Tag: USA

Genocide Syndrome by Proxy?

~ The Koboi Project

Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.

In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism! 

To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?

The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.


Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2014/08/11/rob-rogers-makes-the-mistake-of-expressing-an-opinion-on-israel-and-gaza/

https://www.jpost.com/International/Haig-had-a-special-feeling-for-Israel

https://brownstone.org/articles/ukraine-as-a-proxy-war-conflicts-issues-parties-and-outcomes/

https://www.verywellmind.com/munchausen-by-proxy-5071840

Le Pouvoir Noir 1968 à 2023, Quel Dégringole!

~ The Koboi Project

Image after George Gallaway’s expression “the raised hand of shame covered in blood!” Please see below –

Image: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-black-power-salute-that-rocked-the-world-50-years-ago/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-vetoes-gaza-war-un-resolution-that-doesnt-stress-israeli-right-to-self-defense/
https://humnews.pk/world/us-vetoes-security-council-demand-for-ceasefire/

Ukraine: Sergy Lavrov’s View

~ The Koboi Project

Geetha Mohan of India Today conducts an incisive interview with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov about the situation in Ukraine. He explains the Russian perspective that the war is rooted in the US and West’s efforts to create a springboard against them by pumping arms into Ukraine. Regardless of one’s position on the war, it is refreshing to see the art and craft of the journalism alive and well in India. The interview is presented unedited and in its entirety. Geetha is persistent yet graceful in her pursuit of answers.

Ukraine: Two Wars, One Traditional, One Geopolitical

~ The Koboi Project

I have been struggling to rationalize my realist reading of the war with my sense of the brutality and utter irrationality of Russia’s assault on the nationals, the nation and the very nationhood of Ukraine. I even stopped posting my views on this crisis due to the imcommensurability of these two responses within myself. I understood the dichotomy but had not found the language or image by which to articulate the schism., and then I found an article by Richard Falk titled Why Ukraine?

According to Richard Falk, who is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, there are two wars going on – the first is what he describes as the “traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine” and the second – a “geopolitical war between the U.S. and Russia.” In this scenario there are two aggressors, two villans if you like. Just as as Russia is the aggressor in the traditional war, it is the U.S. that is the aggressor in the geopolitical war. He explains that “it is the prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to world peace” and that this danger has been obscured by its being treated as “a mere dimension” of the prior, ‘traditional’ confrontation.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/04/08/why-ukraine/

Ukraine: Oligarchs, Peace and Sovereignty

~ The Koboi Project

In an article titled “Was Ukraine betrayed by its own elites?,” Lee Jones, Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, outlines the forces whose interplay has led to the horrific invasion that Ukraine faces today. He implicates both Russia and the West but, ultimately lays the blame at the feet of competing Ukrainian oligarchs. He suggests that the most likely outcome, now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, is the balkanization of the nation along ethnolinguistic lines. Yet he is hopeful that, in the light of the mutual injury inflicted thus far, Russia-Ukraine negotiations might progress, leading to a compromise that will restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity (to the extent that is still possible) and secure peace. He suggests that this will involve –

  1. A Russian withdrawal from Ukraine (this might be limited with respect to the territories of the East and the South).
  2. Pro-Western Ukrainians (elites )and their pro-Russian counterparts find a more consensual way to coexist.
  3. Ukrainians stop internationalizing their internal conflict.
  4. Ukraine genuinely works towards neutrality.
  5. Foreign powers (Russia and the West) cease their meddling.

Image: https://forbes.ua/ratings/100-bogateyshikh-ukraintsev-2021-06052021-1536

https://unherd.com/2022/03/was-ukraine-betrayed-by-its-own-elites/

Ukraine: Virus and War, Together!

~ The Koboi Project
Tulsi Gabbard served as the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021 and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. She teweeted that US Biolabs in Ukraine need to be shut down.

Ewan Palmer of Newsweek notes that Gabbard has been condemned as a “traitor” and accused of being a “Russian asset” for making this post. The Republican Senator Mit Romney is reported to have said that Gabbard is “parroting false Russian propaganda” and that her “treasonous lies may well cost lives.” Nevertheless, Palmer also notes that the U.S and Ukraine have been working together since 2005 as part of the Pentagon’s Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) and that the partnership between the U.S. Defense Department and the Ukraine Ministry of Health is part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), which aims to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction following the fall of the Soviet Union. So there seems to be no question that, one way or another, some kind of biolab work is being done by the US in Ukraine.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tulsi-gabbard-labeled-a-russian-asset-for-pushing-us-biolabs-in-ukraine-claim/ar-AAV1LYt

Ukraine: Oliver Stone’s View

~ The Koboi Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iaUWtbE0Os

In this important overview of the historical divisions in Ukraine that have evolved into the present invasion by Russia. Oliver Stone explores and explains Ukraine’s legacy of nazism – the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Stephan Bandera, Mykola Lebed, Dmytro Dontsov, and the imbrication of the neo-nazi movement in contemporary Ukrainian politics. This fascist tendency in Ukraine is represented by figures and organizations like Oleg Tyagnibok, Svaboda, Dimitry Yarosh, Trizub, The Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, and the Social-National Party (SNPU).

Particularly revealing is Stone’s explication of the USA’s involvement in fostering and instrumentalizing these far-right nationalist forces in their war against the Soviet Union during the cold war and, even after perestroika, against Russia. Stone presents abundant evidence of these machinations, during the Euromaidan revolution, including the infamous phone call between the US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador.to Ukraine.- ‘Fuck the EU’! Another important revelation in this documentary is the nature and extent of rupture between Ukraine and and its Russian citizens in the East and the South.. There is, it seems, a civil war taking place, one that has been downplayed by the mainstream Western media.

Ukraine on Fire is the first of two documentaries directed by Igor Lopatonok and produced by Oliver Stone on the emerging situation in Ukraine.

Ukraine: The West Should Get Real and Honest!

~ The Koboi Project

As early as Feb 28, Major General G. D. Bakshi had set out the basic truths about this tragic conflict. While his military analysis may or may not be astute, it is the moral picture that he paints that is of the greatest significance. He salutes the bravery of Ukrainians but points out that it is immoral to press on with an unequal fight in which there will only be destruction. His most damming indictment is of the USA and the West who, for their own strategic ends, are inciting the Ukrainian to fight to the last man, while they themselves will not come into the fight directly.

Ukraine: A prescient analysis from 2015

~ The Koboi Project

Given the derth of intellect and integrity in the mainstream media here in Canada, I thought I would share a prescient analysis on the crisis (the 2014 crises) in the Ukraine by John Mearsheimer, who is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. There is no doubt that there are those in North American establishment who are, today, in the position to say to their political leaders, “I told you so!”

Have we reached that disastrous point of rupture – the balkanization of Ukraine, that Mearsheimer was hoping would be avoided?

Deja Vu: Planet of the Apes 2

~ The Koboi Project

In my pervious post titled Deja Vu: Planet of the Apes I discussed the imprint made on my mind by the violent chase scenes in the said film. This impression was revived by the recent border patrol images coming out of Del Rio, Texas. I noted in that post how this is one of two images brought forth in me, the other being that of the “historical injustices suffered by black people in the US..” Upon further reflection, however, I have come to realize that these two images are infact one and the same. Urko and his fellow gorillas are literally black, while the regressed, abject, Yahooesque humans are Caucasian. This seems to be an artistic inversion of the historical image of the American slave patrol and I suggest that it is in this very reversal that the power of these chase scenes lies.

I wonder if the authors of this filmic scenario were conscious (I would like to think they were) of the Slave Patrol predecessor of their image, and further, if they intended a progressive parody or if it was merely a reactionary pastiche. However, regardless of this authorial intent, I am convinced that this recurring image is etched into the American psyche and is sublimated in all that is now referred to as ‘structural’ in that nations institutions.

Writing on Juneteenth 2020, Phillis Coley cites historian Gary Potter’s three functions of the Southern slave patrol –
(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves;
(2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and,
(3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.

She goes on to note that the use of these patrols to capture runaway slaves was a precursor to the formal police force in America and its ethos has persisted as an element of policing role even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Image: https://www.arise.tv/white-house-condemns-border-guard-use-of-whip-like-cord-against-haitian-migrants/z

mage: https://www.tnp.sg/news/world/white-house-slams-use-horse-reins-threaten-haitian-migrants

image: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/23/1040214077/the-biden-administration-will-no-longer-use-horses-at-a-texas-border-crossing

https://spectacularmag.com/2020/06/15/police-in-the-u-s/