Why were Clean Slates so important to Bronze Age societies? From the third millennium in Mesopotamia, people were aware that debt pressures, if left to accumulate unchecked, would distort normal fiscal and landholding patterns to the detriment of the community. They perceived that debts grow autonomously under their own dynamic by the exponential curves of compound interest rather than adjusting themselves to reflect the ability of debtors to pay. This idea never has been accepted by modern economic doctrine, which assumes that disturbances are cured by automatically self-correcting market mechanisms. That assumption blocks discussion of what governments can do to prevent the debt overhead from destabilizing economies. The Cosmological Dimension of Clean Slates Mesopotamia’s concept of divine kingship was key to the practice of declaring Clean Slates. The prefatory passages of Babylonian edicts cited the ruler’s commitment to serve his city-god by promoting equity in the land. Myth and ritual were integrated with economic relations and were viewed as forming the natural order that rulers were charged with overseeing; in this context, canceling debts helped fulfill their sacred obligation to their city-gods. Commemorated by their year-names and often by foundation deposits in temples, these amnesties appear to have been proclaimed at a major festival, replete with rituals such as Babylon’s ruler raising a sacred torch to signal the renewal of the social cosmos in good order—what the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade called “the eternal return,” the idea of circular time that formed the context in which rulers restored an idealized status quo ante. By integrating debt annulments with social cosmology, the image of rulers restoring economic order was central to the archaic idea of justice and equity. (Mis)Interpreting the Meaning of ‘Freedom’ The Hebrew word used for the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25 is dêror, but not until cuneiform texts could be read was it recognized as cognate to Akkadian andurarum. Before the early meaning was clarified, the King James Version translated the relevant phrase as: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” But the root meaning of andurarum is to move freely, as running water—or (for humans) as bondservants liberated to rejoin their families of origin. The wide variety of modern interpretations of such key terms as Sumerian amargi, Akkadian andurarum and misharum, and Hurrian shudutu serve as an ideological Rorschach test reflecting the translator’s own beliefs. The earliest reading was by Francois Thureau-Dangin1, who related the Sumerian term amargi to Akkadian andurarum and saw it as a debt cancellation. Ten years later Schorr (1915) related these acts to Solon’s seisachtheia, the “shedding of burdens” that annulled the debts of rural Athens in 594 BC. The Canadian scholar George Barton2 translated Urukagina’s and Gudea’s use of the term amargi as “release,” although the Jesuit Anton Deimel3 rendered it rather obscurely as “security.” Maurice Lambert4 initially interpreted Urukagina’s amargi act as an exemption from taxes, on the ground that most of the debts being annulled were owed to the palace. His subsequent 1972 discovery of Enmetena’s kindred proclamation dating some fifty years earlier led him to see amargi as signifying a debt cancellation. F. R. Kraus5 had followed this view in 1954, and greatly elaborated his survey of Babylonian proclamations in his 1984 survey of rulers “raising the torch” to signal debt cancelations.6 In America, Samuel Kramer (History Begins at Sumer [New York, 1959]) interpreted these acts as tax reductions. In a letter to The New York Times the day President Reagan took office in 1981, he even urged the president-elect to emulate Urukagina and cut taxes! The term amargi became popular with U.S. libertarians seeking an archaic precedent for their tax protests. Kramer7 further belittled Urukagina’s reforms as soon “gone with the wind,” being “too little, too late,” as if they were failures for not solving the debt problem permanently. In a similar vein Stephen Lieberman8, deemed Babylonian debt cancelations ineffective on the ground that they kept having to be repeated: “The need to repeat the enactment of identical provisions shows that the misharum provided relief, but did not eliminate the difficulties which made it necessary.…What seems to have been needed was reform which would have eliminated all need for such adjustments.” He did not suggest just what could have created an economy free of credit cycles. A Practical Solution Mesopotamian rulers were not seeking a debt-free utopia but coped pragmatically with the most adverse consequences of rural debt when it became top-heavy. Usury was not banned, as it would be in Judaism’s Exodus Code, but its effects were reversed when the debt overhead exceeded the ability to pay on a widespread basis. These royal edicts retained the economy’s underlying structure The palace did not deter new debts from being run up, and kept leasing out land to sharecroppers, who owed the usual proportion of crops and were obliged to pay the usual interest penalties for non-delivery. Igor Diakonoff9 emphasized that “the word andurarum does not mean ‘political liberation.’ It is a translation of Sumerian amargi ‘returning to mother,’ that is, ‘to the original situation.’ It does not mean liberation from some supreme authority but the canceling of debts, duties, and the like. The Assyrian term “washing the tablets” (hubullam masa’um10; may refer to dissolving them in water, akin to breaking or pulverizing them. Likening it to the Babylonian term meaning “to kill the tablet,” Kemal Balkan11 explained that the idea was to cancel grain debts by physically destroying their records. Along more abstract lines, Raymond Westbrook12 likens the idea of “washing” to a ritual cleansing of the population from inequities that would displease Sumerian and Babylonian patron deities. Urukagina’s edict thus was held to have cleansed Lagash from the moral blemish of inequity. Some Anachronistic Creditor-Oriented Views of Clean Slates Instead of enforcing debt contracts at the cost of social and military instability, Sumer and Babylonia preserved economic viability via Clean Slates. Today’s creditor-oriented ideology denies the success of Clean Slates overriding free-market relations. It depicts the archaic past as much like our own world, as if civilization was developed by individuals thinking in terms of modern orthodoxy, letting interest rates be determined simply by market supply and demand, duly adjusted for risk of non-payment. Modern economic theory assumes that debts normally can be paid, with the interest rate reflecting the borrower’s profit. The implication is that the fall in interest rates from Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome resulted from falling profit rates and/or the greater security of investment. In this view, debt cancellations would only have aggravated debt problems, by increasing the creditor’s risk and hence the interest rate. Modernist assumptions distract attention from what actually happened. No writer in antiquity is known to have related interest rates to profit rates or risk, or to the use of seeds or breeding cattle to produce offspring. We may well ask whether it was fortunate for the survival of Babylonian society that its rulers were not “advanced economic theoreticians” of the modern sort. If they had not proclaimed Clean Slates, creditors would have reduced debtors to bondage and taken their lands irreversibly. But in canceling crop debts, rulers acknowledged that the palace had taken all that it could without destroying the economy’s foundations. If they had demanded that debt arrears be made up by cultivators forfeiting their family members and land rights to royal collectors (who sought to keep debt charges on the crop yield for themselves), the palace would have lost the services of these debtors for corvée labor and in the armed forces to resist foreign attack. Markets indeed became less stable as economies polarized in classical antiquity. Yet it was only at the end of antiquity that Diodorus of Sicily (I.79) explained the most practical rationale for Clean Slates. Describing how Egypt’s pharaoh Bakenranef (720-715) abolished debt bondage and canceled undocumented debts, Diodorus wrote that the pharaoh’s guiding logic was that: “the bodies of citizens should belong to the state, to the end that it might avail itself of the services which its citizens owed it, in times of both war and peace. For he felt that it would be absurd for a soldier, perhaps at the moment when he was setting forth to fight for his fatherland, to be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all.” That would seem to be how early Mesopotamian rulers must have reasoned. Letting soldiers pledge their land to creditors and then lose this basic means of self-support through foreclosure would have expropriated the community’s fighting force—or led to their flight or defection. By the 4th century BC, the Greek military writer known as Tacticus recommended that a general attacking a town might promise to cancel the debts owed by its inhabitants if they defected to his side. Likewise, defenders of towns could strengthen the resistance of their citizens by agreeing to annul their debts. This emergency military tactic no longer reflected a royal duty to restore economic self-reliance as a guiding principle of overall order. What disappeared was the relief of debtors from their obligations and reversal of their land sales or forfeitures when natural disasters blocked their ability to pay or after a new ruler took the throne. The oligarchic epoch had arrived, abolishing any public power able to cancel the society-wide debt overgrowth. 1. Les inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, 1905, pp. 86-87 2. The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad, 1929. 3. Sumerische Tempelwirtschaft der Zeit Urukaginas und seiner Vorgänger, 1930, p. 9. 4. “Les ‘Reformes’ d’Urukagina,” La Revue Archéologique 60, 1956, pp. 169-184.. 5. Ein Edikt des Königs Ammisaduqa von Babylon (SD 5, [Leiden]). 6. Fritz Rudolph Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit, 1984. 7. Samuel Noah Kramer History Begins at Sumer 1959, p. 49. 8. Stephen J. Lieberman “Royal ‘Reforms’ of the Amurrite Dynasty,” Bibliotecha Orientalis 46, 1989, pp. 241-259. 9. “The City-States of Sumer” and “Early Despotisms in Mesopotamia,” in Early Antiquity 1991, pp. 67-97, p. 234. 10. A. Kirk Grayson Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: From the beginning to Ashur-resha-ishi I, Volume 1 of the Records of the Near East Harrassowitz, 1972, p. 7. 11. “Cancellation of Debts in Cappadocian Tablets from Kultepe,” Anatolian Studies Presented to Hans C. Guterbock, 1974, pp. 29-36, p. 33. 12. Raymond Westbrook, “Social Justice in the Ancient Near East,” in Morris Silver and K. D. Irani, eds., Social Justice in the Ancient World, 1995, pp. 149-163. Author Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Archives June 2024
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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s eastward vision was instrumental in advancing the strategic Moscow–Tehran–Beijing nexus and bulldozing a path toward institutionalizing multipolarity. Amidst all the sadness and grief over the loss of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, let’s take a moment to showcase the critical path he helped forge toward a new global order. In the nearly three years since Raisi ascended to the Iranian presidency, Eurasian integration and the drive toward multipolarity have become fundamentally conducted by three major actors: Russia, China, and Iran. Which, by no accident, are the three top “existential threats” to the hegemonic power. At 10 pm this past Sunday in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Iran’s ambassador to Moscow, Kazem Jalali, to be at the table in an impromptu meeting with the cream of the crop of Russia’s Defense Team. That invitation reached far beyond the myopic media conjecture over whether the Iranian president’s untimely death was due to an “accidental crash” or an act of sabotage. It came from the fruits of Raisi’s tireless labor to position Iran as an east-facing nation, boldly forging strategic alliances with Asia’s major powers while sweetening Tehran’s relations with past regional foes. Increased Eurasian integration Back to that Sunday night table in Moscow. Everyone was there – from Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and Secretary of the Security Council Sergei Shoigu to Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, Emergencies Minister Aleksandr Kurenkov and Special Assistant to the President, Igor Levitin. The key message portrayed was that Moscow has Tehran’s back. And Russia completely supports the stability and continuity of government in Iran, which is already fully guaranteed by Iran’s constitution and its detailed contingencies for a peaceful transition of power under even unusual circumstances. As we are now deep into total Hybrid War mode – bordering on Hot – across most of the planet, the three civilization states shaping a new system of international relations could not be more obvious. Russia–Iran–China (RIC) are already interlinked via bilateral, comprehensive strategic partnerships; they are members of both BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and their modus operandi was fully unveiled for the whole Global Majority to examine at Putin’s crucial summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week. In short, none of the three Asian powers will allow the other partners to be destabilized by the usual suspects. A stellar record Late President Raisi and his top diplomat, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, leave a stellar legacy. Under their leadership, Iran became a member of BRICS, a full member of the SCO, and a major stakeholder in the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). These are the three key multilateral organizations shaping the road to multipolarity. Iran’s new diplomatic drive reached key Arab and African players, from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to Libya, Sudan, and Djibouti. Tehran, for the first time, conducted a sophisticated, large-scale military operation against Israel, firing a barrage of drones and missiles from Iranian territory. Iran–Russia relations reached the next level in trade and military-political cooperation. Two years ago, Putin and Raisi agreed on a comprehensive bilateral treaty. The draft of the core document is now ready and will be signed by Iran’s next president, expanding the partnership even further. As a member of an Iranian delegation told me last year in Moscow, when the Russians were asked what could be on the table, they replied, “You can ask us anything.” And vice versa. So all interlocked declinations of Raisi’s “Look East” strategic shift coupled with Russia’s earlier “pivot to Asia” are being addressed by Moscow and Tehran. The Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO is meeting this Tuesday and Wednesday in Astana, preparing for the summit in July, when Belarus will become a full member. Crucially, Saudi Arabia’s cabinet has also approved the decision for Riyadh to join, possibly next year. Iran’s continuity of government will be fully represented in Astana via interim Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who was Amir-Abdollahian’s number two. He’s bound to immediately enter the fray alongside Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to discuss the multi-layered multipolar path. A hypersonic joint statement The overarching charter of what a new system entails was revealed last week at the landmark Putin-Xi summit via a stunning 10-chapter joint statement, over 12,000 words long, with “cooperation” appearing no less than 130 times. This document can correctly be interpreted as a joint hypersonic manifesto comprehensively blowing up Washington’s artificial “rules-based international order.” This section particularly stands out: All countries have the right to independently choose their development models and political, economic, and social systems based on their national conditions and people’s will, oppose interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, oppose unilateral sanctions and ‘long-arm jurisdiction’ without international law basis or UN Security Council authorization, and oppose drawing ideological lines. Both sides pointed out that neo-colonialism and hegemonism are completely contrary to the trend of the times and called for equal dialogue, the development of partnerships, and the promotion of exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations. Iran, sanctioned to death for over four decades, is now learning directly from China and Russia about their efforts to destroy “decoupling” narratives as well as the effect of a tsunami of western sanctions on Russia. For example, an array of China–Europe train corridors is now mostly used to ship Chinese goods to Central Asia and re-export them to Russia. Yet amidst this trade boom, logistical bottlenecks also increase. Virtually every European port refuses to handle any shipments from or to Russia. And Russia’s largest ports continue to have problems: Vladivostok does not have capacity for large cargo ships, while St Petersburg is very far from China. So Chapter 3 of the Russia–China joint declaration places particular emphasis on “port and transportation cooperation, including developing more logistics routes,” and deepening financial cooperation, “including via increasing the share of local currency in financial services,” and increasing industrial cooperation, “including in strategic areas such as car and boat manufacturing, metal smelting, and chemicals.” All that applies to Russia–Iran cooperation too, for instance, in streamlining the International North–South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), especially from Astrakhan in the Caspian to Iranian ports and then via roads down to the Persian Gulf. Iranian Foreign Minister Bagheri Kani had previously remarked that thanks to Iran’s “exceptional geopolitical location” reaching West Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea region, and wider Eurasia, Iran can contribute to the “economic growth and economic potential” of all regional players. Putin’s visit to China last week included a visit to the northeastern powerhouse Harbin – which has strong geographical/historical links to Russia. A giant China–Russia Expo attracted over 5,000 commercial firms. It’s not far-fetched to imagine an equally successful Russia–Iran Expo at a Caspian port. Promethean project What links Russia, China, and Iran is, first and foremost, an emerging framework designed by Sovereign Civilizational States. The fateful passing of president-martyr Raisi won’t alter The Big Picture in the least. We’re in the middle of a long process against an environment conditioned for decades by pain and fear. The process has gained immense traction these past few years, starting with the official launch of the New Silk Roads in 2013. The New Silk Roads and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are a Promethean project that is as much geopolitical as geoeconomic. In parallel came the gradual expansion of the SCO's role as an economic cooperation mechanism. Once again, Iran is a top BRI, SCO, and BRICS member. After Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014, the Russia–China strategic partnership really started picking up speed. Soon, we also had Iran selling practically all of its oil production to China and coming under the protection of the Chinese nuclear umbrella. Then we had the Empire humiliated in Afghanistan. And the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in February 2022. And the expansion of BRICS into formerly western terrains in the Global South. During his memorable Spring 2023 visit to Moscow, Xi told Putin that “changes not seen in a hundred years” would occur and that both should be at the helm of these inevitable changes. That was exactly the crux of their discussions last week in Beijing. The Iranian bombing of ultra-protected Israeli territory with perfect precision – as a response to a terror attack on its diplomatic consulate in a third country – sent a crystal-clear, game-changer message, completely understood by the Global Majority: the Hegemon’s power in West Asia is coming to an end. Losing the Rimland is anathema to perfectly American geopolitics. It must be back in its control as it knows how important it is. New direction The Angel of History, though, is pointing in a new direction – to China, Russia, and Iran as the natural Sovereigns shaping the re-emergence of the Heartland. Concisely, these Three Sovereigns have the epistemological level, will, creativity, organization skills, vision, and tools of power to realize a true Promethean project. It may sound like a miracle, but the present leadership in all three states shares this common understanding and endeavor. For instance, what could be more enticing than the possibility of former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Iran’s next president to join new Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani? In the past, Jalili has been cast as too “hardline” for western palates, but the west hardly matters anymore on these shores. After Raisi’s eastward and multipolarity grand U-turn away from former Iranian “reformist” President Hassan Rouhani’s misguided, failed westward foray, Jalili may be just the ticket for Iran’s next phase. And oh, what a perfectly dashing complement to the Xi–Putin duo that would be. AuthorPepe Escobar is a columnist at The Cradle, editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. Since the mid-1980s he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties. This article was produced by The Cradle. Archives June 2024 6/3/2024 The movement for Palestinian Solidarity in Chilean Universities: defying the liberal academia. By: Camilo Godoy & Catalina CalderónRead NowAfter 76 years of occupation, students from across the Globe have shown their support towards the Palestinian cause during recent months. The agreements, cooperation and public relations with Universities and academic institutions from Israel has been a common factor in the causes towards it, considering the context of imperialism and aggression with direct complicity from the US’ government and the UK after the AlAqsa Flood Operation by Hamas and then continued by other parts of the Armed Resistance in Gaza. Movements from civil society and grassroots organizations have been key in denouncing complicit relations with the genocide itself, considering the decisions made by governments from the Global North have been considerable weak, comparing with the case of Ukraine. On its last report Francesca Albanese, the “Anatomy of a Genocide” (February 26th, 2024) shown that Israel had killed more than 35.000 people, with a 70% of them being children and women. In response, students from Universities such as California Berkeley, Chicago, Spain Universities and more recently Oxford in an effort made by academics, students and professionals have joined together in order to break relations with Israeli institutions. In the case of Chile, a country with 19 million inhabitants, 1.341.439 students from higher education system, and the largest population of arab-palestine descendants, this situation has gone critical since May 15th, when a group of students camped in the Central Campus of the University of Chile. University of Chile is the most prestigious and oldest institution for higher education. Along with this, students from other institutions such as University of Santiago, Chile have demanded the immediate ceasing of the agreements with Israeli universities. The response from the authorities have consisted of advocating for “academic freedom” and defending possible “options for growing on knowledge” not considering that PACBI, movements from scholars such as SWAP (Scholars Against the War on Palestine) and more recently the work of Maya Wind (2024) has stated that Israeli academic institutions have contributed directly to the apartheid itself. In that sense, Eduardo Asfura, Academic at the University of Santiago states that ‘it is contradictory that, in the first public University from Chile, the response of the authorities (in this case, from the University of Chile), to the mobilization for Palestine, shows a dissuasive tone rather than a will for dialogue.’ In may 24th, the University Council from the University of Chile rejected to suspend agreements with Israeli academic institutions, pointing out that ‘the purpose of the international agreements established between universities and their units is to promote academic exchange, whether through training or research, in order to enhance the quality or impact of their work and contribute to the generation of knowledge networks at a global level’ (https://cooperativa.cl/noticias/mundo/medio-oriente/conflicto-israel-palestina/universidad-de-chile-descarta-eliminar-convenios-con-planteles-israelies/2024-05-24/200232.html). Asfura continues to point out that ‘this will has been expressed, fundamentally, in two strategies: 1) initial delegitimization of the strategies of the movement itself, through the stigma of ‘violence’ and "intolerance’ and 2) delegitimization of its demands, by questioning the usefulness and meaning of them. In this second case, the argument has been basically the following: ‘To break with Israeli universities is to silence dissident voices and critical voices. If the world did not do it with us during the dictatorship, it would be a mistake for us to do it now with the universities of Israel’. ‘Unlike what happened in Chile during the dictatorship, Israeli academic institutions have not been the of crimes against humanity”. Also in the 9 months of genocide, these university institutions (Israelis) have shown very little initiative for peace, showing that their main virtue is not dissent, but rather complicity’. In that sense, as Israeli academic Maya Wind put it, ‘Israeli universities are a central pillar of Israel’s regime of oppression against the Palestinians’. Something that is ratified not only in scientific, technological and logistical support’. In more general terms, Luna Jadue, member of the Committee in Solidarity for Palestine of the University of Chile says that “I think that the contribution we can make is important, considering that if the Universities show that we are committed with the social problems for nowadays, it will be easier for the people to understand deeply our struggle for the Palestinian liberation and its foundations”. To the opinion of Mauricio Rosales, Coordinator of the Solidarity with Palestine Committee at the University of Santiago de Chile, this movement “is something that is taking a very wide and massive character. This has strengthened the student movement and has been an opportunity to agitate an anti imperialist view, in order to make Universities Free from Apartheid, considering we are not only fighting for breaking the academic agreements but for demanding our national government to suspend all the relations with Israel’. This refers to the government of Gabriel Boric, which, unlike Gustavo Petro or Luis Arce in South America, hasn't cut diplomatic ties with Israel but has preferred to stick to other formulas such as calling the ambassador and joining the South African demand at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as it been announced on Saturday, on his Public Account Annual Speech in 1st of June, 2024. In relation to the student movement, lately it has started gaining momentum, with a statement from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Chile announcing the immediate suspension of one local and one global frame agreement. This, derived from protests and activities open to the citizens. As well as in other contexts, this has shown that the higher superior education system is still divided between a conservative élite reluctant to any political change, even if that means complicit relations with institutions with empirical relations with a genocide ongoing, based on military cooperation and legal international defense from the arguments of the Likud. Alongside this, even considering that the Palestinian movement still has an elite-base in Chile, this has been a challenge for being more massive and gaining an anti-imperialist approach, which has started exploring debates between the relation from indigenous peoples and the working class from the Global South and palestinian liberation, proving that solidarity with Palestine is not about ethnicity, nor esthetic, but about struggle of the oppressed around the world. Meanwhile the massive movement from civil society recalls the resistance led all across the globe to the Vietnam war and the mid 20th century’ American imperialism. As in the case of the opposition to imperialism during that time, it didn’t come from State actors, but from the civil society (grassroots and student movements) across the globe. Even with all the war crimes and transgressions of Humanitarian Law and Human Rights by Netanyahu's administration and the support from Biden, Rishi Sunak and the German government, Non State actors still have a power to question the international crimes and impunity from colonialist and imperialist countries and their academic allies. Currently, the student movement has been discussing to project Universities as Apartheid Free Zones (AFZ), going beyond only cutting academic agreements, establishing restorative and reparative processes -also on past practices-, preventing new agreements with institutions linked to genocide. This, understanding that liberal academia only acknowledges knowledge as a means to an end and obscures all the relations of power and impunity subjacent. Authors Camilo Godoy Pichon is a Chilean sociologist from the University of Chile and MA candidate in International Studies in University of Santiago, Chile. He has worked on topics such as environmental struggles and conflicts in the Global South, in regards to companies or corporations who promote extractivism and ecocide. He has worked with indigenous people, elders, and children from poor towns and areas from his country, along with developing academic work and research on the environmental justice' topic. He is very interested in analyzing how class influences environmental conflicts and other inequalities in South America and specially in neoliberal countries such as Chile. He has published 2 social/political poetry books both in Chile (2019) and Argentina (2022) and another poetry book on political repression during Pinochet's dictatorship, for the case of poor youngsters killed by the police in Southern Santiago in 1973, which will be published in Spain in early 2023. Catalina Calderón Archives May 2024 6/3/2024 Western arms supplies to Ukraine prevent peaceful solutions By: Margaret KimberleyRead NowThank you, Mr. President. Thank you all for this opportunity to address the Security Council and to provide a briefing on the issue of peace as it relates to Ukraine and its connections with people in this country and all over the world. As a journalist, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and of the United National Antiwar Coalition, and as a citizen of the United States, the nation which has taken a lead role in continuing this crisis, I am very eager to speak to this issue. As of now, the U.S. government has allocated nearly $175 billion for the Ukrainian war effort and to support the workings of Ukraine’s civilian government. For the last two years we have seen a terrible war which would end if this country and others would stop providing arms and instead seek peace. There were opportunities for that very thing to happen in March and April of 2022, when the government of Turkiye hosted peace talks between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The possibility of peace was lost when my country and others subverted these talks by promising the government of Ukraine that it would receive an endless supply of weapons with which to achieve a military victory. Not only has that victory been elusive, but thousands of Ukrainians, the people this country claims to care so much about, have lost their lives. And of course, many Russians have also perished in the fighting. The goal should be for the death toll to end for both nations. We don’t have to guess why this huge sum of money has been spent. We need only recall what the president of the United States and his foreign policy team have said publicly. The Secretary of Defense famously said in a rare moment of candor, that the U.S. wanted to “see Russia weakened.” This is a dangerous goal for the United States to have at all. The world needs cooperation. It is the only way to avoid escalation and disastrous outcomes between the major powers. The U.S. shouldn’t be attempting to weaken any nation but should be continuously engaged in finding ways to prevent and to end conflicts. Not only is the Secretary’s confession dangerous, but it has surely failed. President Biden himself said that U.S. imposed sanctions against Russia would “turn the ruble to rubble.” No such thing has happened, but other nations have suffered economically from the futile effort to keep Russian oil off of world markets. Global South nations in particular were most impacted by what turned out to be a failed effort against Russia. More developed nations, those in Europe, have been deprived of affordable gas supplies they reliably received from Russia for decades. There have been other serious consequences and some of them have fallen on people in this country, the one most responsible for continuing the crisis. Project Ukraine as it is called is a bipartisan effort, with both Democrats and Republicans supporting the continued infusion of huge sums of money to the defense industry, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and to dubious projects in Ukraine itself. This funding is not just spent on the military but is literally supplying many domestic government functions within that country. Most Americans are unaware that small businesses in Ukraine are being supported with their public funds. At least $25 billion in non-military aid has been spent. It isn’t as if people in this country aren’t in need of help. Money for weapons continues thanks to consensus among the political class while needy people here are being removed from the Medicaid program which pays for health care for low-income people, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Students take on thousands of dollars in debt to attend universities. The same administration which is committed to spending money on weapons has never presented a plan to help the estimated 500,000 people in the U.S. who are unhoused. There are constantly calls to cut or end these programs altogether but the funding stream for war remains untouched. Democracy itself is in crisis because of these endless conflicts. War is not the only indicator of violence in the world and peace is not just the absence of conflict. War making leads to immiseration, which is antithetical to the concept of peace. The U.S. public do not have the unanimity of opinion on Ukraine that one would expect considering that billions of dollars have been allocated. Even those who say they support this effort also say that they would like to see negotiations too. A recent poll indicated that 71% of people in this country would like to see a negotiated settlement instead of ongoing conflict. But the millions of Americans who want an end to the conflict have been deprived of the representation we are supposed to have. Not only does the administration refuse to reconsider its position, but there are reports that President Biden wants to prevent future presidents from playing a different role. According to President Zelensky, he is working with the U.S. and other NATO nations on a ten-year plan to provide weapons. Joe Biden can only serve for a maximum of four and a half more years, meaning that he wants to make a commitment that a future president could not change. In so doing, he invalidates the concerns of voters in this country and of the people who are supposed to represent them. As a citizen of the United States, I am frankly shocked by the lengths this country will go to in order to pursue a dangerous plan that is doomed to failure. The most recent tranche of U.S. weapons funding is dependent upon Ukraine mobilizing more men, approximately 500,000. Several million Ukrainians fled to nearby states in 2022 but now they are told they cannot renew their passports abroad. They must return to Ukraine where we see videos of men literally being press ganged into service, dragged off the street and forced to join the military. The freedom that is allegedly being fought for seems to require a lack of freedom for Ukrainians who face the risk of death on the battlefield. This corruption requires a steady stream of indoctrination and propaganda to keep the U.S. population from asking questions or actively opposing the war. I suppose that is why Secretary of State Antony Blinken thought it wise to perform with a Ukrainian band on his last visit to Kiev. Not only that, but neither the Secretary nor his handlers were aware that the song he performed, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” is a lament about poverty and hopelessness in a supposedly free world which isn’t truly free for millions of people. The administration is so divorced from reality that they thought it wise for Secretary Blinken to play this song as men are rounded up to be cannon fodder. I want to add that this conflict didn’t begin in February 2022. It began years earlier with the U.S. plan to have Ukraine join NATO. In 2008 William Burns, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, revealed in a cable known to us, because of the work of Wikileaks, that doing so would cross a Russian red line and potentially lead to “a major split, involving violence or at worst civil war.” As we all know Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange languishes in a UK prison, facing extradition to the country that has made an example of him because he has revealed secrets such as this cable. I reiterate that there have been peace proposals in the past two years, with the most recent attempt being made by the People’s Republic of China, which has developed a comprehensive 12-point plan that could mean the end of destruction and suffering if it is given serious consideration. Lastly, I would like to make a plea to the United Nations to use its power to investigate a catastrophic event that is tied to the Ukraine conflict. On September 26, 2022, the NordStream pipelines were destroyed in an explosion which also sent approximately 15 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming. Investigations have been closed without conclusion and at least one internationally known investigative journalist has provided evidence of U.S. responsibility. Sadly, no one in a position to investigate in this country has demanded an investigation. It is imperative that the United Nations undertake an independent investigation of its own. This is only possible if fantasies about domination are finally and firmly rejected. Doing so would free nations to be honest with one another, to struggle over issues but to resolve them without death or expenditures of money that are better used for human needs. I end by thanking you profusely for this opportunity and for the work of the Security Council in upholding the United Nations Charter on behalf of the people of the world. Thank you so much. AuthorMargaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives June 2024 |
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