The western mass media and governments have fallen into a frenzy of anti-Russian propaganda over Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. One element of their propaganda war is the claim that Russia’s action is illegal under international law. But is this the case and what does it mean for these countries to make that claim when they have themselves invaded and attacked too many nations to enumerate, every one of which was not only illegal, but without any moral, ethical justification whatsoever?

The law on the use of force in international relations has two aspects, codified international law as set out in the Charter of the United Nations, and the commonly understood right to self-defence.

The UN Charter is the primary document governing the use of force. Nation states do not have a right to use force in relations with other sovereign states except in very limited circumstances. It used to be, before the twentieth century, that there was an understanding that all nations had the right to use force, to go to war to ensure their interests. But the cataclysms of World War I and World War II led in each case to an attempt to prevent wars of aggression.

After WWI the League of Nations was created, supported by the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which I have referred to in previous articles, a Treaty still in effect, in which the USA and Soviet Union and all other nations promised never to use war to solve political disputes. The League of Nations fell apart in the 1930’s with the rise of fascism and the aggressions of Italy and Germany. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact still exists.

However the Pact was understood to permit wars in defence of a nation that was under attack. The same applies to the security structure set up after WWII with the creation of the United Nations and the UN Charter that governs relations between sovereign nations and the use of force,

According to Article 2(4) of the Charter all member states are obliged to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial or political integrity of any state. There are two important exceptions to this obligation, the first being the right of individual or collective self-defence under Article 51 and the collective enforcement by the Security Council on the basis of Chapter VII of the Charter which deals with threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression. The inherent right of self-defence, individually or collectively, with the support of other states, exists so long as the Security Council has not taken measures to “maintain international peace and security.” That right, therefore is meant to be a measure of last resort.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a paradigm shift in how war was regarded. Before it, war was considered a part of a continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means, as Clausewitz put it in his famous book, On War, and an acceptable way of resolving disputes. At least, it was not considered illegal. It was outside of law, except for the customary rules of war governing treatment of combatants, civilians, proportionality and so on.

This shift is set out in the UN Charter’s preamble which states that,

“Armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest. and Article 2(4) prohibits any threat or use of forces “inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

The common interest is determined by essential principle of the sovereignty equality of states, which in turn means protection against acts of aggression.

When the common interest is involved then the Security Council can enforce the Charter by using the coercive measures contained in the Charter. Article 42 of Chapter VII authorises the Council to take action, using armed force, to “maintain or restore international peace and security.” But this authority is exercised within the strictures of Article 27(3) that gives the permanent members of the Council the right to veto any decision, including even when the nation casting the veto vote is the subject of the vote. This veto power has effectively led to the paralysis of the United Nations in a number of international conflicts, where national interests are in conflict and has resulted in reality to a state of the world where might makes right.

Disputes in the UN have also led to a situation in which, for instance the United States was able to manipulate the Council to authorise, if we can use that term, the use of force through the back door, and form “coalitions of the willing” to attack US targeted nations. The term is of course a euphemism for a coalition willing to violate international law for the interests of the United States. This practice has become routine for the United States and its NATO alliance since the Korean War. It undermined the general ban on the use of force and in effect allowed the United States to attack and to invade nations at will.

So, how does the Russian claim of legality in its Ukraine operations stand up to the international law and how does it compare with the military operations of the United States?

To answer that question we have to look back in history to the Korean War since it is the only American-NATO war the Americans claim had legal backing. This was the first of the many illegal acts of aggression conducted by the United States after World War II. The Americans claim that their “police action,” their euphemism for the invasion and destruction of Korea and the deaths of millions of people, and the attacks on and attempted invasion of China, at that time, was legal, through a decision of the Security Council. But this is a lie.

There was no valid approval of that American-NATO aggression against Korea and China by the UN. The USA manipulated the vote so that their motion to approve their military plans was presented to the Security Council on a day the Russians were absent from the Council. Votes in the Security Council require the positive vote of all the permanent members. Russia was not there to vote but the Americans pushed their NATO allies, Britain, France and the Kuomintang Chinese, who still held the seat for China at the UN, to vote to approve their war anyway. They did what they were told. That vote was not valid and in law never existed it. It is on this trickery that their aggression rested.

Have any of the other American wars been legal? None of them All of them are in violation of Article 2(4). The list is long. When I first drafted this I set out all the invasions of nations the Americans conducted since then but to list them here would turn this into a thick book of American crimes, from Korea to Vietnam, from Cuba to Congo, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Latin America, to Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon. But one crime must be added to all their war crimes and aggressions, the crime of hypocrisy. For all of their aggressions were conducted for reasons of domination and exploitation of resources and peoples, for profit. There was never any legal justification ever offered, as there were none. None of them were conducted in self-defence, whereas Russia’s action clearly is.

In my opinion Russia acted in accordance with international law under Article 51 of the UN Charter for the following reasons;

First, the Kiev regime was mounting a major offensive with NATO’s help against the Donbass Republics with the intent of destroying them. Intensive shelling had already begun days before Russia acted, the shelling of civilian buildings and infrastructure, which resulted in scores of thousands of civilians fleeing into Russia. During that period the Kiev regime also attempted to assassinate a leader of the Republics with a car bomb. Russia had no choice but to protect the Donbass peoples and since the Security Council could do nothing, and the EU and NATO were supporting the Kiev offensive against the Donbass, Russia was the only nation that could act.

The request for military assistance from the Donbass Republics also compelled Russia to send in its forces to help push back the Kiev forces from the territories of the Republics.

Second, Russia itself had been attacked multiple times by Kiev regime forces. Saboteurs were sent into Crimea time and again to carry out raids, assassinate officials, to destroy infrastructure. They even cut Crimea’s water supply, a crime against humanity. Just a few days before Russia acted a Kiev reconnaissance unit invaded Russia but was detected and destroyed. Russia had every right under The Caroline Doctrine to go after the attackers and to prevent further attacks.

The Caroline Doctrine was established in 1837 when American forces invaded Canada, to assist Canadian rebels who had risen against the government. The Americans travelled to Canada by ship across Lake Ontario. The British then later invaded New York State to retaliate and burn the ship, named the Caroline. As a result of that incident, it was agreed by both the USA and Britain that the right of a nation to self-defence rested on two factors:

1. The use of force must be necessary because the threat is imminent and thus pursuing peaceful alternatives is not an option, and,

2. The response must be proportionate to the threat.

In this case the threat was more than imminent. It was on-going and increasing. The only effective and proportional defensive response was to destroy the offensive forces being deployed. These forces include not only Kiev regime government forces but also the nationalist, Nazi brigades supporting and spearheading the Kiev offensive and all the NATO equipment being supplied to them to conduct the Kiev offensive.

Thirdly, the deeper issue was the imminent threat to Russia from NATO posed by its continuous expansion to the east, its continuous build up of forces and offensive structure pointed at Russia and the completion this September of the American missile systems in Poland, Romania and Ukraine which could then be used to launch a nuclear attack against Russia.

We remember that in the past few months the NATO nations have conducted military exercises that included practicing launching nuclear attacks on Russia. We also remember that the USA has a first strike nuclear war policy, claiming the right to use nuclear weapons wherever and whenever they deem fit. It was evident that they were practising attacks because that was and is their intention.

Russia demanded the Americans withdraw those systems, and to withdraw NATO from Eastern Europe. They flatly refused. Ukraine talked of acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening Russia with them. It would take time for them to manufacture but there was nothing to stop the Americans from giving them nuclear weapons, under their control, as the Americans have done with Germany, for instance.

Russia could do nothing, keep the peace, and watch, as the weapons for its destruction were installed and made ready to fire; to commit suicide in other words, or it could defend itself. It warned the US that it would do so, and had the right to do so, the same right the Americans always claim to have, but again Russia was ignored. It had to act or face destruction and subjugation.

We remember that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, the Americans threatened to invade Cuba and to attack the USSR because nuclear missiles had been placed in Cuba to protect it against American aggression. President Kennedy established the precedent principle that when a nation feels its existence is at stake from nuclear weapons it has the right to use force to protect itself pre-emptively. Russia is acting on the same principle.

Lastly, the NATO powers have lately relied on their bogus legal doctrine of “responsibility to protect” that they invented after the fact to try to justify their aggression against Yugoslavia. No such doctrine exists in international law but they claim the right to use it nevertheless. It applies, according to them, when a military action is justified, though illegal, “for legitimate humanitarian reasons.’ They were warned that this false doctrine could be turned against them. Russia has not referred to it at all, but if NATO can rely on it for their wars of aggression, then surely Russia can rely on it to justify their military action to defend the Donbass, and themselves.

When one takes account of all the factors that governed the Russian decision to send its forces into Ukraine it is clear that in law they had the legal right to do so whereas the United States continues its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and Syria to this day and the NATO media powers and governments say nothing, because they are all complicit in those invasions.

If the United States and the NATO alliance had complied with international law in the first place as set out in the UN Charter, the world would not be in this mess. They caused this, not Russia. The responsibility is entirely theirs and they will be judged for it.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

A lot of ink has been spilled lately on whether or not the USA and its NATO alliance promised the USSR that NATO would not expand into the space evacuated by the withdrawal of the Red Army from Europe. It is clear those promises were repeatedly made and clear they were repeatedly broken. There is no historical dispute. Claims to the contrary are propaganda to excuse NATO’s aggressive strategy against Russia.

The Americans and their satellites states go further and claim a right to expand their alliance, but on what legal, moral or security grounds this right is based they cannot say. They claim that nations have the right to join NATO of their own free will, but this again is a distortion of the facts. The NATO Treaty states that accession to the Treaty is by invitation only. So there is no right of any nation to freely choose to join NATO. That is a decision ultimately controlled by NATO, by the United States in fact, not the nation seeking to join. This contradiction in their propaganda is never addressed. Nor do they answer why, of all nations, Russia’s request to join was rejected. But the meaning of the rejection was clear at the time and is clear now.

The contradiction is never addressed because that would lead to questions on the methods used by NATO to obtain the requests by countries to join in the first place; which in turn would lead to an examination of the threats, intimidation, bribery, and extortion used to coax these otherwise peaceful nations, with no apparent or real enemy facing them, to join an American controlled military machine.

This all this begs the question why the Americans want to expand their military alliance into those countries. There is only one possible answer, not as a means of defence, as they claim, but as preparation for aggression, which they have been conducting against Russia openly now since NATO attacked, without any justification whatsoever, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 gained control of the Balkan states and built its biggest military base, Camp Bondsteel, threatening Russia’s southwest flank.

The economic warfare has been constant since then, disguised as “sanctions” accompanied by hostile diplomatic moves, provocations along Russia’s borders, from Georgia to the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Pacific all accompanied by a constant barrage of anti-Russian propaganda. The NATO aggression and invasion of Libya can be seen as part of their strategy to control the Mediterranean and the oil supplies in North Africa, to cause insecurity to Egypt, and the world has not forgotten their invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, Syria, where American forces still refuse to leave, a fact ignored by the western media and politicians complaining about alleged threats of “Russian aggression.”

The Americans and their allies in NATO are the experts of hypocrisy, for not only do their constant aggressions violate all international law, including, inter alia, the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles, their actions are also in absolute violation of NATO’s own treaty.

Article 1 of the NATO Treaty states,

‘The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.’

The USA and its NATO satellites are not attempting to settle disputes with Russia (or China for that matter) by peaceful means. Instead they are using the entire spectrum of hybrid warfare, total warfare, against Russia. Yet no NATO member nation has demanded of NATO that the alliance and its members comply with Article 1. None of them demand that it complies with the stated adherence to the UN Charter.

The NATO alliance is also in contravention of Article 7 and 8, which state,

‘Article 7

This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.

Article 8

Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third State is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty.’

The contradiction between the NATO Treaty and the security architecture created by the UN Charter is clear. Chapter VII of the Charter governs all nations with respect to international security. There can be no legal basis for the establishment of any military alliances such as NATO whose clear political objectives are aggression and American hegemony over the world.

Article 8 requires NATO member nations not to enter into any international “engagement’ in conflict with this Treaty. Yet they had already done so becoming members of the United Nations. So, not only is the NATO Treaty a violation of the UN Charter, in fact, a negation of it, its own members are in violation of the NATO Treaty by being members of the UN.

In consequence, the Americans and their allies have, to all intents and purposes, abandoned the United Nations as the final arbiter of international security and now promote their private club of aggressors as its replacement, not to establish peace, but to conduct war.

The NATO Treaty is not the only document to be considered. There is the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 which states,

“Article 1

The High Contracting parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”

“Article II

The High contracting parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

The Kellogg–Briand Pact, otherwise known as the General Treaty For Renunciation of War As An Instrument of National Policy, signed by many nations, including the USA and its NATO members and the USSR, is still in force as established by this exchange in the British House of Commons on December 16, 2013.

‘Steve Baker: To ask the Attorney-General if he will make an assessment of whether the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy remains binding on the UK.

The Solicitor-General: I am advised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy (also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact) remains in force and that the United Kingdom remains a party.’

Of course despite this being a fundamental element of international law, the United States of America has engaged in continuous warfare as an instrument of national policy since the date they signed it.

Russia has acted consistently in accordance with international law and humanity in response to the American threats and actions but is met with the boorish behaviour and insults of thugs.

Earlier this year President Putin sent to the American president a proposal for a Treaty which would guarantee the peace in Europe. The offer was rejected out of hand by the Americans who played games with the text and offered to negotiate on peripheral items, while ignoring Russia’s demands that NATO cease its expansion, withdraw American nuclear weapons from Europe, dismantle the bases and equipment it has placed all over eastern Europe in preparation for war on Russia and agree not to place missile systems close to Russia’s borders.

In further reply to the Russian request to negotiate a Treaty, the Americans hyped up their propaganda against Russia and now provoke its puppets in Kiev to mount an offensive against the Donbass Republics. The result the world now sees as civilians are attacked by artillery bombardments, a war crime in itself, resulting in the evacuation of large numbers of people from the Republics into Russia. This mass movement of refugees is hardly mentioned in the western press, nor that it is due to their actions; nor the attempted assassination of Donbass leaders.

The Russian Duma voted last week to recommend to the President that the Republics be recognised as sovereign states. On Monday, February 21st President Putin, also acting on the request of the Donbass Republics, and the recommendation of the Russian Security Council, made the momentous and logical decision to do exactly that. The Minsk Agreements, though supported by Russia, were being impeded and sabotaged by some European nations, by the Kiev regime and the USA. They were at a dead end. The recognition by Russia was immediately followed by the signing of agreements of mutual cooperation between Russia and the Republics. The meaning and importance of this is obvious to everyone and will be seen clearly in the coming days. NATO and the US of course condemned the decision, though their recognition of the Serbian province of Kosovo as an independent state after they attacked Yugoslavia, occupied Kosovo and tore it out of the heart of Serbia, set the precedent; they have no right to complain about anything.

President Putin’s recent meetings with President Macron of France are a positive development as well as his talks with the new German Chancellor. In France, almost every party from the communists to the far right and everyone in between are calling for France to leave NATO and state Russia is the friend of France. Macron plays both sides against the middle but he knows which way the wind blows, and so is very active in order to be seen as a voice of reason and peace in Europe.

The French are also angry with the Americans over the submarine fiasco, in which the Americans kicked the French in the teeth by getting the Australians to cancel their purchase of French submarines to be replaced with American submarines, while the Germans see that the Americans, who still have occupation forces in Germany, are set on forcing them to buy expensive US liquefied gas, of doubtful supply, instead of the cheaper, secure supplies of Russian gas promised by the NordStream 2 pipeline.

In its reply to the Americans, handed to their ambassador in Moscow on February 17, Russia stated that,

“In the absence of the readiness of the American side to agree on firm, legally binding guarantees to ensure our security from the United States and its allies, Russia will be forced to respond, including through the implementation of military-technical measures.”

This has the Americans in a panic, which may partly account for the hysteria of their propaganda because they have no idea what those military-technical measures will be. We can though look at the actions taken to date to have some idea of the possibilities, with the Chief of the Russian Defence Staff travelling to Syria to meet with President Assad, and the transfer of Russian advanced bombers and jet fighters to their bases in Syria. This has implications for control of the Mediterranean as well the illegal, and brutal occupation of Syrian territory by American forces. In the past week Russian military exercises have wound down in Crimea and region but continue in Belarus and President Putin himself is reported to have overseen nuclear force drills the past several days. The US has been placed on notice; your aggression stops here.

In regard to the situation in Ukraine the Russian document states,

‘To de-escalate the situation around Ukraine, it is fundamentally important to take the following steps. These are forcing Kiev to implement a set of measures, stopping the supply of weapons to Ukraine, withdrawing all Western advisers and instructors from there, refusing NATO countries from any joint exercises with the Armed Forces of Ukraine and withdrawing all previously delivered Kiev of foreign weapons outside the Ukrainian territory.

In this regard, we draw attention to the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a press conference following the talks in Moscow with French President Emmanuel Macron on February 7, 2022, stressed that we are open to dialogue and call for “thinking about stable security conditions for all, equal for all participants in international life.

Once again, Russia wants peace. Europe wants peace. But the United States wants its way and is willing to go to war. But if they go down that road, it will be their final act of aggression because as I wrote above, the Russians, have, as do the Chinese and North Koreans, now told the Americans, “we want peace, and are willing to achieve it, but your aggression stops here.’

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

“When whole communities go to war-whole peoples, and especially civilised peoples-the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore is an act of policy…The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”

So wrote Clausewitz many years ago, and so he would write today, for we face a situation in which the United States of America and its satellites in NATO have a single-minded political objective with regards to Russia-its complete submission to American diktats and control, and the break up of Russia into smaller entities the Americans, Germans, and British, can control and exploit. This is the reason they have advanced their military alliance east, secured rapid resupply routes, placed their weapons systems, logistics bases, advance military headquarters and intelligence units, and special forces along Russia’s western border. This is the reason that NATO keeps the war going in Ukraine, to try to weaken Russia, and to provide themselves with a pretext for a wider war when they decide intimidation, threats, and sanctions have failed their objective.

Russia has the single objective of removing the existential threat presented by these preparations and planning of war against it, of surviving, of freeing itself from the US-NATO threat once and for all, so it can develop and prosper as a free and sovereign nation.

The clear political objective of the Americans begs the question as to the motivations, the morality of their objective, that is, why they are threatening the world with war to establish their hegemony; why they seek hegemony. We can analyse that in terms of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, and understand the constant search for greater profits. We can analyse it as well as an expression of a national egoism that is a constant characteristic of the American society and state since its inception as a nation, a characteristic De Tocqueville remarked on in the 1840’s.

The motivations of the satellite nations are the same as any petty thieves and back-stabbers hanging out with any well-armed bully in any gang, though the British leadership dreams of becoming more than a gang lieutenant and looks for opportunities to increase its share of the pie, and the Germans have revived Hitler’s fantasies about destroying Russia while their government and leadership have never forgiven the Red Army for liberating them from the Nazis.

In 1938 The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned to London from a meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, bearing a piece of paper he waved to the newsreel cameras at Downing Street claiming it contained a guarantee of “peace in our time.” In fact, the Chamberlain had acquiesced in the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and we now know had agreed to give Hitler a free hand against the Soviet Union, so long as Hitler did not move west.

Today, Russian negotiators have given up the attempt to resolve the threats against Russia through diplomacy to obtain peace in our time. The Russians did the best they could. They presented clear demands and the reasons for them. They guaranteed the peace if the other side would do the same. But, as I think they expected, their offer of peace was rejected out of hand. Worse, the US negotiators talked to the US media with the same contempt and arrogance for Russia they displayed in the negotiations, dismissed Russian fears, and fed the US propaganda media a constant barrage of lies and half truths to rouse hostility towards Russia among the people. They are motivating the people for war because they do not have the will for peace, only the will for war.

Some argue this is alarmism and things will not go that far. We can hope they are right but history does not support them. The American rejection of Russia’s legitimate and grave security concerns means they are willing to risk war and since economic warfare under the guise of sanctions, attempted colour revolutions, internal meddling, and the continuous approach of NATO boots up to Russia’s border have failed to secure their objective, armed force is their next phase.

The Russian leadership has stated clearly that their red lines have been crossed and that since talks are futile since there is no will to peace among the NATO gang, only a will to war, Russia has to take clear action to remove the threat. From reading the American press it seems they are confused by the Russian actions. They are guessing what the Russians will do next, and even claim, in vain hope, that the Russians do not know what to do. But I think we can be assured that the Russian leadership and general staff had already decided what actions to take before they made their peace proposals. They know what they will do. The Americans can only wonder what form the action will take, and when and where.

The guesses vary from suggesting Russia could establish bases in Cuba and Venezuela to make the US feel what it feels. But this does not remove the existential threat they face in Europe because the Americans state they will have their missile systems in place in Eastern Europe by the end of this year. Russia has a small window in which to act to prevent that, because once those systems are in place an attack can take place at any time. Russia could support a Syrian action to push the US forces out of Syria which they have invaded and occupied for years and which would further weaken the US in the Middle East, but again that does not quickly remove the threat in Europe.

There has been lots of speculation about various military scenarios, to cause NATO and the USA grief but I have no doubt that whatever is done will surprise NATO. We can only be sure that it will come and it will be very effective. We can also be sure it will have serious consequences for the world.

Yet, though world war threatens us in Europe, threatens us in the east against China and North Korea, the world peace movement is nowhere to be seen by the masses. The peace groups try their best, issues statements, hold a few demonstrations, but our effect on the masses is not what it could be, not from lack of trying, but from lack of interest as most people are worried about daily lives, the pandemic, the even worse catastrophe of abrupt climate change, and know only what the mass media feed them.

The US film, Don’t Look Up, a very effective look at American society as it refuses to pay attention to the disaster heading towards it (the comet as metaphor for climate change) presents the state of mind of most people and the media with respect to the threat of world war racing towards them. The result is the same, a society that is so deluded with its own hubris, that it is taking the very actions that will lead to its destruction, singing and dancing all the way.

All I know is that we, the citizens of the West must stand up for Russia, for China, against western aggression generally, against American imperialism, against the existence of the NATO alliance, whose very existence is a violation of the UN Charter. There are people of peace and goodwill in the world, many. But unless we make our selves heard and can be heard loud enough to effect change, what hope can we have to bridle western aggression that rides a pale horse.

I suggested to some colleagues that we lay war crimes charges against the US and NATO nations for the planning, preparation and conspiracy to commit aggression which is what they are doing, and file them with the International Criminal Court. But despite clear crimes being committed right in front of the ICC prosecutor, nothing is said or done, so that an institution designed to prevent war, by its silence, encourages war, and so, instead of peace in our time we are threatened again with war; and, as Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the American fire bombing of Dresden used to say, ‘and so it goes.’

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

On December 9 and 10 the American President will host a virtual meeting titled a “Democracy Summit” with participation from many countries with all their variety of government and political systems, and even the participation of the Chinese renegade province of Taiwan, justly angering China, perhaps the world’s largest socialist democracy, which is pointedly not invited.

This meeting is a follow up to the dress rehearsal Copenhagen Democracy Summit held in 2018 and again in May of this year which I wrote about at the time as a meeting of the new Nazis, organised by the “Alliance of Democracies” so-called, meaning the USA and its allies and nations seeking its favour. I do not think my characterisation was far off the mark.

That rehearsal revealed what it was all about with the opening address made by the former Secretary-General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was head of NATO when the US and its allies attacked Libya and murdered Gadhafi, overthrowing the socialist democracy there and reducing it to chaos and civil war. It is worth mentioning his other accomplishments, since he is emblematic of the cabal that is organising the Summit.

As prime minister of Denmark he supported the invasion of Iraq, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the Israelis against the Palestinians and at home, this “democrat” lowered corporate and property taxes for the benefit of the rich while shifting the tax burden to working people through sales taxes, and reduced democracy in Denmark by reducing the number of smaller towns and regions into larger ones with a consequent reduction of the ability of people to have their voices heard about local issues, and all the time encouraged privatisation of the economy.

It was he who founded the Alliance of Democracies in 2017 along with his friend Joe Biden who made the first address to its members in 2018, the whole thrust of which is to advocate “free markets” and hegemonic control of them by the US and its NATO allies.

The list of countries that are invited to the December Biden summit is long, but does not include China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Belarus. There are only two countries from the Middle East, Israel and Iraq, and only sixteen nations from Africa out of fifty-four.

The participants include nations where the existence of “democracy,” whatever its form, is questionable, such as Kosovo, the key province of Serbia occupied by NATO and handed over to the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and Ukraine where the elected government was overthrown in a NATO backed coup in 2014 and replaced with US puppets with strong fascist tendencies and which has attacked its own people in the Donbass.

It includes Poland which has a government of far-right tendencies which has banned abortions, reduced the independence of the judiciary, and meets refugees trying to cross its border with attack dogs, tear gas and gunfire, Israel which has created an apartheid state, India where farmers had to use strikes to make their voice heard against a hostile government of the right wing Modi, Brazil, where Mr. Bolsonaro, installed after President Lula was framed up on corruption charges, caused the rapid immiseration of his country, and as expected, none of them are socialist countries.

Finally, of course it is all arranged by the USA, where democracy hardly exists, with its tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee party system that maintains control of political life for the benefit of the industrialists, bankers, and the military caste that controls every aspect of American society, with results the world can only observe with disgust.

No, the “Democracy Summit” is purely a capitalist affair, and even then, does not include capitalist states that the Americans view as being in the way of their quest of for world hegemony, Russia being the most notable.

Those who are interested in democracy will be hard pressed to find anywhere on the US State Department website any definition of what “democracy” means to them. It is just a word, a symbol, used to veil the real purpose of the meeting, which is to confirm and support the US Will To World Power against the peoples’ need for a Will To Peace.

Their propaganda is replete with code words for hegemony under the guise of “fighting corruption” –for is not the American government one of the most corrupt, or “fighting authoritarianism”-is not the American system with its heavily armed police that shoot down citizens on the slightest pretext, especially if the citizen is dark skinned or poor, elections controlled by the ruling elite, its controlled media, economic and social policies that benefit only the capitalists while reducing the working population to penury and desperation-one of the most authoritarian states? What is “democracy” to them? It is nothing more than the worship of form over content. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are proof of it.

During President Trump’s regime, Biden’s party concocted a litany of lies about Russian influence on the US electorate in order to explain their loss and justify their continued attempts to remove Trump from office, to frustrate the will of the people that voted for him. The recent revelations that the entire affair was fabricated have shown how tawdry American democracy has become so that the consequence is a nation in which half the voting population believe Biden’s election victory was rigged. It matters not whether it was or was not. The fact is the entire political system in the USA has become so corrupted that the population no longer trusts the electoral wins of their political opponents. The Democrats argue Trump’s win was rigged, while the Republicans believe Biden’s win was rigged, resulting in a precarious state of affairs in which no one in the USA has any confidence in their democracy” whatsoever. Yet Biden presumes the right to lord it over the world as some high priest of “democracy” while the structure of what remains of American democracy is on the verge of collapse.

The US State Department website states:

“Democracy and human rights are under threat around the world. Democracies — whether in transition or established for decades — are confronting serious challenges from within and outside of their borders. Public distrust and the failure of governments to deliver equitable and sustainable economic and political progress have fuelled political polarization and the rise of leaders who are undermining democratic norms and institutions. Across the globe, weak state capacity, tenuous rule of law, high inequality, and corruption continue to erode democracy”. 

To take this statement apart could take a book, but in short when they say “around the world” they really mean the nations that stand up against the American diktats, and not themselves, although they make a nod to the troubles they face inside their own nation. Who is responsible for the lack of trust in western governments but the parties who controlled those governments and behind them the owners of the American, British, Canadian, Australian, Japanese and European capital who have pursued policies designed to keep wages low and profits high, with war as an accepted instrument of policy, and in so doing have had to lie to their people to be able to do it?

The State Department then looks in its own mirror and catching its own reflection states,

“At the same time, authoritarian leaders are reaching across borders to undermine democracies — from targeting journalists and human rights defenders to meddling in elections — all while sowing disinformation to claim their model is better at delivering for people. Hostile actors exacerbate these trends by increasingly manipulating digital information and spreading disinformation to weaken democratic cohesion.”

For is this not a description of the United States today?

Finally they state,

“As President Biden has said, we have to prove democracy still works and can improve people’s lives in tangible ways. To do that, democracies have to come together …”

And there you have part of the reason this Summit is taking place; to make propaganda to be used against the people of the United States to somehow convince them that they actually live in a democracy in order to shore up the continued domination of political and economic power by US capital threatened by the rising discontent of the people.

The other reason of course is to create propaganda against all the nations the United States wants to dominate and exploit, which not only resist but also advocate a multipolar world, in which every nation respects every other. The ultimate objective is to justify war against those nations. For that is where this leads. And how can war lead to democracy?

In 1795 Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay “A Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch,” and it was President Theodore Roosevelt who, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace stated,

“It would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace.”

But of course his county and many others were never honestly bent on peace when war was more profitable.

The eternal quest for more profit drives the modern imperialist nations to rely on plunder and pillage as a regular means of income just as much as the empires of the past. The claim by early capitalists and philosophers that free trade and commerce would lead to peace and not war, out of pure commercial self-interest, and the ruinous cost of wars, was proved wrong as soon as the claim was made. We see similar claims made today by world leaders who every day wage war on other states, or resist the wars conducted against them.

Morality, law, ethics, these are empty words for those who the capitalist system makes into thieves and murderers. But then, when the working population is composed of wage slaves, whose labour power is taken from them every hour of the day without compensation, the only way by which profit can be derived from industrial production, when the whole basis of the economy is theft, how can we expect the governments of such nations, the captains of this slave system, to be anything else except murderers and thieves.

And since the United States has been the preeminent capitalist power since 1945, a world imperialist power, we witness the United States, and its servant nations in the NATO, and other vassal alliances, forcing the world to the edge of world war in a continual and never-ending cycle of crises.

Its actions against Russia, against China, against Iran, against the DPRK, even against its own allies, can push us over that edge into the abyss at any time. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans, warn the American leadership, warn the world, again and again that the consequences will be catastrophic for the world; but the irrational leadership of the United States, corrupted beyond redemption by the presumption that their power gives them the right to dominate the world, only increase their aggressive rhetoric and actions, blinded by hubris and an ignorance of reality. They think they can triumph over the world and threaten to reduce it to a radioactive wasteland.

Kant thought that democracy, that republican forms of government, in which the people ruled, would necessarily lead to peace among nations as democratic rule spread among nations. But we have seen through history that so long as the debt system allows nations to have standing armies and to spend huge sums on creating weapons of unlimited destructive power, so long as the quest for profit remains the basis of the economic system, which leads inevitably to imperialism and colonialism, so long as governments pay men and women in their standing armies to kill, to be killed, for the benefit of others, to be reduced to expendable machines of death, we shall risk incessant war and annihilation.

What better example of this is there than The President of the United States of America threatening to “obliterate” North Korea, to “obliterate” Iran. This is the vocabulary of the deep evil that rests within the heart of the system, evil because it knows no morality, no law, and regards itself to be superior to humanity itself.

Democracy works only when there is a free exchange of ideas, but they control the ideas, control and manipulate the people, blind us with a world-wide system of propaganda using the mass media, and more and more, the social media, to mould our opinions and actions, or inaction. Independent media that are dedicated to peace and dialogue between peoples are becoming fewer or are compromised. So few are able to see the reality, to understand how the system works, how they fit into the system and how they can overcome it.

During the Soviet period, after the defeat of European fascism, the idea spread through the world of the equality of peoples, of nations, of international cooperation, of the community of mankind, of economic systems designed to produce social wealth for the benefit of the people instead of private wealth, making money for a few. Che Guevara wrote a book about the new human beings that this system needed and would produce.

But instead, we have a world in which the oldest capitalist powers are ruled by cutthroats and mobsters. The United States acts as captain of a world order of bandits; all of them dressed up in the clothing of democrats. They want world order, but their “order” is state of world servitude to their moneyed interests.

The Russians, the Chinese, and other still independent nations, call for a new order, one of multi-polarity, but this is to replace the world order of American autocracy with the order of a world aristocracy, still the rule of big powers over small, however well-intentioned they may be. But what is needed is a just world order in which all nations and peoples are equally respected, and have a real voice in solving global problems, an order which exists for the benefit of all the world’s peoples.

We need a world League of Perpetual Peace to replace the United Nations, which, because of its undemocratic structure and control by the great powers, has not been able to accomplish its objectives. Armies need to be abolished, for if all armies are abolished, no one can have the excuse to create one. Differences among nations have to be solved peacefully and this cannot be done if armies and weapons of mass destruction are in the possession of nations. Without the means to make war, there cannot be war. Only then can we have and enjoy any real democracy, and the democracy that each nation and people are able to choose for themselves.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

On October 21 the German Defence Minister warned Russia that NATO will use nuclear weapons against it in case of a Russian attack on its members and then referred to non-existent Russian attacks in the Black Sea and Balkans as examples. This statement reveals the complete moral bankruptcy of the NATO nations, their contempt for international law, for their own citizens, their innate fascist foundation.

Russia threatens no nation in the region or anywhere. It is instead responding to what I have several times in other articles termed Operation Barbarossa II; the continuing and determined NATO preparations for war on Russia which began with the NATO moves into former Soviet nations, despite promises from the US that they would not do so, duping the USSR into withdrawing its forces from Eastern Europe and especially Germany.

That build-up of forces has been on going for several years now, including the US moving its bases forward right up to the Russian borders from Kaliningrad to Odessa. The attack on Yugoslavia was part of this operation, the failed attack by Georgia and the US in 2006, in Ossetia the NATO coup in Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent siege of the peoples of the Donbass who refused to recognise the fascist, NATO agents that took power by violence and massacre.

They have installed logistics bases, arranged all necessary routes from the US to Europe to allow for the rapid transportation of men and weapons, installed forward bases, unit headquarters, continually run military exercises practicing the invasion of Russia, harass the country with aerial reconnaissance, naval reconnaissance, and support 5th columnists to weaken Russia internally and provide propaganda for the NATO citizens to support war.

The German threat is not just reckless. It is criminal for it means they are preparing for a nuclear first strike since Russia has no intentions of attacking anyone unless attacked and so it has to mean that NATO will invent another pretext for an attack, a false flag incident anywhere from the Black Sea to the Baltic, that they will claim is a Russian attack on them. It’s the same old trick that Hitler used to start WWII. The same trick that the US used with the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify to their own people their attack on Vietnam, the same as 9/11, used as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty since that requires all nations to seek nuclear disarmament whereas Germany permits the presence of dozens of nuclear weapons in its territory under the so-called “nuclear-sharing” policy of the US so that US nuclear weapons can be used by Germany for example, with US permission. But this means that Germany is then a nuclear weapons power. In any case, to threaten to use nuclear weapons, as they have done, when the USA has adopted a first strike nuclear policy as part of its overall war strategy, which is a fundamental violation of the principles of the UN Charter, and arguably a criminal action, is part of a conspiracy and preparation to wage nuclear war on the world.

One has to wonder what kind of human being the defence minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is, to make that threat; whether she has any conception at all of what a nuclear attack on Russia would do to Germany, let alone the world, for the response from Russia would be the immediate destruction of her country. Is WWII so far behind us that Germans now think they can get away with threatening Russia again? Are they that deluded? It seems so and that is why they are so dangerous and why the Russian Government handed the German ambassador a note on the 25th of October. Tass reported,

“The German military attaché in Moscow was summoned to Russia’s Defense Ministry where he was handed a note and told that statements by German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on nuclear deterrence of Russia provoked tension in Europe, the Russian Defence Ministry reported on Monday.”

“Provoked tension in Europe” is a mild way to put it when Russia now has to consider whether the NATO attack will come today, tomorrow or next year and so keep themselves on the knife’s edge of expectation and fear, watching the NATO moves with grim determination.

And the provocations to set up a pretext are constant. Last week the Kiev regime in Ukraine threatened Moscow with missile attacks, and are now stirring up more trouble in the Donbass, tightening their long siege of the peoples resisting the fascists in Kiev and their NATO allies, while the NATO forces are pressing home their probes of Russian defences and once again building their propaganda campaign against Russia.

Even the recent NATO action of kicking out of their HQ the Russian liaison officers on a pretext has to be seen as an indication something is happening, that NATO could not risk those officers being around as war plans are made. What else can it mean? Russia responded in kind and ordered NATO officers to leave Russia.

As Hans-Rudiger Minow, of German Foreign Policy, reports in a post,

“The German Bundeswehr (army) has commissioned the “fabrication and delivery” of high-resolution maps of Russia – vector maps in military format, according to a report. Germany is part of a cooperation network, wherein 32 countries – grouped around a NATO core – “share photos and maps with one another.” This procurement of militarily applicable maps comes at a time when tensions between the West and Russia continue to escalate. Most recently, the EU threatened new sanctions. According to the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), new investments must be made, not only “in the defense capacities within the NATO and the EU frameworks.” “Change in Russia” must also be promoted through intensive contacts within the Russian society. At the same time, the US company, Google, and its video platform YouTube has deleted RT DE – the German language edition of the Russian international broadcaster “Russia Today.” This move is akin to measures the DGAP had proposed to accompany a more aggressive German foreign policy.”

And while Germany, on behalf of NATO threatens the destruction of the world, the US threatens the same as well vis a vis China with President Biden, stating the US will “defend Taiwan” if the central government in China decides to establish its governance over the island once and for all. Biden’s statement breaks a long standing US policy of recognising Taiwan as part of China, and is a provocation that he knows China cannot ignore. And if the US inserts itself into an internal dispute in China, it is an attack on China’s integrity as a nation and if war breaks out it could lead to nuclear war as well.

Both Russia and China have reacted to this threat and last week sailed their combined naval flotillas around Japan which surprised the Japanese and the Americans, but the message was clear. Russia and China, to coin an American slogan from their history, are telling the US, “Don’t tread on me.” Or else.

Yet, while all these developments are occurring the UN appears helpless to stop it, the International Criminal Court prosecutor says absolutely nothing about these criminal threats being made, national governments of NATO, all co-conspirators in this plan to commit aggression, are happy to go along and join the attack, and their media are just part of the war propaganda machine, which just praised American General Colin Powell, one of the US war criminals, as a “complex man” who “may have made mistakes.” One even saw such statements from Americans who claim to be “left” and “anti-war.” No doubt, if they were Germans, they would say the same about the generals of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and WaffenSS Divisions and Armies. But at Nuremberg and Tokyo such generals were hanged.

So, what has “democratic society” produced in the past hundred years except war, war and more war? All the tears about the horrors and losses of WWI, WWII, and all the US wars since 1945 mean nothing. Morality means nothing to these people, the law means nothing, people are nothing. They don’t even care about themselves being incinerated in flash of light and thunder. We are faced with the fact we are ruled in the west by psychopaths drunk on illusions of omnipotence and immortality. And so what will stop them?

They have the masses under their thumb. Just try speaking out on social media now and see what happenes to you. Only counter-threats from their planned victims seem to have any effect at all, and that is not working either as the descent into madness accelearates and we move closer and closer to the edge of oblivion.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

On the 24th of July an article appeared on the weblog OpinioJuris written by two British lawyers named Mandelbaum and Borda and a German lawyer named Stegbauer, with the title,

“Legitimation Crisis Or Access To Justice? On The Authority of International People’s Tribunals.”

It appeared simultaneously on the Uyghur Tribunal website, the website of the NATO backed propaganda tribunal headed by the arch-NATO criminal and agent, Geoffrey Nice; who among other things is the British barrister hired by the UK and NATO to persecute President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia on concocted charges, whose “trial” served as propaganda to justify the NATO aggression committed against Yugoslavia.

The ‘tribunal’ is part of the propaganda matrix being constructed by NATO, led by the USA and UK, which has the objective of manipulating peoples minds to generate hatred and hostility towards China to, at the least, hinder its trade and development, at worst, to prepare the minds of people for war. In that sense this ‘tribunal’ is nothing less than a part of the preparation for war, and can be seen, under international criminal law, as part of a conspiracy to engage in the supreme war crime, the crime of aggression.

The propaganda continued at the Uyghur tribunal over the three days of “hearings” that took place from June 4 to 7 which were staged as a piece of theatre, even to the extent of the organisers requiring tickets to attend. It held a second set of hearings, a second act of this staged drama September 9 through the 13, again in London.

It took place against the backdrop of increasing US aggression against China, amplified by the huge American blunder of kicking in the teeth its longest ally, France, in order to drag Australia into using American nuclear submarines against China, the American and European provocations against China over Taiwan, the direct military threats of British and American aircraft carriers still cruising in the area threatening violence, and even the hostage taking of Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou by Canada, on US orders.

Geoffrey Nice not only is chair of the two tribunals dealing with China and persecutor of President Milosevic, he is also a co-author of the Caesar Report on Syria, produced by the NATO backed Centre For Justice and Accountability so-called, another propaganda outfit focused on slandering Syria, along with his friend, former US Ambassador For War Crimes, Stephen Rapp. He seems to be NATO”s ever eager go-to lawyer when they need some propaganda put out to justify their wars

One of Nice’s most notorious crimes in the Milosevic show trial at the ICTY was to deliberately mislead the judges and the world by stating that the Kosovo Field speech made by Milosevic proved Milosevic was for a Greater Serbia. But Milosevic produced the real speech proving that he had said the exact opposite of what Nice claimed, that he had called for interethnic tolerance. Nice was proved to be a liar. But the judges did nothing to him. He was allowed to continue spewing lies day after day throughout that show trial because NATO wanted the show to go on and Nice was their chosen circus ringmaster. So, it is no surprise that he was chosen to be ringmaster of this new propaganda circus.

A Prequel to the September hearings in London was another conference at Newcastle University in the UK held at the end of August, with some of the same actors, again on faked allegations of genocide in Xinjiang. It seems to have been part of the propaganda matrix being constructed against China and to wet the public’s appetite for the Nice London Tribunals hearings.

This ‘tribunal’ claims to be independent. Yet it is neither a “tribunal’ nor independent. It has no legal or other authority. It certainly has no moral authority when we look at its funding and the experts called upon to give their ‘evidence,’ for we see clearly the connections between it, the NATO governments and western financial interests.

This lack of credibility clearly is a crisis for this “tribunal” and so an article was required from lawyers to justify the unjustifiable. Mandelbaum, Borda and Stegbauer dutifully stepped in and provided their argument supporting their claim that the tribunal is about justice, and not propaganda. But on what does their argument rest except sophistry, the throwing of words in the air proving nothing?

Their sophistry begins with statement that this NATO backed tribunal is a “peoples’ tribunal. It is not. It is a British-US government propaganda operation. It was not created by a demand from the world’s people but by the CIA-funded World Uyghur Congress. And unlike other international ‘peoples tribunals’ it targets not a country that is attacking another country but accuses a national government of crimes against its own people. The organisers could have called a tribunal about the genocide against the indigenous peoples of Canada, now notorious, and not denied by the Canadian government, which has failed to bring anyone to account. But they are not interested in targeting other NATO allies, only the chosen enemy of the day, China.

They even claim to be cut of the same cloth as the Russell ‘Stockholm’ or Vietnam Tribunal and that when state actors do not act in the face of ‘crimes’ then the ‘people’ must. This is nothing more than another statement of the bogus ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine invented by the Americans at the Yugoslav tribunal and used ever since as a pretext to attack countries for other reasons. It is nothing less than fascism dressed up as law. Further, the Russell Tribunal did not hold hearings on American crimes against its own people. It was an attempt to draw the world’s attention to the war crimes committed by the USA in its aggression against the people of Vietnam.

The subsequent Russell tribunals on Palestine, Iraq were of the same character, an attempt to expose the war crimes of the USA to the world and they openly saw the role of the tribunals as propaganda, to inform people and move them to action against US imperialism and to bring peace to the world. Russell stated himself stated,

“Our purpose is to establish, without fear or favour, the full truth about this war. We sincerely hope that our efforts will contribute to the world’s justice, to the re-establishment of peace and the liberation of oppressed peoples.”

The International Action Centre in New York with Ramsey Clark, held a peoples tribunal in 1999 during the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia at which I spoke.

Again, its purpose was to try to stop a war, not, as in the case of the Uyghur tribunal, to start one.

For what is the Nice tribunal but an attempt to present slanders, proven to be false, against China in order to generate hostility towards China and for the purpose of conducting war against China, which will bring war to the world.

Indeed, the three writers recognise that the Nice tribunal they support has no legitimacy when they write,

“Peoples Tribunals verdicts and advisory opinions become normative through increasing social acceptance and recognition of the global community. The sociological legitimacy of Peoples Tribunals is thus based on ‘symbolic validation,’ that is, a public perception of legitimacy.”

But the Uyghur Tribunal has no legitimacy on any terms and it certainly has no public perception of being legitimate.

They go further along the road to fascism when they claim that when states fail to act then there is a ‘residual responsibility’ in the public to take action in place of the state. They write,

“In the final analysis, it is argued that, with the residual responsibility as enabling circumstance, Peoples Tribunals do not actually challenge the prerogative of State authorities, as portrayed by critics, but rather complement the very notion of an access to justice that underlies State authority itself. Or put another way, Peoples Tribunals challenge one set of State prerogatives – exclusivity in the areas of governance and justice-delivery – to reaffirm another set of State prerogatives – promoting access to justice for victims-survivors, in cases where States and the international community themselves fail to act.”

In other words, they call for vigilante justice. Isn’t that what it is when citizens decide to take the law into their own hands? We have seen what lynch mobs can do particularly in the United States, where the innocent are more often the ones hanged. Anyone who has seen The Oxbow Incident, a striking American film about men who think they have “justice’ on their side” as they hunt down and hang a man who was completely innocent of the crimes they hunted him for, knows the dangers of this type of thinking. But this is the atmosphere these days, an atmosphere odorous with the smell of fascism, the day of informers, and ruining peoples lives on mere allegations and slanders.

Their claim that somehow they stand in for the state is also laughable when we realise they organisers and participants are agents of the British, American and other NATO states.

So there we have it, another propaganda exercise masquerading as a search for justice and accountability, But it is about time these propagandists be held accountable for their actions, for manufacturing hatred and hostility towards a nation that has brought its people out of the poverty imposed on them by the west during the colonial period and which the west wants to impose again.

At the Nuremberg Trials the Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher, was hanged for putting out propaganda about Jews and inciting hatred leading to genocide. At the Rwanda Tribunal the members of a radio station were convicted of genocide for allegedly making false reports on events that the prosecutors claimed instigated hatred that led to genocide. Hate speech is proscribed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties. Is this not what Nice and his players are doing, trying to instigate hatred and hostility to justify war, to justify harming and killing Chinese? Is this not where it all leads? Is this not a crime against humanity? Are not they the real criminals?

For propaganda is a threat to peace itself. It is not only necessary to eliminate nuclear weapons and armies, it is also necessary to eliminate the psychological weapons that are used to justify, provoke and prolong war. Lenin once said that “disarmament is an ideal of socialism” and it was, we must not forget, the USSR that developed ideals of international peace and responsibility for wars of aggression. The successor state of Russia still relies on these principles.

On the second day of the creation of Soviet power the Decree on Peace was issued that made it a matter of state policy that aggressive war is a crime. Up until then it was assumed that nation states had an inherent right to go to war for their own interests. War propaganda is a way of preparing for aggressive war and consequently is a war crime. This was confirmed at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946.

This was echoed in the Resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations of November 3, 1947 that denounced war propaganda;

“The General Assembly condemns all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.”

A Soviet draft definition of aggression presented to the General Assembly in 1957 defined war propaganda as ideological aggression. Their draft stated that a state has committed ideological aggression when it “encourages war propaganda, encourages propaganda for the use of atomic or other weapons of mass extermination and stimulates Nazi-fascist views, racial or national superiority, or hatred and disdain for other peoples.”

But before that the Supreme Soviet on March 12, 1950 passed a law on the defence of peace that stated:

“The Supreme Soviet of the USSR is guided by the high principles of the Soviet peace policy, which seeks to strengthen peace and friendly relations between the peoples, recognises that human conscience and the concept of right of the peoples, who, during one generation suffered the calamities of two wars, cannot accept that the conduct of war propaganda remain unpunished, and approves the proclamation of the Second World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, who expressed the will of the entire progressive mankind concerning the prohibition and condemnation of criminal war propaganda.

“The Supreme Soviet decrees,

1. To recognise that war propaganda under whatever form it is made, undermines the cause of peace, creates the threat of new war and is the graves crime against humanity.

2. To bring to court person guilty of war propaganda and to try them as having committed a most grave criminal offense.”

The western powers blocked a Russian UN resolution at that time to denounce war propaganda even though it was in accord with the principles of the United Nations Charter, which makes it a duty of all member states to preserve the peace. The west relied on arguments of “free speech” arguments that do not hold water since war propaganda is not designed to enlighten people but to twist their minds into thoughts of hatred and war.

Those who are taking part in the Uyghur Tribunal claim to be for justice but are in truth for injustice. They claim to be acting for victims of oppression but the truth is they are agents of western oppression. They claim to be for peace but are in truth advocates of war. They claim to be founded in law but in fact reject all law. Reject them. Better yet, ignore them. The facts, and history, will condemn them.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

In 2003, when several lawyers, including myself, visited North Korea to learn more about socialism there, we were shown US Army documents captured in 1950 by the communist forces when they seized control of Seoul and overran the American Army headquarters. The documents confirmed that it was the US and its puppets in South Korea that invaded the north, not the other way round, with the objective of crushing the local communist forces and then attacking China. Their plan failed and ended in an American rout. But what did surprise me was the evidence in the documents that the Americans also had the help and advice of Japanese Army officers who had remained in Korea at the end of the war between the US and Japan that ended in 1945. Two growing empires went to war in the Pacific against each other but in the end the defeated and occupied Japanese soon joined the growing American empire in its drive for world domination and Korea was the first proof of their fealty to the US, a fealty tolerated not only because of their defeat but also because American capital and Japanese capital have the same interest; the subjugation and exploitation of China.

On July 6 the Japanese Deputy Prime Minister stated at a Liberal Democratic Party function, that if China acted to take control of Taiwan, as is its right to do since it is an integral part of China, then Japan would defend Taiwan, because such an action by China would represent an “existential threat to Japan.”

“If a major incident happened, it’s safe to say it would be related to a situation threatening the survival of Japan. If that is the case, Japan and the US must defend Taiwan together.” 

Why it would be an “existential threat to Japan” he did not explain.

That he spoke for the leadership of Japan is clear. That any interference in China’s actions in Taiwan would be an aggression against China and in violation of the Japanese Constitution that prohibits Japanese Self-Defence Forces from taking any offensive actions and a violation of the UN Charter is also clear.

In response China has stated time and again that it is prepared to defeat both the US and Japan if they try to interfere when China retakes control of Taiwan, which every action by the Americans and Taiwanese is provoking them to do. The Americans recognise that they do not have enough strength in the region to interfere alone and so have lured Britain, France, and Germany, as well as the ever-eager Australians, to send in naval forces to the South China Sea to support the American and Japanese plans. It is more than ironic to see four nations that were bitter enemies of Imperial Japan in World War II, now colluding with Japan to once again attack China and that Germany, an ally of Japan in the Second World War, once again is attempting to throw its weight around in the world. The Chinese have a long and bitter memory of the Japanese invasion and occupation of their lands in the 1930s and 40’s just as the Koreans have the same bitter memories of Japanese occupation.

But we realise now that the defeat of the fascists and militarists in Germany and Japan in 1945 was not their final defeat, for the governments who fought those two nations also had fascist elements within who hoped that the Nazis would crush communism in the USSR and the Japanese would do the same in China. Instead, the elements of world capital that supported or tolerated fascism and relied on imperialism to increase their profits quickly reorganised and, led by the far right in Washington, created the NATO military alliance to continue the assault on the USSR and now on Russia, China and other independent nations. They wear different clothes now, but use the same lies and techniques of propaganda as the Nazis and Japanese militarists as they prepare for another war against China and Russia.

On July 30 the Chinese government had to warn the British government and its naval task force, led by the new British aircraft carrier, Queen Elizabeth, to keep away from its territorial waters or face the consequences. Yet, at the same time the US and France conducted military exercise with dozens of US F22s and French Rafale aircraft near Hawaii as the French beef up their forces in Tahiti, while the Americans have dispersed their fleet of bombers and fighters including F35s from their big base on Guam, which the Chinese can destroy quickly, to smaller bases, making it more difficult for China to destroy those aircraft. This type of dispersal is usually seen in war settings, when war is on going or imminent.

At the same time the Germans announced that they will be sending a frigate to the South China Sea in support of the Americans and Japanese, while the Americans sent more ships into the Taiwan Straight this week. Some may see all this as sabre rattling. But that is a lot of sabres, and they are doing a lot more than just rattling them.

As Hans Rudiger Minow stated in German Foreign Policy,

“The intensification of western manoeuvres and their growing focus on combat missions, which are highly realistic under current circumstances, coincide with prognoses by high-ranking US military officials, predicting that a war between the United States and China is probable in the near future. For example, recently NATO’s former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Ret. Adm. James G. Stavridis, was quoted with the prognosis that “our technology, network of allies and bases in the region, still overmatch China” – for now. However, “by the end of the decade – if not sooner” the People’s Republic “will be in a position” to “challenge the US” at least “in the South China Sea.” Recently Stavridis published a novel in which he depicted a fictional war erupting between the USA and China in 2034. In the meantime, he considers “we may not have until 2034 to prepare for this battle – it may come much sooner.” Some of his colleagues in the military are predicting that “it is not about 2034,” the Big War could come earlier – possibly even “2024 or 2026.”

But it is not China that is seeking a war. So who is pushing this insanity? The propaganda machines in the west, all part of the military-industrial complex, are legion. But one of the worst is the Hudson Institute, founded in 1961 by Herman Khan, formerly of the Rand Institute, who was famous for playing nuclear war games and theorising on the possibilities of using nuclear weapons in war. Its current leadership and membership include fascists like Mike Pompeo, Seth Cropsey and many others who served in various US government regimes or the US military establishment.

Seth Cropsey’s bio states,

“Cropsey began his career in government at the US Department of Defense as assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and subsequently served as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, where he was responsible for the Navy’s position on efforts to reorganize DoD, development of the maritime strategy, the Navy’s academic institutions, naval special operations, and burden-sharing with NATO allies. In the Bush administration, Cropsey moved to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to become acting assistant secretary, and then principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Cropsey served as a naval officer from 1985 to 2004.

“From 1982 to 1984, Cropsey directed the editorial policy of the Voice of America (VOA) on the solidarity movement in Poland, Soviet treatment of dissidents, and other issues. Returning to public diplomacy in 2002 as director of the US government’s International Broadcasting Bureau, Cropsey supervised the agency as successful efforts were undertaken to increase radio and television broadcasting to the Muslim world.”

In other words he is a long time anti-socialist propagandist and war criminal.

Cropsey penned a recent article published in The Hill, a US right wing journal covering events in Washington entitled ,“Japan Signals An Opening for US in Countering China” in which he praised the statement by Taro Aso that Japan will support Taiwan in case of China acting to take control of its island, claimed that China seeks “world dominance” and predicted a war with the USA in the near future.

He further states that the Japanese have now made a “decisive shift” in foreign and military policy, dismisses the Japanese constitutional prohibition on Japanese offensive actions and calls for Japan to increase it military forces and support to “counter” China.

He wrote:

“Defending Taiwan is a difficult proposition. The PLA is at its strongest within the First Island Chain, particularly around Taiwan, given Beijing’s concentration of naval, air, and missile forces. To defend the island, the US and its allies would have to operate squarely within China’s missile range, jeopardizing the high-value capital assets upon which American combat power depends.

“However, Japan and the US both field significant submarine fleets — Japan’s small but quiet battery-powered boats are an effective counterpart to America’s larger nuclear-powered attack submarines. Submarines are immune to the missiles upon which the PLA would rely to gain sea and air control over Taiwan. If supported by a sufficient fast-boat mining effort, and a robust enough network of mobile ground-launched anti-ship and anti-air missiles, a Japanese-American submarine surge could defeat a PLA invasion of Taiwan, or at minimum prevent the fait accompli for which China hopes.

Given this strategic reality.”

He calls for more military exercises with the US and Japan, France, and Britain and their other allies to “prepare for war.” He then adds the lie that “preparing for war is essential to deterring it” when what he really means is that America is preparing for war in order to wage war.

The forces of peace and reason in the world must denounce these war preparations as a danger to the entire world for a war on China will bring in Russia and others, will lead to world war, to nuclear war and the end of humanity. We must denounce these criminals and demand the International Criminal Court prosecutor take action to warn the Americans, and indict the leaders of the US allies over which it has jurisdiction, their propagandists like Seth Cropsey, and all the rest who are conspiring to commit aggression, the supreme war crime, the final act of insanity, because it seems to me that is what war with China will be, the final act in the human drama. We wont have to wait for abrupt climate change to finish us off.

But the ICC says nothing about all this and the UN Security Council is rendered impotent. So who then is left to object, to say enough is enough, to hell with the criminals and their wars, except us, the people, But what can we the people do? Yes, protest, petition, write, shout, cry, join peace groups like the one I belong to, the Canadian Peace Congress, do anything you can but get up, stand up, as Bob Marley called for us to do, and as John Lennon demanded, Give Peace A Chance.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The United States of America cannot maintain its declining power and influence in the world unless it can dominate Russia and China and it cannot dominate them so long as they are allied. Each of the two nations is a major world power, and China is soon to become, if it is not already, the dominant economic power. Divided against each other they would make themselves more vulnerable to US imperialism that has the objective of splitting both nations into controllable and exploitable pieces. Together, their strategic economic, societal, cultural and military cooperation makes them as strong and stronger than the US and its allies in NATO, Australia and Japan and able to effectively resist and counter the increasingly hostile and threatening policies and actions of the Americans.

So it important to celebrate, as both Russia and China did this week, the Russia-Chinese Treaty on Good Neighbourliness, and Friendly Cooperation that was signed in July 16, 2001 by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. You can read the text here.

In 25 short paragraphs the two nations set out their intent to deepen and expand their cooperation in all spheres, and to base their policies and behaviour in international law and the quest for peace in the world. It specifically resolves any and all border disputes between the two.

Yet, the Americans are intent on trying to drive a wedge between Russia and China using border disputes as a hammer. A few days before the summit meeting between president Putin and President Biden the Washington Post in an op-ed piece, presented the hopes of the Americans, when Isaac Stone Fish, wrote,

‘Despite the countless irritants in the US-Russia relationship, … there is now space to enlist Moscow as a silent but meaningful partner in the global campaign to curb the pernicious aspects of the Chinese Communist Party’s international influence.’

He went on to cite the reasons way the Americans think they can drive in that wedge; rival claims to territories in the east of Russia being the most important, stating,

‘To begin with, Moscow has more to fear from Beijing than Washington. Like the Philippines, India and Bhutan, where Russia is vulnerable to Chinese territorial encroachment.”

But this writer is living in the past. He writes as if the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation does not exist. He forgets that the Sino-Soviet Border War of 1969 arose out of a complex of historical, geographical and political factors, none of which now exist.

Aside from border disputes, both then accused the other of being “revisionists,” that is sliding back to capitalism, instead of maintaining socialism, and, indeed looking back, we can see that both were partly right, because the Soviet Union continued down the road towards the restoration of capitalism and, after Mao, China also went some way down that same road while maintaining the control of the Party.

And indeed, The Sino-Soviet War was a gift to the Americans who immediately used it to drive a further wedge into the socialist camp. Shortly after the war ended, the Americans sent Kissinger to Beijing followed by an opening of relations between the US and China which the Americans exploited to their advantage, against the USSR.

But for the Americans to hope that history can be repeated except as farce, as Marx said, that, once again, they can succeed in dividing Russia and China is futile. First of all the border disputes were all finally settled by a series of negotiations and agreements from 2003 to 2008 and these negotiations were a direct result of the Russian-Chinese Treaty signed in 2001. The border disputes are no longer an issue.

Secondly, the world situation is completely different. Russia now has a capitalist government but has experienced US influence in the early 90‘s and rejected it as the disaster for the economy and the people it was. China under Xi Jinping is reasserting Marxism in every aspect of society. Yet, despite ideological differences, they share the desire to develop as sovereign nations on their own terms, share a long history of cooperation and cultural and economic exchange, and share a common self-declared enemy, which seems intent on making their association and cooperation even stronger.

Their common rival is far weaker than it was in 1969. We remember that America was defeated in the Vietnam War partly due to the crucial military assistance provided to Vietnam by both the USSR and China. It has been defeated in most of is wars since and expended vast sums of its national wealth for little concrete gain. Internally it is riven with factional infighting in the two major parties and between them, and the American people are forced to limit themselves to a choice between the two big business parties, are not permitted anything like a national labour party of any kind, and are told this rigged system is a democracy. Its infrastructure is falling apart, its education system, health care; homelessness is endemic, drug overdoses, and shootings on a mass scale are a daily routine, a symptom of a society tearing itself apart.

It commands the NATO war alliance but the alliance is divided and the real power is held in Washington with the other members so many vassals, afraid of what the big bully will do if they go their own way. Germany is trying to reassert its own power. France has always been a reluctant bride and Turkey uses it for its own best interests but is deeply suspicious of the US, while the UK, which has left the EU, dreams of ancient days of empire without the means to attain it, as London plays second fiddle to Washington.

The US has contempt for international law and the UN Charter. Russia and China regard them as the cornerstones of peace and diplomacy. The US issues diktats to the world; China and Russia seek dialogue and reason. The US constantly threatens war, or its substitute, economic embargo, against any nation refusing to accept its claim to world suzerainty. Russia and China are trying to build a multipolar world order where no nation can dominate the others, and insist on diplomacy and international law. The US insists on bombs and cruise missiles, on torture of prisoners, on assassinations, on the lies of its propaganda, on the pretence of democracy rather than its reality.

The Americans were deluded when they met with President Putin in Geneva, hoping that they could lure him into abandoning China. Their anger at not succeeding appeared very quickly after the summit with new sanctions imposed on Russia and multiple accusations, by sources linked to US intelligence, that both China and Russia have carried out cyber attacks on US and UK businesses and national systems. All this, along with the constant NATO military exercises, the increased preparations for war, the hostile rhetoric, serve only to reinforce the Russia-China relationship. The Americans seem to be making decisions and taking actions based on self-delusions. Only that can explain the futile hope of being able to divide Russia and China when their every action succeeds in the exact opposite, proving to Russia and China that their strong relationship needs to be even stronger.

But other American commentators have expressed the same delusion as Stone does above. One writer in The Interpreter stated that despite the Treaty Russia should be ‘wary of China”, that Russia is the “junior partner” has conflicting interests in India, the Arctic and other places, is economically reliant on China and so on. He wrote:

“It is important at least to engage seriously and directly with Russia, encouraging Moscow to contemplate the risks of excessive dependence on its eastern neighbour.”

The chattering class in the US spends much of its time thinking of ways to divide Russia and China, and are clearly worried about the relative decline of US influence in the world and how to reverse it. Michael Pillsbury of the Rand Corporation, former under-secretary of defence under President Reagan and adviser to president Bush, and Senior Fellow and Director of Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute which has been very active with anti-Chinese propaganda, is worried that Russia has become a distraction and that Biden needs to “develop more leverage on China to make progress in confronting the top adversary.”

In other words, the American leadership is faced with a problem of its own making; two major powers driven together by their experience with US aggression, who are willing to stand up to the declining American hegemony, the existence of which alliance prevents the US from being able to solve its internal problems through the unchallenged exploitation of world resources and markets. The Americans have no solution to this dilemma except to increase their military power, build more weapons, spend more national wealth on arms and to threaten everyone, everywhere; the dead-end it has been in for a long time.

The world has great problems that need to be solved, if they can be, of human caused abrupt climate change, of the covid-pandemic, of poverty and food supply, of environmental collapse, all of which need international cooperation. Russia and China have shown the way forward, have shown what cooperation between nations and peoples can do, while the Americans wallow in delusions and dreams of a world that no longer exists. So we must, with the Russians and Chinese, all celebrate the Treaty signed on July 16, 2001 that ensured peace and cooperation between the two nations and hope that, one day, and it better be sooner than later, a world treaty of friendship and cooperation will be signed by all the nations of the world.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The fascists are very active these days and one of the proofs of this dark shadow looming over the world is the recent so-called “peoples’ tribunal” put on in London over three days in early June. Otherwise called the “Uyghur Tribunal,” it is headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice, Q.C, the Machiavellian British barrister, knighted by the Queen for his services to Britain, who became notorious for trying to frame-up Yugoslavia’s President Milosevic at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal.

This new ‘tribunal’ follows on the China Tribunal also headed by Nice and also based in London, which focused on fabricated allegations of forced organ trafficking by China. This second tribunal focuses on fabricated allegations against China concerning the treatment of Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The allegations before both of these ‘tribunals’ have one objective; to slander the Communist Party of China and to undermine China as a developing and sovereign nation.

The ‘tribunal’ is part of the propaganda matrix being constructed by NATO, led by the USA and UK, which has the objective of manipulating peoples minds to generate hatred and hostility towards China to, at the least, hinder its trade and development, at worst, to prepare the minds of people for war. In that sense this ‘tribunal’ is nothing less than a part of the preparation for war, and can be seen, under international criminal law, as part of a conspiracy to engage in the supreme war crime, the crime of aggression.

The same tactics are being applied to Russia with all the false allegations being made by the Americans against Russia, allegations that Joe Biden shamefully repeated in his meeting with President Putin in Geneva, as if he was king of the world dressing down a wayward vassal. No wonder that meeting was cut short. Only a fly on the wall can tell us what was really said and happened in Geneva, but who can imagine the Russians sitting there for long having to listen to a lecture on how they should stop doing what they are not doing “or face the consequences.” How can any serious person sit there and not either laugh out loud or become angry at the absurdity of it? But of course that is the spin in the western media, the spin that Biden put on the meeting; that he “talked tough to Putin.” Bluster and lies is the American way.

The bluster and lies continued at the Uyghur tribunal over the three days of “hearings” that took place from June 4 to 7 which were staged as a piece of theatre, even to the extent of the organisers selling tickets to attend. It was all acted out by a company of roaming players who go from one forum to another playing their roles, speaking their lines on cue from a script written by shadowy men and women in shadowy rooms in London and Washington.

Geoffrey Nice not only is chair of the two tribunals dealing with China and persecutor of President Milosevic, he is also a co-author of the Caesar Report on Syria, produced by the NATO backed Centre For Justice and Accountability so-called, another propaganda outfit focused on slandering Syria, along with his friend, former US Ambassador For War Crimes, Stephen Rapp. He seems to be NATO”s ever eager go-to lawyer when they need some propaganda put out to justify their wars

One of Nice’s most notorious crimes in the Milosevic show trial at the ICTY was to deliberately mislead the judges and the world by stating that the Kosovo Field speech made by Milosevic proved Milosevic was for a Greater Serbia. But Milosevic produced the real speech proving that he had said the exact opposite of what Nice claimed, that he had called for interethnic tolerance. Nice was proved to be a liar. But the judges did nothing to him. He was allowed to continue spewing lies day after day throughout that show trial because NATO wanted the show to go on and Nice was their chosen circus ringmaster. So, it is no surprise that he was chosen to be ringmaster of this new propaganda circus.

This ‘tribunal’ claims to be independent. Yet it is neither a “tribunal’ nor independent. It has no legal or other authority. It certainly has no moral authority when we look at its funding and the experts called upon to give their ‘evidence,’ for we see clearly the connections between it, the NATO governments and western financial interests.

Much of its funding comes from the World Uyghur Congress whose affiliations with the CIA and funding by the National Endowment For Democracy are well known. In fact it was the World Uyghur Congress that asked Geoffrey Nice to set up the tribunal, according to him, and it provided the initial funding, so that we see right at the beginning, that the US government, through the CIA and NED, is directly involved with the Nice tribunal. Let us look at some of the others involved.

There is Nick Vetch, an extremely rich British businessman, who is founder and CEO of BigYellow a large UK storage company, which, in turn, has some of its shares owned by US financial companies such as Blackrock Inc, Standard Life Aberdeen, American Financial Group and others. Vetch is also a director of the Global Human Rights Fund, a UK “human rights’ organisation, which appears to provide some funding to the Nice tribunal. He is also a member of Nice’s China Tribunal.

Vetch’s connection to the Fund indicates who is behind his activities since the Global Human Rights Fund in turn gets its funding from the European Union, the Swedish Government, the Ford Foundation, George Soros, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other US corporate-backed foundations. The Chair of the Fund is Chris Canavan, managing director of Lion’s Head Global Partners, formerly Director of Global Policy Development for the Soros Fund, formerly senior official with Goldman Sachs Bank in New York and a lifetime member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Other members of the ‘tribunal’ are members of the British Establishment, and aside from anti-China credentials seem to be brought in to add some credibility to the proceedings. They include Dame Parveen Kumar, a UK doctor and member of the British Establishment, Ambreeana Manji, UK law professor who once worked for the British Institute in East Africa, Tim Clark, a UK lawyer and senior director of Vetch’s company Big Yellow and who is also an adviser to G3, which claims to be ‘one of the leading international strategic advisory groups’. Based in London, G3 seems to be an intelligence group with murky connections.

The list includes Ramindar Kaur, social anthropologist, writer, and “human rights” activist who is also deeply immersed in the British establishment. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and head of a number of government studies on UK social issues. There is Dr. David Lynch, a specialist on cancer at University College London, Audrey Osler, Professor of education and human rights, University of Leeds, an advocate of using human rights education to achieve changes in world societies, and Catherine Roe, who began her career as a British diplomat, specialising in multilateral negotiations and who is now a Trustee of the Institute of International Strategic Studies.

Hamid Sabi, is styled as “counsel to the tribunal.” He is a British lawyer, active in the service of the western powers. He is, among other things, a director of Justice For Iran, an organisation accusing Iran of human rights violations, whose recommendations for sanctions against Iranian officials and Press TV are followed by the US and EU and UK governments and who has a history of attacking China.

He is assisted by Aarif Abraham, another UK lawyer, and former lawyer for the NATO tribunal for Yugoslavia, (ICTY) another very anti-China, pro-foreign intervention type who wrote a paper on the Uighurs accusing China of all sorts of crimes. Another assistant is Aldo Samit Borda, a Maltese, but now a lawyer in the UK involved in human rights, who has connections with the British government as he once worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat. The NATO-ICTY connection continues with Marilena Stegbauer, their general assistant, a German, and former intern for the NATO prosecutor at the ICTY, former researcher at Human Rights Institute in the UK, then a writer for The German Diplomat in Germany, who now calls herself a “human rights consultant”.

There is Frankie Vetch, production assistant, son of the Vetch senior, making the tribunal a bit of a Vetch family affair, and Nevenka Tromp, another NATO asset who also worked at the ICTY as a researcher for prosecution in the Milosevic and Karadzic trials. The group is rounded off with Baroness Helena Kennedy, adviser and member of the British House of Lords, Queen’s Counsel, also member of the International Bar Association Institute of Human Rights who in 2020, worked with the Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith and “democracy activist” with Hong Kong Watch, Luke de Pulford, to create the global pressure group the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, in March 2021,

The Coalition for Genocide Response is a supporter of the tribunal. It is the project of John Luke de Pulford mentioned above who is a prominent London establishment anti-communist, anti Chinese Government figure and a supporter of Nathan Law, the Hong Kong fifth columnist working for British interests in Hong Kong, now fled to London. In fact the tribunal has also revealed that it was launched on 3 September 2020, with assistance from the Coalition for Genocide Response that was founded by John Luke de Pulford, the protégé of British journalist turned activist, Benedict Rogers, and Hong Kong Watch functionary, who also has close links to Stand with Hong Kong. Benedict Rogers is the founder of Hong Kong Watch, a notorious propaganda outfit that specializes in churning out fallacies about China. Rogers also has put out false claims about North Korea, works with governments from the UK to Canada and USA and is a leader of the anti-communist Christian Solidarity Worldwide. He states that he introduced Nice to the Uyghurs a couple of years ago. Rogers recently appointed Nice to Hong Kong Watch as a patron, joining the former British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Another of its patrons is Lord David Alton, who is linked with the concocted report on the Hong Kong Police Force, which the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, of which he is a vice-chair, produced in 2020.

On Sept 23, 2020, in the House of Lords, Alton asked the British foreign office minister, Lord Ahmad, if the government would “welcome” the initiative to set up the “Uyghur Tribunal”, and “cooperate” with it. The minister did not give a clear reply but the tribunal has since thanked the British government for fast-tracking visas for foreign nationals to attend the tribunal. In view of Alton’s links with Hong Kong Watch, the extent to which it is covertly involved in the tribunal cannot be underestimated as Benedict Rogers is also an adviser to the World Uyghur Congress. The circle of interconnections is complete.

Those are the people behind the tribunal. Some, like Nice, are clearly NATO assets. None of them are independent or objective.

Since this is supposedly a tribunal they had to produce witnesses. These fit into two categories, expert witnesses and witnesses of fact, that is, people who claim to have observed things.

These were duly paraded before the tribunal, one after one, made statements without offering any proof of their claims and then retired with none of them cross-examined on their statements. Their claims were not tested at all; not by the ‘judges’ who are also in fact the “prosecutors” nor by anyone else. Instead the statements were accepted as true without any examination and when the ‘witnesses’ faltered in reading their lines, the ‘judges’ assisted them. This is not the procedure of a trial or even a hearing. It is more closely associated with an Inquisition. Nice and company are not interested in the truth or falsity of the claims being made. Their only interest is in making sure the statements they require to make effective anti-Chinese propaganda are supplied.

The so-called ‘expert witnesses’ included Ethan Guttman, a Senior fellow at the anticommunist “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an American organisation funded by the US Congress to “educate people on the evils of communism,” who has made many wild claims about China in particular on allegations of “organ harvesting” and Adrian Zenz, also a fellow at the same anti-communist organisation. His propaganda work is notorious.

It incudes Laura Murphy, trained as a literature scholar, who became a “human rights” professor at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, University of Sheffield. Harvard educated, she seems to be a professional witness and has worked for US Government Office of Victims of Crime, and other US government agencies, has put out propaganda on the BBC about “forced labour” in China and received an award for her propaganda work from the US government agency the National Endowment For Humanities, and grants from their National Humanities Centre. She also received grants from the British Academy.

Finally there is Dr. Darren Byler, of the University of Colorado, who is engaged in post doctoral work with the ChinaProject, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, a famous, anti-communist organisation founded by Henry Luce, and, Nathan Ruser, an Australian researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who is an expert in satellite data and surveillance who has written a number of anti-Chinese propaganda articles. There are a few others of the same type.

The factual witnesses are a travelling troupe of players many of whom have given statements in other venues, often contradicting their claims at the tribunal. The Chinese government has exposed the lies of several of these witnesses who travel the world as professional witnesses-earning their keep by telling stories which do not bear up under any scrutiny. But none of the witnesses testified under a real oath, none were questioned on the contents of their statements or how they came to the attention of the organisers, apart from being recruited by the World Uyghur Congress.

Having myself experienced how Nice and the other prosecutors at the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals got people to be witnesses, and how they coerced them into given false testimony when required makes it impossible to accept any of the statements made by these alleged witnesses with anything less than complete disbelief. Not that it matters in legal terms. Despite Nice spouting platitudes about “reasonable doubt” and “assessing the evidence” we all know what the outcome of the hearings, to be continued in September, will be; the condemnation of China.

So there we have it, another propaganda exercise masquerading as a search for justice and accountability, But it is about time these propagandists be held accountable for their actions, for manufacturing hatred and hostility towards a nation that has brought its people out of the poverty imposed on them by the west during the colonial period and which the west wants to impose again.

At the Nuremberg Trials the Nazi propagandist, Julius Streicher, was hanged for putting out propaganda about Jews and inciting hatred leading to genocide. At the Rwanda Tribunal the members of a radio station were convicted of genocide for allegedly making false reports on events that the prosecutors claimed instigated hatred that led to genocide. Hate speech is proscribed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties. Is this not what Nice and his players are doing, trying to instigate hatred and hostility to justify war, to justify harming and killing Chinese? Is this not where it all leads? Is this not a crime against humanity? Are not they the real criminals?

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

On May 10-11 a conference was presented by the “Alliance of Democracies” in Copenhagen that claimed to “unite free peoples” against authoritarianism, to promote the rule of law, to advance the “technological control of democracy,” freedom of expression and US leadership. It was heralded as a forum for guests to hear from prominent individuals on “the frontlines of defending democracy.”

But the true purpose of the Summit was revealed by the opening invitation from the 12th NATO Secretary General (2009-2014) and 24th Danish Prime Minister (2001-2009), Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who celebrated the fact that the first Summit in 2018 was opened by Joe Biden and by the fact that it was moderated by Politico’s Ryan Heath and former ABC and CNN correspondent, Jeanne Meserve, who if not assets of the CIA, acted as if they were.

In an opening video, still on their website inviting people to attend, Rasmussen claims that the USA is the “defender of democracy” against oppression and then immediately cited Belarus, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Taiwan as places where ‘democracy is under threat.” Rasmussen played his role of piper of the NATO propagandists to the end and the clearly scripted and small audience in attendance dutifully played along.

At the opening of the conference Rasmussen once again claimed that the US led the “democracies against “authoritarianism “ without defining what the latter word means. What government is not an authority? What government does not have laws and mechanisms of government that the citizens are to follow and obey? Is the American police state, the state in which 3 people are killed by the police every day not an “authoritarian state” a state in which only two parties, with almost no difference between them, are allowed to vie for power, and in which the media are completely controlled by the secret services and their link to the corporate powers that control the government, not “authoritarian”?

And are not the socialist democracies of China, of Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and the capitalist democracies of Russia and other nations unwilling to bend to the will of the USA also democracies? Of course they are and the socialist democracies provide the people with more ability to have a say in government decisions than our parliamentary style democracies.

So, we understand that Rasmussen is misusing language to fool people so that they cannot see behind the veil and realise that he represents the powers of capital that want to control the world and by “democracy” he really means, the free flow of western capital, and by “authoritarian” he means any nation that refuses to be controlled by western capital.

He went on to state that the “western democracies, and NATO,” the armed fist of western capital, “actively support “protestors in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Belarus, Venezuela, Belarus in their “desire for freedom” Some freedom, some desire. Freedom to overthrow socialism, all progress for working people, for the poor of the world, freedom to overthrow even capitalist states that do not obey the orders of western capital.

He then called for what he called a Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic Charter that created NATO, and having a clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article 5, whereby any western democracy threatened by for example China, can call on its allies to take retaliatory measure against the alleged offending country. This idea is to be brought forward at a World Democracy Summit to be opened by President Biden later this year. He used as an illustration the mild sanctions that China placed on some US and European personalities in response to their economic warfare and sanctions placed on China. Of course Rasmussen never mentioned that it is the USA and its allies that are the ones dictating to the world what to do, using their military and economic power to assert their claimed authority over the world, who are, in fact the supreme authoritarians of the world.

In case viewers did not yet understand who was running the show Rasmussen stated that, “US leadership is crucial” and the “purpose of this Summit is to “provide ideas to President Biden for the global summit conference” later this year.

He then introduced a series of American sycophants. I will not burden you with all of them, as you can watch the conference for yourselves on their website. I will draw your attention to those that set the tone and the main focus of the conference so you get the sense of it.

The first person of note was the President of Slovakia, Zusana Caputova, who blathered on about the “importance of the rule of law” to an audience who all support the American violations of international law around the world, American aggression around the world, and who have nothing but contempt for international law, the sovereignty of nations, and like a dutiful minion of the hegemonic power declared that the countries that challenge their “rules based order,” that is, the American dictatorship, must be condemned and forced to relent.

She ended by stating that, “supporting activists in Hong Kong is not foreign interference in China’s internal affairs.” This, from a flunky for the Americans, who have been using the false claims of Russian and Chinese interference in their internal affairs to bang the drums of war against those two nations for several years.

But then something surprising occurred, The next speaker, Nico Jaspers, CEO of the polling organization, LATANA, stated that his organisations polls showed that, world wide, the United States was seen as the greatest threat to democracy and as creating the greatest economic inequality for its citizens than any other nation.

You could hear a pin drop as he spoke and the confused looks on the audience present. But he covered himself in an acceptable way by agreeing with the suggestion by the odious Jeanne Meserve that this perception was no doubt a glitch due to the terrible reign of Donald Trump and that, under Biden, all would be well.

Then came Uffe Elbaeka Danish Member of Parliament who echoed the previous speakers and also declared Denmark’s support for the Hong Kong “activists that is the 5tth columnists in Hong Kong working for western intelligence agencies whose sole purpose is not the betterment of the lives of people in China, but the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party and China as a sovereign state. He ended his speech with a call to boycott the Beijing Olympic Games.

Tom Tugendhat, head of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, continued the attack on China and the Communist Party, and though he had to acknowledge that the Communists had brought prosperity to China he was evidently angry that they did and the capitalists did not, and stated that economic prosperity “is no good under an authoritarian regime.” This from a man who comes from a nation that saw millions flee as immigrants to other countries after World War Two due to economic hardship, and whose people today are barely able to cover their bills, and when they cannot sleep rough on the street, a nation that became powerful by colonising large areas of the world, including India where they reduced the people to poverty they are still struggling to escape and which ruled Hong Kong during its occupation as a fiefdom without any democracy whatsoever.

He exemplified the overpowering hypocrisy of the event when asked what the thinks of the recently imposed sanctions by China by stating,

“Sanctions are an attack on the people that impose them, they come back to bite you.”

He said this with all earnestness as if he actually believed the nonsense coming out of his mouth, this man whose nation has joined in all the sanctions imposed on many countries by the USA around the world. When one hears someone talking about a reality that does not exist it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the speaker is delusional. But so it is.

This charade turned into farce with the next series of speaker the first being Tsai Ing-Wen, who was introduced as “the President of the Republic of China”, who referred Taiwan as a “country” instead of the Chinese province it is, and who called on the USA to enhance Taiwan’s defence and raved on about “fighting socialism and authoritarianism.”

Then followed members of parliament from, France, the EU, Japan and Australia who repeated the attacks on China who were then followed by the presentation of Juan Guaido as the “Interim President of Venezuela,” news I am sure to Venezuelans, then Nathan Law the Hong Kong 5th columnist working with the British in London, who was touted as a “leader of the democratic opposition,” by Wai Wai Nu, touted as the same for Burma, the western, colonial name for Myanmar, and finally Sviatlana Tskhanouskaya, the insurrectionist NATO asset who was introduced as “the Leader of Democratic Belarus.”

The theatre continued with a series of speakers calling for the control of social media, in order, of course, to “ensure free speech,” and to prevent “foreign interference.” The fact that all the speakers before them had called for foreign interference into the affairs of China, Russia, Venezuela, Myanmar, Belarus was lost on them.

The first day ended with the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, Olha Stefanishyna, appearing in order to beg that Ukraine be admitted to NATO and the EU so that Ukraine can be protected against “Russian aggression.” In seeming support of her plea, next appeared US head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who repeated the false claims of Russian interference in the dubious US elections, then by American Army General McMaster, National Security Adviser, and talking head at the right wing Hoover Institute, who began his comments by attacking President Trump as an ‘enemy of democracy.”

It would seem the USA is about to enter a period of one party rule if the Democrats get their way. But you see, one party rule in that case is “ensuring a return to democracy in the USA.”

He continued by attacking the rule of he Communist Party of China as ‘undemocratic,” declared that the CCP is America and the worlds “top enemy,” thereby admitting that the struggle between capitalism and communism is far from over, and then demanded that China release the two Canadians detained on spy charges. He said nothing about the kidnapping and holding hostage of the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, detained in Canada for two years on fabricated US charges of violating the illegal US sanctions against Iran.

The day ended with more propaganda, this time against Russia from Adam Schiff, Chair of the US House Intelligence Committee, who falsely accused Russia of spreading false information and called for the need to “formalise the link between the western intelligence services and social media, in other words total control of social media by the secret services, and lastly Lisa Peterson, the new US Ambassador for Human Rights for Biden who blathered on in the same manner about human rights everywhere except in the USA.

The second day of the Summit was dedicated to a series of young people from the eastern nations that had once been part of the USSR, from Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Romania, and a couple from small Latin American US allies, all computer programmers, who had been assigned projects to develop systems and platforms to manipulate elections, to detect and eliminate “fake news,” and “malign actions,” who all used the example of alleged “Russian influence” on US and UK elections in their remarks and the threat to democracy represented by Donald Trump. Their entire line was that social media needs to be controlled, that elections have to be run “properly,” code for producing a desired outcome; that peoples thoughts and actions must be controlled and predictable.

All through the two days of the event it struck me that I was watching a conference of Nazis. They wore different style clothing than did Hitler and his forces in the 30s and 40s but they spoke the same way, talked the same way, are as ruthless and murderous as the Nazis, have the same objectives as Hitler, the destruction and occupation of Russia, China, Europe, the world; who pretend they are democrats but are themselves the ones who want to create a totalitarian world state, that is a state under the total control of the USA and its vassals, are willing to commit any crime to do it, and who care nothing for the lives of those they destroy.

What were the Nazis in Germany but the armed, violent fist of German capital, intent on wiping out socialism, the rights of labour, of dominating and exploiting the world, who are expert at creating division among peoples, of using bigotry and prejudice for their ends as the Nazis did with the Jews and others. They too drew on the forces of fascism from all the dark corners of Europe and the world to support their aggression and crimes.

Since the USSR collapsed their forces have ruthlessly destroyed country after country and are now advancing on Russia and China. But just as Hitler got what was coming to him, so these new Nazis, who want it all, want to put the whole word under their boots, will end up with nothing. In trying to destroy they will be destroyed, so long as we are on guard. Their conferences reveal them for what they are, black shirts with the smiles of sharks. Mac the Knife is back in town. Be warned. Be prepared.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.