Instruction: Write an article about: Britain takes aggressive anti-China line with hawkish PM Liz Truss. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Britain, China, Liz Truss, NATO, Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Tom Tugendhat, Tories, UK, United Kingdom

Output:
Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, is the most anti-China British leader in decades. In the Conservative leadership contest that brought her to power, candidates competed to show who could be more belligerent against Beijing.

Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, must be in the running for the most anti-China British leader in a century.
Truss has done more than any other single politician to move the Conservative Party, and therefore the British government, from wanting to be a close friend of China, during the David Cameron premiership, to today where the UK is openly threatening Beijing’s economic stability and political security.
As foreign secretary in 2021, Truss convinced fellow G7 foreign ministers to include a line in their closing communique condemning China’s economic policy. Then, in a major speech this April, she threatened to crack down on China’s rise if they “don’t play by the rules”.
As she vied for the top seat in 10 Downing Street this August, Truss pledged that, if she were made prime minister, she would officially designate China a “threat” to British national security.
When the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan that same month, in a deeply provocative trip aimed at angering China, Truss openly talked about the need for the West to support the Taiwanese separatist movement.
To see the significant influence that anti-China hawks now have in the UK’s domestic politics, we need look no further than the Conservative Party leadership contest, where candidates competed to see who could be the most aggressive against Beijing.
Truss’ major opponent in the race was the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. As chancellor, Sunak had emphasised closer economic ties with China. But it seems he feared appearing “soft” before the Conservative Party membership, and so in July, he came out as an anti-China hawk, claiming Beijing was Britain’s “number one threat”.
Sunak was not alone. Penny Mordaunt, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to remain in the Conservative party leadership race this summer, criticized Boris Johnson for having a supposed soft touch on China. She argued Johnson had prioritized the economy over national security.
Tom Tugendhat, another failed Conservative leadership contender, who served as chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was Truss’ pick for minister of security, warned in an interview that China allegedly poses a great danger to the British people.
The UK’s Conservative leadership race came on the heels of a NATO summit in Madrid in June, where the Western military alliance declared China to be a “strategic competitor” that poses a “systemic challenge” to “our interests, security and values.”
Britain’s shift toward hard-line anti-China policies also coincides with the same move in the United States, where the Joe Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s campaign to counter China’s influence across the globe.
After decades of relatively stable co-operation and co-existence, Western leaders are now falling over themselves to attack China.
Yet these claims of Chinese aggression toward Europe have no real basis. In its thousands of years of history, China’s armies have never set foot on European soil, never mind marched victorious into a European capital.
The Chinese state has never colonized European cities. Looted European art does not sit in Chinese museums. Chinese people have never demanded exemption from European law, nor inserted themselves into European politics. Chinese businesses have never used the threat of Chinese naval fleets to open European markets on favourable conditions.
Certainly, China has become more assertive on the world stage in the era after the 2008 financial crash. As Beijing-based journalist Michael Schuman lays out in his book “Superpower Interrupted”, for many in China, the late 19th and 20th centuries were a period of aberration, a time when one of the world’s natural great powers was forced by colonialism, war, and internal crisis into a diminutive role.
Economic expansion since the 1980s, and the sense of perpetual crisis in the West, has allowed the Chinese leadership to reassert Beijing’s place as a potential superpower.
Yet the Western media always takes the least charitable view of any move made by Chinese leadership. Every time a Chinese fund invests in Africa, or a Chinese ship enters the South China Sea, or the Chinese government signs a security agreement with another country, Western media outlets will warn, Cassandra-like, of the impending doom of Chinese global domination.
China’s newfound assertiveness must be put in its proper geopolitical context.
For decades, the Western alliance has been at war continuously. In this same period, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on a single person.
China has just one foreign military base, in Djibouti, which is part of international anti-piracy operations. (Western governments allege that China is building another secret base in Cambodia. It is not clear if this is true, but even if it is, that means Beijing has a mere two foreign military bases.)
The United States, on the other hand, has some 800 foreign military bases in more than 70 countries.
Even the United Kingdom, a country with a total population smaller than the membership of the Communist Party of China, dwarves Beijing in foreign base totals.
China is not involved in regime-change operations. And unlike the United States, it does not seek to assassinate foreign leaders.
While several countries on China’s borders suffer under stifling economic sanctions, which bring death and misery to untold numbers, none of these sanctions were initiated by China.
Judged by any metric, China is by far the least aggressive of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and is the only member not currently involved in a war.
Given these historical and contemporary geopolitical realities, there is no basis for anyone in the US or Europe to consider China a national security threat.
The United Kingdom and Europe as a whole face manifold issues, from the effects of climate change, to the energy crisis, to entrenched inequality, to an ongoing public health crisis. None of these can rightly be blamed on China building bridges in Africa or developing security arrangements in the Pacific.
What truly motivates British political leaders to feel this way can be gleaned from passing comments made by figures like Tom Tugendhat, one of the candidates in the Conservative leadership contest.
Tugendhat was the long-time chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and the co-founder of the China Research Group (CRG), a self-appointed Beijing watchdog.
In response to a question by Quartz about why he saw the rise of China as such a threat, Tugendhat responded:
The UK, by accident of history, was fundamental to the writing of the operating system of the global system from 1700 through to 1990, and the UK economy, more than almost any other, was built on the basis of it…
We therefore have a choice, which is, do we defend the system upon which our prosperity is built?
In other words, the UK’s economic prosperity still rests on the system that came out of the colonial period, and China represents a credible challenge to that colonial legacy.
The “threat” felt in Western capitals, then, is not of Chinese gunboats on the Thames, but of something much less tangible. The return of China to superpower status is not a threat so much for what Beijing will or will not do, but of what this represents for Western hegemony.
As Tugendhat put it, since the 19th century, the West – and particularly the UK and the USA – have used their status as the pre-eminent imperial powers to write a rule book of their own design.
This is often euphemistically called the “rules-based international order”, but amounts to nothing more that the fruits of centuries of colonialism.
China, with its 1.4 billion population, huge economy, and strong state, is the first credible challenge to that Western colonial framework since the end of the first cold war.
Indeed, given China’s integration into the global economy, and the parallel rise of other nations in the Global South, this may be the greatest challenge to the colonial order since the Age of Victoria.
The fear among Western policy-makers is real, but the concern is not that Europe will be dominated by China; instead, it is a fear that China’s rise means the end of European domination.
After all, the long, bloody, and exploitative history of European involvement in Asia, Africa, and much of the Americas gives the people of the Global South little reason to remain loyal to their old colonial masters, even if they try to forcibly return the gunboats to port.


Instruction: Write an article about: West prepares to plunder post-war Ukraine with neoliberal shock therapy: privatization, deregulation, slashing worker protections. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: António Guterres, Denys Shmyhal, disaster capitalism, EU, European Union, NATO, neoliberalism, Ruslan Stefanchuk, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Ukraine Recovery Conference, Ukraine Reform Conference, Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelensky

Output:
Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland to plan harsh neoliberal economic policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”

While the United States and Europe flood Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars of weapons, using it as an anti-Russian proxy and pouring fuel on the fire of a brutal war that is devastating the country, they are also making plans to essentially plunder its post-war economy.
Representatives of Western governments and corporations met in Switzerland this July to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, “open markets,” drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and “sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.”

Ukraine has been destabilized by violence since 2014, when a US-sponsored coup d’etat overthrew its democratically elected government, setting off a civil war. That conflict dragged on until February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded the country, escalating into a new, even deadlier phase of the war.
The United States and European Union have sought to erase the history of foreign-sponsored civil war in Ukraine from 2014 to early 2022, acting as though the conflict began on February 24. But Washington had sent large sums of weapons to Ukraine and provided extensive military training and support over several years before Russia invaded.
Meanwhile, starting in 2017, representatives of Western governments and corporations quietly held annual conferences in which they discussed ways to profit from the civil war they were fueling in Ukraine.
In these meetings, Western political and business leaders outlined a series of aggressive right-wing reforms they hoped to impose on Ukraine, including widespread privatization of state-owned industries and deregulation of the economy.
On July 4 and 5, 2022, top officials from the US, EU, Britain, Japan, and South Korea met in Switzerland for a so-called “Ukraine Recovery Conference.” There, they planned Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction and performatively announced aid commitments – while salivating over a bonanza of potential contracts.
New NATO candidates Finland and Sweden committed to assure reconstruction in Lugansk, roughly 48 hours after Russia and separatist forces announced the region had fallen fully under their control.
But the Ukraine Recovery Conference was not new. It had been renamed to save the expense of a new acronym. In the previous five years, the group and its annual meetings were instead referred to as the “Ukraine Reform Conference” (URC).
The URC’s agenda was explicitly focused on imposing political changes on the country – namely, “strengthening the market economy“, “decentralization, privatization, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform,” and “Euro-Atlantic integration.”

Before 2022, this gathering had nothing to do with aid – and a lot to do with economics.
Documents from the 2018 Ukraine Reform Conference emphasized the importance of privatizing most of Ukraine’s remaining public sector, stating that the “ultimate goal of the reform is to sell state-owned enterprises to private investors”, along with calls for more “privatization, deregulation, energy reform, tax and customs reform.”
Lamenting that the “government is Ukraine’s largest asset holder,” the report stated, “Reform in privatization and SOEs has been long awaited, as this sector of the Ukrainian economy has remained largely unchanged since 1991.”

The Ukraine Reform Conference listed as one of its “achievements” the adoption of a law in January 2018 titled “On Privatization of State and Municipal Property,” which it noted “simplifies the procedure of privatization.”
While the URC enthusiastically pushed for these neoliberal reforms, it acknowledged that they were very unpopular among actual Ukrainians. A poll found that just 12.4% supported privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOE), whereas 49.9% opposed it. (An additional 12% were indifferent, whereas 25.7% had no answer.)

Economic liberalization in Ukraine since Russia’s February invasion has been even more grim.
In March 2022, the Ukrainian parliament adopted emergency legislation allowing employers to suspend collective agreements. Then in May, it passed a permanent reform package effectively exempting the vast majority of Ukrainian workers (those at businesses with fewer than 200 employees) from Ukrainian labor law.
While the most immediate beneficiaries of these changes will be Ukrainian employers, Western governments have been lobbying to liberalize Ukraine’s labor laws for years.
Documents leaked in 2021 showed that the British government coached Ukrainian officials on how to convince a recalcitrant public to give up workers’ rights and implement anti-union policies. Training materials lamented that popular opinion towards the proposed reforms was overwhelmingly negative, but provided messaging strategies to mislead Ukrainians into supporting them.
Ukraine Recovery Conference participants in Lugano, Switzerland on July 4, 2022
The July 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference, which was held by Lugano, Switzerland and jointly hosted by the Swiss and Ukrainian governments, featured representatives from the following states and institutions:
European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen speaks at the Ukraine Recovery Conference on July 4, 2022
Among the prominent officials who attended were European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, and UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss.
Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky also addressed the conference via video.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the Ukraine Recovery Conference via video on July 4, 2022
Physically present at the Switzerland meeting were Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and Zelensky’s top political ally Ruslan Stefanchuk, the chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Stefanchuk is the second-in-line for the presidency after Zelensky. He is also a member of Ukraine’s all-powerful National Security and Defense Council, which truly governs the country.
(From left to right) Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, and Verkhovna Rada chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2022
Even the United Nations gave its imprimatur to the conference: UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a video statement as well.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses the Ukraine Recovery Conference on July 5, 2022
At the two-day meeting, the attendees agreed that Ukraine should eventually be given membership in the European Union. The country had already been granted EU candidate status just two weeks before, at a June summit in Brussels.
At the conclusion of the meeting, all governments and institutions present endorsed a joint statement called the Lugano Declaration. This declaration was supplemented by a “National Recovery Plan,” which was in turn prepared by a “National Recovery Council” established by the Ukrainian government.
This plan advocated for an array of neoliberal reforms, including “privatization of non critical enterprises” and “finalization of corporatization of SOEs” (state-owned enterprises) – identifying as an example the selling off of Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear energy company EnergoAtom.
In order to “attract private capital into banking system,” the proposal likewise called for the “privatization of SOBs” (state-owned banks).
Seeking to increase “private investment and boost nationwide entrepreneurship,” the National Recovery Plan urged significant “deregulation” and proposed the creation of “‘catalyst projects’ to unlock private investment into priority sectors.”
In an explicit call for slashing labor protections, the document attacked the remaining pro-worker laws in Ukraine, some of which are a holdover of the Soviet era.
The National Recovery Plan complained of “outdated labor legislation leading to complicated hiring and firing process, regulation of overtime, etc.” As an example of this supposed “outdated labor legislation,” the Western-backed plan lamented that workers in Ukraine with one year of experience are granted a nine-week “notice period for redundancy dismissal,” compared to just four weeks in Poland and South Korea.
Neoliberal economic reforms proposed in Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan
In the same vein, the National Recovery Plan urged Ukraine to cut taxes on corporations and wealthy capitalists.
The blueprint complained that 40% of Ukraine’s GDP comes from tax revenue, calling this a “rather high tax burden” compared to its model example of South Korea. It thus called to “transform tax service,” and “review potential for decreasing the share of tax revenue in GDP.”
In short, the Ukraine Recovery Conference’s economic proposal was little more than a repackaged Washington Consensus: a typical right-wing program that involves implementing mass privatizations, deregulating industries, gutting labor protections, cutting taxes on the rich, and putting the burden on Ukrainian workers.
In the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States imposed what it called capitalist “shock therapy” on Russia and other former constituent republics.
A 2001 UNICEF study found that these harsh neoliberal reforms in Russia caused 3.2 million excess deaths, and pushed 18 million children into poverty, bringing about rampant malnutrition and public health crises.
Washington and Brussels appear committed to return to this very same neoliberal shock therapy in their plans for post-war Ukraine.
To accompany its July 2022 meeting in Switzerland, the Ukraine Recovery Conference published a “strategic briefing” compiled by a right-wing Ukrainian organization called the Center of Economic Recovery.
The Center of Economic Recovery describes itself as a “platform that unites experts, think tanks, business, the public and government officials for the development of the country’s economy.” On its website, it lists many Ukrainian corporations as its partners and funders, making it clear that it acts as lobby on their behalf, like a chamber of commerce.
The report that this corporate lobby wrote for the Ukraine Recovery Conference was even more explicit than the National Recovery Plan in its advocacy of aggressive neoliberal economic reforms.
Using right-wing libertarian language of “economic freedom,” the document urged to “reduce government size” and “open markets.”
Its proposal read as neoliberal boilerplate: “decrease the regulatory burden on businesses” by “reducing the size of the government (tax administration, privatization; digitalization of public services), improving regulatory efficiency (deregulation), and opening markets (liberalization of capital markets; investment freedom).”
In the name of “EU integration and access to markets,” it likewise proposed “removal of tariffs and non-tariff non-technical barriers for all Ukrainian goods,” while simultaneously calling to “facilitate FDI [foreign direct investment] attraction to bring the largest international companies to Ukraine,” with “special investment incentives” for foreign corporations.
It was essentially a call for Ukraine to surrender its economic sovereignty to Western capital.

Both the National Recovery Plan and the strategic briefing also heavily emphasized the need for robust anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
Neither document acknowledged that fact that Kiev’s Western-backed leader Volodmyr Zelensky, who spoke at the Ukraine Recovery Conference, is known to have large amounts of wealth hidden in a network of offshare accounts.
Zelensky was named in the Pandora Papers, a leak of suspicious offshore companies, and he is linked to luxury properties in London.
In addition to the National Recovery Plan and the strategic briefing, the July 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference presented a report prepared by the company Economist Impact, a corporate consulting firm that is part of The Economist Group.
This third document, titled “Ukraine Reform Tracker,” was funded by the Swiss government with the stated “aim of stimulating and supporting discussion on this matter at the 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference.”
The Ukraine Reform Tracker analyzed the neoliberal policies already imposed in Ukraine since the US-backed 2014 coup, and urged for even more aggressive neoliberal reforms to be implemented when the war ends.
Of the three reports presented at the conference, this was perhaps the most full-throated call for Ukraine to adopt neoliberal shock therapy after the war – a tactic often referred to as disaster capitalism.
Quoting the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the document insisted that Ukraine has “issues in deregulation and competition that still need to be addressed, such as ongoing state intervention” – depicting state intervention in the economy as something inherently bad.
In this vein, the Ukraine Reform Tracker pushed to “increase foreign direct investments” by international corporations, not invest resources in social programs for the Ukrainian people.
The report emphasized the importance of developing the financial sector and called for “removing excessive regulations” and tariffs.
“Deregulation and tax simplification has been further deepened,” it wrote approvingly, adding, “Steps towards deregulation and the simplification of the tax system are examples of measures which not only withstood the blow of the war but have been accelerated by it.”

The Ukraine Reform Tracker praised the central bank for “successfully liberalising the currency, floating the exchange rate.” While it noted some of these policies were reversed due to the Russian invasion, the report urged “the swiftest possible elimination of currency controls,” in order to “reinstate competitiveness within the financial sector.”
The report however complained that these neoliberal reforms are not being implemented quickly enough, writing, “Privatisation— which already progressed slowly before the war—stalled, with a draft law aiming to simplify the process rejected” by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
It called for further “liberalising agriculture” to “attract foreign investment and encourage domestic entrepreneurship,” as well as “procedural simplifications,” to “make it easier for small and medium enterprises” to “expand by purchasing and investing in state-owned assets,” thereby “making it easier for foreign investors to enter the market post-conflict.”
“Further pursuing the privatisation of large and loss-making state-owned enterprises” will “allow more Ukrainian entrepreneurs to enter the market and thrive there in the post-war context,” the report urged.
The Economist Impact study stressed the importance of Ukraine cutting its trade with Russia and instead integrating its economy with Europe.
“Ukraine’s trade reforms centre on efforts to diversify its trade operations and enhance its integration into the EU market,” it wrote.
The Western government-sponsored report boasted of significantly reducing Kiev’s economic ties to its eastern neighbor, noting: “Russia was Ukraine’s main trading partner in 2014, capturing 18.2% of its exports and providing 22% of its imports. Since then, however, Russia’s share of Ukraine’s exports and imports has decreased consistently, reaching 4.9% and 8.4% in 2021, respectively.”
“Ukraine made particular progress in diversifying its trade portfolio within the EU, raising its trade volumes with member states by 46.2% from 2015 to 2019,” it added.
The report added that it is “essential” that Ukraine carry out other reforms, such as modifying its railways by “aligning the rail gauges with EU standards.”
The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland on July 5, 2022
The Ukraine Reform Tracker presented the war as an opportunity to impose even more disaster capitalist policies.
“The post-war moment may present an opportunity to complete the difficult land reform by extending the right to purchase agricultural land to legal entities, including foreign ones,” the report stated.
“Opening the path for international capital to flow into Ukrainian agriculture will likely boost productivity across the sector, increasing its competitiveness in the EU market,” it added.
The document proposed new ways for exploiting Ukrainian labor in specific industries, “especially pharmaceutical and electrical production, plastic and rubber manufacturing, furniture, textiles, and food and agricultural products.”
“Once the war is over, the government will also need to consider substantially lowering the share of stateowned banks, with the privatisation of Privatbank, the country’s largest lender, and Oshchadbank, a large processor of pensions and social payments,” it insisted.
The Ukraine Reform Tracker concluded optimistically, stating that that “post-war moment will be an opportunity for Ukraine,” and “there is likely to be significant pressure to continue and speed up the implementation of the reform agenda. Continued business reforms could allow Ukraine to further deregulate [and] privatise lossmaking SOEs.”
While these three documents published by the 2022 Ukraine Reform Conference (URC) were vociferous calls for the imposition of right-wing economic policies, they were accompanied by superficial appeals to social justice rhetoric.
The URC released a set of seven “Lugano Principles” that it identified as the keys to a just, equitable post-war reconstruction:

These principles demonstrate the ways that hawks in Washington and Brussels have increasingly weaponized ideas about “intersectionality” to advance their belligerent foreign policy.
In his report “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism,” former US State Department officer Christopher Mott discussed the growing use of left-liberal social-justice talking points to legitimize and enforce Western imperialism.
Mott observed that the “liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash.”
Western-backed liberals in post-socialist Europe have spent three decades creating a false dichotomy between either a liberalizing cultural project that can only be realized under US-led trans-Atlantic hegemony and neoliberal economic reforms, or a purely fictional socialist past whose political legacy is somehow reflected in right-wing anti-communist nationalist parties attempting to roll back advances that women had achieved under socialism.
Despite its patent absurdity, this narrative has won adherents among younger liberal intellectuals, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, who have little or no memory of the socialist period, and who face increasingly desperate career prospects outside of the Western-backed ideological apparatus.
On the other hand, right-wing nationalists like Hungary’s Viktor Orban posture as the only defenders of their countries’ cultural sovereignty against hostile outsiders, while also refusing to break from neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
In turn, organic local activists struggling for legitimate social justice causes find themselves portrayed as agents furthering the agendas of foreign powers.
At best, during peacetime, this undermines their work and hinders progress for their causes. In a country like Ukraine, where Western governments have supported far-right, neo-fascist groups and eight years dragging out a civil war, this is life-threatening.
On May 9, 2022, the US Congress passed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, greatly expanding Washington’s authority to provide military aid to Ukraine.
Lend-lease provisions originated during World War II and were used by the US government to provide military aid to countries fighting Nazi Germany, including Britain and the Soviet Union, without formally entering the war.
Under this framework, the US provides military equipment as a loan; if the equipment is not or cannot be returned, recipient governments are on the hook to pay back the full cost.
The Joe Biden administration explained its use of lend-lease by the need to quickly move the bill through Congress before other funding ran out.
While many North Americans protested what they saw as a pointless giveaway of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign country, lend-lease provisions are loans, not grants.
Britain, one of the United States’ closest allies, only finished paying back its 60-year-old lend-lease debt in 2006. Russia settled its former Soviet obligations the same year.
Given this historical precedent, Ukraine will likely be saddled with debts it can’t readily pay back – debts extended to corrupt Western-backed elites under wartime duress. This means US financial institutions will have further collateral to impose neoliberal structural adjustment policies on Ukraine, subordinating its economy for years to come.
Washington and its allies have a long history of instrumentalizing debt to force countries to accept unpopular pro-Western policy changes, and difficulties of repayment often compel countries to accept even more debt, leading to debt trap cycles that are extremely difficult to escape.
It was in fact the International Monetary Fund, and specifically the refusal of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending, and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU, which led him to turn instead to Russia for an alternative economic agreement, thus setting the stage for the Western-backed “Euromaidan protests” and eventually the 2014 coup.
International Monetary Fund played a crucial role in precipitating #UkraineWar https://t.co/AXXCULv0Gn
— The Leaflet (@TheLeaflet_in) March 5, 2022

Meanwhile, in the current war, Moscow and Russian-backed separatist fighters are occupying and may annex what were historically the most industrialized regions of Ukraine, located in the east.
At the same time, much of what remained of the country’s pre-war industrial base has been physically destroyed by the war. And these same regions hold much of Ukraine’s energy resources, notably coal.
Millions of Ukrainians have already emigrated and are unlikely to return, especially if they are able to access work visas in the EU. Young and educated people with technical skills are the least likely to stay.
The situation is even bleaker when one considers that, well before Russia’s February invasion, Ukraine was already the poorest country in Europe.
While Soviet Ukraine had thrived as a centre of the USSR’s heavy industry, and a source for much of Soviet political leadership, post-Soviet Ukraine has been a playground for rival elites supported by the West or by Russia.
Post-Soviet Ukraine has been devastated by persistent economic crises and rampant and systematic corruption. It has consistently had smaller incomes and a lower standard of living even compared to neighboring post-socialist countries, including Russia.
Ukraine has not been able to restore the size of the economy it had in 1990, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. And looking beyond raw GDP data, the quality of life for many Ukrainian workers and their access to social services has significantly declined.

With limited financial means to provide for basic state functions, much less to repay foreign debts, a post-war Ukraine could be forced to accept humiliating and dangerous concessions in other spheres – serving, say, as an Israel-style trying ground for weapons testing, or hosting Kosovo-style black sites for US covert operations, or providing Western businesses a Chile-style no-regulation environment for tax evasion and criminal activities – all while gutting what little remains of its domestic welfare state and labor protections.
Yet instead of advocating for a diplomatic solution to the war, which could help the Ukrainian government and people concentrate their resources on economic recovery, Western governments have adamantly opposed proposed peace talks, insisting, in the words of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, “This war will be won on the battlefield.”
Washington and Brussels are sacrificing Ukraine for their geopolitical interests. And their Ukraine Recovery Conference shows they expect to keep benefiting economically even after the war ends.
Touched by the resilience, determination and hospitality of @ZelenskyyUA & @Denys_Shmyhal.
I return with a clear to do list:
1. This war will be won on the battlefield. Additional €500 million from the #EPF are underway. Weapon deliveries will be tailored to Ukrainian needs. pic.twitter.com/Jgr61t9FfW
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) April 9, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: USA & NATO responsible for Ukraine war, German & French public say in poll. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alexei Navalny, Annalena Baerbock, Anti-Corruption Foundation, France, Germany, Leonid Volkov, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Output:
Most people in Germany and France blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine, according to a poll conducted not by a pro-Russian group but rather by anti-Putin activists.

Most people in Germany and France blame the United States or NATO for the war in Ukraine, according to a poll conducted not by a pro-Russian group but rather by anti-Putin activists.
This public opinion is unlikely to have a significant impact on government policy, however.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated bluntly in a NATO-funded conference in 2022 that Berlin would support Ukraine “no matter what my German voters think”.

An anti-Putin advocacy group that calls itself the “Anti-Corruption Foundation” conducted a poll in Europe to assess popular opinion of the war in Ukraine.
To their surprise, they found that a majority of people in Germany, the most populous country with the largest economy in the European Union, did not blame Russia for the war.
60% of Germans blamed either the USA, NATO, or Ukraine for starting the war. Just 27% of Germans blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the German poll, respondents were only allowed to pick one answer. In France, the poll was a bit different, and people could blame multiple parties for starting the war in Ukraine. (This explains why the sum of the latter poll is greater than 100%.)
Among the French surveyed, 43% blamed the USA, 36% NATO, 19% Ukraine, and 19% other European countries, while 40% blamed Putin.

These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

The outcome of these polls is even more striking when one considers who sponsored them.
The so-called “Anti-Corruption Foundation” was founded by Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, a regime-change activist who is openly supported by Western governments.
Navalny started his political career as a far-right nationalist, participating in racist rallies alongside skinheads and fascists.
In 2007, Navalny made a fascistic campaign ad in which he compared Muslim immigrants in Russia to cockroaches, portrayed them as monsters, and even shot one with a gun.
In his early years as a political gadfly, Navalny appealed to far-right racists with insinuations that he would kick out immigrants from the Caucasus.
But like the neo-Nazi and extreme-right forces in Ukraine, Navalny later rebranded as a freedom-loving “anti-corruption” activist, and courted staunch Western backing.
Despite its name, Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation” (ACF) doesn’t focus much on corruption. Rather, it is an explicitly anti-Putin opposition group, closely linked to Western governments, and flush with funding.
At the top of its website (as of August 2023), the ACF says, “Together against Putin”. It has a big photo of Navalny, stating, “The man Putin fears”. A button below reads, “Defeat Putin”.
This group is not in any way subtle; it is a Western-backed regime-change organization, dedicated to overthrowing the Russian government.
Navalny’s chief of staff is an anti-Putin activist named Leonid Volkov. In his own political career, Volkov has long been involved in promoting neoliberal economics and pro-EU policies.
Volkov was the longtime chairman of Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation”, although he was ironically exposed for being involved in corruption, lying about lobbying the EU to lift sanctions on London-based Russian oligarchs.
On 16 August, Volkov tweeted the results of the poll, showing that a majority of people in Germany and France blame the US and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine.
But that's not all the bad news I have for you today.Watch these slides and you will see how successful Putin is in spreading his lies and conspiracy theories in Western Europe.Who started the war? The answer of the majority is the Americans, NATO, Ukraine itself…10/14 pic.twitter.com/xKohtP1Gkb
— Leonid Volkov (@leonidvolkov) August 15, 2023

Volkov claimed the results are evidence of “how successful Putin is in spreading his lies and conspiracy theories in Western Europe”.
He failed to mention the US-sponsored 2014 coup in Ukraine, Washington’s color revolution in Kiev in 2004, NATO’s constant expansion and encirclement of Russia, the intentional sabotage of the Minsk Accords by Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky, or the West’s refusal to grant Russian security guarantees in late 2021.


Instruction: Write an article about: German leftist lawmaker says US soldiers and nukes must leave her country. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Annalena Baerbock, Germany, Marshall Plan, NATO, Sevim Dagdelen, Soviet Union, USSR, World War II

Output:
On the floor of Germany’s parliament, Left Party MP Sevim Dağdelen called for the c. 38,000 US soldiers in her country to leave, and to take their nuclear weapons with them. She lamented that Washington “doesn’t actually want allies, just loyal vassals”.

A member of parliament from Germany’s Left Party has called for the thousands of US soldiers and nuclear weapons in her country to leave.
“After 78 years, it is now time for US soldiers to go home. All other allies left Germany a long time ago”, said Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen on the floor of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag.
“The US nuclear weapons must go”, she added, in a March 31 parliamentary event on the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
As of 2022, the United States had 38,500 troops in Germany, in dozens of bases and other military installations.

Dağdelen urged for “breaking with the existing relationship of extreme subservience by Germany on matters of US foreign policy, one that is marked by war, breaches of international law, and support of coups”.
“The US administration gives the impression that they don’t actually want allies, just loyal vassals”, she said. “Yet fewer and fewer countries around the world are prepared to accept this. And that is good news”.
“The US military bases behave like extraterritorial areas in which the [German] constitution does not apply”, Dağdelen said.
“On German soil, assistance is provided in US wars, lethal drone strikes, and torture flights, in breach of international law”.
“And the US hosts conferences at Ramstein Air Base in Germany as if the Occupation Statue was still in force”.
Deutsch-Amerik. Freundschaft heute heißt, dass US-Soldaten aus #Deutschland abziehen & die #Atomwaffen mitnehmen.Meine Rede zu 75 Jahre #MarshallPlan
German- #USA Friendship today means withdrawing US soldiers & nuclear weapons from Germany. My speech today in the #Bundestag ? pic.twitter.com/FC7iFmdlVH
— Sevim Dağdelen, MdB (@SevimDagdelen) March 31, 2023

Dağdelen noted that “there once was a time when the Bundestag had more courage”, recalling that, in 2010, the German parliament voted overwhelmingly to withdraw US nuclear weapons. But she lamented that that resolution was not implemented.
“Now, Germany’s federal government allows itself to be pushed directly into the line of fire by the USA, with supplies of Leopard battle tanks”, she continued, referencing the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
“Now the federal government is refusing to support an international investigative commission into the terror attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines”, Dağdelen added. “I say, terror attacks among friends simply cannot be tolerated”.
She called for Berlin to defend its “democratic sovereignty”, asking, “Why is the federal government refusing, even after 20 years, to condemn the US war of aggression in Iraq as a violation of international law?”
She also addressed Germany’s foreign minister: “Why are you, Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock, not lobbying for the release of Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in prison in the USA for making US war crimes public? Why did you not offer asylum to the dissident Edward Snowden?”
Dağdelen did thank the United States for its support in the battle against the Nazi regime, but she noted that “the main burden in the fight against German fascism was shouldered by the Soviet Union”, which lost more than 26 million people in World War II, compared to 400,000 North Americans.
In an interview with Geopolitical Economy Report in February, Dağdelen condemned the conflict in Ukraine as a NATO proxy war against Russia, lamenting that EU member states have been acting as US “vassals” and sacrificing their own economic interests on behalf of US corporations.
I interviewed German Member of Parliament @SevimDagdelen, of the Left Party, Die Linke.
She called to end NATO's "proxy war" in Ukraine, saying the EU are acting as US "vassal states".
She denounced the US "terrorist attack" on Nord Stream.
Full video: https://t.co/enAXNQbYrm pic.twitter.com/w8BlkroHV8
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 22, 2023


Instruction: Write an article about: Illegal US sanctions blocking aid to Syria, after earthquake killed thousands. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alena Douhan, China, earthquake, HTS, sanctions, SDF, Syria, Turkey, Türkiye, Venezuela, YPG

Output:
Illegal US and EU sanctions have blocked some humanitarian aid from going to Syria after a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people. UN experts have demanded an end to the “suffocating” sanctions, saying they “may amount to crimes against humanity”.

Illegal US and EU sanctions have prevented some humanitarian aid from being sent to Syria, after a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people.
The death toll is increasing by the day, but at least 3000 Syrians had lost their lives due to the earthquake as of February 9.
Thousands of buildings were also destroyed. This is especially damaging because Syria had already been destabilized by a decade of war, fueled with billions of dollars and foreign meddling by the US, Europe, and Israel.
Syrian Arab Red Crescent director Khaled Hboubati told the Associated Press that unilateral Western sanctions have exacerbated the “difficult humanitarian situation”.
“There is no fuel even to send (aid and rescue) convoys, and this is because of the blockade and sanctions”, Hboubati warned.
Syria’s United Nations Ambassador Bassam al-Sabbagh explained that US and EU sanctions have prevented planes from landing in Syrian airports, “So even those countries who want to send humanitarian assistance, they cannot use the airplane cargo because of the sanctions”.
The country’s Foreign Minister Fayssal Mikdad stated, “The sanctions imposed by the United States and Western countries on Syria exacerbated the disaster”.
Syrian state media Sana reported, “Mikdad also stressed that the Americans claim that they did not impose sanctions on humanitarian aid, but in reality their sanctions do not allow anything from reaching Syria, including preventing the purchase of medicines, as well as Washington and its western allies give orders to some countries and threaten them to impose sanctions on them if they negotiate with Syria or if any bank deals with Syria”.
In an interview with the Lebanon-based news network Al Mayadeen, the Syrian foreign minister emphasized that unilateral sanctions are illegal according to international law and violate the UN charter and numerous Security Council resolutions.
In November 2022, the top UN expert on sanctions published a report detailing how “outrageous” Western sanctions are “suffocating” millions of Syrian civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity.”
The UN special rapporteur said “outrageous” Western sanctions on Syria are “suffocating” millions of civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity.”
Proxy war caused the country’s economy to shrink by 90%. Nine in 10 Syrians now live in povertyhttps://t.co/FmY7vMooqX
— Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) November 28, 2022

When the US, Britain, and European Union launched a proxy war against Syria in 2011, they began imposing illegal unilateral sanctions. Those grew into a de facto blockade in 2019, with the passage of the so-called Caesar Act.
Because of these sanctions and war, “The whole [Syrian] population stays in life-threatening conditions with severe shortages of drinking water”, electricity, fuel, and food, reported Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights.
Syria’s economy shrunk by 90% due to the foreign-fueled proxy war. Today, nine in 10 Syrians live in poverty.
The “huge negative effect of unilateral sanctions” have “a devastating effect on the whole population” and “a devastating effect on nearly all categories of human rights”, Douhan reiterated.
The UN expert stated, “Maintaining unilateral sanctions amid the current catastrophic and still-deteriorating situation in Syria may amount to crimes against humanity against all Syrian people”.
Syria’s northwestern Idlib province is controlled by an extremist Salafi-jihadist militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is a rebranded al-Qaeda affiliate. It has received extensive support from NATO member Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey).
The northeastern part of Syria is occupied by the US military, in alliance with Kurdish-led forces from the SDF and YPG militias. This territory, which is effectively controlled by Washington, makes up a significant part of Syria’s oil fields and wheat production.
China condemned the US sanctions against Syria, and called for them to be lifted. While sending humanitarian aid, Beijing also denounced the US military occupation of the country and its theft of Syrian resources.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated:
The US has long been engaged in the Syrian crisis. Its frequent military strikes and harsh economic sanctions have caused huge civilian casualties and taken away the means to subsistence of the Syrians.
As we speak, the US troops continue to occupy Syria’s principal oil-producing regions. They have plundered more than 80% of Syria’s oil production and smuggled and burned Syria’s grain stock.
All this has made Syria’s humanitarian crisis even worse.
In the wake of the catastrophe, the US should put aside geopolitical obsessions and immediately lift the unilateral sanctions on Syria, to unlock the doors for humanitarian aid to Syria.
“US troops continue to occupy Syria’s principal oil-producing regions. They have plundered more than 80% of Syria’s oil production and smuggled and burned their grain stock. All this has made Syria’s humanitarian crisis even worse,” Mao Ning said following the massive quake. pic.twitter.com/1j3dz8MlTA
— Andy Boreham 安柏然 (@AndyBxxx) February 8, 2023

Syria’s neighbor Türkiye was also hit hard by the earthquake. At least 16,000 people have died in the country.
China responded by sending an 82-member rescue team and more than 20 tons of humanitarian supplies.
While Venezuela is under illegal Western sanctions and a US blockade, it has shown solidarity with the people of Syria.
In response to the earthquake, the Venezuelan government sent to Damascus a plane full of 15 tons of food, medicine, and other aid, along with a search and rescue team.
Venezuela’s ambassador to Syria, José Gregorio Biomorgi Muzattiz, stated, “Solidarity will never be blockaded”.
Syrian state media confirmed that a plane from Venezuela's state-owned airline Conviasa landed in Damascus, bringing 15 tons of humanitarian aid:
Venezuela "breaks the [US/EU] blockade and arrives in Syria to help the people affected by the earthquake"https://t.co/gVIWYfIckc
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 9, 2023


Instruction: Write an article about: Despite Biden’s claims, Gaza health ministry death toll is accurate, scientific studies show. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, The Lancet

Output:
US President Biden criticized Gaza’s health ministry, but its statistics on Israel’s killings of Palestinians are accurate, according to peer-reviewed articles in top medical journal The Lancet.

The death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza reported by the Palestinian health ministry is accurate, according to two peer-reviewed studies by scientific experts published in top medical journal The Lancet.
As of December 18, Israel had killed 19,453 Palestinians in Gaza, the ministry reported. Two-thirds of the deaths were children (7,729) and women (5,153).
United Nations bodies, human rights organizations, and major media outlets have often used these statistics, because they have a history of being accurate.

“International organizations including the United Nations usually rely on these same figures as they are seen as the best available”, the Washington Post acknowledged.
“Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements”, the prominent US newspaper wrote.
Israel has claimed, without any evidence, that Gaza’s health ministry is untrustworthy, because it is supposedly run by the political party Hamas. (In reality, the Gaza health ministry is partially funded by and linked to Hamas’ political rival, the Palestinian Authority, based in the Occupied West Bank.)
The US government has echoed Israel’s disinformation. President Joe Biden said in an October 25 press conference, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed… I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”.
Despite Biden’s criticism, HuffPost revealed that the US State Department uses the Palestinian health ministry figures in its own reports on Gaza.
In one of such memos, a US official acknowledged that, if anything, “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation”.
This was exactly the conclusion reached by scientific experts at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The peer-reviewed article “No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health”, published in leading medical journal The Lancet on December 6, noted that the Palestinian institution “has historically reported accurate mortality data”.
In past conflicts, discrepancies between Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) data and independent United Nations figures were only between 1.5% and 3.8%.
Gaza MoH data were also quite similar to figures from Israel’s own Foreign Ministry, with a difference of just around 8%.
Scholars Benjamin Q Huynh, Elizabeth T Chin, and Paul B Spiegel wrote that they “found no evidence of inflated rates”.
Scientific experts from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine came to a similar conclusion in their own peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, published on November 26.
For this previous study, scholars Zeina Jamaluddine, Francesco Checchi, and Oona M R Campbell reviewed death statistics from October 7 to 26, analyzing the list of 7028 deaths compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Out of the 7028 names, only one had a duplicated ID number, one had an implausible age, and just 281 lacked an ID number.
The experts concluded that the data were reasonable, writing, “We consider it implausible that these patterns would arise from data fabrication”.
They also reviewed MoH figures from previous wars in Gaza, and found them to be reliable.
“Assessments of Palestinian MoH data validity in the 2014 conflict had shown them to be accurate, and we saw no obvious reason to doubt the validity of the data between Oct 7 and Oct 26, 2023”, the scholars stated.
If anything, they concluded that the Gaza MoH figures may be rather conservative.
“The death reporting system currently being used by the Palestinian MoH was assessed in 2021, 2 years before the current war, and was found to under-report mortality by 13%”, they wrote, adding that “it is plausible that the current Palestinian MoH source also under-reports mortality because of the direct effect of the war on data capture and reporting, for example by omitting people whose bodies could not be recovered or brought to morgues”.


Instruction: Write an article about: US blocks peace in Gaza, supporting Israel’s genocidal war on civilians. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Nakba, Palestine, UN, UN Security Council, United Nations

Output:
The United States vetoed Gaza ceasefire proposals at the UN Security Council, while sending Israel more weapons. UN experts warn Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing. An Israeli scholar of the Holocaust says Israel is guilty of “genocide” against Palestinians.

While Israel indiscriminately bombs the Gaza strip, killing thousands of Palestinian civilians, the United States has blocked numerous ceasefire proposals at the United Nations Security Council.
Instead of supporting peace, Washington has sent more weapons and military aid to Israel.
Meanwhile, mainstream Western human rights organizations have clearly stated that Israel is carrying out rampant war crimes, wiping out entire families.
A top UN expert warned “that Palestinians are in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing”.
An Israeli scholar who is a specialist in genocide and the history of the Nazi holocaust even published an article warning that Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide”.

Gaza is a small strip of land that is just 40 kilometers (25 miles) long. But with roughly 2.3 million people, it is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
Since 2007, Palestinians in Gaza have lived under a suffocating Israeli blockade. In 2011, UN experts emphasized that this blockade flagrantly violates international law. But Israel continued to impose it, controlling everything that goes in and out of Gaza.
Human Rights Watch stated in 2022 that Israel’s 15-year blockade had “devastated the economy in Gaza, contributed to fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and forms part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians”.
Israel had “turned Gaza into an open-air prison”, Human Rights Watch wrote.
Even the United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged the same back in 2010, insisting, “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp”.

In response to an attack by Palestinian militants on 7 October, 2023, Israel tightened the blockade even further. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”.
The top Israeli official described Palestinians as “human animals”.
The UN human rights chief, Volker Turk, publicly stated that this Israeli siege was illegal, and violated restrictions under international law against collective punishment of civilians.
Ignoring the United Nations, Israel launched a devastating war, relentlessly carpet bombing civilian areas in Gaza.
In 13 days of nonstop attacks, Israel had killed 4,137 Palestinians, according to data published on 20 October by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The vast majority, 70 percent, of the Palestinians killed by Israel were children and women.
Another 1,000 people were missing, many trapped under the rubble of their houses.
Israel destroyed or damaged at least 30% of all housing units in Gaza, OCHA reported.
A staggering 1.4 million of the roughly 2.3 million people in Gaza were internally displaced.
A week into the Israeli bombing, on 14 October, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published an alarming statement: “A UN human rights expert warned today that Palestinians are in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing and called on the international community to urgently mediate a ceasefire”.
“Palestinians have no safe zone anywhere in Gaza, with Israel having imposed a ‘complete siege’ on the tiny enclave, with water, food, fuel and electricity unlawfully cut off”, the OHCR stressed.
The UN human rights office quoted the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, writing:
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” the UN expert said. She noted that Israeli public officials have openly advocated for another Nakba, the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands during the hostilities that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Naksa, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, displaced 350,000 Palestinians.
“Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war,” the expert said. “Again, in the name of self-defence, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.
“Any continued military operations by Israel have gone well beyond the limits of international law. The international community must stop these egregious violations of international law now, before tragic history is repeated.”
Many countries have joined UN officials in calling for a ceasefire to end the violence in Gaza. But the United States has blocked all attempts at bringing about peace.
On 16 October, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted on a resolution that called for a humanitarian ceasefire. The measure was proposed by Russia.
The ceasefire resolution was opposed by four former colonial powers on the council: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.
Five Security Council members supported it: China, Russia, Gabon, Mozambique, and the United Arab Emirates.
The remaining six countries on the 15-member UNSC abstained: Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Malta, and Switzerland.
The UN News agency noted that Russia’s representative, Vassily Nebenzia, blamed the “selfish intention of the Western bloc” for sabotaging the ceasefire proposal, stating that the US and its allies had “basically stomped” on the attempt to bring about peace.
The Western powers killed a UN Security Council resolution that proposed a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza
The resolution was proposed by Russia
5 countries voted for the ceasefire:???????? China???????? Gabon???????? Mozambique???????? Russia???????? UAE
4 voted against:???????? France???????? Japan???????? UK???????? US… pic.twitter.com/6UMfoRRqQH
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 17, 2023

Two days later, the UN Security Council held another vote on a Gaza-related resolution. This measure, which was proposed by Brazil, called for “humanitarian pauses”, in order to send aid to besieged civilians.
The United States was the only country on the 15-member council that voted against this resolution. Washington thus killed the proposal, because it is one of the five permanent members, which have veto power.
12 UNSC members voted for the humanitarian pauses: Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland, and the UAE.
The United Kingdom abstained in the vote, along with Russia. But while London abstained as a show of support for Israel, Moscow abstained in protest of how weak the measure was.
UN News reported, “Prior to the vote, two amendments proposed by Russia, calling for an immediate, durable and full ceasefire, and to stop attacks against civilians were rejected by the Security Council”.
The UN News agency added that Russia’s ambassador, Nebenzia, “proposed a call to end indiscriminate attacks on civilians and infrastructure in Gaza and the condemnation of the imposition of the blockade on the enclave; and adding a new point for a call for a humanitarian ceasefire”.
US vetoes Security Council resolution that would have called for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza
Favor: 12 (Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland,UAE)Against: 1 (US)Abstain: 2 Russia, UK pic.twitter.com/y4tiAbRMUQ
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) October 18, 2023

An anonymous senior diplomat from an unnamed G7 member state acknowledged to the Financial Times that the nations of the Global South, which represent the vast majority of the world population, have been enraged by the West’s support for Israel as it massacres Palestinian civilians.
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South”, the diplomat lamented. ”Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again”.
"We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South", a Western diplomat admitted. "Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again".
True — although the Global South never supported the G7 colonial powers.
What is different now is Global… pic.twitter.com/Nz3a3VlCZ7
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 19, 2023

On 18 October, the day that the United States unilaterally killed the UNSC proposal for a humanitarian pause in Gaza, President Joe Biden arrived in Israel.
There, Biden met with the country’s far-right prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The US president reassured him unflinching support for Israel.
The Biden administration also released a $105 billion national security package, which included $14.3 billion in aid for Israel (along with $61.4 billion for Ukraine).
This funding was in addition to the baseline $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States provides to Israel every year.
Biden’s friendly meeting with Netanyahu came at a moment when Israel was bombing not only Gaza, but also the occupied West Bank, southern Lebanon, and even airports in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo.
On 19 October, Israel attacked the roughly 1,000-year-old St. Porphyrios Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza, killing at least 17 civilians, including 10 members of a family.
Numerous international Christian churches condemned this Israeli assault on Palestinian civilians. The Catholic Church’s Vatican News agency cited a statement by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, which wrote that “targeting churches and its affiliated institutions, in addition to the shelters they provide to protect innocent citizens, especially children and women who lost their homes as a result of the Israeli bombing of residential areas during the past thirteen days, constitutes a war crime that cannot be ignored”.
The World Council of Churches likewise stated, “We condemn this unconscionable attack on a sacred compound and call upon the world community to enforce protections in Gaza for sanctuaries of refuge”.
Amnesty International then published a bone-chilling report on 20 October titled “Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza”.
The mainstream Western human rights organization described Israel’s attack as a “cataclysmic assault on the occupied Gaza Strip”, writing:
Amnesty International has documented unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.
The organization spoke to survivors and eyewitnesses, analysed satellite imagery, and verified photos and videos to investigate air bombardments carried out by Israeli forces between 7 and 12 October, which caused horrific destruction, and in some cases wiped out entire families.
Here the organization presents an in-depth analysis of its findings in five of these unlawful attacks. In each of these cases, Israeli attacks violated international humanitarian law, including by failing to take feasible precautions to spare civilians, or by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, or by carrying out attacks that may have been directed against civilian objects.
“In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity. Testimonies from eyewitness and survivors highlighted, again and again, how Israeli attacks decimated Palestinian families, causing such destruction that surviving relatives have little but rubble to remember their loved ones by,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure.
Our full findings and calls here ???? https://t.co/FtogYxR2Xf
— Amnesty International (@amnesty) October 20, 2023

The same day that Amnesty released this report on Israeli war crimes, Republicans and Democrats in the US Senate voted unanimously, 97-0, to support Tel Aviv.
An Israeli scholar has argued that Tel Aviv is engaged in a campaign of genocide against Palestinians.
The magazine Jewish Currents published an article on 13 October by Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in the United States.
Segal wrote that “the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians”.
“Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,’ as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, Segal explained, adding, “In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent”.
Even a columnist at the mainstream British newspaper The Guardian, Chris McGreal, warned that the “language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal”.
He noted that Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, blamed the Palestinian people as a whole for the 7 October attacks, declaring, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true”.
Similarly, a member of Israel’s parliament from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party, Ariel Kallner, openly called for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, proclaiming, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948”.


Instruction: Write an article about: Western media helps Ukrainian neo-Nazis spread staged propaganda. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Azov Battalion, corporate media, Freikorps, media, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion organized a photo op training Ukrainian elderly women and children to shoot guns. Top US and British media outlets eagerly spread the fascist propaganda to demonize Russia.

Major Western media outlets have helped to amplify a photo op staged by neo-Nazi extremists in Ukraine as a form of anti-Russia propaganda.
Ukraine’s state-backed neo-Nazi militia the Azov Battalion organized a training session for civilians on February 13 in the southeastern city of Mariupol, near the border with Russia.
The fascist extremists captured videos and photos of Ukrainian elderly women and children learning how to shoot guns. And they found eager allies in the Western press.
Several US and British media outlets promoted the training session, depicting it as a noble form of Ukrainian self-defense against an impending Russian invasion, without mentioning that the event was organized by neo-Nazis.
This is despite the fact that the Nazi-style Wolfsangel symbol could be clearly seen on the patches of the Azov extremists hosting the training.
A Nazi-style Wolfsangel patch can be seen on the Azov militant training Ukrainians
Media networks like Bloomberg promoted video footage of the training session in which these Azov fascists proudly display their Nazi-style Wolfsangel patches, and failed to disclose their extremist far-right views.
Another Nazi-style Wolfsangel patch on an Azov militant at the training session in Mariupol, Ukraine
The Azov Battalion played a key role as the violent muscle behind a US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Following the putsch, Azov was officially incorporated into the country’s National Guard.
The group makes no secret of its fascist and white-supremacist ideology, proudly using two Nazi symbols in its official logo.
The Nazi symbols used by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion
NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, exemplified how renowned Western reporters helped amplify this neo-Nazi propaganda operation.
Engel tweeted a photo of a Ukrainian great grandmother named Valentina Constantinovska who participated in the training.
The veteran NBC journalist failed to mention that the event was organized by neo-Nazis.
Did you not notice the fascist Azov Battalion insignia? Did you not realize it was fascist Azov Battalion? If you didn't know, why are you covering Ukraine when you know so little? pic.twitter.com/WYyRo937Kw
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) February 14, 2022

Photos of this elderly Ukrainian woman holding an assault rifle on the ground were heavily promoted by US and British media outlets.
Newspapers like The Times and the Daily Telegraph put the image on the front page, while failing to mention the fascist Azov extremists behind the photo op.
Amazing. Czech media reporting that Granny Valentyna's photo op was organized by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Meaning a bonafide Nazi propaganda tool is the darling of the Angloid media elites. Truly the face of Ukrainian resistance.https://t.co/Gis690ivAK pic.twitter.com/hYVdnd2zBe
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) February 14, 2022

A video package of the Azov training session was prepared by major Western news agency the Associated Press (AP), and subsequently republished by numerous top media outlets.
The original AP source footage was simply titled “Ukraine special forces offer training to civilians.” In the lengthy description accompanying the video, the AP quietly acknowledged that the Azov Battalion was “formed in 2014 by far-right activists,” but this fact was curiously not disclosed by other media outlets.
In fact the Azov Battalion published video of the training session on its own official YouTube account, and posted a press release about the event to its website.

Western corporate media outlets essentially acted as Azov’s unwitting press team.
Military.com published the AP video with the headline “Ukraine Special Forces Offer Training to Civilians.”
Britain’s The Independent ran the footage as well, under the title “Ukraine Special Forces train elderly and child civilians amid rising Russian tensions.”
Neither Military.com nor The Independent disclosed that the training session was organized by Nazis, describing them instead simply as “the Special Forces Unit Azov.”
Not all Western media outlets were so gullible, however.
The internet loves Valentina, a 79-year-old Ukrainian grandma training to repel Russian invaders!
*5 seconds later*
We regret to inform you Valentina was trained by far-right nationalists https://t.co/PtEqjPoZkn
— max seddon (@maxseddon) February 14, 2022

Euronews, for instance, published the same footage with the title “Ukraine far-right group offers training to civilians.”
Euronews acknowledged that the training was organized by “Members of Ukraine’s far right movement Azov.” The media outlet reported, “Ukraine’s far right Azov Battalion, part of Special Forces Unit at Ukraine’s National Guard, trained residents to assemble and dissemble a gun, to load ammunition and aim at targets.”
London’s BBC, on the other hand, uncritically promoted the video of the neo-Nazi training session.
Why did @OrlaGuerin and @BBCNews not inform viewers that the weapons training shown here is by the far-right Azov Brigade?https://t.co/FLzNCYIQrG https://t.co/3YHUKzmy7n
— Media Lens (@medialens) February 14, 2022

On January 30, NBC News published another example of subtle Nazi propaganda. Its video titled “Kyiv residents pick up their guns to train for potential Russian attack” featured Azov fighters, but did not mention their far-right extremist ideology.
NBC described the hard-line fascist militants simply as “veterans of the conflict against pro-Russian separatist rebels in Ukraine’s Donbas region.”
Every single time. pic.twitter.com/bOiBFOSlya
— Ian Goodrum (@isgoodrum) February 15, 2022

Azov is one of several far-right extremist militias in Ukraine. The country has even launched its own version of the Freikorps, proto-fascist paramilitaries in Germany that formed the violent base of Nazism.
One of the few exceptions to this pattern of whitewashed Western media reporting was Al Jazeera English, which published a report on February 13 titled “Ukraine: Allegedly neo-Nazi armed groups fighting Russia-backed separatists.”
Al Jazeera English reporter Charles Stratford interviewed members of Ukraine’s far-right Freikorps.
Unlike the other journalists, Stratford did make it clear that these extremists are neo-Nazis. He did not hide their explicitly fascist ideology.

The report by Al Jazeera English even showed the Freikorps militants posing in front of a Nazi-style Wolfsangel flag, next to a Ukrainian national flag.

AL Jazeera English also made it clear that some of these Nazi extremists have been incorporated into the Ukrainian state.


Instruction: Write an article about: Ukraine is brutally repressing the left, criminalizing socialist parties, imprisoning activists. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Azov, David Frum, left, media, Nazis, Russia, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky

Output:
Ukraine’s Western-backed government has criminalized socialist political parties, while its Nazi-infiltrated intelligence agencies are hunting down leftists, accusing them of being too soft on Russia. This comes after Kiev gave state honors to WWII-era Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with Hitler.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
Ukraine’s Western-backed government has used Russia’s February 24 invasion to drastically escalate its repression of the left, banning Ukrainian socialist parties and imprisoning left-wing activists.
There are widespread reports of Ukrainian state security services arresting and torturing leftists. Neo-Nazis and far-right extremists have systematically infiltrated Kiev’s police, military, and intelligence agencies since a US-sponsored 2014 coup installed a compliant pro-Western government.
In an early morning speech on March 20, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council was banning 11 opposition political parties, half of which are left-wing.
Some of the parties that were criminalized include the Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Party of Socialists.
Zelensky published an English-language transcript of this speech on the official website of the office of the president, boasting of having prohibited the dozen opposition parties.

To justify illegalizing these left-wing forces, the Ukrainian government accused them of being pro-Russian, or having unproven “ties” to Moscow. However, some of these opposition parties have publicly condemned the Russian invasion.
Ukraine, which is under martial law, is using the war with Russia to crush all political opposition. And the US and EU are staunchly supporting the regime as it consolidates absolute power.
On March 20, Zelensky also signed a decree to seize control of all private media outlets, combining them into one state-controlled platform, with a “unified information policy” that ensures no deviation from the official Ukrainian regime propaganda line.
Citing martial law, Ukraine president signs decree to combine national TV channels into one platform https://t.co/Bkyi6m2DXM pic.twitter.com/sg7bqtaGQF
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 20, 2022

Back in February 2021, more than a year before Russia invaded, Zelensky similarly shut down several TV channels that criticized his government. He subsequently arrested opposition politicians who challenged his iron grip on power, such as the elected lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk. Zelensky did this with full Western backing.
But this is far from the first time that Kiev has implemented such extremist policies.
After the US-backed “Maidan” coup in 2014, the Ukrainian regime effectively declared war on the left. Kiev banned all communist parties and launched a far-right “decommunization” campaign that made it illegal to be a communist.
Simultaneously, the Western-backed Ukrainian government gave state honors to Ukrainian fascists who had collaborated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust.
Britain’s establishment newspaper The Guardian admitted this in a 2015 article titled “Ukraine bans Soviet symbols and criminalises sympathy for communism.”
The Guardian wrote, “Two new laws that ban communist symbols while honouring nationalist groups that collaborated with the Nazis have come into effect in Ukraine, raising concerns that Kiev could be stifling free speech and further fragmenting the war-torn country.”
These articles say something about the state of Ukraine's democracy.
The Communist Party is banned. Singing the Internationale can get you 5 years in prison. It's an offence to deny the "criminal character" of the USSR.
Meanwhile Nazi collaborators are honoured and racism is ok pic.twitter.com/gKUKrmHiux
— Carlos Martinez (@agent_of_change) March 16, 2022

The use of all Marxist symbols is illegal in Ukraine, including the hammer and sickle or even Soviet-era souvenirs and memorabilia.
After the Western-backed 2014 coup, it was made illegal in Ukraine to sing The Internationale, the anthem of the global socialist movement.
Any individual caught violating Ukraine’s far-right “decommunization” laws faces up to five years in prison, and members of left-wing organizations face up to 10 years behind bars.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s post-Maidan coup regime made it a crime to criticize ultra-nationalist Nazi collaborators, including the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Leaders of these far-right Ukrainian death squads, including Hitler collaborator Stepan Bandera, have become state heroes.
The United States and European Union strongly supported the right-wing regime in Kiev as it passed these extremist policies, blatantly violating the civil liberties of left-wing Ukrainians.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, there have also been reports of rampant use of torture and other extreme human rights abuses committed by the neo-Nazi and far-right forces in Ukraine’s security services.
Ukrainian leftists created a Telegram channel called “Repression of the left and dissenters in Ukraine,” sharing chilling reports of brutally violent crimes carried out by the Western-backed Ukrainian regime. (Some of their stories are embedded at the bottom of this article.)
The authenticity of these accounts was confirmed by prominent left-wing activist Paweł Wargan, the coordinator of the International Secretariat of the Progressive International.
The internal Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which has been infiltrated by neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, has been particularly vicious in its crackdown on the Ukrainian left.
Left-wing activists and journalists have been quite literally hunted down and tortured. Extremists in the SBU also shot and killed a Ukrainian negotiator who had been involved in peace talks with Russia, accusing him of “treason.”
Amid the horrors of war, the Ukrainian left has faced tremendous and violent repression. Read their plea for international solidarity. pic.twitter.com/bX42kYKurV
— Paweł Wargan (@pawelwargan) March 19, 2022

Following the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014, neo-Nazi militias like the Azov regiment were officially incorporated into the National Guard, while the fascist Aidar Battalion became part of the Armed Forces.
NATO member states have sent weapons to these Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and have even trained them.
After Russia invaded, Ukraine’s National Guard posted a propaganda video on Twitter boasting of a neo-Nazi fighter from the Azov detachment greasing bullets with pig fat in order to kill Chechen Muslims, which the Ukrainian state institution dehumanized as “orcs.”
This is the official, verified Twitter account of Ukraine's National Guard publicly portraying Russian Chechen Muslims as monstrous "orcs," and praising its Nazi soldiers for threatening to kill them with lard-greased bullets: https://t.co/gs0yYu4qXohttps://t.co/PMKeTajw9e
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 27, 2022

While the Ukrainian regime criminalizes socialist parties and hunts down leftists, in alliance with neo-Nazis, Western media pundits are heaping praise on Kiev.
David Frum, a former speechwriter for US President George W. Bush and editor of the centrist Atlantic magazine, insisted on Twitter that “Ukraine may be the first example in human history of a country that under the pressure of war is becoming *more* tolerant and *more* liberal.”
Frum tweeted this mere hours before Ukraine banned socialist parties and seized control of all media outlets in the country.
Ukraine may be the first example in human history of a country that under the pressure of war is becoming *more* tolerant and *more* liberal
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 19, 2022

Below Multipolarista has embedded reports compiled by the “Repression of the left and dissenters in Ukraine” Telegram channel:
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, representatives of the far-right and liberal milieu have been spreading calls for violence and even for the killing of those who had previously publicly advocated the implementation of the Minsk agreements, against “decommunisation” and for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Donbas. Activists of left-wing groups were the first to be threatened.
Lists of unreliables have emerged. Some “left-wing activists” also started compiling lists of “wrong leftists”.
On 3 March, SBU officers, with the participation of neo-Nazis from the Azov group, detained leftist activist Oleksandr Matyushenko from the Levitsa association in Dnipropetrovsk.
He was charged under Article 437 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code – “waging aggressive war”. And, as the courts in Ukraine do not work now, he was arrested for 30 days without trial – on the prosecutor’s order.
The details of the criminal case are not known because the SBU refuses to introduce it to anyone but his lawyer. But most lawyers refuse to defend him or demand 3,000 dollars for their services, a rather large sum for Ukrainians.
On the same day, 12 people were detained in Dnipro on similar charges. On March 4, 14 people were detained. On 5 March, 11 people were detained.
In Kyiv, arrests had begun even earlier. On 27 February, brothers Mikhail and Aleksandr Kononovich, leaders of the Ukrainian Komsomol [the Communist Youth], ethnic Belarusians, were detained.
It is not known where they are and what they are accused of, as there is no contact with them.
On 7 March, journalist Dmitriy Dzhangirov, a member of the New Socialism party, Vasyl Volha, a former leader of the Union of Left Forces, journalist Yury Dudkin and publicist Aleksandr Karevin, who managed to write on his Facebook page: “The SBU has come”, were detained in Kiev.
Where all of them are now and what they are accused of is also unknown. Dzhangirov’s Facebook page posted a video of him, possibly under physical duress, saying things that are not typical of him.
On 11 March, left-wing activist Spartak Golovachev disappeared in Kharkiv. “The door is being broken down by armed men in Ukrainian uniforms. Goodbye,” he managed to write on social media.
It should be noted that there is fighting for Kharkiv, but in general it is under the control of the Ukrainian armed forces.
On March 11, in Odessa, the SBU detained Elena Vyacheslavova, the daughter of Mikhail Vyacheslavov, who died on May 2, 2014 in the fire of the Odessa House of Trade Unions.
The whereabouts of several members of the left-wing New Socialism and Derzhava parties are also unknown. They have stopped making contact or writing anything on social media. They may be in hiding, but they may also have been detained.
On March 13, in a village near Odessa, neighbors with nationalist sentiments burned down the house of left-wing activist Dmitry Lazarev.
On March 4, Vladimir Ivanov, a left-wing activist from Zaporozhye, disappeared. His whereabouts are unknown. Posts that are uncharacteristic for him are appearing in his Telegram account.
According to reports from Dnepropetrovsk, on March 19, in the city of Krivoy Rog, security forces broke into a house and detained Yuriy Bobchenko, chairman of the Trade Union of Metallurgists and Miners of Ukraine at the Arcelor Mital Krivoy Rog enterprise, owned by transnational capital.
All indications are that as the fighting continues, the repression of dissenters and leftists will continue.
Our capacity to defend the rights of the politically repressed in Ukraine is now very limited.
And solidarity with Ukrainian political prisoners of the left and human rights defenders in all countries is very important to us.


Instruction: Write an article about: US pushing war on China: Malaysia’s ex PM explains imperialism’s roots in capitalism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: capitalism, China, imperialism, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia, neoliberalism

Output:
Malaysia’s ex Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the US is provoking war with China over Taiwan. He also explained how imperialism is rooted in capitalism.

Malaysia’s longest-serving Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned that the US is trying to start a war with China over Taiwan. He also explained how imperialism is rooted in capitalism and detailed its economic exploitation of the Global South.

“Malaysia’s Mahathir says US seeking to provoke war in Taiwan,” Associated Press
“Mahathir: We can learn a lot from China,” 2019 interview with The Star
PBS interview with Mahathir Mohamad in 2001
Quotes from the 2001 PBS interview:
INTERVIEWER: I want to take you back to the end of the Cold War, [when] you said that capitalism was capitalism with a big “C,” not democracy. Can you tell me what you meant by that?
DR. MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: It’s quite obvious that when the Eastern bloc was still there, it was a bustle between capitalism and communism. Once communism was defeated, then capitalism could expand and show its true self. It’s no longer constrained by the need to be nice, so that people will choose their so-called free-market system as opposed to the centrally planned system.
So because of that, nowadays there is nothing to restrain capital, and capital is demanding that it should be able to go anywhere and do whatever it likes.
INTERVIEWER: You also said that capitalism can be linked to the new imperialism; instead of bombs, instead of nuclear warheads, capital is the new weapon. Can you tell me what you mean by that?
DR. MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: In the old days you needed to conquer a country with military force, and then you could control that country. Today it’s not necessary at all. You can destabilize a country, make it poor, and then make it request help. And [in exchange] for the help that is given, you gain control over the policies of the country, and when you gain control over the policies of a country, effectively you have colonized that country.
INTERVIEWER: [Friedrich von] Hayek, [Milton] Friedman and others would say that free markets work. Free markets should be left alone to rule the world, and prosperity would follow. What do you think would happen if free markets are left unregulated?
DR. MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: If they are left unregulated then they will profiteer, because the market is all about making profits, as much profit as possible, and they will do anything in order to increase their profits. One [thing companies will do] is to become monopolies. If they could monopolize something, they could corner the market; then they can enrich themselves. What happens to people — that is irrelevant to them.
They are not in the business of attending to the social needs of people. They are only thinking about their profit, and if you allow the market to go free, unregulated, then the world will face monopolies of giants who will not care at all about what happens to people, what happens to the consumers, for example.
Of course, a big company can be more efficient, probably do more R & D. But you reach the stage of a monopoly, you don’t have to bother, because whatever you produce people have to buy anyway. That will lead to a deterioration in the quality of things. So it is not true at all that a free market will ensure a democracy. It doesn’t.
There must be a balance between a free market and some regulations which are essential in order to safeguard the interests of consumers and of people in general.
…
We believe in trade, but we didn’t believe in just being a market for other people. But the stress is on market opening. Even if you open your market to us, we have very little to sell other than raw material…. In terms of finished product, we must sell more raw material all the time in order to buy less and less finished product.
So when you talk about opening markets, you’re talking about the rich people who can manufacture goods with added value and selling it in our markets, not the other way around.
…
INTERVIEWER: In the early to mid-90s, we heard of the Washington consensus. Maybe you can explain what you felt was the Washington consensus. Here in Malaysia, did you feel that there was a new policy being pushed? What for you was the Washington consensus?
DR. MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: Washington itself implied that this is something out of the rich Western countries, and if they agree on something that is to be imposed on the rest of the world, it means that there is no consultation. It should be a world consensus, not a Washington consensus.
Every time we are up against this understanding there, we find that they are all designed in order to be in their favor, to enrich them, in fact, and it would be at our expense. That is why we feel a need to resist the Washington consensus.
…
INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk more about the Washington consensus and the American desire for Asia to open her markets. Was the head of the IMF coming to you and saying, “What you should do is open your capital markets — it’ll make you prosperous”? Was there other talk of American free marketeers as evangelists, who were like missionaries going out to Asia and spreading the gospel of the free market? When did you sense this, and was anyone talking to you about this?
DR. MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD: I think it was very early on, long before globalization was being implemented or becoming a very common household word. Various delegations came from America, one of which was headed by [former Secretary of State Alexander] Haig, and they were insisting that we allow American banks to operate as national banks in this country.
We pointed out that if they come in, their size would smother the Malaysian banks. But [we were told] this is good for you, because they are going to bring in their expertise [and] efficiency, and things would be stimulated by their participation. We have a responsibility to protect our local banks. We told them that we are not ready yet for that. Wait until we are big enough, and then you can come in.
So very early on there has been this pressure to give national status to foreign companies. National status is what we use to protect our weak businesses, banks, and industries so that they have a chance to survive. But if you allow at that early stage for foreign companies to attain national status, then there’s no way we can protect our own businesses.
Of course, when globalization became a formal idea which everybody seemed to espouse, it is the same thing: the desire [to] give foreign companies national status in your country. We felt if we do that, then all our own businesses will be just swallowed up. All will just perish, so that is why we fear that globalization, as defined by the Western countries, is not going to be good for us, and we had a foretaste of that during the currency crisis.