"On October 7th, a large group of armed fighters broke out of the Gaza Strip to launch an unprecedented attack – by air, land, and sea – in southern Israel, thousands of rockets were launched, military bases as well as kibbutzim were targeted and briefly seized.

During the operation, dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood, over a thousand people were slaughtered, including hundreds of military personnel and innocent civilians. In order to secure concessions such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli authorities, more than 200 prisoners including some soldiers were taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips amid Israel’s ongoing relentless airstrikes.

Israel has occupied Palestine longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. The so-called “Palestinian Authority” (PA) is trained and supported by the Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, not the people. Essentially trustees in an Israeli prison, the PA is not a sovereign state of any kind. The people of Palestine live under a foreign military occupation.

Gaza, on the other hand, is a concentration camp which measures only 25 miles in length and five miles in width making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Crammed inside the camp are 2.3 million Palestinians, refugees in their own ancestral lands along with their descendants.

Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. Gaza is completely controlled by the Israeli military. For more than 15 years, food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. have been severely restricted by Tel Aviv. All the while, Palestinians besieged in the coastal enclave are routinely subjected to small as well as large-scale indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

This recent terrorist attack in Israel which saw so many civilians killed – including in crossfire with Israeli forces – was in fact a prison break led by Hamas, the armed militia which rules the Strip.

This horrible attack was blatantly, if unintentionally, provoked by Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and his ruling coalition full of extremist settlers and Jewish supremacists bent on the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria” as they call it.

It does not have to be this way at all.

Killing the Peace Process

Beginning in 1979 at Camp David, Israel promised to let the Palestinians have a sovereign state on the 22 percent of Palestine left after Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians off their land in 1948, this was known as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. What remained was the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip illegally occupied by Tel Aviv since 1967.

By 1988, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Leader Yasser Arafat, who headed the Fatah party, had recognized Israel within its 1967 borders. The Oslo Accords “peace process” began in 1993 and was supposed to implement this two-state reality.

It was a sham. All the while, even though the Fourth Geneva Convention says that it is illegal for one nation to transfer their own civilian populations into land seized in war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 says that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of the Israeli Jewish colonists or “settlers” moved to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which they consider part of greater Israel. This has effectively made a sovereign state there impossible.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu, who used to play along with the narrative of an eventual two-state solution, in the last decade officially canceled the illusion that he would ever let this occur.

In fact, Netanyahu said in 2015 that, “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel. Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again. We are realistic and understand.”

Netanyahu was then asked specifically whether he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “correct.”

Even though he temporarily relented on official annexation of the Jordan river valley, Netanyahu still vowed in 2020 that “Israel will retain security control on the entire area west of the Jordan River.” In other words, from the River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will never be free.

So this is why B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all finally came out in 2021–2022, after the 40-year illusion of “independence someday instead of freedom today” had finally crumbled, and officially declared that Israel was an “apartheid state.”

Jimmy Carter warned that if Israel did not let the Palestinians go, they would be stuck in this apartheid corner. So did former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barakand former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

If the whites of 1920s Jim Crow Mississippi had said, “we will not end segregation and our two-tiered ‘rule of law,’ but we will let northern Mississippi become an independent black nation someday instead,” but then they never did that, that would be where Israel-Palestine is right now.

Ever since then, Western liberals – regulated by the Israel lobby – have only paid lip service to the two-state solution while Israel created “facts on the ground,” with the ever expanding settlements relegating Palestinians to noncontiguous Bantustans cut off from each other with the separation wall and networks of checkpoints run by Israeli occupation forces.

Imagine if someone said about South Africa in 1983 that, “DeClerk and the whites of South Africa have a right to exist. And they have the right to defend themselves. And the blacks, well they have the right to aspirations of having those rights.” This simply will not do.

Hamas Is the Likud’s Strategic Ally

That is not to say that Hamas is secretly controlled by Israel, but their seemingly antithetical interests are in fact closely aligned and serve each other’s purposes. AsBrian McGlinchey, Andrew Higgins, Robert Sale, and others have exhaustively detailed, for decades, Israel has provided Hamas and its precursors with both direct and indirect financial support.

The day after the October 7^th attack, Tal Schneider railed against this policy in Times Of Israel,

For years, the various governments led by [Netanyahu] took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the [PA’s] West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Originally borne out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the right-wing Islamist movement was seen by Israeli leadership as an instrument to undercut the dominant opposition to the occupation, Arafat’s secular leftist PLO.

Beginning in the 1970s, Israel’s backing of Hamas and its predecessor, Mujama Al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” a former senior CIA official told Sale.

According to U.S. intelligence officials speaking with Sale, “funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel.”

In the early 1980s, the Islamist movement began radicalizing. This was precipitated by the rise of Hezbollah in opposition to the Israeli invasion and nearly two decade occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-installed dictator in Iran, and the subsequent founding of the Islamic Republic.

The group known today as Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was officially founded in 1987 and flourished during the First Intifada, or violent uprising against the occupation in Palestine.

Despite the group’s refusal for many years to ever recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” along with the PLO dropping that maximalist demand themselves, Israeli aid to Hamas continued apace.

This is because “the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” a U.S. official told Sale. Indeed, Hamas condemned the PLO as traitors for going to the negotiating table with Tel Aviv in an attempt to work out a two-state solution.

As Higgins later wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel – particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 – Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians.

Fatah also cracked down on Hamas during the 1990s over their tactics including suicide bombings, which led to further clashes and bad blood.

Following the Second Intifada, in which over 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians were killed, Likudnik Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initiated a policy known as “disengagement” in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 2005, Tel Aviv set about removing thousands of settlers and occupying forces.

The Israeli army was redeployed in the areas surrounding Gaza instead. On the surface, this may look like a concession, but Likud’s goal was to decisively kill the peace process and with it any hopes Palestinians had for their right of return or a future state.

As Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s senior adviser, bluntly told Haaretz almost two decades ago,

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.

And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens – when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.

Hamas achieved a plurality victory against Fatah – now led by Abbas in the wake of Arafat’s death – in the Palestinian territories’ 2006 parliamentary elections. But before a coalition government could be instituted based on the results, George W. Bush and his neocon retinue – displeased with the results of the democratic election they had encouraged – attempted a coup, supporting Fatah against Hamas.

As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair,

[This outlet] has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by [Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time resident strongman in Gaza], and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power…

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

As a result of this proxy war, came Hamas’ complete takeover in Gaza which has been used to justify the blockade and the rest of Tel Aviv’s illegal collective punishment policies.

Ever since the siege was imposed, the fact that the Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas years ago is predictably trotted to justify Israel’s wars against the Palestinians trapped in the enclave. Gaza has no air defense, army, navy, or air force to speak of, but thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed amid these canned hunts.

Half of the population in Gaza – approximately 1.15 million people – are children who were not even alive when Hamas won in 2006, and there was never another election.

As Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport hasextensively chronicled, this is exactly what Likud wanted.

“The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’ Gaza is optimal for Israel. When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria,” Erez Tadmor, a former head of Likud information campaigns, posted on Twitter.

“[Netanyahu] succeeded in disconnecting between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and effectively shattered the vision of a Palestinian state in these two areas. Part of the achievement is linked to the Qatari money that comes to Hamas every month,” said Yonatana Orich, one of Netanyahu’s advisers and another Likudnik campaign manager.

Distal Abtaryan, former minister of information and current Likudnik member of the Knesset, put it this way,

Every home needs a balcony, and Israel is a home. The balcony of this home is Samaria… if Hamas crumbles, Mahmoud Abbas may rule [Gaza]. If he rules it, voices on the left will encourage negotiations, a political settlement, and a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as well… this is the real reason Netanyahu doesn’t annihilate Hamas, everything else is bullshit.

In 2019, Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves and an associate of Netanyahu,said, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

That same year, Netanyahu boasted to members of his party in the Knesset,

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist Party and the current Finance Minister was even more explicit,

The [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment, the [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court]. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN security council. Then would we need an American veto? Or would we not need an American veto? … Given that the main game, the central court, where we play now, is the international delegitimization, there [Abbas] is beating us in significant spaces. And Hamas, at this point in my opinion, will be an asset. I don’t think I have to worry about [Hamas].

The Netanyahu Doctrine

They thought it would work so well. In March, Smotrich proclaimed that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Last month, Netanyahu even presented a map of “The New Middle East” to the UN General Assembly with Palestine, from the river to the sea, completely erased.

“There’s no question: the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu announced. “I believe we’re on the cusp of a more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”He continued, emphasizing “we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.”

The Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, along with Netanyahu, also believed the Palestinians could be erased. They envisioned a Middle East where Washington’s long-time Arab dictatorship vassals would finally plant the Palestinians firmly under the bus, recognize Israel, and sign phony peace deals in exchange for American arms as well as other favors.

For instance, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became signatories of the Abraham Accords which is a thinly veiled foundation for a regional military coalitionled by the US and Israel eyeing Iran.

Under the accords, Gulf capitals such as Abu Dhabi or Manama recognize Israel – absent a Palestinian state or end to the apartheid regime – so they can receive increased access to advanced weapon systemsmanufactured by the US military-industrial complex.

Before Israel began its latest war on Gaza,killing hundreds of Palestinians every day, recent polling had already shown that as a result of Israeli massacres and war crimescommitted against the Palestinians, the Abraham Accords have become increasingly unpopular among the populace in Bahrain and the UAE.

In July, with the support of the Joe Biden administration, Israel’s security forcesinvaded and bombed the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing a dozen people including five children. Israeli bulldozers tore up the camp’s roads, electricity, and water networks. 1,000 troopsparticipated in the raid, along with Apache helicopters, drones, and 150 armored vehicles.

Another point of contention in the region is Netanyahu’s policies of setting records this year for settlement expansion and construction in illegal Jewish-only colonies,further eviscerating even the pretense of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli forces and settlers have repeatedly desecrated, the Al-Aqsa Mosque this year. During the holy month of Ramadan, worshipers within, including women and children, were viciously beaten. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have also encouragedattacks against Palestinian Christians, which have escalated substantially.

For Palestinians, prior to this month, this year was already one of the deadliest on record. Before the end of September, more than 220 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, including over three dozenchildren. That figure included 187 people who were murdered in the occupied territories and another 37 killed – mostly amidst a smaller bombing campaign – in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and Biden were dead wrong. Peace in the region must be made with the Palestinians. But never again will any heads of state be foolish enough to believe Palestine and its people can be circumvented, erased, or ignored.

Slaughtering “Human Animals”

Since the October 7^th attack led by Hamas, Israel has pummeled Gaza indiscriminately with thousands of bombs so far killing more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children. Concurrently, in the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killedby settlers and Israeli occupation forces.

Foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt along with Abraham Accords signatory states the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco published a joint statement condemning Israel’s collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza. The diplomats implored the UN Security Council to implement a ceasefire immediately, as almost half of all residential units in the enclave are said to have been obliterated.

After 20 straight days of bombing, Mondoweiss reported,

• Around 219 educational facilities have been hit by Israeli bombardment, including at least 29 UNRWA schools.
• Approximately 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced.
• 24 hospitals have received evacuation notices from Israel in northern Gaza.
• Hospitals are operating at more than 150 percent of their capacity.
• At least 130 neonatal babies dependent on incubators are at risk of death due to lack of electricity.
• There are approximately 166 unsafe births taking place per day in Gaza.
• 101 health personnel have been killed by Israeli strikes, over 100 others wounded.
• Gaza’s population of over 2 million, which continues to be carpet bombed, is still being denied fuel, clean water, and adequate food supply by Israel’s ongoing siege on the enclave.

The death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza may soon skyrocket, as Tel Aviv has cut off Gaza’s food, water, electricity, and medicine. William Schomburg, the head of the Gaza mission for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), has warned the al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, the Strip’s main medical centers, are “rapidly running out of fuel and medical supplies.”

He added, “during our visit to al-Quds hospital there were heavy airstrikes all around us and the entire hospital shook.” A third of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. The dire lack of fuel, water, and sanitation will soon break the back of Gaza’s healthcare system and may lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera.

The White House’s unconditional backing of this unprecedented Israeli onslaught against Gaza  threatens to drag Americans into a regional war with Hezbollah, Iran, and their Resistance Axis allies including in Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces illegally occupy a third of the war-torn country.

The destruction of Washington’s Global War on Terror and regime change wars of the last 20 years will likely be dwarfed by such a conflict.

To put this in perspective, the American government’s wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia during this century killed and caused the deaths of well over four million people.

Washington should immediately cut all military aid and ties with Tel Aviv, as well as cease its disgraceful diplomatic cover. American forces should not be in harm’s wayto “deter” other actors from getting involved, nor to defend this merciless regime. The Israeli government, currently waging siege warfare against Gaza, has declared the Strip is populated by “human animals.”

Tel Aviv is now readying for its ground invasion, the American people must swiftly demand a lifting of the siege and a ceasefire."

Source:

https://original.antiwar.com/connor_freeman/2023/10/26/netanyahus-support-for-hamas-backfired/

I recently archived an article written by J.R. Nyquist on Trevor Louden’s website (link below), both of whom are friends with Gordon Chang — they’re a team allied on their core foreign policy views for both Russia and China.  That article tries to make the case that Putin is a secret communist.

I should start by saying I’m deeply anti-communist.  I have no sympathy for communism.  I write what I do here only to debunk false paranoid conspiratorial excesses that see communist plots in under every rock.  To be effective at opposing communism and communists we have to get our facts straight and not waste our energy attacking phantoms.

The aforementioned people are biased hawks who see what they want to see.  They can cherry-pick and frame things to make their case, of course, but that’s not interesting or helpful.  If their narrative were true then we wouldn’t have such clear and strong evidence of Putin NOT wanting to take Ukraine and trying to negotiate its neutrality, to pick just one example.  I can cite chapter and verse proving this case with countless empirical facts over years -- and I will below.  Though Trevor and his gang would merely invent epicycles to explain away the mountains of contrary evidence and point back to this one time in the 1980s when a person said a thing, therefore the mountain of evidence should be dismissed as merely demonstrating the cynical cunning of our enemy who’s playing not just 4d chess but 8d underwater backgammon.  On their read, even when our enemy fails or concedes something this is only ever part of a broader plot to feign weakness for a coming attack.

Trevor, Nyuist, and Chang et al are either:
1. Delusional or
2. Operatives for the state department / CIA.

I strongly lean toward #2 for Trevor and Chang, and #1 for Nyquist.  By saying I think Nyquist is delusional I want to be clear that I also think he's a very smart and knowledgeable man.  He's definitely not an idiot.  Clever people are far better at rationalizing their existing beliefs than dumb people.  Nyquist is very clever.

Let’s start the debunking with some quotes from his article:

“[…] Because this subject is of grave importance to our country, and because the danger of war is growing day to day, we should no longer allow naïve judgments about Russia to pass without contradiction.
[…]
In January 2016 Putin publicly criticized Lenin. But he didn’t criticize Lenin for being a communist. He criticized Lenin for “providing regions with autonomy.” By doing this, Lenin “planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia and which would later explode.” This explosion took place in 1991 and led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Putin was not criticizing Lenin’s communist ideas. He was criticizing Lenin for causing the breakup of the Soviet Union. […]”

In 1990 as part of the negotiated end of the Soviet Union the US and other western leaders promised not to expand NATO “one inch east” (of Germany) thereby reducing the pressure on Russia to act to defend itself from an expansive encroaching military alliance hostile to Russia.  There have been many propagandistic attempts to downplay or debunk this, though we have the declassified documents and statements from the men involved:

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2067093/was-russia-given-assurances-that-nato-would-not-expand-toward-them

After agreeing not to expand NATO in 1990 the US aggressively sought to expand NATO.  Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania, and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.  Since Russia was assured that NATO was would expand "one inch east" the US has grown NATO by 16 more countries.

In 2004 the US aggressively pursued a color revolution in Ukraine to achieve regime change.  This was called the “orange” color revolution:
 https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2009271/book-revolution-in-orange-the-origins-of-ukraine-s-democratic-breakthrough-chapter-7-we

Imagine if China or Russia pursued a color revolution in Canada or Mexico — what would happen?  The example of the 1962 “Cuban missile crisis” tells us: the US would freak out and invoke the Monroe Doctrine (any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is a hostile act) to justify sending planes, tanks, and troops to crush it.

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4159307/reminder-from-1962-the-operation-northwoods-memo-describes-an-elaborate-months-long-us-covert-mil

Both before and after the Cuban missile crisis the US launched many efforts to pursue regime change in Cuba.  Depending on which sources you believe the number of regime change efforts ranges from dozens to hundreds, though in any case it's not a short list.  Just from declassified CIA documents alone we can be certain the number was more than you can count on both hands.  The US believes it has the right if not the duty (cf. Monroe Doctrine) to disallow what it perceives as hostile foreign influence anywhere near the US homeland and it has used both subversive methods and warfare to achieve this.

In 2008 at a NATO meeting in Bucharest the NATO officials admitted their expansionist plans openly, including for Ukraine:

"We, the Heads of State and Government of the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, met today to enlarge our Alliance and further strengthen our ability to confront the existing and emerging 21st century security threats.
[...]
NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.  We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. [...]"
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm

At this point we should take note that Russia is an unusually historically-minded nation and civilization which has been invaded at least 5 different times through Ukraine in the last few hundred years -- as recently as WW2 -- due to the features of the geography relative to Russia's core:

"[...] If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west. So it is with landscapes around the world—their physical features imprison political leaders, constraining their choices and room for maneuver. These rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.
[...]
In the past 500 years, Russia has been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1707, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. [...]"

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/russia-geography-ukraine-syria/413248/

If any western leader were a leader in Russia and saw an expansionist military alliance that opposes Russia trying to take root in Ukraine they would do the same things Russia has done -- or more.  This is easily understood on basic security grounds (cf. Monroe Doctrine).  In response to that 2008 push to get Ukraine into NATO then-ambassador to Russia (and now CIA director) William Burns wrote a secret diplomatic cable back to the US federal government describing the Russian reaction.  We know about this only because of Wikileaks which published the cable (now referred to colloquially as the "nyet means nyet" memo):

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5563242/archive-from-2008-wikileaks-us-diplomatic-cable-nyet-means-nyet-no-means-no-regarding-ukr

The whole classified US cable makes for an interesting read though I'll focus on just one paragraph:

"[...] Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. [...]"

This 2008 US diplomatic cable makes it clear the US was well aware of Russia's concerns and understood the legitimacy of their concerns, yet proceeded with further efforts to gain control over Ukraine to make them a de facto if not official member of NATO.

In 2014 the US tried another regime change operation in Ukraine and this time succeeded.  We have a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State) and Geoffrey Pyatt (US Ambassador to Ukraine) talking about the final details of their involvement in the US coup in Ukraine in 2014 where they decide who will run the country:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/2009243/reminder-leaked-2014-nuland-pyatt-phone-call-about-us-coup-in-ukraine

Following the 2014 coup the US installed 12 secret CIA bases in Ukraine (more than any other country the CIA operates in -- a huge presence) according to reporting from the New York Times based on having visited the secret bases in Ukraine and talking to over 200 people involved:

"[...] The C.I.A.’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power. [...]"

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5317495/new-york-times-the-spy-war-how-the-c-i-a-secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin

The CIA work in Ukraine wasn't just surveillance, they used Ukraine as a staging ground to setup sleeper cells inside Russia to engage in terrorism inside Russia by 2014:
https://epistemology.locals.com/post/3267440/antiwar-com-report-the-cia-is-directing-sabotage-attacks-inside-russia-using-operation-glad

The CIA wasn't alone in training and directing terrorists from Ukraine to operate inside Russia, they also received assistance from British intelligence MI6:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/3005446/the-grayzone-leaked-documents-british-spies-constructing-secret-terror-army-in-ukraine

Following the US coup in Ukraine that installed a government hostile to Russia one of their first public acts was to ban use of the Russian language inside Ukraine -- a country in which more than 1/3rd of the whole population spoke Russian (including their current leader Zelensky).  Russian language speakers aren't evenly distributed across Ukraine they're focused in the areas geographically nearest Russia.  This triggered open civil war inside Ukraine where the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts sought independence from the western-controlled regime in Kiev.  These regions asked to join the Russian Federation and Putin said no.  Putin didn't want to take these regions.

Russia has had a critical-for-them naval military presense in Crimea since 1786 -- before the US was founded.  Crimea has been Russia's only warm-water port for centuries.  Since the breakup of the Soviet Union Russia has had a long-term lease on Crimea renewed in 2010 for another 25+ years.  Following the 2014 US coup in Ukraine Russia saw the writing on the wall and realized they were under imminent threat of losing their only warm water port and so annexed Crimea.  It should be noted that the majority of Crimean residents favored this according to not just a plebicite run by Russia, but according to US government-funded surveys of public sentiment in Crimea.  This meant Crimea was now officially a part of Russia from Russia's perspective though Ukraine didn't see it that way and vowed to retake Crimea.

By 2015 the CIA was training nazi's in Ukraine to fight Russia:
https://epistemology.locals.com/post/1875873/cia-trained-nazis-in-ukraine-to-fight-russia

By 2017 the US was publicly sending weapons to Ukraine, starting with Javelin missiles.

By 2019 the RAND Corporation had drawn up plans for subversive, economic, and military measures to harm Russia:

"[...]  The purpose of the project was to examine a range of possible means to extend Russia. By this, we mean nonviolent measures that could stress Russia’s military or economy or the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we posit would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as measures that would lead Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence. This report deliberately covers a wide range of military, economic, and political policy options. Its recommendations are directly relevant to everything from military modernization and force posture to economic sanctions and diplomacy; consequently, it speaks to all the military services, other parts of U.S. government that have a hand in foreign policy, and the broader foreign and defense policy audience.
[...]
Most of these measures—whether in Europe or the Middle East— risk provoking Russian reaction that could impose large military costs on U.S. allies and large political costs on the United States itself. Increasing military advice and arms supplies to Ukraine is the most feasible of these options with the largest impact, but any such initiative would have to be calibrated very carefully to avoid a widely expanded conflict. [...]"

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5309342/reminder-from-2019-rand-corporation-extending-russia-competing-from-advantageous-ground

Also in 2019 Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine on a platform of peace: friendliness toward Russia, and tolerance of and integration with the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.  By March of 2021 Zelesnky signed a loftily-worded decree making it clear he was not going to pursue peace, but military dominance of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk:

https://ppu.gov.ua/en/press-center/today-president-of-ukraine-volodymyr-zelenskyy-signed-decree-117-2021-of-march-24-2021-on-the-strategy-of-de-occupation-and-reintegration-of-the-temporarily-occupied-territory-of-the-autonomous-republ/

This action was met with great concern by Russia who saw it -- correctly -- as a threat by Ukraine that they were going to (re)take Crimea by force.  From Russia's point of view this meant Ukraine was planning to attack the Russian homeland.  Russian officials had no doubt read the RAND Corporation document as well -- it's public -- and realized the US was hell-bent on harming Russia using Ukraine as a weapon.  Ukranian officials were planning on going to war with Russia using NATO was their shield:

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/1988042/ukraine-adviser-to-zelenskiy-alexey-arestovich-has-been-advocating-and-planning-for-war-with-russi

By this time in 2019 we have US and British spies training nazis and terrorsts to harm Russia, we have the US shipping weapons to Ukraine, and we've had 5 years of NATO countries training the Ukrainian military -- all following a US coup in 2014.  Add up the evidence and it's very clear what the west has done: make Ukraine a de facto member of NATO while pushing aggressively to make it official.  Given this bleak reality -- that Russia's absolute red line of Ukraine being in NATO was being violated -- Russian officials began drawing up plans to reverse this.  The first attempt was diplomatic.  Later in 2019 Russia tried to negotiate with NATO insisting on an ironclad treaty ruling out NATO expansion into Ukraine and more broadly rolling back prior NATO expansions to those of 1997:

"The demands, spelled out by Moscow in full for the first time, were handed over to the US this week. They include a demand that Nato remove any troops or weapons deployed to countries that entered the alliance after 1997, which would include much of eastern Europe, including Poland, the former Soviet countries of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the Balkan countries.

Russia has also demanded that Nato rule out further expansion, including the accession of Ukraine into the alliance, and that it does not hold drills without previous agreement from Russia in Ukraine, eastern Europe, in Caucasus countries such as Georgia or in Central Asia."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-list-demands-tensions-europe-ukraine-nato

The US and NATO declined such a treaty according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

“[…] The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that. [...]"

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5286990/reminder-from-2023-nato-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg-explains-that-russia-asked-for-a-treaty

The refusal of NATO to sign a treaty meant Russia had exhausted diplomatic efforts to prevent NATO expansion into Ukraine and so Russia prepared for a military operation it later launched in February 2022:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5318897/reminder-from-february-2022-putin-s-two-initial-speeches-at-the-start-of-the-war-laying-out-his-c

This Russian "special military operation" (SMO) was meant to be a lighting attack just strong enough for force Ukraine to negotiate.  The Russian SMO worked, by April 15th 2022 a draft treaty had been initialed:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5358439/ted-snider-putin-s-draft-treaty-between-russia-and-ukraine-did-exist

Ukrainian officials said Russia was prepared to end their SMO as early as March -- just a few weeks after the start of the SMO -- if Ukraine had agreed:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924342/antiwar-com-ukrainian-official-confirms-russia-was-ready-to-end-war-in-march-2022-if-kyiv-agreed

Former Ukraine officials said after the fact the treaty was a good deal and contained many consessions from Russia:

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4938590/former-top-advisor-to-zelesnky-arestovich-says-istanbul-peace-agreement-was-good-had-many-concess

Unfortunately the US and UK blocked Ukraine from signing the treaty:

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3479375/antiwar-former-israeli-pm-bennett-says-us-blocked-his-attempts-at-a-russia-ukraine-peace-d

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2039350/turkish-foreign-minister-mevlut-cavusoglu-some-members-of-the-nato-alliance-favor-continued-bloo

It's clear that various western interests were concerned this early peace negotiation would end the war "too soon" when they believed they had an opportunity to harm Russia (remember the "Extending Russia" paper from RAND):

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/1962057/some-warhawks-concerned-russia-ukraine-war-will-end-too-soon

Once Ukraine pulled out of the peace negotiations with Russia in April 2022 -- after being pushed by the US and UK to do so -- Russia changed it's goal from forcing a negotiation to imposing it's goals using military force.  Russia mobilized more soldiers and ramped up military production and set plans to annex Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts -- which they did by Septermber 2022.

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/1979884/russia-s-goals-and-framework-for-their-war-on-ukraine-early-april-2022

Despite repeated warnings the US has given long-range (190 mile) missiles to Ukraine in 2024 and so Russia has said in response they will impose a buffer zone big enough to protect what they perceive as Russian homeland, including the annexed regions (Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia).  This means Russia will not accept anything less than conquering 190 miles beyond the already-annexed territories.  Until and unless Ukraine -- and most importantly the US -- agree to negotiate an end to this conflict Russia will continue to demilitarize Ukraine (killing all their soliders, destroying all their war production capability), and will continue to advance it's troops ever-deeper into what was once Ukrainian territory.  If Ukraine doesn't surrender they may not have any country left by the time Russia is done.

I've summarized the key facts of this issue and provided citations which expand on what I've summarized to document clearly what Russia has done and why.  Russia did not want war, contrary to what Nyquist et al claimed in 2017.  Russia does not want to reclaim the territory of the Soviet Union, as claimed by Nyquist.  Russia wants security for itself along its own borders and has been completely unambigous about this for years and now decades. If you poke a bear in the eye don't be surprised if they bite you.

Context:
https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5563022/archive-j-r-nyquist-is-vladimir-putin-a-communist

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5292056/documenting-us-regime-change-efforts-in-and-around-russia-over-the-last-20-years-belarus-georgia

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/2760093/podcast-pete-quinones-how-the-west-brought-war-to-the-ukraine-w-ben-abelow

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4286405/podcast-the-grayzone-aaron-mat-interviews-former-ukrainian-government-official-and-diplomat-and

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5342208/wsj-putin-s-punishing-peace-deal-for-ukraine-revealed-some-details-from-the-april-2022-dra

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5558336/independent-ukraine-war-analysis-as-of-april-25th-2024

In my experience most people accept that voluntary interaction with other people is morally good, and coercing innocent people is morally bad. If I have a dollar and you have a pen and I want your pen more than my dollar and you want my dollar more than your pen, then we can make a trade where I get your pen, you get my dollar, and we both feel better off by the result: we both got what we wanted, and we would both say we're better off than we were before our trade. People only engage in voluntary interactions when both parties will benefit from the result (where benefit is understood in the broadest sense). Even charity benefits both parties because the person giving is deriving some psychological or other benefit from the act of charity at the same time the person receiving charity is getting some (usually) tangible benefit.

The beauty of voluntary interactions is that they almost by definition require both parties to benefit (sans mistakes). If one or both parties would not benefit from the interaction, why would they choose to engage in such interaction voluntarily? Obviously they wouldn't. Voluntary interactions demonstrate our preferences through the choices they actualize.

If I hold a gun to your head and demand that you give me your money or else I'll kill you or lock you in a cage, virtually nobody thinks this is moral. Coercion is immoral because it violates individual rights. Even if I used some of the money I took from you by force to help orphans, this would not make my act of coercion any more moral. Coercion is wrong because it's an immoral means, regardless of what the ends are. This is easy to see when we talk about a man robbing people at gunpoint.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear, if we add in a voting process to the previously mentioned example of robbing people at gunpoint many if not most people seem to think robbing people at gunpoint becomes moral. If everyone in our neighborhood votes on whether or not to send people with guns to take money from everyone by force and the majority favor it then most people seem to accept that. Why is that? In part I think the answer is that humans have an innate respect for authority. So when a person or institution claims to have authority we are likely to accept their claim by default. Another reason for this is our pervasive bias in favor of the status quo, whatever it is (slavery was regarded as perfectly normal and acceptable by most people for most of human history). As far as I know the only rational way of coming to question the status quo is by becoming educated in rationality, ethics, and maybe history. Since few people have taken the time required to seriously study such things most people are likely to accept however things already are. Acceptance of the status quo is further facilitated by plausible-sounding myths in popular culture and by outright propaganda used by those who might mean well but are poorly informed, or more cynically, by those who benefit from the status quo.

Does voting about something change the morality of that thing? No. If 99% of everyone in your neighborhood voted to kill the remaining 1%, would that be moral? Obviously not. What if 99.99999% vote to kill just 1 innocent person -- would that be moral? No. No matter the breadth of a majority, the morality of an action is unchanged. If voting is allowed to have unlimited scope, unlimited power, then it is nothing but the tyranny of the majority. In a just and moral society it's absolutely essential that minorities be protected because by definition they lack the numerical strength to protect themselves. The smallest minority is the individual. A just and moral society protects individual rights no matter how many people vote to violate those rights. Should we let a majority white population vote on whether to keep black slaves? No. Should we let two wolves and one sheep vote on whether to have mutton for dinner? No. The legitimate scope of power for what voting can do, or what government can do more generally, is not unlimited. In a just and moral society the proper role of voting and government is limited to protecting individual rights. Every inch moved beyond this is an inch in the direction of tyranny. Whether tyranny by government or tyranny by the majority, it's tyranny nonetheless -- even a well-meaning tyranny is still a tyranny. Any system that gives itself the power to violate individual rights -- even for well- meaning ends -- is a system of tyranny and oppression that we should all oppose.

If a healthy patient walks into a doctor's office for a routine checkup and the doctor has waiting 5 other patients in desperate need of a heart, liver, kidney, etc. Should the doctor murder the one healthy innocent patient to save the 5 who need organs? No. Even if the net number of lives saved is 4, the ends don't justify the means. So it is with voting and government policy. The ends can never be used to justify any means, because if you take that approach it can be used to justify any horror you can imagine, even murdering an innocent stranger for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Even ignoring the principled ethical argument, just consider the practical horror of ends that are desired but never achieved. In Soviet Russia they desired some kind of Utopian nation and used this goal to justify mass starvation, gulags, countless arbitrary executions, etc. So if you take the approach of saying the ends justify the means you can quite literally justify killing millions of people and still never actually achieve your goals. And again, that's ignoring the principled ethical argument against the ends justifying the means which says actions must be ethical, and so no matter the end-goal, the methods of achieving it must be ethical. Or in other words: the ends can't justify the means -- we must evaluate the ethics of each action, not just the desired outcome.

I'm going to guess that you the reader agree that voluntary interactions are good, forcing people to do things at gunpoint is bad, that voting to kill innocent people is unjust even if a large majority of voters agree that they want to kill innocent people, that harvesting the organs from an unwilling and innocent person even to save several others is not just, and that ends cannot justify the means no matter how well-meaning the ends are. Though watch what happens to your own emotions when I bring up forced wealth redistribution in state welfare programs. Do you think it's just and moral for people with guns to come take your justly acquired private property by force? No. But what if they use some of the loot they took to help poor people -- is it moral then? No. What if the people with guns are representatives of the government -- is it moral then? Do the ends justify the means in this instance? Why is that? How can you justify your position without engaging in a logical fallacy like special pleading, appeal to consequences, appeal to emotion, appeal to expediency, etc? I'll save you the trouble: you can't. It's simply not possible to make a philosophically robust, principled argument in favor of coercing innocent people.

Yet many people do argue in favor of coercing innocent people in some cases. How do they do it? They rationalize. They change the subject. They throw out red-herrings. They use vague or misleading language to cloak their position in a way that makes it seem morally respectable. They give examples of what amounts to how two wrongs make a right. They appeal to systems of ethics that might sound good, but in the final analysis depend on evasions or errors in reasoning. They hem and haw about a "social contract" that nobody signed. They engage in victim-blaming and tell you that if you don't like having your individual rights violated you should move. In other words they respond with emotions, not reasons. Just as you probably are right now (link1: "When our beliefs are threatened by facts, we turn to unfalsifiable justifications").  Remember earlier when I said to pay attention to your emotions as I talked about this? How do you feel now? Are you upset? Do you feel repulsed by what seems like a cold apathetic maybe even malevolent attitude toward poor people? But wait: we're not talking about poor people, we're talking about the just and moral use of force against innocent people and how voting interacts with this. I picked this example to provoke emotions and demonstrate how it is that we justify coercing innocent people. We justify such things not with sound ethics and reason and evidence, but with emotions. Then later we rationalize our emotions with increasingly clever arguments that we find endless support for because of our confirmation bias -- we seek out information that supports whatever it is that we already believe (link2: "Selective Exposure Theory", link3: "How facts backfire"). Is that what you're doing right now? Are you currently screaming at the page with your favorite rationalizations? Have you decided that the implication of what I've written is such that you think I'm an amoral psychopath and thus you feel justified dismissing whatever I've written? I encourage you to ask yourself: do you have rational arguments against what I've written, or does it simply make you uncomfortable and thus you desire to reject it? Are you engaged in careful rational deliberation about the facts of the matter, or are you letting your emotions get the better of you? Is it possible even in principle if you're mistaken? Is it possible there are things you don't know? Is it possible you've been misled? Is it possible there is a compassionate "third way" that doesn't involve letting children starve nor violating the individual rights of innocent people? I will not answer such questions here, I raise them only to encourage you to open your mind (link4: "Why Are Unfalsifiable Beliefs So Attractive?").

The key moral problem with Soviet communism, or Nazi socialism, or any number of lesser attempts at socialism or "mixed" economies is that people are forced into the system. With such systems you either accept the diktat of the people in charge or you risk execution or imprisonment. If a group of people willingly join together to create their own communist commune for just their own members and violate no individual rights in the process, I say good for them. Or if a business owner wants to make their business by owned by the workers as in socialism, so long as they're not violating individual rights in the process that's a fine thing too. What people choose for themselves is none of my business or anyone else's so long as any harm is restricted to consenting adults. The trouble comes in when people want to impose their will on innocent people by force. This is why voting and governments must have very limited scope: to help ensure nobody can initiate violence against or enslave their innocent fellow man. To help ensure no ideology (no matter how well-meaning) can be imposed by force on unwilling people.

So what are government-mandated welfare programs? They are programs created by usually well-meaning people that accept using violence as a legitimate means of achieving their goals. Either accept this violation of individual property rights and involuntarily pay into the system or we'll send people with guns to your house and put you in a cage. This is an example of well-meaning tyranny, but tyranny nonetheless. It's also a poorly informed policy in terms of how well it does what it aims to do (lookup the goals of the war on poverty vs. the outcome 5), what kind of unintended consequences it has (subsidizing poverty rather than eliminating it), etc. And it's astonishingly short-sighted: are the key problems that are attempting to be addressed by welfare programs the best place to take action? If you only look at a snapshot of the present world you might think struggling children are the key issue in need of being helped. But why are there struggling children? If you look one level deeper it becomes clear that the key problem is actually parents making the immoral choice to have children they can't take care of. Parents without the skills, material means, environment, etc are having children that they won't be able to raise on their own to be well-adjusted. So really the problem is parents. Parents are the moral agents making the implicit or explicit choice to have children they can't provide for.

Should the immoral choices of others be sufficient to justify harming innocent 3rd parties? Clearly the answer is no: forcing innocent people to pay for the immoral choices of others is a bad system. And yet that's the system we have. People defend it because they are used to the status quo, and because they can see no better option. But appealing to the status quo is not an argument, it's a logical fallacy.

Nobody wants to see children suffer. Children are not to blame for their parents bad choices. I think most people would agree that progress toward protecting individual property rights can't take a path that involves children currently benefiting from welfare starving to death. But for the purpose of this essay I will not address possible solutions to this problem and instead will confine myself to a discussion of our perception of morality and how it changes when voting is involved.

Here's where I think we usually go wrong in such discussions. We tell ourselves that "sure initiating violence is in principle wrong, but in practice there are a few careful well-meaning limited exceptions." This is a mistake. What we should be doing is questioning our assumptions. We should be working to discover the principles that maximize human flourishing. Once we have those principles we should work on plotting a gradual course in the direction of that ideal of human flourishing. The right answer is not that we accept poorly defined principles and only apply them sometimes. The right answer is that we define better principles and better paths to achieve our principles. To many this sounds unnecessarily rigid or dogmatic, but recognize the fork in the road we're discussing: one path uses reason and evidence to maximize human flourishing. The other uses emotion instead of reason, popular myths instead of evidence, and moves only chaotically toward a future that may be better or worse. If you want to build a rocket that can send people to the moon or you want to build a microchip, emotionalism and a lack of evidence are not successful attributes. So it is for working towards a better world for all of humanity in the realm of ethics and politics. My argument here is not saying we should ignore emotions and let robots make all our choices -- not at all. My argument is that rationality and evidence enable us to be most successful at whatever our goals are. If we don't have a firm grasp of the principles that do (or should) guide us or we don't have principles that work in practice (i.e. we need various exceptions), then this is a sign that our principles are not as good as they could be and that we're relying on intuition (chock full heuristics and biases and all the problems that entails!) and thus making less progress toward the ideal of human flourishing than we could be making.

Should we ignore evidence? Deny rationality? Reject ethics? Of course not. No matter what our goals are, we need ethics and rationality and evidence to make good choices that enable us to best achieve our goals. What is true for designing a spaceship is true for designing government policies. Emotions are an input, a factoid, a piece of data: not a reliable decision-making technique by itself.

Conclusion

There's nothing magic about voting. Voting cannot trump ethics and rationality. If we want to live in a better world we need a better understanding of ethics, rationality, and the legitimate (limited) scope for the power of voting. We need to reflect very carefully about how democratic voting has acquired an almost mystical quality in popular culture, and we need to question our assumptions about such things.