Eurasia note #27 - Ukraine's First Casualty is Truth

One woman's resilience exposes the lies of press and military jocks

Mar 1

One woman’s story captures humans’ internal strength and the meaning of place.
Propaganda leads us to find fault in ourselves and project it on others.
Self-hate is central to control, internal not external: resist and overcome.
Can we imagine ourselves in her place, and break the ties that bind?
And does an analytic mind tell us something we’re keen to ignore?

Tbilisi, Mar 1, 2022

Three days before the Russians arrived, Ukraine amplified its bombardment of Donetsk. An economics lecturer called Galina, a woman of 65, texted her friend (whom I know): “Ira, it is very scary. They are putting us into the ground.”

She had refused to leave with her daughter and grandchildren back in 2014. “Someone needs to teach,” she said. Her Siberian sinew led her to stay on — even last month when engineers opened a damaged railway line and rescued women and children by train. She is still in Donetsk.

Her story is personal to me and her circle but given wider publicity it would soon attract partisans — detractors would traduce her words or attack the woman; those finding the vignette useful to their cause would promote it.

Propaganda works because of the othering of people, the trick of distancing those like ourselves. But to do so it must alienate us from our own being so that we no longer recognize ourself in others. Thus we hate ourself and project that hate on them.

This seems to be why propaganda is always accompanied by vituperation. It is not enough to say “they're wrong” and have done with it. You must scowl, spit and point, work oneself into paroxysms of righteousness — and in the end, pin a badge on them.

The first casualty of war is truth. It is one of the few incontrovertible aphorisms.

Most people would agree they’re probably being lied to, even while they chant to the mendacities of the television monitor. Even the anchor, pro-noun-cing words from a teleprompter, has no idea if his words speak truth.

The presenters’ words are as meaningless as if a dog walker in Hoboken paused in front of a store, watching jaws masticate mutely from banks of screens.

You know it’s not authentic. Like a powdered caffè latte in a cardboard cup we take a “lie to go” — the counterfeit will do for now.

It is a comfort blanket; a version of events to explain “out there.” Like an eiderdown of old, it has an embroidered image in one corner that you remember through the half-closed eyes of a child just before sleep.

If information can change our perception, can we counter it by imagining ourselves in the place of the teacher I mention above, and break the ties that bind?

Consciousness dawns

The screen flickers like moonbeam on wall during a restless night, casting a frame of changing topography in snatches of wakefulness. It tells us nothing about the coming day; it may as well be a different world.

With a clap the bed knocks the wall, which trembles in concert with the rattling pane. The night is stripped of its virgin innocence. You jump barely conscious to the floor; jumbled thoughts align: you are in your bedroom but why not the bunker. Why not down below with the huddled masses?

Why didn’t you leave and join your daughter in America? Granted, you would have had to face those impudent, degrading, Western eyes at the consulate and apply for a visa.

“Why does a single woman want to enter America… do you have a husband… why are you traveling alone?” Each virtual slap in the face a reminder that to them you belong in the borderlands of Central Asia. “Application refused.”

That blond, coiffed Ursula, the European Union president with her “von” — a nobiliary particle that was not part of the grammar you learned at pedagogical university — now she says of Ukraine: “They are one of us and we want them in.”

Why now? Why not in the eight years that she watched the country become the poorest in Europe. When no-one lifted a hand. [1]

Eight years after the EU dangled a carrot of membership, to lure Ukraine from Russia, only to snatch it away once Kyiv had turned its back on Moscow’s subsidies, calculated at $250 billion over a decade.

Busted flush

But you are an economist. You can recite the crisis like rote.

Europe’s biggest country after Russia is also its poorest. Growth is less than half what it should be. At 3 per cent, and inflation at 10, foreign direct investment is low at 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2019, according to the World Bank and, net, there’s an outflow.

Ukraine has the makings of a strong and diversified small business sector spanning industry, agriculture and trade. This is the sector that traditionally accounts for 80 per cent of jobs and 65 per cent of sales.

Yet the vast majority of small firms say loans are inaccessible or prohibitively expensive. The retail bank sector is unstable, often corrupt. The central bank interest rate has come down from the high teens to 10 per cent but commercial rates are lofty.

Powerful borrowers often do not repay loans, including politicians benefiting from parliamentary immunity. Non-performing loans in all Ukrainian banks stood at 41 per cent in Jan 2021, according to the National Bank of Ukraine. They get away with this because of corruption in judiciary, security and law enforcement. That would include the general prosecutor — who was famously replaced on the “orders” of Vice-President Joe Biden in Mar 2016.

Western laundromat

Foreign and local politicians made use of Ukraine’s banks to turn the country into a cash laundry.

Not all the corruption is domestic. In Nov 2019 a Ukrainian lawmaker Alexander Dubinsky revealed a leaked criminal referral that detailed payments to Hunter Biden from the oil company Burisma.

The Bidens were part of a $7.4 billion fraud siphoning public funds from Ukraine, allegedly through American investment firm Franklin Templeton Investments. The scheme is said to have begun under president Viktor Yanukovych and continued, after the 2014 Maidan coup, under his successor Petro Poroshenko. [2]

This goes to show that even color revolutions are “just bizniz.”

See Moneycircus, Jan 27, 2022 — Eurasia Note #19 - Ukraine: Just Bizniz for Some: Claiming to defend a country, while looting it, has a touch of depravity

Just bizniz

All the international organizations were huddled in Kyiv: the World Bank, USAID, Soros’ Open Society, all funding a cottage industry of NGOs like Dozorro, SocialBoost and Centre of United Actions.

The IMF knew about the corruption, so did Transparency International, and some like Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) made it worse. AntAC is a barely-disguised effort to perpetuate corruption, so long as it is directed to Western ends.

Not only is AntAC and its operator Vitaly Shabunin accused of embezzling $4.4 million in U.S. funds, U.S. diplomats tried to quash an investigation. When Ukrainian lawmakers tried to force NGOs to publish their financial accounts, Western diplomats crushed that attempt, too. [3]

It became an overseas training centre for color revolutions. It was a den of hackers for the CIA and FBI, a coordination centre for political theatre when Trump was president, a den of liars, spies and thieves.

Checkpoint Covid

All the United Nations had to say was Covid, Covid, Covid. They closed the checkpoints across the disputed territory of Donbas, separating families, leaving people without pensions and social benefits, often not even medical care and education. [4]

The one thing Covid didn’t stop was the flow of cash. An HIV charity, 100% Life, has been accused of embezzling some of the $142 million it receives from the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Most of the cash flowed through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), though some via U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). [5]

Until Jan 2021, the head of PEPFAR was Deborah Birx, who quit as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator in Dec 2020 after ignoring Lockdown rules.

And all the time, omnipresent, Georg Soros and his Open Society Foundations meddled and diddled. The “philanthropist” financed by U.S. taxpayers and working with U.S. intelligence agencies and diplomats — an “active and ongoing effort to affect politics, economics, and societies in Europe and across the globe,” as Judicial Watch reminds us.

“The Soros operations are highly sophisticated and multi-faceted, working across academia; the courts; labor and agriculture; “social justice” organizations; religious associations; and, of course, political groups. OSF operations also utilize U.S.-b ased non-profit organizations to further their agenda. Key personnel in the Soros/OSF network (and their affiliates) are former U.S. government officials capable of leveraging their government status and access to benefit the OSF’s progressive goals.” [6]

To pick two names: W. Bryce Kincaid currently posted to the U.S. Embassy in London was previously posted in Ukraine. She was formerly a legal clerk with OSF.

Andrew Lohsen, currently a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington (funded by the Pritzker family) was with the OSCE’s mission to Ukraine, and was is a former research consultant with the OSF.

End of the line

There never was peace. For eight years the snipers and the mortars took lives: 14, 000 souls.

The bombing increased as the West banged the drum for war. The bombardment began on Feb 21 three days before the Russians arrived.

When it finally was time for women and children to leave Donetsk, they found many of the railway lines unusable. Track, stations, locomotives, bridges and other parts of the transportation system had been damaged even before February’s attacks by sabotage and shelling — Kyiv-based media blamed locals for bombing their own escape route. Engineers managed to reopen a line and extract people to Russia. [7]

Since then it’s been admitted the Ukrainian military blew up railway lines between Ukraine and Russia. According to Ukrainian Railways they have been completely destroyed. [8]

The tangled tracks tell a tale of two versions of the world order, the one that State Department spokesman Ned Price last week revealed in a surprisingly open statement.

Price said that Russia and China “also want a world order”, but their world order “would be profoundly illiberal.” He admitted in plain English that these powers also seek a “world order” and they counterpose it to the “illiberal” East. [9]

Ukraine intimates that it wants to belong to Price’s alternative order. Yet it was hoping to pair up with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In Jan 2022, Chinese president Xi Jinping sent a note to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy stressing Ukraine’s importance to China’s BRI.

The “development of the China-Ukraine strategic partnership” will be near impossible without rail traffic through Russia. Ukraine’s attempt to re-establish its position on the New Silk Road lies in tatters.

This is its dilemma, for which the West offered no answer in the past eight years. Surrounded to the east by Russia, it is hard to see how Ukraine will carve an economic future as a terminus point at the end of the line.

I do not know if Galina shares this conclusion. Like all academics she must adapt to the hand the feeds. But in Donetsk there is a woman who stands by her conviction. And her act, not words, demolishes every syllable that leaks from the drooping lip of the fey, sybarite press.

Moneycircus