[Photo: US missiles found in ISIS stronghold in Mosul, Iraq.]

=By= Kurt Nimmo

The Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD.

The discovery did not warrant a headline on CNN or The New York Times.

“Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul,” reports Iran’s al-Alam News Network, citing a local source.

“The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war,” an Iraqi security official told an Arabic-language media outlet.

In early 2015 Qasim al-Araji, the head of the Badr Organization in Iraq, told parliament he had evidence the US armed the Islamic State, according to a report carried by the Arabic language Almasalah.

Iranian media and other sources claim US military aircraft dropped weapons in areas held by the Islamic State.

“The Iraqi intelligence sources reiterated that the US military planes have airdropped several aid cargoes for ISIL terrorists to help them resist the siege laid by the Iraqi army, security and popular forces,” Iraqi intelligence claimed in December, 2014.

“What is important is that the US sends these weapons to only those that cooperate with the Pentagon and this indicates that the US plays a role in arming the ISIL.”

In January 2015 Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said American aircraft delivered weapons and equipment to ISIS southeast of Tikrit, located in Salahuddin province.

“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” the leader of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Last February Iran’s FAR News Agency reported the Iraq Army shot down two British planes delivering weapons to the Islamic State.

Both the Islamic State and al-Nusra are in possession of US-made BGM 71E TOW anti-tank missiles.

The London-based organization Conflict Armament Research (CAR) previously reported that ISIS fighters are using “significant quantities” of arms including M16 assault rifles marked “property of the US government.”

CAR has documented a CIA-Saudi program begun in 2012 that has provided thousands of tons of weaponry to “insurgents” (jihadi mercenaries) in Syria. The weapons are shared with the Islamic State.

“Conflict Armament Research was able to trace the serial numbers of weapons recovered by Kurds battling ISIS in Eastern Syria back directly to the CIA-Saudi weapons airlift program,” notes Brad Hoff for Levant Report.

If Hillary Clinton is elected next week the restocking of the Islamic State’s arsenal and the war in Syria will continue.

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states that had donated to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia had chipped in at least $10 million, and Boeing added another $900,000 as Secretary Clinton made it her mission to get Saudi Arabia the planes with which it would attack Yemen,” writes David Swanson.

Clinton is well aware the Gulf Emirates arm and provide logistical assistance to the Islamic State.

“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote in an email to John Podesta.

Clinton did not mention Obama’s secret authorization in 2013 that armed jihadis fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The deal allowed the Saudis to arm jihadis with US weapons. It also permitted the CIA to train the mercenaries on how to use the weapons, including anti-tank missiles, The New York Times reported.

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[Graphic: Calais street scene by Harriet Paintin of Bow and Brush.]

=By= Harriet Paintin and Hannah Kirmes-Daly

Afghanis comprise a significant proportion of the Jungle’s residents. In light of a recent EU agreement with Afghanistan which means that European aid money is dependent on the Afghani government agreeing to accept 80,000 deportees, Afghanis stand little chance of being granted asylum in Europe. This man highlighted the painful contradiction felt by so many in the Jungle, that the nations responsible for so much of the violence in their country turn them away when they seek protection. So many have already had their asylum cases denied in various European countries and now expect to be deported. Their long journeys of flight and hope will end right back where they started.

The high street, once a buzzing center of activity, was deserted; the closed shops, restaurants and barber shops reduced to empty shells with broken windows lining a muddy street. The police perimeter was already firmly in place, a man cycling past with plastic bags of clothes was pulled over and interrogated. “It’s just clothes! Nothing else,” he insisted as the policeman in full riot gear roughly pulled out the contents of the bags, revealing just clothes, nothing else.

Misinformation and Confusion

French authorities claimed that 7,500 beds had been made available, that a simple registration procedure would see people onto buses to transport them to three CAOs across the country, or possibly detention centers. Three different lines for single men, families, and minors, marked out by pictograms. This registration would take place on October 24 and 25, with the demolishment of the camp scheduled for the 25th.

Women’s protest (Harriet Paintin)

This information had been made available far too late to be translated and transmitted to the many languages and residents of the Jungle, meaning that Monday morning began with an overwhelming sense of chaos, disorganization and misinformation that would come to characterize the following days. Scarce scraps of information were filtered down through various organizations on the ground and painstakingly analyzed by everyone, volunteers and refugees alike, in an attempt to understand what was happening.

As Clouchard states, “misinformation is to democracy what propaganda agencies are to totalitarian states”. In the context of this eviction the lack of information felt like not just an organizational slip-up, but a deliberate attempt to misinform and mislead people. In the confusion that ensued, people were unable to take balanced, well-informed and empowered decision about their futures; instead, they were herded onto buses that they didn’t even know the destination of.

At one point, volunteers tried to hand out maps, to enable refugees to decide between the three locations that were supposed to be on offer to them. Officials shouted back, “this is not allowed, people don’t have a choice, don’t give them a map!”

The Registration Process

Calais police registration lines (Harriet Paintin)

With a heavy media and police presence the mood was subdued and access was restricted to accredited media (500 people) and a handful of volunteer organizations. Inside, people packed up their homes and belongings in the cold, gray morning light and headed towards the police lines for registration. The long line of unaccompanied minors waited for their futures to be determined by one woman peering into their face for about 30 seconds to decide if they were under 18.

Inside the Jungle however, far from the complete chaos which everyone had been expecting, there were pockets of relative normality as those who did not want to take the buses busied themselves with their daily lives, cooking lunch for their children, playing guitar.

As for the official demolition, the police cordoned off a tiny section of the camp and invited journalists to watch as they carefully dismantled it. When the real demolition began the following day all access to the high look-out point in the camp was restricted to journalists, where they would have been able to see the bulldozers and cranes destroying houses, and countless fires breaking out across the camp.

Jungle house on fire (Harriet Paintin)

One of the most noticeable homes on fire was a beautifully constructed two-story building complete with a terrace. The inhabitants had set the house on fire themselves as a symbol of protest; they did not want their home and their memories to be destroyed at the hands of the police. As the smoke climbed into the sky, they laughed and reminisced about their past years in the Jungle. Only three people of a community of more than twenty were left, everybody else had already left, to Paris, to flats in Calais; not a single one was planning on taking the bus.

In the midst of this dehumanizing chaos there were several moments of resistance like this where people, for a brief moment at least, were able to take control of their situation and express discontent. Faced with extreme police repression and no individual rights, these actions were incredibly powerful. Individuals carried flags of their home nations up and down the line of policemen who stood stoic and expressionless in their riot gear. The women of the camp, so infrequently visible that their presence has even at times been doubted, organized themselves and protested against their treatment, calling out for “safety and dignity for all women! Underage, overage, we’re all the same! In [camps in] Paris we sleep on the streets!”

The Fire

At about 3am on Wednesday morning a huge fire started, burning all the homes and possessions left behind. A fire which quickly spread out of control throughout the camp and razed it to the ground, leaving the high street looking like a devastated ghost town.

Later, the registration area quickly descended into chaos as people were told that the last buses were leaving that afternoon. The line for minors closed early and hundreds were told to come back the next day. In the midst of this chaos and confusion the destruction of the camp continued in full force as the bulldozers and cranes moved in.

Calais Jungle burning scene (Harriet Paintin)

“It’s exactly like the scenes we have run away from, it’s just like watching our homes being burnt by the rebel forces” gasped one young man from Sudan as he gazed upon the desolation and destruction before him.

After the last buses departed, the French authorities and some media outlets reported that the camp had been cleared and the eviction was a success, ignoring the hundreds left behind. Having been turned away by the authorities for the third day running, children were ordered back into a Jungle which by this time had become an apocalyptic scene of burning buildings, toxic smoke, exploding gas canisters. They had nowhere else to go but the streets, with no information about what options are open to them, if any.

This eviction may have been dressed up as a “humanitarian effort” but the blatant contradictions between the official line of events and the reality on the ground reveals gaping fault-lines in Europe’s refugee policies. With unaccompanied minors left sleeping on the street, then by no stretch of the imagination has this been a successful operation. Rather, this is nothing but a complete failure on behalf of the authorities who are responsible for their protection. If the eviction was planned with the best interests of the Jungle residents in mind, then it would have worked out in a different way.

There has been a refugee camp in Calais since the early 1990s, and after each eviction people have returned to rebuild. Long term residents of the Jungle believe that there is nothing that the authorities can do to stop people coming and trying to reach the UK; they are confident that before long, small camps will spring up again, but without the facilities and systems of mutual cooperation and aid that people have built in the Jungle their survival will be even more precarious.

Harriet Paintin is a freelance writer and musician, and Hannah Kirmes-Daly is a freelance reportage illustrator. They work together on documenting individual stories through art and music, focusing on refugee stories. Follow them at brushandbow.com.

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Ron Ridenour
Author, Activist, Journalist

Perhaps the biggest perceived political dilemma for the world right now is what will happen in the United States, and thereby to the world, depending on which of the two becomes president. Because of this unprecedented hate-filled election campaign, many pundits consider this election to be the most important in USA history.

I have long postponed making a prediction about what could occur with either Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton as president. I also vacillated about making a prognosis regarding Barack Obama when he first campaigned for the presidency. The main reason for both hesitations have to do with the two main moral principles in my life’s political struggles for over half a century: always fight against racism-racial/ethnic/gender inequality, and against war and for peace.

What happened, though, with many of the extremely brave civil rights leaders and activists, as well as many peace activists? In the effort to gain “political influence” many went into the Democratic Party and deemed it “necessary” to support imperialist wars and the capitalist economy. This has been the case with several SNCC leaders such as John Lewis, and the Black Congressional Caucus in general, and with the independent “socialist” Sanders.

When it came to Obama’s first election campaign, it could seem that I would be abandoning solidarity with black people if I severely criticized him and opted to support no presidential candidate or a decent one with no chance of winning. And now eight years later, if I come out against Clinton, it could seem that I support an avid racist-foreign hater-sexist reality show buffoon.

Returning to 2008, I finally decided to write something about Obama just after he won the election.

“What do I feel? Justice won, justice denied; on-going pain of war, mass murder, torture, unnecessary starvation, unnecessary sickness and early death. Disappointment at not being able to cry with unrestrained gladness that , at long last, my people in kinship have achieved a political and a personal victory of such gigantic proportions. The knowledge that the joyful feeling exists for many makes me feel good in its self. The knowledge of why I can’t cry out of pure joy is most disheartening, though. The permanent war age will continue.”
~ Ridenour, Nov. 2008

And it did! Obama continued and extended the wars. In 2013, I wrote that Obama had become the worst president in US history, because of these war policies; because of his economic policies that increased corporate profits by 171% after taxes, more than under any other presidency since World War II and most assuredly the worst, because his color convinced so many blacks and progressive whites “to give the man a chance”. (Ridenour, Feb. 2013).

And now, it is a female capitalist-imperialist who will most likely take over the reins instead of the buffoon, unless…! She promises to support women gender rights won through long struggles, which the male chauvinist promises to repeal. She promises to support non-white and non-Christian minorities while her opponent castigates them. Maybe she will be better on these important issues.

What is telling, though, is that during her husband’s administration with its criminalization legislation, through their joint law firm that does the white ruling class’s bidding, and their “charity” foundation consisting of millions of dollars from wealthy Americans and foreigners seeking political favors, black people are as poor as ever and more blacks are imprisoned than ever.

What is also telling and negligibly treated by the Establishment media is that Trump states that he will curtail making regional wars and a potential world war. Because of this, Clinton actually accuses him of being a Vladimir Putin “puppet”. She seems to be saying, if you are a patriot you should stand for warring against Russia, which could escalate into a nuclear world war.

What is not presented to the public is a basic economic law that when seeking causes to policies, one must trace the money. Trump is not as dangerous as Clinton because he makes his money from domestic endeavors. He has no invested interest in imperialist-capitalist endeavors that facilitate or necessitate warring on foreign nations as does Clinton’s rich clients and supporters—Monsanto, oil and mineral industries, Haliburton, Goldman Sachs and, of course, the weapons industry.

Down to the wire, we learn even more about Clinton’s arrogant neglect of the nation’s own holy National Security by sending hundreds of thousands of emails over her private mobile telephone when she was Secretary of State, hardly an example of a trustworthy person for the presidency.

“The worse the better”

Almost no major US medium endorses Trump. The entire Wall Street capitalist class is against him. The Political Establishment of the two-branch one political-party system is against him. Most of the military and secret service elites are against him. Nearly all US’s European ally politicians and media are against him. So, from OUR standpoint there must be something good about him. “OUR” can be understood as revolutionary, radical left, or just those who do not want wars to escalate.

Trump wants NATO to be less aggressive, less expensive. He wants to curtail US’s funding 70% of its lavish budget, and no war against Russia or China. He opposes the corporate proposals for more international trade deals: TTIP, TPP, CETA …

OK, we can’t count on what he says. He lies just as does Clinton. And if he did win, he might well surround himself with a cabinet and advisors who would be pro-war, just like those Obama embraced from Bush and Clinton’s time. Nevertheless, if he does win, the European Establishment and many misguided European citizens could well become disenchanted with the United States because of this scary buffoon, and because behind him are tens of millions of scary voters many of whom support more guns and violence, more racism, sexism and plain old hatred.

With Trump in the big saddle, Europeans might begin to look for the reasons behind all this bigotry—the fact that contemporary racism is ingrained in an America founded on genocide, slavery and military interventions and wars. Europeans might also seek their own solutions to their issues rather than being captive and dependent upon a United States policeman-of-the word regime.

Today though, more Europeans than ever hope to see a particular presidential candidate win the US elections, namely Clinton. In Denmark, where I live, an August poll found that 88 % of Danes wanted Clinton. Trump received 2.3 %, an historic low for a US presidential candidate.

Some European political parties are encouraging Americans living in their land to vote for Clinton. The former anti-war Socialist People’s Party (SF) in Denmark, for example, paid for a huge ad on buses depicting Trump in a ridiculous manner and appealing for Americans to vote against him.

BBC wrote in October that most Brits look on with a “mixture of fascination and horror” as the campaign “descends into the gutter.” Chris Morris, Oct. 16, 2016:

“In Eastern Europe, in particular, Mr Trump’s flirtation with Moscow, his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his disparaging remarks about the Nato alliance have caused serious concern…A recurring theme of his campaign has been…the US should and would be prepared to walk away from existing alliances.

“Mr Trump has also taken aim at the European Union, predicting that it will ‘break up’, and supporting the Brexit campaign in the UK.”

“Hillary Clinton by contrast…is steeped in the tradition that allies in Europe form an important part of the American view of the world…[including support for] her adversarial hawkish relationship with Russian leaders.”

That is precisely why I hope for a victory for those less bellicose viewpoints, not that I could actually vote for the narcissist. My view of the US election fiasco is associated with the way I judged the UN COP 15 climate summit held in Copenhagen, December 2009, which most viewed as a “fiasco”. I worked there as one of two PR advisors for Bolivian President Evo Morales. I wrote that the summit was a “smashing success” namely because it forced many people to understand that the Establishment would not cure the climate ills it had created. (Ridenour, Dec. 2009)

“I have heard many debates in the UN where presidents condemn climate change but they never say—cowardly enough—what causes it. We say clearly that it is caused by capitalism,” President Evo Morales said in closing.

And so I hope that if Trump does win, many more people throughout the world as well as in the US will be able to understand that it is not the Man or Woman, white/black/brown/red, or Establishment political parties that can or will make a better world for us. It can only be us on the streets struggling from the grass roots that at least have the potential to stop their wars, their ingrained inequality and racism, their greed and their hatred.

If Clinton wins, it will be more difficult for that consciousness to develop. As with Obama’s first reign, it will take a long period before a protest movement will flourish, and it will take much more than protest to accomplish our common mission. I hope that progressives, traditional liberals and social democrats will see that their hopes for building a better world by supporting the Kennedys, Clintons and Obama has not succeeded, and that they will understand the need to act militantly to eliminate capitalism and its wars—that is a revolutionary view.

November 1, 2016

Ron Ridenour

is the author of six books on Cuba including: “Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn”, Cuba Beyond the Crossroads with Theodore MacDonald, and Cuba at Sea, plus other books such as "Yankee Sandinistas", “Sounds of Venezuela”, and “Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka”. He has lived and worked in Latin America including in Cuba 1988-96 (Cuba's Editorial José Martí and Prensa Latina), Denmark, Iceland, Japan, India. www.ronridenour.com; email: ronrorama@gmail.com. 

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=By= Gilbert Doctorow

Rushing to war – justified by half-truths and propaganda – is a story as old as written history and the topic of great novelists like Leo Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina offers lessons for today’s stampede toward WWIII, says Gilbert Doctorow.

Russian literature is too important to be left to professors of Comp Lit or to Slavic Departments at our universities, as is so often the case with the novel that I propose to examine here, Leo Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina. Great literature is great precisely because of its multi-layered construction and the timelessness of the issues and considerations that constitute its substance.

Like War and Peace, Karenina has been the subject of many films going back to 1911, running through the 1930s with two classic versions featuring the legendary Greta Garbo and right up to time present and the widely discussed version released in 2012.

The novel has a core triangle, the relations between the heroine, her unloved and unloving husband who is 20 years her senior, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, and her lover, Prince Alexei Vronsky, for whom she gives up everything but does not find happiness or inner peace, seeing instead that her only way out is suicide. It is about love and passion, about the basic building block of all societies, the family.

This side of Anna Karenina has been especially highlighted in the film versions, being universally appealing and not tedious in the least. Indeed, the first (silent) Garbo film was entitled Love. The novel’s basic narrative is also about the relations between the sexes. The issues surrounding feminism, aired at length throughout the development of the core plot, speak to our present day with perfect clarity notwithstanding the passage of 140 years from the time the words were written.

It is easy to understand the feeling of any film director taking in hand this magnificent novel with its splendid story line and turning literature into cinema. However, what Tolstoy produced may also be described as a piece of documentary film-making as we understand the profession today. The side plots, the relief to the main plot, are not just ballast. They are the result of the author’s going through salons and clubs in Moscow and St. Petersburg, going through the meetings of the nobility among themselves in corpore at their assemblies and individually over tea at their country estates, going through the interchanges between these landlords and their peasants over how to use the new farm machinery they have introduced and how to split up the profits, these and many other topics of the day as if with a team of cameramen and sound operators who record every word.

The whole of Russian society was “tape recorded” by Leo Tolstoy and its thinking on a great variety of subjects was set out in Karenina for our perusal.

Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for his role of public chronicler was such that he ignored the rules of the novel and continued the narration for more than 50 pages beyond the suicide of his heroine. It is to those last pages of the novel that I direct attention today, because the issues and the thinking about those issues recorded by Tolstoy parallel what we see around us today in the United States as we head into what may well be World War III.

Anna Karenina was written over the course of five years, from 1873 to 1877 and during that time the topics which predominated in the salons Tolstoy visited changed from domestic concerns like the effectiveness of the institutions of local self-government and justices of the peace introduced with the Great Reforms of the 1860s, the viability of noble estates as agricultural units in an age of railway construction and industrialization to one topic of international relations and Russia’s standing in the world.

The Slavophile movement was gathering speed and reached its culmination in the final year that Tolstoy wrote his novel, when, in the context of brutal massacres of Bulgarians, Serbs and other peoples in the Balkans seeking to cast off the Ottoman yoke, Russian civilians were volunteering in the hundreds and thousands to join their Slavic brethren for a decisive fight against the Turks.

Enthusiasm for Battle

The enthusiasm for battle in Russian liberal society, what we can the “country party,” was viewed skeptically, like any popular movement outside its control, by the tsarist authorities and their loyal supporters, whom we shall call the “court party.” This distrust on the part of authorities was all the more keen as it infringed on the monarchy’s key role of managing foreign and defense policy.

And, in the end, this distrust was well placed because the popular enthusiasm ultimately engaged the Russian imperial forces in a new war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78 which, though victorious on the battlefield, ended in a humiliating setback to Russia’s international standing when mediated by the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin.

What occurred in 1878 was not a mere historical curiosity, but instead was a “dry run” for the conflict 36 years later which we all know as World War I. In 1914, as well, the “country party” and the “court party” were divided over the inevitability and desirability of the coming war with Austria-Hungary and its ally Prussia.

If I may change labels, it was the Realists (or court party) against the Romantic Nationalists (the country party) who were under the spell of ideology. This question has been examined in magisterial fashion by historian Dominic Lieven in his recent book The End of Tsarist Russia.

In Anna Karenina, the stormy debates between conservative monarchist and progressive noble elites over what should be done in the Balkans are embodied by his characters. The second or third most important personage in the novel, Prince Vronsky, is shown departing for Serbia together with a squadron of soldiers under his protection. His enthusiasm for the South Slav cause is shown to be an accidental consequence of his loss of Anna and of all reason to live.

By the same token, the volunteer soldiers boarding their train to the south for transfer to Serbia are depicted as drunkards, failed gamblers and other marginal persons in what is a clear tip-off of Tolstoy’s own feelings about war in general and this war in particular. But there is no reason to guess, Tolstoy’s views of the forces leading to war are expressed most clearly through the voices of his alter-ego, Konstantin Levin, the forever naïve and self-questioning hero of the novel, a provincial farmer-nobleman, and his father-in-law, Prince Shcherbatsky, the representative of an older generation raised under pre-Reform values.

When history repeats itself, the parties to conflicts do not necessarily occupy the same sides of a given argument. In the 1870s, Russian liberal society was deeply moved by the notion of humanitarian intervention, virtually in the same sense as this has become a fixture of the American political establishment and driver of foreign policy since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the U.S.

The voice for humanitarian intervention in Anna Karenina is Levin’s half brother, Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, a Moscow intellectual, for whom the Pan-Slav cause has given him a preoccupation to fill his days and sense of purpose.

Below is the argumentation adduced in favor of the intervention in the Southern Balkans by the “country party” through Sergei Ivanovich. If we put aside the Christian factor, which today is so scorned in our  politically correct multiculturalism, you will find points very similar to what is today being adduced by American and European commentators in their expressions of horror over the Syrian-Russian bombing of east Aleppo and their urgent calls for humanitarian action:

“There is no question here of a declaration of war, but simply the expression of human Christian feeling. Our brothers, one with us in religion and in race, are being massacred. Even supposing they were not our brothers nor fellow-Christians, but simply children, women, old people, feeling is aroused and Russians go eagerly to help in stopping these atrocities. Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw drunken men beating a woman or a child – I imagine you would not stop to inquire whether war had been declared on the men, but would throw yourself on them, and protect the victim.”

To which, Sergei Ivanovich adds: “The people have heard of the sufferings of their brethren and have spoken.”

Levin casts the first stone against this blanket assertion: “Perhaps so,” he said evasively, “but I don’t see it. I’m one of the people myself, and I don’t feel it.”

Self-Interest for War

The old prince Shcherbatsky drives home the point: “I’ve been staying abroad and reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, I couldn’t make out why it was all the Russians were all of a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn’t feel the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was a monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I have been here, my mind’s been set at rest. I see that there are people besides me who’re only interested in the yoke of Russia, and not in their Slavonic brethren.”

They ask a peasant standing by, Mihalich, about his views on the subject. Of course, Mihalich has no views, deferring to whatever position the tsar may hold, and Levin presses on:

“That word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalich, far from expressing their will, haven’t the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people’s will?”

To this, Sergei Ivanovich responds in a way that lays bare what “public opinion” is all about. In my view, the exchange of opinions have direct relevance to where we, in American society, find ourselves today over the prosecution of our “humanitarian intervention” and “values guided” foreign policy in Syria at a moment when a great hue and cry has gone up over the killing in east Aleppo:

Sergey Ivanovitch: “let us look at society. … All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction.”

“Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing,” said the prince.

“That’s true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them.”

“Frogs or no frogs, I’m not the editor of a paper and I don’t want to defend them, but I am speaking of the unanimity in the intellectual world,” said Sergey Ivanovich, addressing his brother.

“Well, about that unanimity, that’s another thing, one may say,” said the prince, continuing: “So it is with the unanimity of the press. That’s been explained to me: as soon as there’s a war their incomes are doubled. How can they help believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic races … and all that?”

In effect, what Tolstoy was describing in these passages is precisely the “group think” of his day, when all of educated society and all the arbiters of public opinion in the print media were whipping up a pro-war fury that no one could publicly resist. So it is now, with the calls of our newspapers of record, of our major media and of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States demanding a show of force in Syria, under the innocuous terms of imposing a “no-fly zone” and setting up “safe havens for refugees,” to put a halt to the killing in east Aleppo being perpetrated by the Syrian armed forces, in close collaboration with the Russian air force and Iranian fighters on the ground.

These voices of the Western establishment make these calls, willfully ignoring the plainly stated warning of the chief of Russian operations in Syria that the newly installed air defense systems will shoot down any unidentified planes or cruise missiles entering Syrian air space, even at the price of heading us into World War III.

The Western media and politicians today are all croaking like frogs before the storm. And the American public is as ignorant about the background issues to the present crisis in Syria, about the nefarious activities of their own and allied forces in support of the Islamic jihadist rebels controlling east Aleppo, just as Mihalich was ignorant about the issues surrounding the coming Balkan war. This “ostrich effect” is the true nature of modern day isolationism in the United States.

I close this review of the highly relevant exposition of reasoning about drivers of foreign policy in Anna Karenina by quoting Tolstoy’s recommended cure for the war fever of the arbiters of public opinion:

“I would only make one condition,” pursued the old prince. “Alphonse Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia. ‘You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all’!”

“’A nice lot the editors would make!’ said Katavasov, with a loud roar, as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.”

To update this proposal, I believe that our special forces operating illegally on the ground in Aleppo for the coordination and technical support of the jihadist rebels and “moderate opposition” to President Assad will very willingly trade places with an incoming special regiment of storm troopers drawn from the likes of Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Victoria Nuland, the irresponsible loudmouths who claim to speak for the American people and who are in fact leading us to collective suicide.

Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

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