TIP-TOEING WITH LOONS

NADAV: It’s difficult to understand how we aren’t gleefully waltzing toward a global war.

VANDANA: And the real thing, not the isolated pseudo-conflicts we’ve been dabbling in for two decades.

NADAV: Yeah.

VANDANA: Indeed, that’s my sense. And I've been hearing others riffing about this.

NADAV: These things just seem to spark off. Do they not? I'm no historian.

VANDANA: Folks have to want it, I suppose. But there are loads of triggers and slopes.

NADAV: And how many conflicts, in how many locations, of what severity before they converge kind of osmotically?

VANDANA: Indeed, it's hard to see how all the build-up and attention and tribalist passions and tit-for-tat fails to land us in an ugly place. Like, not even the UN has any faith in the UN or its ability to stave off or intervene in conflict.

NADAV: Yeah. What I don’t understand is that, troublingly, everyone appears to know many of the details pretty well, or well enough.

VANDANA: And you think that folks should be more vocal about their opposition to war? Or would be if they better connected some of those dots?

NADAV: Well, so many critical details can be found anywhere anyone could wish to find them; and yet, like just about everything at the moment, I keep having weird arguments with people about those details and their meaning.

VANDANA: Me too. I wrote a fair bit about the most recent manifestation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict shortly after troops rolled into Ukraine.

NADAV: In the Spring of 2022.

VANDANA: Yeah.

NADAV: Right.

VANDANA: Partly, I was shocked to learn more about the history of the conflict and all that I didn’t know previously.

NADAV: It’s complicated.

VANDANA: I don’t know how complicated it is. It’s more that everyone’s been working hard to pretend what’s happening isn’t happening.

NADAV: Which makes it appear complicated from the outside.

VANDANA: Sure. More surprising, though, was how news outlets quickly began offering all these weird, unstated reversals of everything they put into the record about the region and the conflict in months and years before this latest escalation. And from that disorienting place I watched as every news organization shared video after video of the current war but claiming that these showed the opposite of what was so clearly evident in each one of them. It was a lot to absorb.

NADAV: Like?

VANDANA: Well, reporters and non-governmental organizations spent years researching and discussing an openly ultranationalist, white supremacist movement sweeping Ukraine.

NADAV: I didn’t catch any of that.

VANDANA: Whole mini documentaries were produced. Documentaries on things like all the training camps for kids had sprung up all over the country; how these were run by skinheads with visible fascist tattoos, cultivating the next generation of ethno-nationalist extremists who will populate their growing and evermore brazen militias. Instead of playing soccer or learning to start and keep a fire, they learn to assemble and clean a Kalashnikov and acclimate to crawling through trenches amidst gunfire and explosions.

NADAV: I’ve never seen any of that.

VANDANA: Well, this sort of thing was everywhere for a decade.

NADAV: I don’t doubt that, it just never crossed my radar.

VANDANA: You probably wouldn’t have caught wind of it unless you belonged to one of the minorities targeted by these ghouls.

NADAV: And who would that be?

VANDANA: Well, the usual: Roma, Jews, anyone not considered ethnically Ukrainian or with the wrong skin colour.

NADAV: Right.

VANDANA: Outlets also published articles about how the US, in order to back and build up Ukraine’s war machine, was having to reverse decades-old federal policy preventing financial or material support for known neo-fascist, white supremacist groups abroad. As you can imagine, that’s the kind of thing that gets the attention of groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and others.

NADAV: Of course.

VANDANA: If you hadn’t seen these reports or exposés when they were published, you could easily find them by just typing any relevant keywords into the search field of virtually any news or human rights group’s website. You could go to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Counter Extremism Project, Minority Rights Group, The Simon Wiesenthal Center… And that was true when the press flipped and started pretending the idea of Nazis in Ukraine was Russian propaganda and recommending chastisement of anyone suggesting otherwise.

NADAV: You mentioned news outlets. Like who?

VANDANA: All the mainstream outlets ran articles and investigations into the problem with racism and ultranationalism in Ukraine. Those were trending themes in the West. This was at the height of the social justice moral panic. The Guardian, BBC, NBC, CTV, CBC, on and on, all ran stories and produced mini documentaries on the far-right running amok in the former Soviet nation. And those same people writing stories about how the government of Ukraine was having to pass laws banning Nazi symbols and propaganda, that things were so out of hand, were now claiming neo-fascism there was fake news planted by Putin.

NADAV: And I guess that stuff is easy enough to look up today but harder to find if it’s been edited or removed.

VANDANA: Oh my gosh, yes. Have you seen this warning on Google searches? That search results you’re looking for are being hidden from you? That they have content you’re after but you can’t know what it is or where to find it?

NADAV: No.

VANDANA: I get this all the time now. On anything interesting. But you might not even notice.

NADAV: I haven’t.

VANDANA: You have to read the fine print. It just kinda blends in with the rest of the text on the search page.

NADAV: Wild. But what is this about? I mean—

VANDANA: Well, they’ve conformed to new EU internet rules allowing folks, any individual, “to be forgotten.” And Google’s applying those rules globally.

NADAV: But, so, what does that mean?

VANDANA: Wait, more than that, Sweden also just pushed the EU courts to force Google to stop even informing publishers what content of theirs was being omitted from searches. As in: we don’t even get to know what or who or even why something or someone is being memory-holed. Sweden saw any information that a purge had even taken place as only further infringing upon peoples’ rights.

NADAV: But what does that mean? What does that look like? Like, how does it work? Can I do that?

VANDANA: Yes. It means anyone who published anything that now looks bad and they don’t want the world to know about can apply to have that essay or whole website or their names effectively purged from Google archives. And it’s happened. I read one story of a lawyer who committed fraud having news of his fraud expunged.

NADAV: How is that real?

VANDANA: I get it. It’s about privacy. I mean, I think it would be better if we cultivated a culture that didn’t condemn people for all time for saying or doing something dumb and actually embraced some kind of meaningful policy of redemption.

NADAV: Seems like a lot to ask. I mean, outside of Scandinavia.

VANDANA: That’s what I thought, too. Like, that it was curious this request was coming out of Sweden, who’s all about rehabilitation and not punishment even of its worst criminals, for example.

NADAV: If they can’t handle true information about actual events then, well, what chance does the US or China have?

VANDANA: Sure. Yeah. Still, the last time I read about this, Goggle admitted it had millions of requests and as many individual URLs were thusly disappeared. Wild, right?

NADAV: Wild. And I wasn’t even aware this was happening. It's straight up memory holing. Unabashed. Orwellian-style.

VANDANA: Wilder still is how, seemingly overnight, noticing any of that stuff, about the context and situation on the ground in Ukraine, became the clearest signifier of one’s ill-concealed ultra-far-right leanings and, naturally then, shaming people for pointing it out evidence of one’s progressive partisanship and standing on the [backward] side of history.

NADAV: Right. Like, pointing out the growing fascism problem got you labelled a fascism sympathizer.

VANDANA: Just like noticing people’s gross racism or sexism had you pegged a sexist or racist. It’s a wild time.

NADAV: Yeah. On that, the Ukraine bit and missing information, I only just learned that the US/Ukraine pact rejected every option for peace prior to and immediately after the war began. I didn’t know there was a deal to end the war just four days after it started, one that would have seen relinquishment of any occupied land if Ukraine promised to remain neutral and not join NATO and have limits placed on its military expansion.

VANDANA: And the Biden administration baulked at the Istanbul peace talks, promising to give Ukraine all the resources it desired, and enrich everyone therein, if it instead made war with Russia.

NADAV: Exactly. I think that tells you everything you need to know.

VANDANA: Yeah, I don’t know anyone who knows that piece of the story. I mean, just try talking to someone about Ukraine, which you can’t of course, but find anyone you like: either someone who thinks there must be an immediate ceasefire or someone who believes Ukraine just needs to be given her own nukes and license to use them. Ask them about Istanbul. They’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.

NADAV: Seems likely.

VANDANA: And what do you make of all these careful reversals and omissions being paired with the most ludicrous propaganda, that began flowing like a failed water-main right after?

NADAV: Like?

VANDANA: Like, instead of showing the world what was happening — Ukraine and its population being annihilated — we saw video after video reported as, very clearly to anyone with just one partially functioning eye, the opposite of what it was.

NADAV: I don’t know how much of that I saw. We were in the middle of a pandemic.

VANDANA: Perfect timing, then.

NADAV: I suppose.

VANDANA: Well, with the total absence of real footage of any actual military prowess or even lucky guerilla attacks by the side we were enthusiastically supporting, the media shared glaring incompetence and total failures — only, labelling and describing those as unmistakable victories due to Ukraine's martial prowess.

NADAV: Like?

VANDANA: Things as obscene as Ukrainians launching anti-tank rockets from too close a distance (in the apartment above while the tank passes on the street below) for the weapon to arm itself (and thus the rocket, costing as much as a pair of new Toyota Corollas, having no impact.) This was reported as evidence of NATO-allied troops taking it to the evil Russians. It was as though the lack of explosion and the tank just rolling on as if it was not even struck was the clearest sign of the explosive devastation of said tank.

NADAV: Huh.

VANDANA: Or several times I watched footage of entire Russian tank regiments, maybe twenty and forty vehicles come under “devastating attack.” CNN, the Telegraph, Global News, others all claimed we were witnessing evidence of a brilliant ambush and Ukrainian forces. What was said to be “unexpectedly incompetent” Russian armoured convoy “destroyed in ambush near Kyiv” was, by any viewing of any footage, clipped and reorganized or whole and raw, very clearly a total failure to inflict any meaningful damage.

NADAV: Really?

VANDANA: I promise you, no version of this story showed impairment coming to the many tanks in the area. Unedited footage showed effectively the entire column, minus two or three vehicles, driving away after the entirety of the attack — with no indication of the consequences for those launching the attack. And then you’d get that footage paired with a clip from a reporter, who showed up on the scene a day or week later, standing next to the husk of a vehicle and pretending like this was evidence of the war having been all but won.

NADAV: Huh.

VANDANA: Yeah, when all we saw was the inability of Ukrainian forces to do anything about a full column of Russian tanks, tanks just chilling out for hours unprotected and then rolling on to make war.

NADAV: Right.

VANDANA: All of that is to say that by April of 2022 the world knew Ukraine was losing, and ultimately would lose, any war they chose to fight alone against Russia.

NADAV: Because they were untrained and didn’t have the gear.

VANDANA: That’s part of the picture. But we’re also pretending Russia isn’t backed by BRICS nations and many others. That they don’t, as a result, have a bottomless pool of resources despite the most crippling sanctions ever imposed.

NADAV: I think people know that. But it’s true that we pretend NATO is at war with Russia. Which is basically not happening. Especially looking at who’s actually on the ground fighting. Yes, there’s a nearly bottomless number of Russian troops and convicts-made-troops, millions of them. But there are also conscripts and enlistees from every corner of the planet. I was just looking into this the other day. Ukraine has seen enemy combatants arriving from Serbia and Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. All of those you might expect, but also thousands have arrived from all over the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Of course, places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, too; but also Somalia, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Zambia; Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, North Korea, of course, and Malaysia. And, naturally, Cuba as well.

VANDANA: Right. And now, along with the decimation of their cities and the loss of uncountable numbers of civilians, it seems Ukraine has already surpassed their capacity to make war. Not only have they continued losing more and more troops, with combat deaths having reached up to 30,000 each month recently, but the situation has become so dire that they’ve okayed conscription of males up to 60 years of age.

NADAV: And the leadership can be seen submitting evermore desperate calls for American weapon systems to keep up the fight and strike deep inside Russia.

VANDANA: Yeah. That’s because they lost the war, not because they’re winning it.

NADAV: And with that we, the world, have now entered a period unlike anything during the Cold War.

VANDANA: Yeah. Putin has seen all of this and called, in the poker sense, on NATO’s stated commitment by promising to significantly increase Russia’s defence spending in the coming year.

NADAV: Right, I saw that. And he formally submitted that he’d change Russia’s military doctrine to construe any attack on Russia — by any force merely backed by a nuclear power — as tantamount to a direct nuclear threat and thus justifying a nuclear response.

VANDANA: Indeed. And, despite their history of neutrality and the provocation of such, Finland and Sweden have already applied for NATO membership, while looking to reinforce their borders.

NADAV: And they, along with Poland and Germany, have also warned their populations to prepare for war.

VANDANA: Indeed.

NADAV: And as all that’s happening, of course, Israel finds herself under attack from not less than five nations, backed by near-nuclear Iran and the rest of BRICS.

VANDANA: Indeed. And what has the response been? For France, Britain, and the US to deploy their navies to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, while fending off attacks.

NADAV: Attacks that are being called the most significant naval combat operations since the Second World War.

VANDANA: Yes, while Japan sees its largest military build-up in a century, launches its first aircraft carrier since then, and sends a destroyer into the Taiwan Strait for war games.

NADAV: Right. So, it’s hard to see this as something other than the world gleefully escalating toward war of the nuclear kind on any less than three fronts.

VANDANA: It’s a kind of drug induced mania.

NADAV: It’s worse than that. We’re all tip-toeing, hand-in-hand with the droopy senility of a man magically immune to his nation’s 25th amendment.

VANDANA: Indeed. If not now, when?

NADAV: And, worse, that’s someone who can only be, it seems, succeeded by one of two equally self-interested and brain-dead loons.

VANDANA: Right. Though at least one of those loons appears to be opposed to needless wars.

NADAV: But you can’t mention that.

VANDANA: No no, don’t go there. You’ll soon be seeking Google's expungement protocol.