Thursday, June 2, 2022
Maduro’s Success: Principled Resistance To Imperialism Pays Off
https://popularresistance.org/maduros-success-principled-resistance-to-imperialism-pays-off/
By Francisco Dominguez, Morning Star. June 1, 2022
The world has been stunned by a double wonder: Bolivarian Venezuela’s political survival and its miraculous economic recovery: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has reported that it expects the Venezuelan economy to grow for the first time since 2014, by 5 per cent, one of the highest in the region.
Venezuela’s rate of inflation has come down from something like 10 million per cent, as reported by CNBC in 2019, and described as the “biggest economic disaster in modern history” by the Washington Post in the same year, to 7.1 per cent in September 2021 and to an incredible 1.4 per cent in March 2022.
The March 2022 issue of the PSUV magazine Economia Politica y Revolucion reports that corn production, essential for arepas — Venezuela’s staple food — has increased by 60 per cent, rice 17 per cent, with an increase of non-oil exports of 76 per cent.
These developments are coupled with a strong export performance not only of oil, a sturdy revival of domestic consumption levels, abundance of the supply of all basic necessities, rise in the population’s standards of living, gradual and robust reconnection with the world economy — excepting the US — and a successful battle against the Covid-19 pandemic with one of the best performances in the region and the world — 5,716 deaths, that is, 20.1 per 100,000 inhabitants compared with 304.18 per 100,000 in the US.
All this within the context of the vicious US blockade involving over 600 nasty unilateral economic measures. Though Venezuela’s economy is recovering, it is still suffering from the consequences of US aggression since it still needs to address and reverse all the distortions caused by US sanctions.
President Nicolas Maduro’s confidence in Venezuela’s economic recovery is such that he took the decisions to condone the $70 million debt to St Vincent and the Grenadines, reduce half the size of the debt of other member countries of the Organisation of the Eastern Caribbean (OCES), and restarted the agreement with the countries affiliated to PetroCaribe with a 35 per cent discount in the price of oil.
To reduce this simply to economic confidence, however, would be misplaced since it is driven by Venezuela’s revolutionary solidarity, inspired by Hugo Chavez’s political and ethical vision whose tradition President Maduro, leading the PSUV and the Bolivarian revolution, has maintained.
None of the above would have been possible without the solid support of the people of Venezuela, especially its productive sectors, namely workers and peasants — not as atomised masses supporting the government in resisting imperialist aggression, but as conscious and active citizens organised in their class institutions.
The resistance to imperialist aggression has strengthened the relationship of the mass organisations of the people (trade unions, peasant bodies, communitarian organisations, women, youth, and so forth) with the PSUV.
The party’s authority has immensely increased while simultaneously that of the right-wing parties, especially Juan Gauido’s wing, has massively weakened. At the December 2021 regional and municipal elections, the PSUV and its allies scored a sweeping victory by winning 20 out of 23 governorships and 213 mayoralties to 120 to various right-wing oppositions.
Thus, it beggars belief that preposterous and utterly false charges have been made accusing Maduro of leading a right-wing-leaning government. The Anti-Blockade Law (October 2020) and the Law of Special Economic Zones (April 2021) have been used as a battering ram to depict President Maduro as neoliberal.
Similar charges have been levelled against the government of Cuba for setting up the special economic zone in Mariel, but also against President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua for his strategy of the popular economy, depicted as a “brand of neoliberal developmentalism.”
Evo Morales also suffered similar criticisms as being committed to a neoliberal programme based on “fiscal austerity, low inflationary growth, inconsequential agrarian reform, low social spending, and alliances with transnational capital.”
The Anti-Blockade Law and the Law of Special Economic Zones stipulate the participation of private capital in the unavoidable readjustment of the productive apparatus, required to bring about the desperately needed economic recovery.
In the context of Venezuela’s economy having lost 99 per cent of its revenues because of US sanctions, it makes economic sense to draw and harness existing sources of capital, always under the aegis of the Bolivarian state, to generate productive activity, sources of employment, and value added, all aimed at improving the population’s living standards.
However, the positive results mentioned above ought not to be exclusively attributed to these special economic laws, but, more importantly, neither the Bolivarian government, President Maduro, or the PSUV at any point since the death of Hugo Chavez, have abandoned their commitment to social justice as a central ethical tenet that guides their politics and actions. In fact quite the opposite is the case.
Imperialist-driven isolation aimed at economic collapse of socialist revolutions is an axiomatic fact of history. Lenin himself was compelled to adopt the New Economic Policy caused by the catastrophic situation brought about by the economic, political and military aggression of 14 imperialist countries between 1918-21.
As a consequence of imperialist aggression, by 1921 the USSR faced famine, huge food queues in cities caused by acute shortages, a severe decline of energy supplies, multiple peasant revolts, military mutinies, strikes, hyperinflation, black market racketeering and the collapse of the value of the rouble. With all the contextual historic, political, and economic limitations of the comparison, Venezuela — subjected to sustained US economic warfare — has confronted a similar situation of potential collapse.
At any rate, no truly neoliberal policies anywhere in the world, from the US to Sri Lanka, implemented as an emergency package to deal with a severe economic crisis have ever produced an improvement in any country’s economic performance, rise in the standards of living, expansion of the self-organisation of the mass of the people (workers, peasants, women, youth, pensioners, and the poor in general) and greater political support for the government that implemented them.
This is obvious to even the most superficial observers of current affairs in Latin America who find it difficult to deny that it is neoliberal policies that lie at the heart of the catastrophic failure of domestic oligarchies in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Mexico, Argentina to consolidate their rule, a malaise that is currently hitting the narco-state of Colombia and fascist President Bolsonaro in Brazil hard.
Joe Biden’s desperation to obtain extra sources of oil supplies led him to send a US delegation to talk directly to President Maduro — a government the US does not recognise — on at least two occasions, which have resulted in a stronger reassertion of Venezuela’s national sovereignty and a massive vindication of Maduro’s legitimacy.
Thus far these peculiar encounters have produced a very mild easing of US sanctions but a strengthening of Caracas’s demand for the full lifting of all sanctions and a formal recognition of President Maduros’ democratically elected government.
Contrast this with Europe’s abject submissiveness to Washington’s diktats. Nevertheless, Washington remains committed to “regime change” in Venezuela and continues to recognise the obsolete 2015-elected National Assembly and Guaido as “the interim President of Venezuela” — both confirmed in an official State Department statement as recently as May this year.
With the strong economic recovery presided over and led by President Maduro’s government and the PSUV, the revolution has entered a phase of deepening the transition from a rentier, oil-export-based economy, to economic diversification and import-substitution, aimed at continuing the socialist transformation of state, society and economy.
All these objectives were reaffirmed at the PSUV’s fifth national congress, held with a vibrant atmosphere in March to coincide with the ninth anniversary of Chavez’s death.
In case there is any remaining doubt about the socialist direction of Bolivarian Venezuela, there are well over four million citizens organised in the people’s militia to assuage anybody’s misgivings.
The Fight Over Land And Genetically Engineered Agriculture
https://popularresistance.org/war-within-the-war-the-fight-over-land-and-genetically-engineered-agriculture/
By Mitchel Cohen, Covert Action Magazine. June 1, 2022
War Within the War.
Ten months before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, that country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the private sale of farmland, reversing a moratorium that had been in place since 2001.
An earlier administration in Ukraine had instituted the moratorium in order to halt further privatization of The Commons and small farms, which were being bought up by oligarchs and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As documented in a series of critical reports over ten years by the Oakland Institute based in California*,* the moratorium on land sales in Ukraine aimed to prevent the acquisition and consolidation of farmland in the hands of the domestic oligarch class and foreign corporations.
The marketization of farmland is part of a series of policy “reforms” that the International Monetary Fund stipulated as a precondition enabling Ukraine to receive $8 billion in loans from the IMF.
Even amid the pandemic there has been “wide-ranging opposition from the Ukrainian public to reversing that ban, with over 64 percent of the people opposed to the creation of a land market, according to an April 2021 poll.”
Additionally, the IMF loan conditions required that Ukraine must also reverse its ban on genetically engineered crops, and enable private corporations like Monsanto to plant its GMO seeds and spray the fields with Monsanto’s Roundup. In that way, Monsanto hopes to break the boycott by a number of countries in Europe of its genetically engineered corn and soy.
It is the thesis of this essay that agricultural competition over land use between the U.S. and Russia—two gigantic capitalist countries with the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world—is a neglected but important force driving the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. government has for the last decade wrestled with Russia over who controls the energy pipelines through Ukraine into Europe, and in what currency costs for that so-called “natural” gas and oil are to be paid. At the same time, the war’s disruption of Ukraine’s wheat harvest and the historic droughts hitting the U.S.’s “wheat belt” have driven the cost of bread around the world through the roof. United Nations officials are making dire predictions concerning the world’s supply of grain.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, world food commodity prices made a significant leap in March 2022 to reach their highest levels ever, rising 12.6% in that month alone as war in the Black Sea region shocked the markets dependent on staple grains and vegetable oils. Global wheat prices rose by 19.7%, vegetable oil by 23.2%, and grains 20.4%. In Tunisia and in other countries, cooking oil, semolina, and rice have all but disappeared from grocery stores, and flour shortages have led to a run on bakeries.
In the Middle East, millions who already spend more than a third of their income on food, are being hit hardest by the war’s impact on the global food supply. Yet UN agencies have begun to divert sacks of grain that had been earmarked for other war zones to the Ukraine, leaving the people of Yemen and refugees from many areas in desperation.
In peaceful times Ukraine harvests 80 million metric tons (MMT) of grain—a category that includes wheat, corn, barley, rice and millet. Between them Russia and Ukraine supply more than 25% of the world’s wheat. Russia recently overtook the U.S. and Canada to become the leading wheat-exporting country in the world; Ukraine is the world’s 6th largest exporter of wheat.
But this year, Ukraine’s harvest will likely reach less than half the norm. “A single MMT of wheat…is enough to feed every person in Europe for about two days, or the entire population of Africa for about a day and a half.…A country like the UK could only make it up by having everyone stop eating for three years. That’s the thing about tonnes of grain: a million here and a million there and pretty soon you’ve got a real issue on your plate.”
People in France or Italy were never expecting to have any Ukrainian wheat shipped to them at all; but they are now competing against Egyptians and Moroccans, who are now suddenly looking for new sources of bread.
The grains are not only used for bread and flour, but also for alcohol, fuel, and for feeding animals. With more than half the tonnage grown in Ukraine last year never intended to be used for direct human consumption, shortages will impact other parts of the economy too.
The Communist Party of Greece points out that “the military conflict in Ukraine is the result of the sharpening of competition between the two warring camps, primarily focused on spheres of influence, market shares, raw materials, energy plans and transport routes; competition which can no longer be resolved by diplomatic-political means and fragile compromises.”
How much of the predicted food system collapse is a result of the war’s disruption of grain harvests, and—a question few in the U.S. mainstream media are asking—how much are skyrocketing food prices caused by plain old capitalist rivalry between two of the main grain-exporting countries of the world?
Competing Systems For Growing Crops
U.S. agriculture relies on two main inputs: migrant farm labor and the monocropping of genetically engineered corn, soy, and other crops designed to tolerate—and thus be saturated with—Monsanto’s cancer-causing herbicide Roundup. The government’s regulatory process is broken, if it ever worked properly at all: Corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Novartis, BASF and the other pesticide and pharmaceutical manufacturers are allowed to mask the truth about the dangers of their products.
They are facilitated in this by the complicity of federal (and global) regulatory agencies, allowing them to intentionally thwart the Precautionary Principle. Where the introduction of a new product or process whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown, that product or process should be rejected. We need to support the development of international movements opposing the subservience of government agencies to the giant corporations.
Six years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to seize economic opportunities around the growing of food by opposing genetically engineered agriculture and Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s most widely used herbicide; he initiated a program to eliminate pesticides and genetically engineered crops from Russia’s fields. The goal was to out-compete the U.S. and Canada as the world’s number one and two grain exporters by going organic, which mattered especially in Europe with its stricter laws regarding the import and planting of GMOs.
Monsanto had planned to open its first plant in Russia, but in June 2016 Russia’s State Duma adopted a government bill banning the cultivation and breeding of genetically modified plants and animals, except as used for scientific research purposes. A few weeks later, Putin signed federal law No. 358 prohibiting cultivation of genetically engineered crops. The law also made it illegal to breed genetically engineered animals on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Putin had said he envisioned a future in which Russia would become “the world’s largest supplier of ecologically clean and high-quality organic food.” He called on the country to become completely self-sufficient in food production: “We are not only able to feed ourselves taking into account our lands, water resources; Russia is able to become the largest world supplier of healthful, ecologically clean and high-quality food which the Western producers have long lost, especially given the fact that demand for such products in the world market is steadily growing.”
The 2016 laws were designed to implement Putin’s earlier proposals “to protect the Russian market and consumers from GMO products, as their use could have unforeseen consequences.”
As reported in Farmers Weekly in June 2015, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich announced that Russia would not use GM technology to increase productivity in agriculture. “Russia has chosen a different path. We will not use these technologies,” Dvorkovich said.
As a result of this decision, Russian products will be “some of the cleanest in the world in terms of technology use,” Dvorkovich continued. A bill for a full ban on the cultivation of GM crops is currently making its way through the Duma.
Farmers Weekly continues: “Russian agriculture minister Nikolai Fyodorov also believes Russia must remain a GM-free country. At a meeting of deputies representing rural areas organized by United Russia, he said the government will not ‘poison their citizens.’” United Russia is Russia’s largest political party, holding 2/3 of the seats in the state Dumas.
This was a far different response than provided by the government of Ukraine. Despite large protests against GMOs and the foreign corporate land grab, and despite the fact that Ukrainian law had prohibited private sector farmland ownership, Ukraine’s government negotiated a multi-billion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund that stipulated a removal of the blocks to GMO production that was “transforming millions of pristine acres into [a] poisoned wasteland. Eco-genocide for profit. Monsanto’s dirty hands are hugely involved.”
Ukraine’s agricultural success is crucial for its economy and ability to reduce its dependence on Russia, the New York TImes explained in May 2014. The Times continued:
““Western interests are pressing for change… As part of (an IMF loan agreement), the country’s government must push through business reforms that” let agribusiness and other corporate sectors operate freely.
In a recent article for The Real Agenda News, Luis R. Miranda takes it a step further: “Big multinationals want to exploit Ukraine’s potential. Especially Europe’s richest farmland.”
In retaliation for Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis back in August 2015, Russia extended its list of countries that it would subject to a food import ban. Far from the sanctions hurting Russia’s economy, as Monsanto and other pesticide-producing corporations expected (and hoped), over the decade Russia succeeded in its plan to become the world’s number one exporter of wheat and other grains. Putin claimed that Russia’s success in that regard was due in part to the preference of much of the world for non-GMO food.
The United States, on the other hand, uses genetically engineered crops (and now trees), and the pesticides and fertilizer they require, as weapons, breaking up the indigenous communities in Mexico, for example, disrupting the economies of other countries and forcing them into dependency. Even U.S. food aid to the victims of the tsunamis in the South Pacific and to earthquake victims in Pakistan and Haiti was genetically engineered and saturated with pesticides. One result of the U.S. “police action” in Somalia in 1992 was the imposition of thousands of acres of genetically modified cassava, uprooting local communities.
In the last 30 years, the takeover of domestic agriculture by GMO crops has been part of U.S. war efforts. Following the U.S. “shock-and-awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003, L. Paul Bremer—the U.S.-appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq—issued Order 81. Officially titled “Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law,” the edict prohibited farmers from saving seeds from genetically engineered crops, and made it illegal for them to replant those seeds, thereby serving as enforcer of Monsanto’s patents.
Bremer’s edict was part and parcel of the IMF’s “structural adjustment program” (SAP)—the subject of major protests in Ukraine 11 years later in 2014. The IMF’s SAPs mandated the purchase and planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds as part of its requirement before allowing for the ending of military hostilities, opening up Iraqi agriculture to the cultivation of GMO crops.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the author of much of U.S. foreign policy, portrayed American aid this way: “To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason.” For Kissinger, the withholding of food as well as its selective distribution is to be used as a weapon in the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives.
And so, the United States systematically dumps cheap genetically engineered products saturated with pesticides on foreign markets, undermining local producers and forcing them to purchase the patented seeds from the company manufacturing them, along with the pesticides needed to kill off the plants’ weedy competitors. Uprooted from their lands, local producers become dependent on the United States and its corporations, and many try to flee across the border to the United States.
In his 2001 book, A Cook’s Tour, chef Anthony Bourdain presented a very unexpected take on Kissinger, one worth savoring:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
One note on Milošević and Kissinger: As brilliant a quote as this is by Anthony Bourdain, to compare Milošević with mass-murderer Henry Kissinger is an error. Milošević was posthumously cleared of all crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which after his death ruled in 2016—contrary to years of U.S. and particularly Germany’s denunciations—that there was no evidence that Milošević had “participated in the realization of the common criminal objective” and that he “and other Serbian leaders openly criticized Bosnian Serb leaders of committing crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing and the war for their own purposes” during the Bosnian War.
With the advent and proliferation of genetically modified crops in the 1980s—a technology intimately tied to the widespread application of pesticides and in particular Monsanto’s Roundup—the tentacles of globalization expanded outward into control of the world’s food supply. Those private commercial patents were (and continue to be) enforced by U.S. military power.
And so, Leticia Gonçalves, for ten years the head of Monsanto’s operations in Europe and the Middle East, was not worrying over the new Russian anti-GMO and pesticides laws. “We still believe that Ukraine and Russia both are long-term opportunities for our business and we want to make sure we are in a position to accelerate our business growth despite the short-term geopolitical and macroeconomic challenges,” she said.
Such longer term strategic views are not usually part of U.S. thinking; they might more readily be associated with China’s command-economy strategists, who plan ahead for 20, 50, and even 100 years. And yet, here we see a shift within capitalist planning. Today, Gonçalves oversees leading GMO exporter Archer Daniels Midland’s ancient grains, seeds and edible beans, and is a member of ADM’s Executive Council.
Monsanto Is The Devil And The Devil Must Be Slain. But It’s Not The Only One
In the U.S., powerful figures such as Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, former President Barack Obama, and current President Joe Biden have rejected the demands of the anti-GMO coalitions.
Fed up with the pharmaceutical/agribusiness company lies, movements like “Millions Against Monsanto,” networks like the “Organic Consumers Association,” dynamic “artivists” such as Rev. Billy and his “Church of Stop Shopping Choir” (whose performances of “Monsanto Is the Devil” galvanized New York audiences for weeks on end), and the movement for community-supported agriculture coalesced family farmers and anti-corporate activists.
They exposed the government agencies’ revolving door—an arrangement whereby the giant agriculture and pharmaceutical corporations place their hirelings onto U.S. regulatory boards such as the Food and Drug Administration. Monsanto’s lackeys in government write their own laws and block even tepid demands for labeling of GMO products, at Monsanto’s behest.
Billionaire Bill Gates—a major investor in Monsanto and proponent of genetic engineering (as well as experimental vaccines in the so-called “Third World”)—seized the opportunities he envisioned (and created) regarding a future of massive food shortages in global grain production, that we are seeing today; Gates began buying up acre after acre of farmland on which to grow GM crops.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used taxpayer money to stomp all over the world promoting Monsanto’s controversial GM seeds; she mouthed the industry’s talking points as though they were gospel. The Clinton State Department intervened at Monsanto’s request “to undermine legislation that might restrict sales of genetically engineered seeds.”
Clinton was so gung-ho in promoting GMOs that Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott called her department “the de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry.” Meanwhile, Gates has become the largest private individual owner of farmland in the U.S. and Clinton, while losing her campaign for the U.S. presidency to Donald Trump in 2016, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from GMO manufacturers for speeches she delivered.
Key pieces of information regarding the U.S. government’s worldwide pressure tactics (including the use of its military) on behalf of Monsanto’s patented seeds exploded onto the internet via thousands of cables “liberated” by current political prisoner Julian Assange. The cables Assange published—some of which I have described in more detail in “‘The World’s Most Evil Company’ May Lose a Few Court Fights—But Will Keep On Poisoning and Killing Millions of People with Its Carcinogenic Pesticide ‘Roundup,’”—revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto and the other biotech corporations, twisting arms of government regulatory bodies throughout the world, along with planting its agents in movements to squelch opposition to GMOs.
The cables showed U.S. diplomats bringing financial, diplomatic, and even military pressure on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech corporations.
Where Is Nestor Makhno Now That We Really Need Him?
Back in Europe, Monsanto’s Leticia Gonçalves was counting on Russia being forced to yield its opposition to Monsanto and support for organic agriculture; inter-capitalist rivalries and the U.S. military (and its control of NATO) would put the squeeze on Putin’s anti-Monsanto bluster, and make the world—or at least Russia—safe for Monsanto’s Democracy. And it appears she was right. By the end of February 2017, less than two years after Russia banned the cultivation of genetically engineered plants and animals, the first Monsanto factory was nevertheless allowed to open in the Kirov region near the village of October (Zuyevsky District).
“We have been waiting for Monsanto on the Kirov lands for a long time and have been working systematically for several years,” said marketing expert Igor Vasilyev, who now serves as the Governor of the region. Its former governor, Nikita Belykh, is a “liberal” in the Russian context—a long-time critic of Vladimir Putin and at least in theory a supporter of more human rights in Russia.
But Belykh allowed himself to be appointed by Putin to government office in the Kirov area 500 miles away from his home in Moscow where, according to Russian scientist Boris Ikhlov, writing from the State University of Perm, Belykh brokered the deal allowing Monsanto to set up shop in Russia. Belykh was arrested in 2016 and has been serving an eight-year prison sentence for accepting a large cash bribe.
A number of Russian intellectuals understandably merge their opposition to Putin’s rule with involvement in “human rights” groups, but they do not stop there. They also bring into the ideological mix ardent support for neoliberal “progress,” as exemplified by their applause for Monsanto and the genetic engineering of agriculture.
According to Ikhlov, the liberal intelligentsia “sought to re-assure the Russian people that GMOs are safe and challenged the government’s anti-GMO policies.…Russian supporters of GMOs cite a list of hundreds of works in which the harmlessness of GMOs is allegedly proved. The list is on the Internet, but there is no text of any of these works. I wrote a letter to the Italian authors of this list, asking them to give me a link where I could find out more about each scientific article from the list. The Italians gave me a link, and it turned out that in this list there is not a single work dedicated to proving the harmlessness of GMOs.”
Ikhlov illustrates the case of a member of the board of a main “human rights” organization funded by U.S. “donations,” who was a proponent of expanded civil liberties in Russia and who at the same time tied his critique of Putin’s human rights policies to supporting Monsanto’s biotechnologically engineered seeds and privatization of agriculture. (I have removed his name and affiliation, as well as other examples that Ikhlov provided, awaiting independent confirmation.) Many liberal Russian intellectuals, Ikhlov says, ended up supporting the Zelensky government in Kyiv, which today has strong ties to Monsanto despite public protests for many years against it.
Convoluted? Yes. Especially as the politics of neoliberalism express themselves through what at first may seem to be “human and scientific progress” in biotechnology and opposition to centralized political rule. So how can we disentangle these threads? Looking at the reality of the institutions of global capitalist domination—imperialism—should help.
“The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) is [sic] helping biotech run the latest war in Ukraine,” writes Christina Sarich in Natural Society. “Make no mistake that what is happening in the Ukraine now is deeply tied to the interests of Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and other big players in the poison food game.”
Exposed by the California-based Oakland Institute in 2014, the World Bank and IMF provided a loan of $17 billion to Ukraine.
Hidden from mainstream media exposure in the U.S., the World Bank and IMF loan “has opened up Ukraine to major corporate inroads,” writes Joyce Nelson in The Ecologist. “Loan conditions are forcing the deeply indebted country to open up to GMO crops, and lift the ban on private sector land ownership. U.S. corporations are jubilant at the ‘goldmine’ that awaits them.”
It is worth reading more from this 2014 report in *The Ecologist—*years before Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. The information provided is shocking—and unreported here in the U.S. While some in the U.S. understand that the 2014 political battles in Ukraine were over the expansion of NATO and control over energy pipelines to Europe, there was, and still is, an equally large but hidden global battle over GM grains, land ownership and usage, and “food pipelines.”
In late 2013, the then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a European Union association agreement tied to the $17 billion IMF loan, whose terms are only now being revealed.
Writing in The Ecologist in September 2014, Joyce Nelson examines the IMF-Ukraine loan packages in great detail. The next few paragraphs below are taken directly from that report:
Instead, Yanukovych chose a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a discount on Russian natural gas. His decision was a major factor in the ensuing deadly protests that led to his ouster from office in February 2014 and the ongoing crisis.
According to the Oakland Institute, “Whereas Ukraine does not allow the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, Article 404 of the EU agreement, which relates to agriculture, includes a clause that has generally gone unnoticed: it indicates, among other things, that both parties will cooperate to extend the use of biotechnologies.
“There is no doubt that this provision meets the expectations of the agribusiness industry. As observed by Michael Cox, research director at the investment bank Piper Jaffray, ‘Ukraine and, to a wider extent, Eastern Europe, are among the most promising growth markets for farm-equipment giant Deere, as well as seed producers Monsanto and DuPont.’”
Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tons of corn.”
Monsanto’s “Non-GMO” $140m Investment
The excerpt here from Joyce Nelson’s Ecologist article, concludes with: In May 2013, Monsanto announced plans to invest $140 million in a non-GMO corn seed plant in Ukraine, with Monsanto Ukraine spokesman Vitaliy Feschuk confirming that “We will be working with conventional seeds only” because “in Ukraine only conventional seeds are allowed for production and importation.”
But by November 2013, six large Ukrainian agriculture associations had prepared draft amendments to the law, pushing for “creating, testing, transportation and use of GMOs regarding the legalization of GM seeds.”
The Oakland Institute report and Nelson’s story in The Ecologist are devastating, and reveal what (to us) are the intense intra-capitalist rivalries that have exploded into open warfare in Ukraine.
Nor does it end there. The U.S. non-profit Food & Water Watch combed through five years of cables from 2005 to 2009 released by WikiLeaks revealing U.S. State Department pressuring governments worldwide on behalf of Monsanto and other biotechnology corporations like DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow. On May 14, 2013, it released its report, “Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.”:
“The U.S. State Department has lobbied foreign governments to adopt pro-agricultural biotechnology policies and laws, operated a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology, and challenged commonsense biotechnology safeguards and rules – even including opposing laws requiring the labeling of genetically-engineered (GE) foods.”
According to consortiumnews.com (March 16, 2014), Morgan Williams is at “the nexus of Big Ag’s alliance with U.S. foreign policy.”
Besides being president and CEO of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council, Williams is Director of Government Affairs at private equity firm SigmaBleyzer, which touts Williams’ work with “various agencies of the U.S. government, members of Congress, congressional committees, the Embassy of Ukraine to the U.S., international financial institutions, think tanks and other organizations on U.S.-Ukraine business, trade, investment and economic development issues.”
The U.S.-Ukraine Business Council’s 16-member Executive Committee is packed with U.S. agribusiness companies, including representatives from Monsanto, John Deere, DuPont Pioneer, Eli Lilly, and Cargill.
The Council’s 20 “senior Advisers include James Greene (former head of NATO Liaison Office Ukraine); Ariel Cohen (Senior Research Fellow for The Heritage Foundation); Leonid Kozachenko (President of the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation); six former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, and the former ambassador of Ukraine to the U.S., Oleh Shamshur.
Shamshur is now a senior adviser to PBN Hill + Knowlton Strategies—a unit of PR giant Hill + Knowlton Strategies (H+K). H + K is a subsidiary of the gargantuan London-based WPP Group, which owns some dozen big PR firms, including Burson-Marsteller (a long-time Monsanto adviser).
Hill + Knowlton, one might recall, orchestrated the phony “incubator” testimony to Congress in 1990, which became the pretext for sending thousands of U.S. soldiers into battle and bombing the hell out of Iraq. The PR firm invented the infamous yellow ribbon campaign, to whip up support for “our” troops. In pure advertising terms, the war campaign was a public relations masterpiece. First 15-year-old Nayirah’s unchallenged testimony about having witnessed babies pulled from incubators and left on the floor, then the yellow ribbon campaign, and then the claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia—all fabricated by the PR firm, with the support of the U.S. government.
As I wrote at that time in HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS, 101: Yellow-Ribboning the Lies: How George Bush Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to America, Hill + Knowlton was paid between $12 million (as reported two years later on 60 Minutes) and $20 million (as reported on 20/20) for “services rendered” for its Iraq fictions. The group fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a phony “human rights agency” set up and funded entirely by Kuwait’s emirocracy to promote the war to a gullible U.S. population.
Yet, even though these facts are now well known, the myths persist, and are reinforced in order to continue the perpetual drumbeat of war against Iraq, and now against Russia and Ukraine. (“Oh, but this time it’s different,” we’re told.) A 2003 HBO “behind-the-scenes true story” of the Gulf War never makes clear that the incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq.
“Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who co-wrote Live from Baghdad. As he explained to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), ‘That story turned out to be false because those accusations were made by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of information and were never proven.’ Unfortunately, HBO viewers won’t know that when they see the film.”
“[W]hen Hill + Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American public, the owners of this highly effective propaganda machine were residing in another country,” the United Kingdom, writes Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. “Should this give some pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a certain potential for the future exercise of global political power…. the power to manipulate democratic political processes through managing public opinion”?
Hill + Knowlton demonstrated 31 years ago that, when it comes to facts, the truth can be bought and sold to the highest bidder regardless of the consequences for U.S. soldiers, Iraqi civilians and indeed the idea of whether real democracy could exist under such manipulative circumstances.
Hill + Knowlton Strategies
Joyce Nelson continues in The Ecologist, noting that on April 15, 2014, Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper published an op-ed piece by H+K assistant consultant Olga Radchenko. The piece railed against Russian President Vladimir Putin and “Mr. Putin’s PR machine” and stated that
“Last month [March 2014—a month after the coup], a group of Kiev-based PR professionals formed the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, a voluntary operation aimed at helping to communicate Ukraine’s image and manage its messaging on the global stage.”
The PBN Hill + Knowlton Strategies website states that company CEO Myron Wasylyk is “a Board member of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council,” and the company’s Managing Director/Ukraine, Oksana Monastyrska, “leads the firm’s work for Monsanto.” Monastyrska also formerly worked for the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.
According to the Oakland Institute, the terms of the World Bank/IMF loan to Ukraine have already led to “an increase in foreign investment, which is likely to result in further expansion of large-scale acquisitions of agricultural land by foreign companies and further corporatization of agriculture in the country.”
Nelson concludes her absolutely crucial 2014 investigative report in The Ecologist with the following prescient warning:
“Now the company is involved in fomenting a Cold War 2 or worse, and on behalf of Monsanto—recently voted the ‘most evil’ corporation on the planet. That’s something to recall in the midst of the extensive mainstream media demonizing of Putin.
War
Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine has both obscured and heightened the competition between the GMO/non-GMO modalities for the export of grains and the use of vast acreage of land for GMO cultivation, just as it is a direct outgrowth of the more obvious fight between the U.S. and Russia over who controls the energy pipelines to Europe.
One important consequence of the U.S.’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the administration of sanctions on Russia accepted by many countries in Europe, but not in Asia or South America—is the driving up of the costs of fuel, fertilizer, pasta and bread throughout the world, as well as increasing farmers’ economic insecurities which threaten consistent and dependable food production. Add to that, perhaps, the recent explosions, fires, and plane crashes at nearly two dozen food processing facilities across Canada and the U.S.
Also driving up prices in the U.S. are large, sudden and unexpected mandates reducing available railroad transport of nitrogen fertilizers, diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) and other farm-related materiel, just in time for spring planting season.
Russia, which manufactures much of the world’s fertilizer (estimated at 25%), derives it—along with the energy pipelined to Europe—from fracked “natural” gas. Fracking—banned now in New York State, but not in Pennsylvania or in other states—is as environmentally destructive in Russia as it is everywhere else.
There was a moment a few years ago when things might have gone differently when, along with the marketing of organic foods, came opposition to the use of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides (part of the definition of what in Europe is meant by what it means to be “organic”). But with Russia now as fully invested in “mainstream” corporate agricultural technology as the U.S., that hope is greatly diminished.
Sanctions’ Unexpected Consequences
On March 27, 2020, Russia’s Minister of Agriculture signed Order #160 that establishes a process for registering genetically engineered (GE) events for feed use “making it possible for those events to be imported after registration.”
However, the existing mechanism for registration of GE products for food use is still in effect. As of October, 2020 Russia continues to ban cultivating and breeding GE plants and animals.
Still, in Russia, just as it is in the U.S., the ideology of industrial modernization is disguised as “progress.” Individuals and social movements are portrayed as “anti-progress,” which trivializes opposition to the imposition of the IMF’s neoliberal structural adjustment programs. Today in Russia food regulation is virtually non-existent. Sausages, fish, mineral water, wines, chocolate and even bread are adulterated. Diabetes is rampant. And the liberal intelligentsia use the cover of “scientific progress” to dispense support for Monsanto and its genetically modified agriculture—a hallmark of the IMF’s structural adjustment programs.
United Nations World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley, who oversees international aid to refugees, warns that his agency is out of money. “We need a billion dollars for the next six months and we have just a little over 10 percent of that,” he warns.
That is an amount that the wealthier countries of the world could make up in a heartbeat … if they really cared about the suffering of people in Ukraine, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. It is chicken feed compared to the amounts President Biden has asked Congress to provide. They could end this war (and most wars, such as the bombing of Yemen) on the spin of a dime, instead of perpetuating it.
But they would rather keep the fight going over who controls the energy pipelines to Europe, as well as whether to allow genetically engineered crops in Ukraine—among other decisions and actions that Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. have been dancing to.
In June 2020, “the IMF approved an 18-month, $5 billion loan program with Ukraine,” writes the Bretton Woods Project. The Ukraine government lift[ed] the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands, after sustained pressure from international finance institutions (see Observer Winter 2019). Olena Borodina with the Ukrainian Rural Development Network commented that, “the agribusiness interests and oligarchs will be the primary beneficiaries of such reform…[This] will only further marginalize smallholder farmers and risks severing them from their most valuable resource.”[61]
Ukraine saw several large protests against the privatization of its land and agriculture.
A bill lifting the moratorium was passed in an emergency Parliamentary session in March. According to a May press release by U.S.-based think-tank the Oakland Institute, this coincided with mandatory Covid-19 stay-at-home orders in place across the country, “effectively quelling potential protests or demonstrations.”
U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia reflect the return of U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s geo-political Cold War strategems—what he termed the “Grand Chessboard.” While Ukraine’s Zelensky government welcomed the IMF and World Bank’s stipulations insisting on the growing of Monsanto’s GM crops, it is not clear at the time of this writing how tightly Putin and the Russian Duma are willing to chain Russia to existing relations with Monsanto/Bayer and the technologies of the genetic engineering of agriculture.
On the one hand, the war has driven Russia further away from its prior anti-GMO policies, even though one could surmise that its new relationship with Monsanto would be negated by the sanctions and push Russia back into the “organic food” direction. But the Russian government seems now willing to forego its potential market for organic crops and energy in Europe, blocked by the sanctions, and pivot to China.
China has been driven closer to Russia as a result of the war in Ukraine—especially as the potentially huge market opens for Russia’s products there and in other Asian countries which do not claim the same strictures on how food is grown.
As I had written earlier, it is complicated, with several different forces at play. We never hear about the Oakland Institute’s May 2020 analysis in U.S. mainstream corporate media, nor even on some erstwhile “Left” media like Democracy Now. Who would know, in the U.S., that “on April 28, 2020, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the sale of farmland in Ukraine, lifting a moratorium that has been in place since 2001. This bill is part of a series of policy reforms upon which the IMF conditioned its $8 billion loan package.
“Amidst an ongoing economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented street protests against the lifting of the moratorium by Ukrainians who are overwhelmingly opposed to the law.”
The Oakland Institute concludes that “opening the sale of land will benefit Western agribusiness interests and oligarchs who will now further consolidate ownership of land and intensify large-scale, industrial agriculture in ‘Europe’s Breadbasket,’ at the expense of Ukrainian farmers. While conditionalities accompanying Western foreign assistance are common practice, the way Ukraine has been forced to put its land for sale has no precedent in modern history.”
Meanwhile, the World Food Program’s David Beasley’s appeal to push the politics aside to help the world’s children is especially gut-wrenching…and ignored, unless it serves some immediate ideological purpose: “Don’t make us make decisions between taking food from the children in Ukraine to the children in Yemen,” Beasley pleads. But that is exactly what the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine sectors of the world’s capitalist class are doing.
DHS ‘Concerned’ Over Nazis Returning To US After Fighting In Ukraine
https://popularresistance.org/dhs-concerned-over-nazis-returning-to-us-after-fighting-in-ukraine-why-isnt-the-media/
By Alexander Rubinstein, The Grayzone. June 1, 2022
Why isn’t the media?
Us Corporate Media Has Provided Glowing Coverage To Paul Gray, A Notorious American White Nationalist Fighting In Ukraine. A DHS Document Warns He’s Not The Only Us Fascist Drawn To Kiev.
As the United States undergoes a national mourning process over a spate of mass shootings, American white nationalists with documented histories of violence are attaining combat experience with advanced US-made weapons in a foreign proxy war.
That’s according to the Department of Homeland Security, which has been gathering intelligence on Americans who have joined the ranks of the more than 20,000 foreign volunteers in Ukraine.
The FBI has indicted several American white nationalists associated with the Rise Above Movement after they trained with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and its civilian wing, the National Corps, in Kiev. But that was almost four years ago. Today, federal law enforcement has no idea how many US neo-Nazis are participating in the war in Ukraine, or what they are doing there.
But one thing is for certain: the Biden administration is allowing the Ukrainian government to recruit Americans – including violent extremists – at its embassy in Washington DC and at consulates across the country. As this report will show, at least one notorious extremist fighting in Ukraine has received extensive promotion from mainstream media, while another who is currently wanted for violent crimes committed in the US was mysteriously able to evade FBI investigators looking into war crimes he previously committed in Eastern Ukraine.
According to a Customs and Border Patrol document released thanks to a May 2022 Freedom of Information Act request by a nonprofit called Property of the People, federal authorities are concerned about RMVE-WS’s, or “racially-motivated violent extremists – white supremacy” returning to the US armed with new tactics learned on the Ukrainian battlefield.
“Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azov Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist white supremacists to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia,” the document states. “RMVE-WS individuals in the United States and Europe announced intentions to join the conflict and are organizing entry to Ukraine via the Polish border.”
The document, which was drafted by Customs and Border Protections, the Office of Intelligence, and other Homeland Security sub-agencies, contains write-ups of interviews conducted by law enforcement with Americans en route to Ukraine to fight Russia.
One such volunteer interviewed in early March “admitted to contacting the Georgian National Legion but decided against joining the group as they were accused of war crimes,” according to the document. Instead, the volunteer “ hoped to obtain a work contract with the Azov Battalion.”
That interview was conducted nearly a month before additional war crimes committed by the Georgian Legion were reported by The Grayzone. However, the volunteer’s allegation may also refer to the illegal execution of two men who had attempted to break through a Ukrainian checkpoint, or an additional, unreported crime known to insiders within volunteer networks.
One key “intelligence gap” listed in the document speaks to the US government’s complete lack of oversight in the proxy war it is sponsoring in Ukraine. NATO arming campaign which has offered no assurances that Western weapons won’t fall into the hands of Nazis. “What kind of training are foreign fighters receiving in Ukraine that they could possibly proliferate in US based militia and white nationalist groups?” the document asks.
Property of the People shared the document with Politico, which sought to downplay and even discredit its explosive contents by inserting the caveat that “critics say” the Department of Homeland Security document “echoes one of the Kremlin’s top propaganda points.”
But as this report will illustrate, the presence of hardcore American neo-Nazis in the ranks of the Ukrainian military is far from a deception cranked out by the Kremlin’s propaganda mills.
From Fascist Street Brawler To Volunteer Fighter In Us-Backed Unit
Among the most prominent American white nationalists currently serving in the ranks of the Ukrainian military is Paul Gray. The US military veteran has spent almost two months fighting among the Georgian National Legion, a Ukrainian military outfit that has been celebrated by US lawmakers and has committed multiple war crimes.
Besides having served in the US Army, Gray is a veteran of various street brawls against leftist groups in the US. This April, he was shuffled to a hospital in “an undisclosed location” in Ukraine for wounds sustained in combat. This time, his adversaries were not masked members of Antifa; they were soldiers in the Russian military.
To be sure, Paul Gray is not just some angry suburban dad glibly labeled a fascist by the liberal media because he delivered an off-color rant at a parent-teacher conference. He is the real deal: a former member of several bona fide fascist groups including the now-defunct Traditionalist Workers Party, American Vanguard, Atomwaffen Division, and Patriot Front.
Gray is also a former soldier of the 101st Airborne Division with a Purple Heart and multiple deployments to Iraq who was eager to impart battlefield lessons and training to Ukrainians engaged in a US-backed proxy war with Russia. This January while in Ukraine, he joined the Georgian National Legion, an outfit led by a notorious warlord who has enjoyed friendly visits with high profile members of US Congress while boasting of authorizing gruesome war crimes in Ukraine.
In fact, Gray is among at least 30 Americans currently fighting with the Georgian National Legion. The unit is therefore at the heart of the ratline channeling US weapons and fascist foreign militants into the Ukrainian military, while Congress and American corporate media cheer it on.
Indeed, Fox News has featured Gray no less than six times, painting him as a heroic GI Joe sacrificing himself to defend democracy. Fox did not inform its viewers of Gray’s identity until his most recent appearance, obscuring his record of neo-Nazism from its viewers.
For Texans who bore witness to the street rampages of local fascist organizations throughout the past five years, Gray was a familiar face.
Back in 2018, Gray was slapped with a citation by local police for trespassing on the campus of Texas State University at San Marcos. He was distributing fliers at the time for Patriot Front, a fascist organization led by Thomas Rousseau. While Gray, along with two others, were identified by the university, the names of five others were withheld, leading “the community” to accuse “the university of protecting white supremacists.”
Rousseau had been rising through the ranks of Vanguard America, a growing organization at the forefront of white nationalism. But the group swiftly collapsed after one of its members, 19-year-old James Alex Fields, plowed his car through dozens of people protesting the now-notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 after he had been photographed equipped with a shield featuring the organization’s emblem. The attack, which was witnessed by this reporter, left a protester dead, and resulted in Fields being locked away for life. Vanguard America’s founder, Rousseau, subsequently bolted from the group and formed Patriot Front.
According to self-described “anti-fascist” journalist Kit O’Connell, Gray joined forces with Patriot Front to provide combat training to fellow veterans. He also helped the group disrupt the Houston Anarchist Bookfair in 2017.
Gray has also been associated with the Traditionalist Workers Party, a lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as with Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi organization whose members have trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, and which was designated as an illegal terrorist organization by the United Kingdom and Canada.
In leaked chat logs, Atomwaffen celebrated the bloody exploits of a member who murdered a gay Jewish college student in December 2017. Another member slaughtered the parents of their own girlfriend. Yet another member of Atomwaffen, Devon Arthurs, murdered his neo-Nazi roommates that same year after they mocked him for converting to Islam.
One of Arthurs’ victims, Andrew Oneschuk, had appeared on the Azov Batallion’s official podcast a year before his killing. The host encouraged the teenager and other Americans to come to Ukraine to join Azov – something Oneschuk had previously tried and failed to do in 2015.
Details of Paul Gray’s involvement with Atomwaffen and the Traditionalist Workers Party were left unexplained by journalists Kit O’Connell and Michael Hayden. However, this reporter was able to corroborate Gray’s collaboration with the neo-Nazi Vangaurd America organization, as well as Patriot Front.
In 2017, Gray helped organize a rally featuring Vanguard America and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, a prominent white supremacist blogger. The event was billed as “a movement of like-minded whites are banding together to fight off the diseased hordes of anti-white, anti-fascist, communist scum parasitizing and subverting the good denizens of Bat City.” The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi blog, hailed the fascist confab as a gathering of “proud white men got up and talked about Jews and their hordes without any reservation whatsoever.”
Prior to the fascist jamboree, Gray successfully convinced Texas State Representative Matt Schaefer to sponsor the rally, promising him the event was simply aimed at supporting “conservative leaders and the policies they are seeking.” Schaefer later apologized for accepting Gray’s request, claiming he was “lied to.”
Gray ultimately grew so prominent in the Texas neo-Nazi scene that he became a target of local “antifa” groups, who doxxed him and distributed photographs of him at fascist rallies. They also revealed that on Facebook he had “liked” a number of neo-Nazi pages, includinig Liftwaffe, a “Nazi-themed weight-lifting group” named after Nazi Germany’s Air Force.
In one of the photos, Gray can be seen in 2017 sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the neo-Nazi podcast Exodus Americanus. Later that year, Gray’s sister opened a cafe in East Austin that became a target of anti-gentrification protests.
Gray rallied three of his friends, all fellow army veterans, to confront the protesters. When he later appeared on the Exodus Americanus podcast, his hosts introduced him as “our buddy down in Texas,” and “one of our dudes,” and described the protesters as “brown hordes” and “the local beaner squad.”
“Do you recall,” one of the hosts asked Gray, “when [co-host] Roscoe and I got really drunk and slept on your couch?”
During the interview, Gray recounted how he and his friends “fought off” the protesters. One of the hosts closed the interview by reciting the slogan, “white power!”
Fox and Nazi Friends
At some point in early 2021, Gray found his way to Kiev, Ukraine and opened a gym, which helped him insinuate himself into the mixed martial arts culture popular among local ultra-nationalists.
In early February, 2022, as war with Russia approached, the known American neo-Nazi joined the Georgian National Legion and began training civilians and volunteers in American military techniques. His exploits earned glowing coverage from a San Antonio, Texas NBC affiliate, which effused, “From the front lines of Ukraine, veteran Paul Gray is using his extensive military background to empower a nation.”
Fox News had also discovered Gray around this time; the pro-GOP network cast him as an American Rambo leading Ukrainians into battle against Putin’s war machine. Throughout the first two weeks of March, the network featured Gray four times, giving him ample opportunity to wax poetic about spreading “democracy” and draw favorable parallels between Ukraine and his home state of Texas.
On March 1, when Gray was featured for the first time on Fox News, reporter Lucas Tomlinson noted that “he would only give us his first name.” Two days later, he was interviewed again on Fox & Friends, where he described the war in Ukraine as “their 1776.”
According to Gray, the Georgian Legion was “training hundreds every day. We’re out there. There’s Americans, there’s Brits, Canadians and all people from free countries of Europe and America and beyond.”
Asked whether there’s an “insurgency in the making,” Gray responded that “absolutely, these people here are doing everything they can to assist their soldiers on the front line and to assist their neighbors in some kind of insurgency if needed.”
Gray concluded the interview by appealing for more US weapons to Ukraine, which he called its “arsenal of democracy.” Fox host Pete Hegseth asked Gray whether he was willing to kill Russians, but the foreign fighter was unwilling to answer the question, changing the subject and chumming it up with Hegseth about how they both served with the 101st Airborne Division.
On March 8, Fox News’s Tomlinson discussed a trip he had made to the Georgian Legion’s “training camp” where he met Gray. “He said there was a platoon of Americans. When I asked to show me, he wouldn’t show me, but he says there’s 30 Americans joining him.”
Again, on March 12, Fox interviewed Gray. While in previous interviews Gray used the Georgian Legion’s emblem as his backdrop, he’d now been deployed to Kiev and wore their patch while holding a rifle. During the interview, Gray accused Russia of war crimes and genocide against Ukrainians, whom he called “the strongest Europeans” and again called on the United States to send its “arsenal of democracy” and “help out Ukrainians with the airspace.”
During the first four of Gray’s appearances on Fox News, his name was not disclosed. However, two local media reports identified the Fox favorite by his full name during the same period. None of the reports mentioned his close association with neo-Nazis.
After March 29, Gray disappeared from the media for almost a month. He only re-emerged after being injured in combat on April 27, when he was interviewed in Coffee or Die, the magazine of the Black Rifle Coffee Company, which is popular among right-wing law enforcement and military personnel. Gray told Coffee or Die’s correspondent Nolan Peterson, “We were ready for a tank to come down the road when the artillery hit us. A concrete wall protected me but then fell on me.”
Gray and his companion Manus McCaffery were shuffled off to a hospital “at an undisclosed location” according to Peterson, who said the pair “worked together as a team targeting Russian tanks and vehicles with US-made Javelin anti-tank missiles.”
Photos provided by Gray to the publication show him and McCaffery posing in Ukraine with two telling patches on their uniforms. One appeared to represent the ultra-nationalist Right Sector organization, however, the sword typically displayed in the group’s emblem was replaced with a gladiator-style helmet. The other patch featured a literal fasces.
Forbes also reported on Gray and McCaffery being wounded in Ukraine, but like Coffee or Die, it failed to note his neo-Nazi affiliations.
Some 19 days after he was injured, Fox caught up once again with Gray. The network neglected to note the foreign fighter’s neo-Nazi history, but for the first time, it quoted him by his full name in two segments it aired. One Fox piece highlighted Gray’s weapon of choice: the American-made Javelin anti-tank missile, showing him posing by a Russian tank he supposedly destroyed. “Confirmed kill,” a self-satisfied Gray declared.
Gray told the outlet that he planned on returning to the battlefield as soon as he recovered.
Ukraine Is “A Petri Dish For Fascism. It’s The Perfect Conditions”
When Paul Gray signed up for the Georgian National Legion, he joined thousands of foreign volunteers eager to fight Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield. The Legion’s leader, Georgian warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili, is a former mixed martial arts fighter who shares Gray’s enthusiasm for hand-to-hand combat. Now fighting his fifth war against the Russian Federation, Mamulashvili, was reportedly sent to Ukraine at the insistence of jailed former Georgian President and longtime US asset Mikheil Saakashvili.
As The Grayzone reported, members of Congress on key foreign policy committees have hosted Mamulashvili in their offices inside the US Capitol. Ukrainian American nationalists, meanwhile, have raised funds for his Georgian Legion on the streets of New York City.
Gray now joins a growing list of Georgian Legion veterans with extremist backgrounds. The roster includes Joachim Furholm, a Norwegian fascist activist who was briefly imprisoned after attempting to rob a bank in his native country.
After signing up for the Georgian Legion, Furholm made several attempts to recruit American neo-Nazis into the ranks of the Azov Battallion, which had set up housing for him near Kiev as well as “training facilities for foreign volunteers he attempted to recruit.”
“It’s like a Petri dish for fascism. It’s the perfect conditions,” Furholm said of Ukraine in a podcast interview. Referring to Azov, he stated that “they do have serious intentions of helping the rest of Europe in retaking our rightful lands.”
Furholm appealed for listeners to contact him through Instagram. When a young man in New Mexico reached out, the Norwegian urged him to join the fight in Ukraine: “Get over here laddie, there’s a rifle and a beer waiting for you.”
Furholm’s media appearances were not limited to fringe neo-Nazi podcasts. After delivering a speech at an Azov rally in 2018, he was interviewed by the US government’s Radio Free Europe.
There is one Georgian Legion veteran whose violent exploits made him more notorious than even Furholm. He is an American military veteran named Craig Lang.
Wanted Murderer Rides The Us Ratline From The Venezuelan Border To Ukraine
Lang was a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan who was injured in the latter theater of combat. Upon returning home for medical care, he fell into a bitter dispute with his pregnant wife, who retaliated against him by sending him a video of herself having sex with other men. Lang promptly gathered up some body armor, night vision goggles and two assault rifles, ditched his base in Texas and drove straight to North Carolina, where his wife lived.
There, he surrounded her condominium with land mines and attempted to murder her. Lang’s failed revenge killing earned him a dishonorable discharge and a prison sentence that was reduced to a short, several months stint on the grounds that the Army had been aware of his history of mental illness.
After his release, Lang continued to cycle in and out of prison before gravitating to Ukraine, where he linked up with fellow Army veteran Alex Zwiefelhofere. Both men joined the ultra-nationalist Right Sector organization in 2015, while Lang reportedly recruited dozens of fighters from the West.
By 2016, Lang was fighting alongside the Georgian National Legion in the eastern Donbas region, and giving interviews on behalf of the unit.
While on the front lines in 2017, Lang and sixth other Americans fell under investigation by the Department of Justice and the FBI, as they were believed to have “committed or participated in torture, cruel or inhuman treatment or murder of persons who did not take (or stopped taking) an active part in hostilities and (or) intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm on them.”
Leaked documents from the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division of the Office of International Affairs claim Lang and the other suspects “allegedly took noncombatants as prisoners, beat them with their fists, kicked them, clobbered them with a sock filled with stones, and held them underwater.” Lang, who is said to be the “main instigator” of the torture, “may have even killed some of them before burying their bodies in unmarked graves.”
According to the leaks, one American under Lang’s command showed FBI investigators video of Lang beating, torturing and eventually killing a local. Another video, according to the publishers of the leak, shows Lang beating and drowning a girl after a fellow fighter injected her with adrenaline so that she would not lose consciousness as she was drowned. Lang allegedly carried out these crimes as a member of Right Sector.
As the low intensity war dragged on in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, Lang and Zwiefelhofere reportedly grew “bored of the monotony of trench warfare.” In a desperate search for high-intensity combat action, the pair traveled to Africa, reportedly to fight al-Shabaab, but were swiftly deported by Kenyan authorities.
Back in the United States, the duo decided they wanted to travel to Venezuela to overthrow its socialist government and “kill communists.” To fund their expedition and secure guns and ammo, the pair posted an advertisement claiming they were selling weapons. When a Florida couple responded, they traveled to the Sunshine State and murdered them in their own home, stealing $3000, according to a superseding indictment from the Department of Justice.
How Lang managed to leave the United States after carrying out the alleged murder is unclear, as is the reason why he was not immediately apprehended for questioning by the FBI in connection with the bureau’s investigation over war crimes in Donbas. Somehow the wanted criminal was able to ride the ratline from the US to Colombia, and then back to Ukraine again.
Several months after the murders, Lang and Zwiefelhofer arrived in Cucuta, Colombia, a town on the border of Venezuela that has served a base for destabilization operations against the government in Caracas. There, they joined a band of insurgents seeking to attack the Venezuelan army. Zwiefelhofer was arrested upon his return to the United States, while Lang managed to escape justice by returning to Ukraine.
Despite being wanted for extradition to the United States, Lang’s lawyer, Dmytro Morhun, told Politico that his client had apparently returned to the battlefield. In reporting Lang’s membership in an unnamed “volunteer brigade,” Politico noted that he had also re-emerged on social media with a new Twitter account featuring a photograph of himself “wearing a Ukrainian military uniform and brandishing an anti-tank weapon.”
Discovered by this reporter, Lang’s Twitter account offers a strong hint that he belongs to Right Sector, the former street gang now incorporated into the Ukrainian military. This was the same unit Lang belonged to when he allegedly tortured a woman to death.
While previously a hot topic, the shocking saga of Craig Lang conveniently disappeared from the media’s radar following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February. Politico’s May 24th report contained his first mainstream media mention in months, with his name buried deep in the article.
Paul Gray, for his part, continues to receive glowing media coverage despite the exposure of his ties to neo-Nazi organizations. Meanwhile, the thirty Americans allegedly fighting by his side remain unidentified.
As the Department of Homeland Security has privately acknowledged, extremists like Gray and his compatriots are likely to return to the home front before long, bringing along a wealth of combat tactics and new connections with an international network of fascist militants and war criminals. What happens then is anyone’s guess.
Scott Ritter And Ray McGovern On Ukraine, Russia, And China
https://popularresistance.org/scott-ritter-ray-on-ukraine-russia-china/
By Ray McGovern. June 1, 2022
Scott and I focused initially on President Biden’s just-completed Excellent Adventure in the Far East and the U.S. effort to woo countries away from China or, at least, pre-empt closer bilateral ties.
I again posed the question (see my brief talk Thursday, embedded in https://raymcgovern.com/2022/05/27/why-is-win-win-a-no-no/ ), Why must China’s “win-win” approach be dismissed out of hand — especially when it was so mutually beneficial 50 years ago in reducing tension and keeping the peace?
Recent developments, including talks with Chinese officials, have fortified Scott’s view that China remains extremely reluctant to go to war over Taiwan. Nevertheless, China will do so “in a heartbeat” if Taiwan declares independence and develops a more substantial military relationship with the U.S.
Bottom line: Scott predicts that the U.S. will be at war with China within six months to a year — and will lose. This could be avoided if the U.S. takes the military aspect out of the equation in confronting China and does the sensible thing in limiting the competition to the economic sphere.
Ray discussed the lemming-like bloc heads now leading the NATO bloc and compared them to statesmen and stateswomen of the past — the German Social Democratic Party’s Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, for example; and Angela Merkel (no Socialist she), who told President Obama to his face that Germany would not join any effort to send offensive arms to Ukraine. Sadly, serious leaders of the past, experienced in foreign affairs as well as politics, have been replaced by political hacks with little or no experience (or even interest) in Ostpolitik, which yielded a peaceful, mutually beneficial detente in the 1970-80s.
The economic sanctions are already making themselves felt, however, in Germany and elsewhere. And there are preliminary signs that even some bloc-head lemmings may be having serious second thoughts. Fissures are cracking open and expanding among the NATO countries — particularly among those most affected by the sanctions.
Scott reiterated his longstanding view that Russian forces will prevail on the ground in Ukraine, adding that recently they have been performing in a very impressive, professional way. This, despite what the NY Times and Washington Post has been saying, (and even their narrative of Russian “blundering” has begun to change under the force of circumstances). One major question: If Establishment media find themselves forced to acknowledge strong Russian advances in the coming weeks, will they turn on the Biden administration as the mid-term November elections draw near? Snippets of truth have begun to appear in the likes of the NY Times and Washington Post.
The way things have evolved on the ground, serious embarrassment may be unavoidable. Will Biden cut his loses? I suggest the answer to that is No. Rather, with no adults in the room, Biden may instead be persuaded to up the ante (see below). I do hope someone tells the president that the Russians will not back down in the face of escalatory steps they are capable of neutralizing, and that this includes what they call “offensive strike missiles” capable of reaching Russia.
UPDATE
In this context, the trial-balloon-type media reports yesterday afternoon, after our interview, that the U.S. is preparing to send long-range rocket systems to Ukraine, takes on added importance. A final decision by the White House is expected as early as next week. (See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/05/27/artillery-long-range-ukraine-rocket-system/ )
One key weapons system under discussion is the U.S.-made Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) capable of firing a torrent of rockets 180 miles or more. This is much farther than the systems currently in Ukraine’s inventory, and could put Russia itself within range. This system has been sitting atop the long list of requests from Ukrainian officials, who say it is needed to curb advancing Russian forces in the Donbas. U.S. officials reportedly “have concerns” that Ukrainian forces might end up firing into Russian territory, causing major escalation.
Meanwhile, CNN reports (See: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/us-long-range-rockets-ukraine-mlrs/index.html ) that Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who was part of a congressional delegation trip to Kyiv earlier this month, told CNN he believes the systems could help Ukraine gain significant momentum against Russia.
Crowing About the MLRS
“I think it could be a game-changer”, Crow said, not only for offensive attacks but also for defense. He explained that Russian conventional artillery, which has a range of about 50km, “would not get close” to Ukrainian urban centers if MLRS systems were positioned there. “So it would take away their siege tactics,” he said of the Russians.
The Kremlin has warned that any country providing advanced weaponry to Ukraine will face harsh repercussions. Yesterday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the West has “declared total war” against Russia. The Russians would see any attempt to provide MLRS to Ukraine as additional proof of the West’s intent.
I would expect any MLRS that make it into Ukraine to be neutralized as soon as they are detected. And then Lockheed Martin (poor thing) would have to manufacture and sell still more! The money is there; the only problem is how fast it can be spent down. And so it goes.
Jason Crow styles himself as something of a specialist on Russia. He has asserted that: “Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”
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