excessive precipitation and humidity was the problem in 1932 (in Ukraine precipitation was almost three times the average). The harvest looked promising during the summer, but various kinds of mould and mildew infected the harvest, particularly in Ukraine and North Caucasus, where as much as 70% of the harvest was damaged in large areas.

Tauger refers to figures from state farms (sovkhozi) in Ukraine in 1932, according to which only 60% of the required quota had been achieved. On the other hand, Tauger finds an abrupt 60 % harvest increase from 1932 to 1933, specifically in Ukraine. (The 1932 Harvest…, p. 81)

….

Collectivisation

Collectivisation, which was imposed – at breakneck speed – in 1930, revolutionised ownership and production in the countryside, where all the food was produced. More than half of all farms had been collectivised as early as in 1931. Such a “shock therapy” naturally spawned a whole series of problems that would necessarily lead to a decline in production; from discontent to anger and outright resistance among farmers, compounded by violence against owners of large farms.

Meanwhile, investment prioritised industry, and there was an exodus from the countryside to the towns. In short: Chaos.

What followed were two years of poor harvests, 1931 and 1932. Food was rationed in all of the country’s cities, and rations were repeatedly reduced both years. Tauger describes the ensuing chaos and some of the authorities’ reactions: People fled from factories and from collective farms, so there were millions of people just drifting throughout the country, in search of better conditions. Towards the end of 1932, the authorities re-introduced a “tsarist” rule requiring “internal passports”. (Ibid p. 86-87). The authorities particularly wanted to stop the influx of people to areas affected by food shortages. The internal passport requirement has been interpreted as part and parcel of Stalin’s authoritarian style, and of his genocidal intentions. In reality, it is more a reflection of the extent of chaos in the country at this point….

If the chaos in the country was a direct consequence of the collectivisation campaign, the subsequent famine can be said to be so too. In fact that is what the majority of historians studying the issue have concluded. Though meteorological conditions may have reduced the harvest, as described above, we should safely be able to say that harvest reduction hit the Soviet Union, and not least Ukraine, at a difficult point in time.

Mark B. Tauger is not convinced that collectivisation as such caused the famine. For one thing the harvest of 1933 was excellent, also in Ukraine, in spite of the fact that the grain seeds had been sown during the spring when the famine was at its worst (Tauger, Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation, p. 84-85).

In order to assess the effects of collectivisation, we have to take a look at the prevailing conditions at the time and also during the period preceding it. There were Socialist uprisings here and there in Europe at the end of the war in 1918, but only in one country was there a successful revolution, and that country was inhabited mainly by peasants engaged in primitive agriculture. According to Marxist theory, socialism required a well-developed industrial society. A bone of contention among the Bolsheviks was whether it was possible to create industry in a Soviet society without any help from other socialist countries, and if so, how.

The economic basis was rickety, indeed. Robert C. Allen, Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, is the author of Farm to Factory. A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003). This is an extensive study of statistical material in several countries, including tsarist Russia …. Judging from official figures, the economy and productivity of Soviet Russia in the twenties – the period referred to as NEP (1921-28) – was equivalent to that of South-East Asia and the poorest parts of South America. The country had little in common with countries such as Germany and the USA (Allen, p. 3-4).

The crux of the problem was the backwardness of agriculture. Allen compares agriculture in the European part of Russia to agriculture in areas in Canada with similar meteorological and topographic conditions. … According to his calculations, production per hectare in the twenties was very similar in the two areas. However, production per working person was 8 times greater in Canada. (Allen p. 73).

In 1928, 82% of the Soviet population lived in rural areas, working under relatively primitive conditions. Villages were over-populated and produced only a slim surplus to send to markets in the cities. The country was thus vulnerable to harvest fluctuations and food insecurity, and famines occurred fairly frequently. After all, one of the main demands of the October Revolution had been “Bread!” Hence there were several famines during the twenties. The worst of them was at the end of the civil war in 1921-22, when fatalities probably numbered about 5 million. Another serious famine occurred in 1928-1929, and not without reason.

After the October revolution, agricultural productivity decreased. One important reason for this was that the proportion of people living in rural areas had grown from less than 70% (in the last year before the war, 1913) to 82% in 1928. Per capita production in Russia/the Soviet Union was thus almost the same in 1928 as in 1900, and it had fallen since 1913 (Allen, p. 5).

The Russian Revolution had to a large extent been a peasant revolution. Peasants divided the major landowners’ land between them. This they felt entitled to do in view of the revolutionary activities in the cities. … As a result, the number of farms rose from 16 million in 1913 to 28 million in 1928.

Creating industry without foreign investment requires enormous economic effort. For the Soviet Union, there were few other sources of capital than the country’s agricultural sector. However, most farmers were still living practically in a barter-economy. They had little surplus to sell. What little excess production reached the cities was produced by large farms. Determining prices of industrial goods versus agricultural goods became a source of contention towards the end of the NEP period. When business conditions benefited the agricultural sector, owners of the large farms were the ones to thrive, something that stimulated capitalism within the sector. When, on the other hand, business conditions benefited industrial production, agricultural produce was not delivered to the market and the reciprocal exchange of goods between the sectors shrank.

One consequence of all the land partitioning was thus that the amount of agricultural produce for sale in the cities fell sharply. In 1928, it shrank by 24% compared to 1913. As for the most important of all the agricultural commodities, grain, the reduction of produce that reached the cities was 50%; likewise for potatoes and vegetables. The Communist Party and its policies were in deep trouble (Allen, p. 79-81).

Moreover, wheat and grain in general had constituted the country’s main exports during tsarist times. Exported grain in 1928 amounted to no more than 1:20 as compared to in 1913. …

In other words, the agricultural sector proved incapable of a substantial rise in productivity under the prevailing conditions, and as a result society as a whole was vulnerable to imminent famines. …

To ensure food security in the country and to stimulate industrialisation, the Communist Party decided to restructure the entire agricultural sector.

Collectivisation as a prerequisite for industrialisation

They opted for a fairly drastic measure: that of the collectivisation campaign. I won’t go into the details of how it was performed, but briefly look at the outcome in terms of production and productivity.

Production fell in 1931 and 1932, but rose during the following years. In 1937 the country’s total production was 10% higher than in 1928. More importantly, though, the supply of grain to the cities had risen by 62%. This can be explained by the fact that productivity had doubled after the collectivisation, not least since the new, large agricultural units could sustain tractors and other mechanised farming equipment. As a result, fewer working hands were needed, so large numbers of people left the land to work in industrial plants. During the thirties, 25 million people moved from rural communities to thriving and rapidly growing industrial towns (Allen, p. 100-101).

It seems clear, then, that though the collectivisation campaign was far from pretty, it did ensure future food security for the Soviet Union. Also, it seems to me, while recent history is dotted with numerous and terrible famines, only some are stridently flagged as “crimes against humanity”. The Holodomor narrative appears to be a cynical manipulation of a tragedy for political purposes.

I should add that the ongoing accelerating ecological breakdown is indeed a crime against humanity. Its results will include global famine. It is currently being hastened by Russia, Ukraine, the USA, the EU and other NATO countries. The victims: the largely powerless inhabitants of the countries perpetrating the crime and, to an even greater degree, the populations of the Global South.

Intermezzo

07.05.2023 / pelshvalen

I shall be publishing the second part of Thorarinn Hjartarson’s analysis of the “Holdomor” narrative in a couple of days.

In the mean time you might take a look at an article that appeared yesterday in Helsinki Times. I was kindly informed about it by a friend in Poland. I gather press freedom is not much greater in Poland than it is in Norway these days.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/23512-detaining-gonzalo-lira-another-blow-to-the-freedom-of-press-in-ukraine.html

Harnessing history to politics

30.04.2023 / pelshvalen

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of the quotes indirectly, foregoing quotation marks.

On 23 March, the Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) unanimously approved the following resolution: “The Allting declares that the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 was a genocide.”

The statement accompanying the resolution reads:

The famine was a direct consequence of forced collectivisation, and was systematically used as retribution… The Soviet authorities’ aim was to suppress Ukrainian national sensibilities. Hence the Ukrainians were deliberately starved for political purposes.
https://www.althingi.is/altext/153/s/0834.html

A multinational effort

The Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) has taken the extraordinary step of determining the cause of a famine that occurred 90 years ago in Ukraine. I am not aware of any Icelandic historian who has discussed it, and it is hardly likely that members of the Allting have been able to acquaint themselves with its circumstances. Most probably, quite a few of them had never even heard about it. But do we really have to know? As long as others “know”, we should be on the safe side, no? This is, after all, a multinational effort, a response to the “plea from Ukraine” in which the expression “genocide” is used to describe the famine in question.

The essence of the Icelandic resolution and the accompanying statement is that the famine was perpetrated by the authorities in Moscow, “deliberately and for political reasons” and that it was targeted particularly against the Ukrainian population.

Why is the Allting adopting such a resolution? No resolution has been adopted about, say, the famine in Bengal in 1943, which killed millions. That affair would be closer to home, as it were, since the British were in charge there. The answer is pretty obvious: the purpose of the resolution is to support today’s Ukrainians in their war and to thwart today’s Russia and stir up more russophobia.

A famine ravaged in the Soviet Union during the winter and spring of 1933. According to Wikipedia it claimed 5.5–8.7 million lives, 3.3–5 millions of whom were in Ukraine. There is little controversy about the extent of the famine. Most historians today, including Timothy Snyder and Stephan G. Wheatcroft, who differ in most other respects, set the number of lost lives in Ukraine at around 3.5 million. Ukrainian nationalists, however, multiply that figure to 7 million, and the West-leaning former President Jushenko stated, on his visit to the USA in 2006 that “Holodomor claimed 20 million Ukrainian lives”.

During the Cold War, proponents of the blood-curdling theory that the famine was genocide – deliberately carried out by the authorities in Moscow against the Ukrainians – were mainly Ukrainian emigrants in the West.

The British historian Robert Conquest introduced it to the field of historical study with his book Harvest of Sorrow in 1986. Conquest was already world-famous after having written his anti-Communist magnum opus The Great Terror in 1968, about “Stalin’s purges”. In the 1986 book (Harvest of…) he maintained that the famine in Ukraine had been a deliberately engendered scourge upon the people. It was the result not of any food shortage, but of the authorities’ rigorous demands for and collection of grain in the wake of the collectivisation campaign in 1930. Conquest wrote that the lesson to be learned appeared to be that Communist ideology served as the basis for an unparalleled genocide of men, women and children. In other words the lesson he had learned was about the malevolence of Communism.

He quotes Ukrainian scholars who hold that collectivisation was imposed on the Ukrainian people with the specific purpose of suppressing the Ukrainian separatist movement and to do away with the social foundation underlying Ukrainian nationalism: private ownership of land (Harvest of Sorrow, p. 219). However, the collectivisation was implemented in the same manner elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Was it intended as a scourge on other peoples too? As theories goes, this one seems a bit far-fetched.

On the independence of Ukraine in 1991, and particularly after anti-Russian forces came to power and the orange revolution (2004), the Holodomor theory has become the bedrock of Ukrainian nationalism and national conscience and has been taught in all schools. Under the leadership of Viktor Júsjenkó (2005-2010) the Holodomor Law was enacted in 2006.

Section 1 states that Holodomor 1932–1933 was the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Section 2 states that Public denial of Holodomor amounts to an insult against the memory of millions of Holodomor’s victims and an offence against the dignity of the Ukrainian people, and is punishable by law.

This law still applies, and Ukrainian nationalism systematically seeks to erase the distinction between the past and the present in order to nurture anti-Russian sentiment. Putin is said to continue where Stalin left off.

Harnessing history to politics is not a Ukrainian invention, but prohibiting discussion and alternative interpretations is undoubtedly a bit over the top. The Russian Duma’s reaction in 2008 to Kiev’s historical analysis was: “the famine in 1933 does not qualify as genocide according to the internationally accepted definition of the term”.

The purpose of the multinational declaration stating that the famine amounted to genocide is twofold:1) It serves to perpetuate the disrepute of Communism 2) It is a weapon in the ongoing campaign against present and past Russia.

So what actually happened in Ukraine in 1932–33?

Asking Ukrainians will probably not be helpful, since any surviving doubts about the official storyline are punishable by law.

During the cold war, discussion in the West about the Soviet Union tended to be highly politicised and dichotomous. Political sympathies inevitably coloured analyses of the country’s history and the ideological dividing line between opponents ran between (market) liberal and socialist sympathies. The narrative about the collectivisation held a fairly prominent position in that discussion, not least because that was a field in which anti-communist authors held excellent ammunition.

With the gradual opening of the Soviet archives starting under Gorbachov, we have seen the emergence of interpretations that tend to explain developments around 1930 in economic rather than political terms. However, ever since Ukraine was dragged into a geopolitical confrontation in the wake of the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the invasion of Russia in 2022, Ukrainian history has once again increasingly been understood from a political and moral perspective, cf. The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines.

What side we are on about our interpretation of history tends to determine what side we are on in the present conflict and vice versa.

Timothy Snyder

In 2010, a book published by the US history professor Timothy Snyder became a best-seller in the USA, Germany and Poland: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Soviet Union, Poland and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Morally, he basically equates Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes and adds that we now know, having discussed Soviet documents for 20 years, that in 1932, Stalin turned collective farming’s famine into a politically motivated deliberate starvation campaign. (Chapter 1). He adds that Stalin’s campaign targeted the Ukrainians because of their nationality.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/136199

Snyder has no primary references about the famine, but he supports his claim by extensively quoting nationalist Ukrainian historians. His book has lent academic credence to the Holodomor narrative. Snyder is much appreciated in Ukraine and has been a guest of President Zelensky.

He is using history as a political crowbar. Ever since the occupation of Crimea in 2014, he has written a barrage of articles explaining how Putin is an existential threat not only to Ukraine but to all of Europe and that he continues where Stalin left off.

Davies and Wheatcroft

Over the past twenty years or so, the British professor, R.W. Davis has been the West’s grand old man about Soviet economic history. (He died in 2021.) Together with E.H. Carr, he wrote the last volume of the great History of Soviet Russia. His bibliography includes the seven-volume Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, one volume of which is called The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933. The co-author to that volume is Professor Stephen Wheatcroft, based in Melbourne, whose specialist field is Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as agriculture and famines all over the world. He has engaged in detailed studies of the Soviet collectivisation campaign.

Davies and Wheatcroft’s book is the single most detailed and thorough book about the “grain crisis” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that has ever been published, at least in the West. One of the main conclusions of the book is that the famine was a result of a severe grain shortage in the country, not that grain was withheld from people. The authors take pains to dismiss Robert Conquest’s claims on that score, not least because those claims had been so widely disseminated and trumpeted.

[The following is a back translation:] Our studies about the famine have led us to completely different conclusions than those reached by Dr. Conquest. He argues that Stalin “wanted the famine”, that the Soviet authorities did not want to deal with it successfully and that the famine was deliberately imposed on Ukraine. The story we are telling in our book is the story of Soviet authorities struggling with a famine crisis that to some extent was caused by their own failed policies, but which at any rate was unexpected and unwelcome. Their agricultural policies were formed by conditions preceding the revolution, by civil war experiences, by the situation on the international stage, by intractable geographical and meteorological conditions as well as by the modus operandi of the Soviet system during the Stalin era. They were formed by people with inadequate relevant training. Above all, the famine was a consequence of the decision to industrialise agricultural land in record time.
R.W. Davies og Stephen G Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933, p. 441

The book includes a footnote quoting R. Conquest explaining that he had not maintained that Stalin had intentionally caused the famine in 1933, only that when the famine was imminent, he could have prevented it. Here Wheatcroft writes that when he and Davies confronted R. Conquest with evidence about the extent of the crisis and the number of secret emergency measures taken by the Politbureau to mitigate it, he withdrew his previous criticism.

Was there a grain shortage

What was the real extent of the crisis, i.e. the size of the harvest following the summer of 1932? Encyclopedia Britannica reflects the prevailing line of thought in the West, explaining that the famine was no less than an attack on Ukrainian farmers; that it was engendered deliberately is inferred from there being no preconditions for any famine in Ukraine; that the harvest there in 1932 had been less than average, (partially due to the chaos caused by the collectivisation) but sufficient to feed the population.

This is the crux of the matter, then. The Holodomor narrative is underpinned by the assumption that the harvest in 1932 was normal, so that the sole cause of the famine was the state’s excessive grain collection. Was that the case? Stephen Wheatcroft writes, in 2018:

The famine was associated with two years of harvest failure in 1931 and 1932. 1931 was a year of drought with demonstrably excessive temperatures and low rainfall in the early summer injuring the ﬂowering and ﬁlling out of the grain. 1932 was a year in which the biological yield (prior to harvesting) was relatively normal, but in which harvest losses were excessively high as a result of damp weather during the harvest period, and a slow progression of the harvesting which greatly increased harvest losses. …In 1931 and 1932 the level of grain actually available for use was dangerously low.
Roundtable on Soviet Famines

Mark B. Tauger

Mark B. Tauger, professor at West Virginia University is one of the world’s most prominent specialists on famines and has devoted 30 years to studies of famines in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. In 1991 an article by him appeared in Slavic Review: “The 1932 harvest and the Famine of 1933”.

One important conclusion reached by Tauger in that article is that publicly available harvest figures for the years following 1930 were extremely unreliable. The figures for expected yields tended to be exaggerated, and the authorities’ demands for and collection of grain (so-called procurement quotas) were based on those figures. Modern assessments of the causes of the famine are also based on those figures. He writes that due to the drought-reduced harvest in 1931,

the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree,… from the 1931 quota of 22.4 million tons to 18.1 million tons;
The 1932 Harvest…, p. 71

Although the procurement quota had been sharply reduced, harvesting in 1932 did not go well and 10% was missing from the much reduced quota that was collected. As a result there were violent confrontations between collectors and farmers in the autumn of 1932, not least when it became clear that there was insufficient grain to feed the country’s population.

At the time, the authorities always operated with overoptimistic assessments of the amount of threshed grain. Tauger refers to annual reports from collective farms (in 1933, we find reports from about 150 thousand collective farms handed in when the harvest was over) which indicate that the harvest was poor compared to official expectations.

Tauger also points out that the famine was not limited to Ukraine:

Soviet regional mortality figures for the early 1930s, compiled by TsUNKhU [the Soviet Statistical bureau] and recently published by Wheatcroft, show that while the famine was more severe in certain Ukrainian oblasts than elsewhere, it was by no means limited to Ukraine. Both urban and rural mortality rates in 1933 considerably increased over those of 1932 in most regions, and in the Volga basin,Urals, Siberia, and central agricultural regions, they approached or equalled Ukrainian levels.
Ibid, p. 87

In Bloddlands (p. 41–42) Snyder maintains that Stalin’s governmnt had not cut back grain exports in 1932–33 and did not send relief to the affected areas. Tauger provides exact figures:

Due to the poor harvest in 1931 and the need to transport grain to areas affected by famine, the government reduced grain exports from 5.2 million tonnes in 1931 to 1.73 million tonnes in 1932. They declined to 1.68 million in 1933
Ibid p. 88

There is no doubt that grain collection during the autumn and early winter of 1932 was extremely harsh…. Moreover, the authorities did not understand until too late and poorly the truth about the real amount of grain, the local shortages and the imminent famine.

Only in November were the procurement quotas reduced for North Caucasus and Ukraine. In February 1933, grain seed and grain for food was sent back to areas where the need was greatest, 320 tonnes to Ukraine and 240 tonnes to North Caucasus. By April, total aid to Ukraine had exceeded 560 thousand tonnes.

Ibid p. 88

To my mind, Thorarinn Hjartarson has convincingly made the case
1) that the famine was ghastly, but that it was not due to malevolent intentions on the part of the Soviet authorities;
2) that when one country wishes to support another country, it should be wary of hot-headed political rhetoric.

When engaged in contests or conflicts, humans tend to forget what differentiates them from other mammals.

I may or may not translate and publish the rest of T. Hj.’s analysis where he examines various theories as to why the grain harvest was poor two years in a row.

Antagonising journalists

26.04.2023 / pelshvalen

By mistreating and possibly poisoning the prisoner Aleksej Navaljnyj, the Russian authorities are merely reinforcing the Western public’s perception that the concept of justice simply does not exist in Russia.

No matter what you or I think about Navaljnyj’s political views, he is not suspected of having killed anybody, or of having turned “customers” into helpless drug addicts or even of having raped a child. Such crimes, had he committed any of them, might have justified the nine-year prison sentence, with which he has been saddled. He has only been convicted of the sort of financial activities regularly committed with impunity by the filthy rich. Moreover, he is said to be kept, not in a “prison”, but in a “labour camp”, whatever that means.

Of course the Russian authorities have every reason to laugh – even guffaw – over Western sensibilities. I shall not even mention the innumerable school (and other mass ) shootings and deplorable health conditions in US America, merely limit myself to pointing out that you need not be in prison to get killed, one way or another. I do, however, want to stress that Western suppression of investigative journalists and whistle blowers is increasingly reminiscent of what has hitherto been considered more typical of Russia and China.

Suppression of fact, current or historical, is basically unsustainable. The suppressed fact will sooner or later catch up with the suppressor or his/her descendants. And there is no vouching for the good behaviour of those who have been duped.

Take military expenditure: According to Sipri, 2.2 percent of global GNP went to military expenditure in 2022. That’s quite a lot of money not being used on health services or education. 39% of that military expenditure was US American, 13% was Chinese and 3.9% Russian. A lot of people are being duped pretty seriously, wouldn’t you say? A lot of people are going to be, sooner or later, very very angry. But the Western powers have counted on the general public’s tagging along nicely, led by a nose ring.

Indeed, so far, the Western powers’ suppression of fact has duly had the effect of discombobulating and paralysing the general public.

It has also had the effect of turning Julian Assange into a martyr, a saint. Now I very much doubt that the long-suffering man ever intended or wanted to be considered a saint, but there you are. His name is emblazoned on banners and heads “Free Assange” petitions all over the world. Even The Guardian (a paper that in my opinion stabbed Assange in the back some years ago) acknowledges the importance of his case. It is, in fact, a test case. If Assange is convicted, Russia will rightly be able to say: You, the West, are no better than us.

But beware, Mr Lavrov: You are quoted as having rejected the notion that journalists do not commit crimes. While I always enjoy your elegant irony, I advise that you desist from antagonising journalists, be they Russian or Western. After all, there are journalists on this side of the ugly curtain who are doing their utmost to present an alternative to the prevailing US/NATO narrative about the Ukraine war. While they are not your allies, they are not your worst foes either. And while you may consider Navaljnyj a pain in the ass, he will not go away even if he dies. On the contrary, he will haunt the Russian authorities for years to come, if for no other reason because journalists on this side of the ugly curtain will find it less risky to revile your country than to revile their own. I am sure you can understand that.

Rødt

21.04.2023 / pelshvalen

Rødt is the name of a Norwegian left-wing political party. It is the only political party that still advocates leaving NATO. The party maintains that NATO is not a defence alliance, but an alliance of nations vindicating US global hegemony. The party avers that NATO not so much solves as creates problems.

It is the only political party that has been, until now, opposed to Norway’s sending weapons to Ukraine – on the grounds that more weapons will not solve the underlying issues that lead to the war.

However, Rødt is at a crossroads. As we should all know by now, the mainstream media is anything but free, and its Manichean approach to the Ukraine war has been so consistent that few can resist what is, in point of fact, a NATO narrative. Who can fail to shudder, for instance, at a barrage such as the one in Guardian on 4 April 2022 regarding the Bucha massacre?

Now there have been some doubts about that massacre. For one thing the timeline seems dubious. Quite another matter is that the press and hence also the general public always immediately assume that if an atrocity has been committed, it must have been committed by the Russians or Jihadists.

Alas, even the last Norwegian holdout against NATO propaganda is folding. This weekend, a national Rødt conference may possibly decide to approve sending weapons to Ukraine.

In the event, this will have no practical consequences for Ukraine or the war. Norway sends weapons to Ukraine, with or without the approval of a relatively small political party. But it will have consequences for Norway, in that there will no longer be any Norwegian political opposition to the NATO narrative.

That would be very unfortunate.

Defence of self or of hegemony

11.04.2023 / pelshvalen

Have you heard of “perception management”? Simply put, it means persuasion on the basis not of facts but of lies (or suppression of facts).

During the 1980s, Reagan decided to “kick the Vietnam syndrome“, a condition from which the US public was suffering, sick to the heart of the horror and shame of the Vietnam war, so that future presidents would find it very difficult to pursue the nation’s foreign policy goal of maintaining global hegemony.

In Reagan’s case, the challenge was to convince the US public to support US martial activities in Central America. As Robert Parry subsequently wrote (in 2014):

In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others – depending on the U.S. government’s needs.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/30/endless-war-and-victory-perception-management

Various tactics were used, one of them being:

to weed out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration attacked New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime’s massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job.
Ibid

During its wars, the US Government found new ways of limiting television viewers’ insight:

One solution involved imposing strict control over the movements of journalists. The government could no longer afford to allow – as it had in Vietnam – enterprising reporters to run around the battlefield, going wherever they wanted and speaking with whomever they pleased.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-pentagon-tried-to-cure-america-of-its-vietnam-syndrome-83682

An important group targeted by perception management consisted of the many who were saddened and shocked by revelations of crimes against humanity. We have therefore been seeing, with increasing frequency, the waging of what Joseph Darda calls “humanitarian wars”. In his paper Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Narrative: Human Rights, the Nayirah Testimony, and the Gulf War, he quotes George Bush, who in 1990 was preparing for yet another war:

With a war on the horizon, Bush took the proclamation [his own presidential proclamation designating December 10 as Human Rights Day] as an opportunity to situate the looming Gulf War in a human rights context. “In a world where human rights are routinely denied in too many lands,” he observed, “nowhere is that situation more tragic and more urgent today than in Kuwait.” Listing the atrocities reportedly committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, Bush concluded, “As long as such assaults occur, as long as inhumane regimes deny basic human rights, our work is not done.” The Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait was not merely a threat to Kuwaiti sovereignty but also, Bush alleged, a threat to the sanctity of human rights everywhere. Americans could not feel secure in their own liberal rights until these rights were restored to the citizens of this small, oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf. Thus, the United States’ intervention in the Middle East was not really a war but, as Bush continually stressed that fall and winter, a unified “stand in defense of peace and freedom.”
https://josephdarda.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/darda-kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome-narrative-human-rights-the-nayirah-testimony-and-the-gulf-war.pdf

Next, I quote someone who appreciated George Bush’s appeal to humanitarianism. On the face of it, he sounds like a humane fellow. Only the name of the source, (hoover.org) gives us pause:

The Bush administration made its case for military action, and, after considerable debate, the American people, through their representatives in Congress, gave approval. The administration also made its case to the United Nations, highlighting the damage that inaction would inflict on prospects for peace in the long term.

Although the dangers of careless military activism are easy to imagine, the cost of passivity is more difficult to discern. In the 1990s, the Vietnam syndrome helped delay and limit U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. Those delays and limits extended murderous Serbian repression and actually accelerated ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Failure to intervene militarily often permits humanitarian crises to continue and leads to more dangerous conflicts.
https://www.hoover.org/research/kicking-vietnam-syndrome

I have previously written about the bombing to kingdom come of Libya, a vicious NATO operation performed allegedly to protect demonstrators. This was definitely a case of successful perception management, since the public hardly raised an eyebrow at the devastation in NATO’s wake.

Of course, one very important reason to go to war is “self defence”. For some years now, the USA has been spreading its network of military bases in the Far East – obviously for “self-defence” (in case the humanitarian plight of the Uighurs fails to capture sufficient public sympathy). I quote Glenn Greenwald, mocking the self-defence rationale:

I was looking at a video earlier today of George Bush and others saying that the reason we had to go fight in Iraq and invade Iraq is that we’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here. And I saw a video earlier today of California Democrat Adam Schiff saying exactly the same thing about the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Namely, the reason we must fight Russia over in Ukraine is that, if we don’t, we’ll have to fight them over here. Presumably, the Russian army is on the verge of attacking the American homeland right after it gets done trying to hold a town or two for more than three months in Ukraine, confident that it can conquer the American homeland, despite spending 1/15 in its military of what the United States spends.
https://rumble.com/GGreenwald (Sorry, I failed to take a note of the post)

More recently, “freedom and democracy” has supplanted humanitarian justification of destabilisation activities – bellicose or otherwise. During the Euromaidan Protests, Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator Chris Murphy visited Kiev to “show solidarity” to the demonstrators. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra right‐wing Svoboda Party, and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleg Tyagnibok.

John McCain — repeat: a US Senator — enthusiastically addressed the protesters — Ukrainian protesters in Ukraine, not in the USA:

Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.

We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause (bold text is my highlighting)

He told CNN:

What we’re trying to do is try to bring about a peaceful transition here, that would stop the violence and give the Ukrainian people what they unfortunately have not had, with different revolutions that have taken place – a real society. This is a grassroots revolution here – it’s been peaceful except when the government tried to crack down on them, and the government hasn’t tried that since.

I’m praising their ability and their desire to demonstrate peacefully for change that I think they deserve.
Ibid (bold text is my highlighting)

Now, there is every reason to question how “peaceful” this so-called “peaceful transition” was. After all, quite a few protesters and some police officers were killed. We have been told that they were killed by officers defending (the Democratically elected) president Yanukovich. Apparently, the story is being compellingly disputed by Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski. Read the abstract of his paper and/or download it here.

However, his peer-reviewed paper has been ignored by mainstream media (which has proven its stalwart ignorance of late). It is truly quite fascinating. No less fascinating is the story of its suppression and the suppression of another of his papers, that of the 2014 Odessa massacre.

To conclude, for now, my exploration of applied perception management in Western foreign policy matters, I bring to your attention an investigative journalist’s address on March 24 this year, to the UN security council about the OPCW examination of the dreadful deaths by mysterious means in Douma, Syria, in April 2018.

So! The final OPCW report appears to have been a cover-up. For what? Why? What/who killed the victims in Douma?

There are still nearly 1000 US troops in Syria. What are they doing there? Who is currently controlling Syrian oil? What are the effects on the Syrian population of US sanctions?

Every day, to this day, Syrian civilians are being killed or maimed by land mines. And the nearly 20 Israeli attacks on Syria over the past year have not helped.

The regime change attempt in Syria was motivated and presented to the public as defence of human and civil rights. I put to you, though I cannot provide documentation — because investigative journalism is now becoming illegal in a growing number of “Democratic” countries — that the regime change attempt was largely orchestrated by the USA for reasons that are totally non-humanitarian. The result was death and devastation.

As usual.

Meanwhile, the arms race is on, full speed. And the engines of perception management are running at maximum capacity.

Please do not bring any more children into this world. I put to you that bringing children into the world now is turning into an act of parental egoism, the victims of which will be those same children.

The tightening of the screw

30.03.2023 / pelshvalen

Europe is currently undergoing a tightening of the screw. As most of you will have learnt from either Milton Friedman or Naomi Klein or both, crises (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine, etc.) will be inexorably exploited by the powers-that-be. Result: the poor will become poorer, the rich richer. This is inevitable unless a concerted effort is made to change the tide, as was the case after the series of cataclysmic events constituted by WWI, the Spanish flue, the Great Depression and WWII.

I would urge you to read Thomas Piketty’s book “Capitalism and Ideology”, which is basically a history book. If you you do read it, you will probably find that it is one of the most important books you have ever worked your way through, because it answers a great many questions you may have asked yourself and many more that you probably never even thought to ask.

True, it’s a very large book, and most people don’t have time to read hundreds of pages. More’s the pity, because the author writes well, clearly and often humorously, not so much about violent wars but about the contradictions that caused them.

For those of you who want to take a shortcut, I have good news. Yes, I believe the man must care very deeply about the plight of our planet and the creatures, including humans, upon it, because a 156-page document called “Extracts” is freely available on his website. It’s the first item on the list:

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/ideology

The list also includes all the statistical graphs used in his book, and finally a link to the equivalent page in French.

I was initially only interested in the fluctuations of inequality in the 20th and 21st centuries. Only reluctantly did I go back to read, with rapidly growing fascination, what he had written about the previous periods of human history, because it all turns out to be interrelated.

Still, since I live here — in Europe — and now, I find that developments since the 1980s in Europe and the USA are frightening. Here are a few examples where Thomas Piketty’s graphs speak for themselves:

Inequality 1900–2020

Labour productivity : Europe vs United States

Growth and progressive taxation in the U.S. 1870-2020

There is something uncanny about the years 1980 to 1995, isn’t there. For most of us, the leitmotif was that everything started getting a little worse at about that time. To begin with, just a little, and hardly anybody noticed. But we’re noticing now!

Piketty also writes extensively about other countries, such as India, China and Iran. You’d be surprised by what he and his colleagues have uncovered, very surprised, in fact.

Piketty writes that he is an optimist. “We”, that is not only the Western countries but also countries like India Japan and Iran, were able to turn things around after WWII, dramatically reducing inequality and improving the welfare of lower and middle class people. I believe he is trying to convince us that “we” can do it again.

Libya again

29.03.2023 / pelshvalen

NATO Killed Civilians in Libya. It’s Time to Admit It.

Why, you may be asking, am I writing about Libya when everybody else is writing about Iraq?

Well, for one thing, for that very reason; because everybody else is writing about Iraq.
Secondly, while the US demolition of Iraq happened 20 years ago, that of Libya is more recent and therefore more indicative of the current foreign policy outlook in Western countries.
Thirdly: While the war against Iraq met with considerable resistance in some of the Western press, the war against Libya met almost none. The press had been house-trained: no mainstream outlet peed on expensive carpets, so the general public was basically in the dark about the lies that legitimised the bombings.
Finally, I have been appraised of information that I have not previously known about.

And that brings me straight to the rather surreal aspect of this ignominious war, which some countries, not least my own, waged against a country that was, from the 1990s on, one where even you or I might have wanted to live.

Libyan Government revenue greatly exceeded expenditure in the 2000s. This surplus revenue was invested in a sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), which was conservatively valued at $53 billion in June 2010.11 The United Nations Human Development Report 2010—a United Nations aggregate measure of health, education and income—ranked Libya as the 53rd most advanced country in the world for human development and as the most advanced country in Africa.
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report (HC 119)

My final point, that of information that has only recently been brought to my attention, is no more and no less than the above reference:

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (i.e. the UK H of C)
report on
Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options
Third Report of Session 2016–17

This report is a pretty damning document: For one thing, it explains, there was basically no truth in the claim that Gaddafi was planning to kill the protesters in Benghazi – on the contrary:

Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. (etc.) (§ 32)

… émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene. In the course of his 40-year dictatorship Muammar Gaddafi had acquired many enemies in the Middle East and North Africa, who were similarly prepared to exaggerate the threat to civilians. (etc) (§ 35)

An Amnesty International investigation in June 2011 could not corroborate allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops. However, it uncovered evidence that rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence. The investigation concluded that much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge. (§ 36)
Ibid

Another matter was that Western intervention “shifted the military balance in the Libyan civil war in favour of the rebels”, ” turned a blind eye to the supply of weapons to the rebels” and, in short:

The combination of coalition airpower with the supply of arms, intelligence and personnel to the rebels guaranteed the military defeat of the Gaddafi regime. On 20 March 2011, for example, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces retreated some 40 miles from Benghazi following attacks by French aircraft. If the primary object of the coalition intervention was the urgent need to protect civilians in Benghazi, then this objective was achieved in less than 24 hours.
Ibid

Etc, etc. Read the report if you are at all in doubt about the cynicism of the entire operation, the purpose of which was, from the very start, to orchestrate regime change, not “to protect civilians”. I really cannot fathom how the House of Commons has been allowed to publish it, if not to humiliate the French:

A further insight into French motivations was provided in a freedom of information disclosure by the United States State Department in December 2015. On 2 April 2011,Sidney Blumenthal, adviser and unofficial intelligence analyst to the then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reported this conversation with French intelligence officers to the Secretary of State:

According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.

The sum of four of the five factors identified by Sidney Blumenthal equated to the French national interest. The fifth factor was President Sarkozy’s political self-interest.

Ibid

What did we, readers of the mainstream press, know about Libya in 2011, when France’s President Sarkozy started insisting on mililtary intervention in Libya? Did we know about Libya’s reserves of oil? Did we know about the vast network of underground pipelines and aqueducts, built under his rule which brought high-quality fresh water from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara, and which, from 1991, supplied much-needed irrigation and drinking water to populous cities and farming areas in Libya’s north? This was the so-called “Great Mande-Made_River“.

Gone now. Alas, all gone.

Did the mainstream media tell us that the United Nations Human Development Report (UNDP) 2010 – a “United Nations aggregate measure of health, education and income”– ranked Libya as the 53rd most advanced country in the world for human development and as the most advanced country in Africa? A country with a free national health service, free education and free electricity?

Did the mainstream media tell us about what emerged from Hillary Clinton’s 1700 emails released by Wikileaks about her role in the US engagement in Libya?

Unlike the Iraq war, the US and NATO crimes against humanity in Libya went practically unnoticed. The NATO countries’ intervention lasted less than a year, and since no ground forces were involved (at least not officially), no lives were lost on “our side”.

Although, the consequences of the war were disastrous for Libya, for Africa as a whole, and, indirectly, for Europe, (but not – I repeat NOT – for the USA) mainstream media has not taken pains to inform the public about the real facts.

Like the Iraq war, the war on Libya in 2011 was based on lies, the most important of which was that Gaddafi was preparing genocide against the people of Benghazi. The annihilation of Libya was officially undertaken for “the protection of civilians”.

Protection of civilians, my foot.

Anger

22.03.2023 / pelshvalen

I am just a common inhabitant in a country of just five million – just one country of 195. I live in the West – i.e. the part of the world that makes up just 15 per cent, or so, of the world’s population.

Countries in the West take orders from an infinitesimal minority of people in the USA, where the rest of the 331 million have no say whatsoever in the greater scheme of things. Just like me.

I find to my surprise that I have something else in common with them: Anger.

Many people in the USA are angry and have been so for a long time. During the Trump presidency and its immediate aftermath, we even had the impression, here in Europe, that the self-defined “greatest country in the world” was on the brink of civil war.

Mainstream media no longer highlights the risk of civil war in the USA – but I’m pretty sure that the anger is still there, lurking under the relatively smooth mainstream surface. US American anger is presumably as variegated as is anger in the rest of the world. There are for instance a number of widely held views in the US that I do not share. (Now that I think of it, the European press tends to highlight the most outlandish of US popular trends. I will not mention examples now, because my goal here is to explore common ground.)

In terms of common ground, I suspect Europeans and US citizens share a growing sense of distrust of “the system”, “politicians”, “the elite”, “the press”, “the financial services” – whatever, and please do not even think of adding “the Jews”!

Now, since I dropped that word, let me make it eminently crystal clear: Being Jewish does not – NOT – mean being politically or financially this, that or the other, nor does it mean being morally or otherwise responsible for the ongoing attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. Being Jewish means no more and no less than being, for instance, Catholic or Protestant or Moslem or Agnostic (I write this notwithstanding my great admiration for the novelist Philip Roth who would have disagreed with me, maybe) or even US American.

Now, where was I? Yes. Anger. Distrust. We have been, most of us, taught since early childhood to blindly trust and honour our countries, our governments, our authorities. In Communist Eastern Europe, people have learnt to be less credulous, although they love and honour their countries no less than we love ours. But I put to you that citizens of Eastern European countries are more inured to lies on the part of “the system”, “politicians”, “the elite”, “the press”, “the banks” – whatever – than the rest of us. They are more realist.

We in the West trusted our authorities blindly, and many of us are now angry. Maybe we believed in what was impossible. Maybe “honesty” exists only in children’s books. At any rate, I, for one, have noticed with growing frequency over the past years (maybe I had previously been naive) that Government spokespersons, representatives of political parties, corporations and financial services have been scrupulously trained to lie blithely when lies are “required”, in other words in the service of their employers’ self-interest. Communications advisors are extremely well-paid, by the way, presumably to compensate for psychological damage from fears of an eternity spent in whatever hell their particular religion has in store for them.

For the record, I wish to add that honesty between people who love each other is not, definitely not, limited to children’s books. Such honesty exists, thank goodness, and is still held in high regard.

But this post is about anger, anger as opposed to peace. Because I fear that most of us do not want peace. For one thing, we do not accept the implications of peace as they are presented to us. In the case of Afghanistan, for instance, the implications of peace were that women would be horribly suppressed. And yes, women are now horribly suppressed. In the case of Ukraine, peace might mean that parts of Ukraine (the Russian-speaking parts) must be seceded to Russia, and that Ukraine will never be a member of NATO. In the case of Israel, the implication of peace would be that Israel relinquishes the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967 in defiance of “international law”. Whatever your views on these implications, there are certainly enough people who are so adamantly opposed to them, that they will prefer war to peace.

Now, I particularly dislike the way women are treated in Afghanistan. However, I very much doubt that economic sanctions, not to mention prolonged outright occupation would ever have had the desired effect on the proud Afghan men. Battering the men would never have made them see what we consider to be the errors of their ways.

My experience – but I know that many would disagree with me – is that if you beat a recalcitrant child, you may cow him, you may find him submissive, but he will hate you, deep down, hate everything you stand for, and he will not weep at your funeral, though he might weep for himself. Had we left the arrogant Afghan cats alone, they would sooner or later have come out of hiding and asked for milk, just like all cats. Then we could have bargained for women’s rights.

But we – the West (i.e. governments of the West) – are not cats, not dogs, nor even sharks. We are just plain stupid. We destroy everything we touch with our arrogance, our conceit and not least with our financial tricks and shenanigans.

As for the Palestinians: Has anyone ever been willing to go to war for them? Alas, they are on their own. Not only must they try to defend what little is left of what is actually their country (according to the UN), those of them who never fled from Israel after 1949 are treated as third class citizens. They have no petroleum, no rare-earth elements, they are hardly worth guano, i.e. shit, from an investor’s perspective. So nobody will send them guns and tanks and fighter planes with which they can defend themselves.

Not that I would want us to do so. I merely roundly condemn any country that supports and finances the oppressor, and I recommend – yes, only recommend – that other countries boycott (not sanction) Israel, as long as it flagrantly practices apartheid in contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and occupies territory to which it has no right.

Uganda is another country to which we are not sending guns and tanks and fighter planes. Yet, Uganda is harshly suppressing homosexuals. That is very regrettable. But so did we in the West until just half a century ago. Uganda must find its way. I am glad that, so far, we have not declared war on Uganda (but you never know).

Live and let live! Not war. Not sanctions. Not bullying.

We are so sure, here in the West, that our way is the best way. That our way is the only acceptable way, that we have seen the light.

I can assure you, in case you missed the point, that if there is one thing we haven’t seen here, it’s the light.