Hedges on Substack:

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Garvey, CounterPunch:

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

Spiegel:

SZ:

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

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

Alexander Zevin, New Left Review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Ellsberg, il Fatto Quotidiano:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berliner Zeitung:

„Mir ist das ‚Z‘ auch schon in der U-Bahn aufgefallen. Das beunruhigt mich“,  sagt der Berliner. Die Mitarbeiter der Bodo-Uhse-Stadtteil­bücherei bleiben nach erneuter Nachfrage dabei, dass das „Z“ in der Größe sich schon immer auf dem Kunstwerk befunden und nichts mit Propaganda zu tun habe. Sie schicken als Beleg unter anderem ein Foto, das aus dem Jahr 2018 stammen soll.

Es zeigt Kinder und Erwachsene, die sich um den blauen Bären vor der Bücherei mit dem großen „Z“ auf dem Bauch gruppieren. Auch auf der Internetseite ist der Bär auf einem Foto bereits mit dem „Z“ versehen. Das Grün der Bäume legt nahe, dass das Bild aus einem vergangenen Sommer stammt. Die Sprecherin Helga Schneider mutmaßt, dass es vor dem Angriff auf die Ukraine lediglich niemandem als besonders aufgefallen sei, da es den Kontext noch nicht gegeben habe.

…

Die Berliner Innensenatorin Iris Spranger (SPD) hat in einem Interview erklärt, dass das Bundesland die Verwendung des Buchstabens „Z“ im Kontext des Krieges als Straftat ahnden wird. Auch ihre Kollegen in Niedersachsen und Bayern wollen das Symbol verbieten. Der bayerische Justizminister Georg Eisenreich (CSU) beruft sich auf Paragraf 140 Nummer 2 des Strafgesetz­buches. Er verbietet die öffentlich zur Schau gestellte Billigung von Angriffskriegen, die geeignet ist, den öffentlichen Frieden zu stören.

…

Unter welchen Bedingungen die Verwendung des letzten Buchstabens des Alphabets als Straftat zu werten ist, dürfte Juristen allerdings noch Kopfzerbrechen bereiten. Ein Sprecher des Bundesinnenministeriums stellte nach den Vorstößen aus den Bundesländern bereits klar, dass der Buchstabe an sich nicht verboten sei und weiterhin legal verwendet werden könne.

Marco D’Eramo, New Left Review:

It is not frequently noted that, for over two years, Covid-19 was used to justify the complete closure of China to the outside world: a sealing off which hadn’t occurred since the Qing dynasty attempted to block the importation of opium in the 1830s. The complete disappearance of Chinese tourists from other countries was only its most visible expression. From a certain perspective, Covid was the vehicle for the (at least partial) reorientation of China’s economy towards internal consumption; though here too, it merely highlighted a tendency that had begun before Trump’s election.

…

Globalization, the Chinese trade surplus and the American deficit are often folded together in a semi-mythic narrative. The story goes that China uses part of its surplus to buy US Treasury bonds in order to finance directly the US’s trade deficit – that is to say, American shopping in China. The graph below shows that this was substantially true until 2011 (indeed, we see an exponential increase in the Chinese Central Bank’s acquisition of US treasuries in the early 2000s). Yet the tale is interrupted in 2012. From then on, the amount of federal bonds held by Beijing has not increased – if anything, it has slowly diminished. Even as it continues to accrue an enormous yearly trade surplus, China has stopped buying new American bonds, only partially renewing those it already possesses.

Almost a quarter ($7.6 billion) of US public debt is held by other countries, but contrary to popular belief, the largest holder of American debt isn’t China ($1.095 billion in January 2022), but Japan ($1.3 billion). Nor are oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE great acquirers of federal bonds; quite the opposite. Even more significant are the disproportionate amounts held by Luxembourg ($311 billion), Switzerland ($299 billion) and the Cayman Islands ($271 billion).

…

The problem nobody seems capable of resolving is the superimposition of different temporal horizons: months of fighting in Ukraine; years of fallout from sanctions; and decades of a new world order (in which the eventual role of Russia remains a mystery, with or without Putin). What is certain is that the Chinese government is taking every precaution to avoid being hit by the unravelling of globalization, knowing full well that they – far more than Russia – are the real target of the US. After the phone call between Biden and Xi on 18 March, an anchor on Chinese state television mockingly paraphrased the former’s request to China: ‘Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?’