"Astray"

Berletic: "While protest[er]s may believe they have legitimate anger and causes, the fact that US-funded organizations are directing and promoting the protests indicates yet another case of hijacked-grievances; -The US just demanded Indonesia open its airspace to US military aircraft, a demand Indonesia rejected; -US-funded media operations in Indonesia just 2 weeks ago attacked alternative media outlets who exposed US interference last year in Indonesia as a means of "pre-bunking" attempts to expose it again ahead of protests this year they knew were coming; -The protests are enhanced by the global energy and economic crisis deliberately created by the US war on Iran in West Asia; -US control over Indonesia would threaten the Malacca Strait, further constricting Chinese maritime shipping of both imported energy and exported goods; …"

the role of historians such as Timothy Snyder and Serhii Ploikhi in whitewashing Ukraine’s tragic history of antisemitic and other ethnonationalist violence. As a special treat for you as a Substack reader, I am sharing this second part of the interview with you several days before the full video is posted on YouTube. The interview continues the conversation we have been having on Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism: A Word in History. I shared my my reflections on this topic over May, and over fifty years, in this post. Marta Havryshko is an exceptionally courageous Jewish Ukrainian woman. She now works as a scholar in the USA after fleeing Ukraine as a war refugee in 2022. In addition to her historical scholarship, including on topics such as sexual violence in war, Marta has exposed the extreme ethnonationalism of the current Ukrainian regime. Marta has spoken out against, for example, the widespread use of Nazi symbols in the Ukrainian military and rightist politics, ‘busification’ (street abduction of military age men by conscription agents), and open avowal of antisemitism together with celebration of Ukrainian nationalist Holocaust perpetrators, like Andriy Melnyk. For this display of integrity and moral courage, the Ukrainian regime has placed her on the notorious Myrotvorets kill-list. And harassed and undermined by the democracy loving liberal scholars of the Western academy who “stand with Ukraine.” …."

Berletic: "The US is controlled by US-based corporations Americans themselves fund daily by buying their goods and services; These corporations are lead, chaired, and owned by majority white nominally "Christian" men, or in other words, Westerners - not ethnic or religious minorities like "Jews;" These corporations also make up the vast majority of lobbying money spent annually in the United States with organizations like AIPAC making up LESS than 1% of all US lobbying; It is stated US policy to scapegoat Israel amid the US war on Iran, a policy that has been promoted by the mainstream media, the algorithms of US-based social media platforms, and even the US administration itself; …"

Bivens: "….. So, again: Were U.S. or NATO intelligence agents part of the “kill chain” last month that took the lives of 21 sleeping Russian teenagers? We don’t know. It’s possible, even probable, that the teachers college at Staroblsk was left click, right click, left click’ed into oblivion via some nightmarish Palantir-provided, AI-guided U.S. death tech. Just as likely happened to another school infamously destroyed by mindless U.S. war-making, Iran’s Minab elementary school, vaporized 4 months ago along with more than 100 little kids. One assumes the teachers college was targeted accidentally. But it’s even possible it was targeted directly, out of some evil plot to rile up the Russians and to provoke them to smash Kyiv — as they have already begun to do, including overnight and into this morning. Why would Ukraine +/- its C.I.A. handlers intentionally target a bunch of teenagers at a teaching college? Perhaps to breathe new life into a smoldering war in danger of petering out, and to summon American and European voters back into the fight. (Remember, this has never been about helping ordinary Ukrainian people, who have been sacrificed for more than a decade now to the war-making agendas of others.) That might sound crazy. But is it? Consider that the odious Ukrainian organization Mirotvorets (Peacemaker), which for years now has winkingly claimed to be affiliated with the C.I.A. and publishes what amount to kill lists, identifies nine top faculty of the Staroblsk teachers college as traitors to be eliminated. For example, here is the site’s page devoted to Natalya Tsyganok, a “criminal” who is an assistant director of the college: …." "…. The banner atop the Mirotvorets webpage lists itself as headquartered in Langley, Virginia, a barely-veiled claim that it is C.I.A.-endorsed. C.I.A. has never disavowed Mirotvorets — even though this weird organization has published lists of enemies to be eliminated that included American journalists and scholars, and then has gleefully crossed off in red those critics who end up “liquidated” (murdered). So, in a world spinning out of control, we have a self-proclaimed Ukrainian-C.I.A. joint venture that publishes kill lists highlight the faculty of an obscure teachers college — which then gets blown to hell, so that 14- and 15-year-old girls die in terror in their beds — which then becomes the official (yet rarely mentioned here) justification for angry Russians to escalate dramatically this morning and to rain death down on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, smashing apartment blocks, killing 13 so far, burying innocents (including some children) in the rubble …"

In episode 77 of Global Majority for Peace, Ileana Chan is joined by Tings Chak, researcher, writer, and Asia Co-coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research ‪@TricontinentalAsia‬ to unpack why Asia has become the central frontline of US strategy. She explains how Washington is rapidly rebuilding a regional military architecture, from new bases in the Philippines and the militarization of Okinawa to arms sales to Taiwan, while countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Australia navigate this new Cold War landscape through their own histories, contradictions, and constraints. She also examines the limits and openings of BRICS and South‑South initiatives, arguing that Asia’s militarization reflects a dying world order and underscoring the need for regional, anti‑imperialist solidarity.

I have seen Tibet/Xizang only from the air, on a Pakistan Airlines flight from Islamabad to Beijing in January 1988, but I have a long-standing interest in the region and wrote several articles about it in the late 1970s for my newspaper in New York, based on conferences and interviews with some exiled Tibetan monks. At the time I was strongly influenced by anti-communist and anti-Chinese propaganda in the US, so my articles (of which I still have copies) reflected a very negative view of the Chinese activities there. It was also only a short time after China's cultural revolution, which caused a lot of turmoil in all parts of the country, including Tibet/Xizang, and the testimonies I heard from the monks were skewed by that. I have since learned a lot about what Ms. Vankosvska describes here. …

Karat: "…. What this piece argues — and documents, source by source — is that Trump’s war on the media is not an aberration. It is the most visible expression of something being built across Western governments simultaneously: a formal architecture for controlling information ecosystems, constructed in NATO military doctrine, in European Union foreign policy law, and in domestic counterterrorism frameworks, by administrations that agree on nothing else but have independently arrived at the same conclusion about who should decide what the public is allowed to believe. The mechanisms differ. The logic is identical. And none of it requires a single journalist to be arrested to work."

I cannot but fully agree with what Lascaris says in this video, and I wish most Europeans could hear and understand this. "Last month, Russia's Ministry of Defence published a list of factories in Europe that produce drones for Ukraine. At the time, Russia's Defence Ministry warned the EU that Europe was escalating the war by supplying Ukraine with more and more drones, and that its escalation would lead to "unpredictable consequences". This past weekend, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack on Russia since the war began in February 2022. Dimitri Lascaris reviews recent ominous developments in Russia and argues that, as a result of Europe's escalating provocations, Russia will launch missile strikes on military-industrial facilities on EU territory, and will likely do so before the end of 2026"

Berletic: "-In this video, I respond to a recently received e-mail attempting to set me up for a smear piece trying to frame my work exposing US interference in Southeast Asia (and Indonesia in particular) as a “coordinated campaign” with “Russian media;” The author was Ika Ningtyas, a “fact-check coordinator” at Soros Open Society-funded Tempo in Indonesia. Ika Ningtyas has also worked for or coordinated with US government organizations like Voice of America, NED-funded organizations like Remotivi, as well as US and European government-funded organizations like Aliansi Jurnalis Independen; This represents an effort to attack people exposing the danger of US interference abroad and an attempt to protect opposition groups the US is funding and backing in targeted nations; The ability of the US to reach into a targeted nation’s political and information space represents a danger equal or greater than the threat of US military aggression - allowing the US to undermine and even overthrow governments without the US military firing a single shot; The vast networks the US builds up over years to achieve this eventually reach critical mass and by the time the targeted nation realizes something must be done, it is too late - making it important to expose this problem and address sooner rather than later;"