Propaganda War as Ukraine Business Flounders and EU Grows More Fascist

Don't laugh: This guy could manage to kill us all.

War Propaganda

An intensification of recent propaganda from Western and Israeli intelligence and media sources includes the lie that Iran is a nuclear threat to Israel (which has hundreds of nuclear weapons); that it is Iran and not Israel (which has massacred at least 40,000 but more likely, 200,000 Palestinians) that is driving the present crisis and that it is Iran that needs to exercise “restraint;” that the Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr who was assassinated by Israel a few days ago was implicated in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing of US marines; the atrocious claim that Hezbollah was responsible for a missile attack on Arab children playing football in the Golan Heights; that Iran has been “acting aggressively,” and that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was caused by a planted Mossad bomb and not a missile.

Zionist Shenanigans

Kit Klarenberg, on his Substack post, picks up on a story reported in July by Mondoweiss of an anonymous collective of tech professionals, known as Zionism Observer, who managed to shut down an “extortion” website operated by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Multiple major online hosting, domain registration and software companies were publicly pressured into purging the website.

But the website is now operational again.  

“Known as Alkasheff Gaza, the website hosts a searchable database of Palestinians, along with their names, government identification numbers, addresses, places of worship, and more. It is claimed the individuals listed spied for Hamas. This information is drawn from local municipal police files seized by IDF operatives. The resource burst into public view in May, when Zionist forces rained down leaflets on Gazans featuring pictures and names of 130 purported local spies, and a QR code for visiting an accompanying, contactable Telegram channel”.

These leaflets threatened that the IDF would publish damaging details on even more Gazans if they didn’t first call the IDF on a number provided. Some “informants and collaborators” are clearly children, some of them very young. In addition to allegations that individuals featured on the leaflets had spied for Hamas, the site threatens to supply damaging personal information on targets, including criminal records, extramarital affairs and sexual proclivities.

Klarenberg argues that the purpose of Alkasheff Gaza is psychological torture:

“Mental coercion of civilians in war zones is a brazen violation of established laws of armed conflict, and the Genocide Convention. Yet, these tactics have been a core component of IDF operations since October 2023.”

An associated interactive “evacuation” or forced displacement map for trapped Gazans from a secret Israeli military intelligence database that divided Gaza into 620 “population blocks,” was created in April 2022 possibly suggesting that the ongoing genocide has been in Israel’s pipeline for a long time.

Mobilization Crisis for Ukrainian Business

Polina Ivanova reported yesterday for the Financial Times on the shortage of manpower for Ukrainian business as a result of mobilizations (see Polinova). Her figures show that there are 11.1 mn Ukrainian men aged between 25 and 60k. Of these, 1.2 mn are already serving; 2.9 mn are living in the territories occupied by Russia so are presumably unavailable; 1.3 mn have emigrated or are living abroad; 1.5 men are disabled (many of whom, I suspect, as a result of wounds received on the battlefields). 0.6 million are described as “critical workers,” 2.8 mn are classified as self-employed and registered taxpayers and 0.9 mn are not “registered in the systems.”

She calculates that this leaves 3.7 mn still to be mobilized.

Ukraine has said it plans to mobilize as many as 500,000 although I believe that the numbers actually being mobilized are far fewer. Russia’s Minister of Defense has recently calculated that Ukraine lost 60,000 men, dead or wounded, in July 2024 alone. At best, one would safely conclude that Ukraine is losing more men each month than it is able to recruit.

Ivanova’s story cites the case of a company, Interpipe. Although half of its workforce can be exempted from military service, it still has 1,000 vacancies and cannot survive at present levels of production, given that half of its continuing workforce may still be mobilized. Men can be drafted (press-ganged) even while on their morning bus commute. Unauthorised conscription vans have been spotted outside the factory gate.

Ukraine’s business community is advocating a reform that would allow companies to pay a military fee of 20,000 hryvnia ($487) per worker per month to shield them from conscription, and/or to exempt all Ukrainian men who earn a salary above 36,500 hryvnia. According to Ivanova’s sources, Ukrainian businesses have already lost on average 10-20 percent of their workforces to conscription or emigration since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The impact of recent Russian advances and of extensive power cuts are exerting even further pressure on those who are subject to mobilization to seek exit from the country. Many are killed or arrested in so doing. The bill allowing companies to pay for workers not to be drafted would exempt around 895,000 men from military service and raise roughly 200bn hryvnia for the army.

But the proposals are very contentious and divisive. Meanwhile, the army has ordered all men to refresh their contact details and other information by mid-July. Yet, already, Ukrainians are spending between 700 mn and 2 bn hryvnia a year buying exemption documents. A possible benefit of exempting all Ukrainian men who earn a salary above 36,500 hryvnia is that it might incentivize people to leave the shadow economy (to which some 800,000 have resorted in a bid to avoid conscription), declare their income, and start paying taxes.

Europe

Conor Gallagher for Naked Capitalism (Gallagher) writes that the European Commission is putting Italy on notice for alleged “rule of law” deficiencies, which could put in jeopardy EU cohesion and recovery funds earmarked for Rome. He interprets this as a form of financial blackmail to force EU members into line behind neoliberal orthodoxy and NATO priorities. The use of such blackmail has also been in evidence in the cases of Hungary and Poland. But in the case of Poland, the “rule of law” problems disappeared when NATO enthusiast Donald Tusk was elected prime minister last year.

Meloni meeting Xi: Even highly popular leaders cannot escape the imperialist pressure.

Formally, the Meloni government is being charged with going slow on reform of strict defamation laws and on budget cuts to public media, and Italy’s public broadcaster is being criticized for not censoring an anti-fascist monologue on one of its shows.

Yet the Meloni government has demonstrated high loyalty to neoliberal objectives such as privatization, promotion of short-term worker contracts, abolition of a basic income program, a fall in the real value of wages of 2.9% since 1990 (which has accentuated emigration from Italy and required Meloni to resort to immigration of workers). The government in Rome has worked hard to keep money flowing from the EU’s Covid recovery fund and is vulnerable to EU threats to cut it off from that spigot. Italy is the largest recipient (208 billion euros) of the EU’s Covid recovery fund.

Some Italian government ministers are critical of how the economic war against Russia harms Italian interests, and of French proposals to send European forces into Ukraine, but Meloni is still a strong supporter of the proxy war in Ukraine. On the debit side, so far as Washington and Brussels are concerned, Italy is party to a bid for improved ties with Syria so as to be able to return more Syrian refugees to Syria. Washington and Brussels prefer that refugees continue to go to Lebanon and they continue to oppose Syria because it is an ally of Russia (and refused to lie down to the Western shenanigans that supported Jihadist terrorism against the Assad government).

More seriously perhaps, from the point of view of Washington and Brussels, is Meloni’s trip to China (albeit one that is very similar to one by the German Chancellor some time before), where she committed to a “one China” policy and signed some minor agreements, despite the fact that Meloni pulled Italy out of the BRI program a year ago. Were Meloni to go further down the road of a rapprochement with China, Gallagher suspects her government would be undermined by Washington.

Yet Italy needs China or some similar economic deus ex machina. Italy still faces a major energy crisis that is a consequence both of the self-imposed European sanctions on Russian oil and gas (to which Italy is increasingly driven back to) and the falling through of a plan with Algeria for Italy to be a European oil and gas hub. Plus, its trade has been negatively impacted by Houthi attacks on its vessels in the Red Sea; a planned increase in energy supplies from Algeria hasn’t worked out; and it is being punished by EU-imposed austerity for its excessive deficit, given that EU rules require a state’s debt to be no higher than 60 percent of national output, with a public deficit of no more than three percent.

The saga puts the European Union in an increasingly negative light and may serve to hasten its further fragmentation and decline.