Ukraine Updates from the New Yorker, My Comments

The following is partly from a New Yorker interview (2/27/23) with Jeffrey Sachs. The interview is extraordinary because it breaks the wall of silence from Western media about how complicit the U.S. was in instigating that war. Note how Sachs has to consistently resist the interviewer's insistence on the official line that Putin is a maniac who is solely responsible for an "unprovoked" invasion of Ukraine. Sachs very clearly recounts the provocations. 

Why does the interviewer insist on the official narrative? "[T]here will always be an 'official version' of reality--say, that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only have the best interest of their slaves at heart--which no one, neither masters nor slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insists subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event." From a description of Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), by James Scott

And if you don't believe the media are waging an information war, ask yourself when was the last time you heard about Seymour Hersh's exposee about the U.S. sabotaging the Nordstream Pipeline. There's radio silence about that too, and when it's mentioned, there's a concerted effort to discredit Hersh, the reporter who revealed the My Lai masscre in Vietnam--another inconvenient truth.

Excerpts:

"The [Ukraine] war began...nine years ago, with the U.S. participation in the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, in February, 2014—the very active U.S. role in that. We’ll only perhaps know the full extent of it when the archives are opened, decades from now. We know enough that this was why the war actually occurred....

"In late 2013, when protests against Yanukovych broke out, the U.S. took the occasion to play extremely actively in this and in ways that were rather direct, let us say—paying a lot of money to those who were leading this so-called movement and helping to finance what became a coup.

"(Interviewer) So you think what happened in 2014 was a coup?

"It was a coup, of course. It was an unconstitutional seizure of power when very violent groups, well armed, stormed the government buildings in February, 2014. [Protesters, angered by Yanukovych’s rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union, were killed by security forces after trying to occupy parts of Kyiv; afterward, Yanukovych was isolated politically and fled to Russia with the assistance of the Kremlin. I asked Sachs over e-mail for a source for his claim about the role played by the U.S. He responded, “It is public knowledge that the National Endowment for Democracy and US NGOs spent heavily in Ukraine to support the Maidan. I have first-hand knowledge of that spending.” The N.E.D. told The New Yorker that it provides funding to civil-society groups but “does not provide funding to support protests.”]....

"I’ve been an adviser economically all over the world, and I know leaders all over the world and have known leaders all over the world for many decades. I’ve seen a lot, and what I’m trying to convey is something very basic about American foreign policy, and that is that it is devastatingly based on lies and covert actions, and I see those lies all the time.

"I happened to be on a talk show the night that Colin Powell presented the U.N. testimony. There were six panelists. They went around the table, and they finally came to me. I said, “It’s lies. It’s clearly lies,” which it was. It wasn’t just wrong intelligence; it was lies cooked up to justify a war. Then I happened to know about the lies of the U.S. in Syria. You keep talking about Putin bombing people in Syria; the United States both provoked the disaster and stopped it from ending. I know that.

".... I am telling people that the narrative that we have is leading to an escalation of deaths, and it’s putting us on a path to nuclear devastation."

You might also read political scientist John Mearsheimer's 3/1/22 interview (here), which agrees. The U.S. provoked the Ukraine war.

Excerpt:

"For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that 'the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.'"

I'll remind readers that "truth is the first casualty of war." You will have no trouble finding editorials and news stories in the West about how bad the Russians are, so the above interviews very rarely see the light of day. 

When the recent stage of the war began, my niece sent me a Tweet alleging the Russians were so bad that when the Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island responded to a demand they surrender with ""Russian warship, go fuck yourself!" the Russians killed the Ukrainians. Even that was a lie (see Wikipedia here)

Finally, I'll mention my father was a soldier in World War II, in fact he was on the first wave landing in one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific, Iwo Jima, where he was wounded. I know of no one more anti-war than my father, who actively encouraged me to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war. When I was in college, he bought me a subscription to I.F. Stone's newsletter. To give you an idea of Stone's take on U.S. belligerence, and the narrative used to excuse it, his biography is entitled All Governments Lie. My conclusion, based on conversations with Dad, was that he was deeply ashamed of having participated in even a "good" war.

Update: A (suppressed) Ukrainian political scientists demonstrates that the snipers killing protesters were part of a false flag operation, and actually protesters themselves. In other words, the outrage at the elected, Yanukovich government, was manufactured. Excerpts from the link above:

:In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was 'exceptional in many ways,' and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment.

"However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been 'political....

"Among those fervently supporting Katchanovski’s appeal was renowned US academic Jeffrey Sachs. 'You have written a very important, rigorous, and substantial article. It is thoroughly documented. It is on a topic of great significance,' Sachs wrote to the scholar. 'Your paper should be published for reasons of its excellence…The journal will only benefit from publishing such a work of importance and excellence, which will further the scholarly understanding and debate regarding a very important moment of modern history.'"