The Ukrainian people are fighting for their survival...against Ukraine.
via ▻https://diaspora.psyco.fr/p/12681591
▻https://thespectaclemag.substack.com/p/the-ukrainian-people-are-fighting
Articles • EQUATOR
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The state’s response has been to transform the conscription system into a kidnapping operation. Ukrainian men aged 25 to 60 are now subject to conscription under martial law and forbidden from escaping the country. Because they cannot be persuaded to join, they are simply taken.
This practice has now acquired its own grim name, ‘busification,’ after the minibuses used by conscription squads to kidnap unwilling conscripts. The website ▻https://busification.org/en has archived nearly 10,000 clips of Ukrainian civilians documenting the human rights violations they are witnessing and experiencing. What follows in this article is drawn from a miniscule fraction of them, and I will include video throughout this article, but I want you to understand that every clip I show you represents dozens you will never see.
Des vidéos à voir pour bien comprendre ce qu’est la fameuse démocratie ukrainienne…
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The Demand for Silence
2025-12-03Yevgenia Belorusets (photographer):
– ►https://www.equator.org/articles/the-demand-for-silence
“... A friend of mine, who is now in the army, said to me this week: “I won’t let them forget this.” I dedicate this article to his words. ...”
From Yevgenia Belorusets’s series Hiding In (2024) -
cf. thespectaclemag.substack.com - voir l’adresse indiquée ci-dessus
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…because I knew nothing about Ukraine or Russia beyond what the mainstream Western media had told me. Five years later, my opinion has changed completely, and this was not achieved by any single event but by the process of starting the spectacle and researching the Palestinian genocide, Israel, the United States Empire, China, Latin America, and all the things in between. I realised that the same mainstream Western news telling me to support Ukraine wholeheartedly was the same news that told me there was no genocide in Palestine. The same news that lied to me about China, Venezuela, and Cuba. That is when I began to do my own research.
What I found was that Westerners are not given the full story about Ukraine and Russia at all. We are never told about the civil war that began in 2014 with the mistreatment of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east, and the conflict that led to 14,000 of them being killed by Kyiv. We are never told the truth about the Western-backed Maidan coup that placed Ukraine under the control of the US and EU. We are never shown anything about what is happening inside Ukraine right now, to the Ukrainian people themselves. We are simply fed propaganda in order to keep the war machine running.
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Iran After America • EQUATOR
▻https://www.equator.org/articles/trump-war-iran-vali-nasrVali Nasr est interviewé
The myth of a cost-free war – where the US bullies the world into submission with sanctions and threats and kidnap – has collapsed. If Iran can constrain the US, other powers will notice, and the result will be something the US can no longer manage.
Since 1979 the United States had been able to maintain, with authoritarian regimes and with Israel, a particular order in the Middle East. But the US took an axe to that order by attacking Iran and putting the Gulf states in danger – and since then it has shown that it is not willing or capable of defending the region. The US has caused this order to fall apart, and it cannot fix the situation. Donald Trump, even after this war ends, has no vision for a new order in the Middle East. So the more the US is seen around the world as the destroyer rather than the builder, the more both its soft power and hard power come into question.
[…]
How should we describe this new generation of leaders? Are they more ruthless than their predecessors?
They are the more extreme people whom the previous Supreme Leader had sidelined. But they have also learned that his moderation did not bring them peace; it actually brought them war. They believe the US only respects extreme violence and pressure. But they are also a generation born after the revolution. These are not the young activists and ideologues who languished in the Shah’s prisons and then came to power, your Trotskys and Lenins. These guys are more state-minded technocrats, they are Brezhnevs and Stalins.
Are we going to see more repression along the lines of January’s massacres?
Iran is nationalistic, angry, depressed. It’s a very difficult domestic situation. Yes, there are now more cultural freedoms. But the economic situation in Iran is horrible, and the Islamic Republic is not going to reform politically. On the other side, they’re being invaded and bombed. And it’s not the regime that’s being bombed – it’s the Iranian people and their livelihoods.
#Iran
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The Demand for Silence | Yevgenia Belorusets
►https://www.equator.org/articles/the-demand-for-silenceThese latest attempts at peace talks are far from the first. Several “bad peace” agreements have already been rejected – followed by notes of satisfied righteousness in the international media. Over time, the very idea of peace has acquired a bad reputation. It is viewed as “peace by coercion”.
I have taken part in several discussions about potential peace scenarios over the past two years. Almost all of them have viewed the conflict through the lens of international law, geopolitics and the need to forcefully respond to the aggressor. In other words, to establish, in relation to Russia, the rule of “peace through strength”, and to make #Ukraine “indigestible” for Russia, as Ursula von der Leyen said this August. As if being part of another’s digestive process could ever bring any good to a country or its allies. In this war, symbolic language has served as a new Iron Curtain, concealing the reality that an alternative to a “bad peace” is nothing other than war itself, in all its forms.
This article was written mostly during August and October, at a time when it felt necessary to describe the violence that has been required to sustain armed resistance. I felt as though I were telling the world something essential – something the politicians had somehow overlooked as they discussed the prospect of the war lasting until 2030, all the while offering no new proposals.
Now I find myself thinking, far too often, that I am merely repeating something that is already well known. The detail has been noticed; people simply choose not to speak about it. At a certain point, writing about this subject even began to seem useless to me.
A friend of mine, who is now in the army, said to me this week: “I won’t let them forget this.” I dedicate this article to his words.
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Despite the threat of fines, a reported 1.5 million men have not updated their information on the database. If these figures are even remotely accurate, then an enormous number of people wish to avoid mobilisation, or do not trust the state conscription process. Figures of this scale speak for themselves. They also reveal that in this war there exists a vast territory of silence – a space for people’s opinions, doubts and decisions, which find no path to public expression, and may not even be fully formed as political positions or judgements.
But where there are no words, there are still actions: hiding, avoiding or disobeying the order to fight.
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These images [of people resisting conscription] usually circulate anonymously. Filming or publishing them could result in criminal prosecution. I am often unable to watch videos like this all the way to the end. They leave me with a feeling of limitless helplessness, in part because hardly anyone seems to acknowledge them publicly. It is as if everyone has agreed not to discuss what we are all seeing. Lately I’ve been asking myself: Can it be be that people aren’t seeing these videos? Not hearing these cries for help and pleas to spread this information widely?
Some of my friends talk about these videos in their kitchens, like people used to in the dissident era. But out in the public sphere, it is as if nothing is happening. We no longer live within the boundaries of national states. News circulates internationally, and the inability to address violations of human rights has also become an international process. It is as if our society – and international discourse as well – has fallen under a collective spell.
I even worried I was going insane, because I was constantly seeing things that, for too many other people, remained insignificant. I hear over and over again from colleagues in European cities comments like: “Now is not the time to talk about that.” The demand to remain silent about the complex dynamics of resistance to Russian aggression is something that has not been truly reflected upon. In my view, this demand has in fact become the background policy for many respected media outlets. Political activists who support Ukraine have told me too often that “if these facts become known, it will be impossible to convince the Europeans to help Ukraine”.
This line of argument acts as an obstacle to discussion, and a form of self-censorship. It helps create the illusions that make it possible to exclude whole fragments of reality, and to look away from so much of the trauma, pain and internal violence that has permeated a society engaged in a protracted war.
I have started to think that this silence gives rise to the image of a country that wants to wage war – a heroic society, united in its opinions and preferences. This is what Ukraine looks like in the campaigns of its information war, in which politicians, journalists and activists talk proudly of taking part.
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The past few months have seen a wave of clashes between civilians and conscription brigades. Veterans and demobilised soldiers often participate on the side of the civilians. In August, there were spontaneous demonstrations in the cities of Kovel and Vinnytsia; people tried to break into conscription centres and liberate those held inside. For some reason, the international news media ignored these evocative protests.
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The news of #David_Chichkan’s death destroyed a part of my world; the grief of this loss pursues me. But so do attacks on the freedom of civilians, the operation of illegal prisons, and military service contracts signed under threats of violence or through torture – all of these things tear at the fabric of society, destroying the very foundations of human dignity.
Why is the entire space of war buzzing with imposed silence? This war has created the illusion that acknowledging one kind of experience diminishes another – as if the very freedom to choose devalues the choice of joining the resistance; as if acknowledging and opposing internal violence in a society defending itself will always mean “working for the enemy”.
Silence not only fails to support Ukrainian society. It normalises and legitimises an abnormal, criminal situation. It forces people to accept that violence is natural, is to be expected, is part and parcel of society. The cry for help receives no response. And that is also a response.
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Beyond the Apocalypse - How visions of #catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies | #Amitav_Ghosh
▻https://www.equator.org/articles/beyond-the-apocalypseThis pattern, in which interventions spearheaded by foreign officials and experts end up by compounding problems on the ground, has repeated itself over and over again in coastal Bengal. Of these, none has been more destructive than the introduction of prawn and shrimp farming.
The idea that shrimp farming might be a good way for farmers to earn some extra money was first suggested by Western experts in the 1960s, and the initiative was taken up enthusiastically by USAID 20 years later. Initially intended as an income-generation plan, in recent decades shrimp farming has also been strongly advocated by experts and aid agencies as a ‘climate solution’. The thinking behind it, as explained to Dewan by a Western development professional, was this: “Climate change is a fact. [All of] #Bangladesh will become saline; it is inevitable. Bangladesh should accept this and focus on cultivating saline-tolerant species such as tiger prawn… ”
[...] But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless.
[...] Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of #climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.
