KIM PETERSEN—I grant that Chomsky is indeed a polymath, but is he an expert on military operations? Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic (The New Atlas channel), on the other hand, are Americans steeped in militarism. Berletic is a former US marine and Ritter is a former intelligence officer for the US marines. Both of them explain the Russian strategy in shaping the battlefield. The reason for this is to minimize Russian casualties and Ukrainian civilian casualties. This is unlike American Shock and Awe warfare where “collateral damage” (as killing of civilians by US military is trivialized) is accepted to attain US military objectives.
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—For all his anti-imperialist rhetoric, Chomsky remains a controversial and deeply contradictory individual. Defining himself often as an anarchist—a form of adventuristic ultra-leftism—he is prone to criticise in harsh terms Lenin and Stalinism, that is any truly existing socialist government, be it China, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or the Soviet Union. In that way he ends up denouncing imperialism but canceling the denunciation by also attacking socialist nations under Imperialist attack. This is the “plague on both your houses” approach that is typical of many so-called “liberal progressives”. Chomsky also has a terribly naive conception of how the working class can attain power. In his book Turning the Tide, he argues that socialism can be secured in the US via the ballot box.
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CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes recently profiled Eliot Higgins, founder of the “journalism” outlet Bellingcat. Bellingcat performs a specific kind of investigative journalism – the kind that always alleges wrongdoing by official enemies of the United States and the U.K., which also happen to be the governments that fund Bellingcat. Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (https://mate.substack.com) feign surprise that 60 Minutes’ reporter Scott Pelley neglects to mention Bellingcat’s many ties to western governments.
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ERIC ZUESSE—One thing that I find quite striking is that in none of the web-pages that come up when web-searching “UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT” have I found any of them that use the word “coup” to refer to what incontestably was the coup that in February 2014 grabbed Ukraine for the U.S. (As those links show, that’s an empirical statement, a historical fact, no mere hypothesis.) Instead, all of them start with the false implicit assumption that it was instead a ‘revolution’ there, and that Russia was the aggressor against Ukraine during 2014 and seized Crimea from Ukraine, and that the Donbass (far eastern) part of “the Russia-Ukraine conflict” was (and was ONLY) a Russian invasion of that part of Ukraine, and that those two alleged ‘grabs’ by Russia had started this war between Ukraine and Russia.
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EDWARD CURTIN—While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.
There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed. It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocations.
