by Jaqueline Luqman, published on HoodCommunist, March 23, 2023
The Washington Post, or the Pentagon Post, as Eugene Puryear aptly named the paper this Saturday, printed a bizarre “key update” on the official visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The update reads: “Chinese President Xi Jinping claims to have come to Moscow as a peacemaker, but talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about China’s 12-point proposal for peace on Monday appear to have yielded no progress so far.
The update goes on to say, “Beijing’s summary of discussions did not mention any progress — or whether Xi offered to act as a mediator — underscoring analysts’ view that the talks are more about deepening China-Russia ties and cementing economic deals at a moment when Beijing has massive economic and political leverage over Moscow.”
It’s almost comical how the US media frames this barely two-day-old meeting, or it would be if I didn’t know that so many millions of Americans are misled and misinformed daily by this rag.
The idea that Xi Jinping would go to Russia and tell President Putin, “Forget all the treaty violations and NATO aggression and threats to Russian sovereignty and eight years of attacks against ethnic Russian people in Donbas Vlad, be the bigger man here leave Ukraine to NATO and those Russian people to the Kyiv army.” is insultingly comical. Or comically insulting.
Because that is the inference being made here, that because Xi hasn’t convinced Putin to concede – the only conditions under which the US and NATO will accept negotiations with Russia – then the meeting between the two leaders must not only be a failure on the first day, but even worse it’s a sneaky underhanded sleight of hand trick that Xi is playing on the rest of the world to really make a bunch of slick back room economic and trade deals with Putin instead. He’s not really there for peace, the Pentagon Post claims, he’s really there to make money, and worse Xi is colluding with Putin – as another Washington Post key update claims, to position themselves as the leaders of a new global order opposed to US power.
Why it’s like these two think they’re allowed to act in the interests of their own countries without the oversight and approval of the United States…the nerve of them!
The Xi/Putin visit comes on the heels of the ridiculous arrest warrant issued by the International Kangaroo Court…I mean International Criminal Court last week. I’m sorry to insult kangaroos like that, they’re noble creatures. A Kremlin envoy to the United Nations told reporters Monday that Russia will brief the U.N. Security Council on “the real situation” about “Ukrainian children in Russia” in early April.
Ukraine says the Kremlin has abducted more than 16,000 children and taken them to Russia. But Nebenzia said Moscow has taken the children to Russia because it “wanted to spare them of the danger that military activities may bring.” He added that Russia would return the children “when conditions are safe.”
We’ve talked frequently on this show (By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik) about the 8 years that the Kyiv army bombed the eastern Ukrainian region, and during that time Kyiv has never once moved civilians in that region out of harm’s way, because the purpose was to kill as many of those people who voted to secede from Ukraine as possible, children included. So when Russian officials relocated children from that region – most of whom were orphans – and you should be asking yourself why there are so many orphaned kids, and the answer is because of the Kyiv army’s war against their own people for 8 years – they were doing what Ukraine refused to do. And the ICC is merely doing the bidding of its handlers, the US government, in issuing this spurious arrest warrant.
Meanwhile, no arrest warrant has ever been issued by the ICC for George W. Bush, not for Dick Cheney, not for Donald Rumsfeld, not Colin Powell, not Condoleeza Rice, not for a single, solitary US official or for Tony Blair, or any UK official responsible for perpetrating the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, nor for the ongoing crime committed against the Iraqi people since the 2003 invasion. Over 1 million Iraqis dead – including an estimated 500,000 children who died because of sanctions the US imposed on the country, whose deaths the late Madeleine Albright said were worth it for the US to get whatever it is they got out of that invasion, which of course was control of Iraqi oil.
And the US making a big deal about this arrest warrant is yet another example of American Hypocrisy because the US has a hate/hate relationship with the ICC. Even before the Trump administration sanctioned members of the ICC and their families to block ICC investigations into US war crimes and torture in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes in Palestine in 2020, the George W. Bush administration passed legislation prohibiting any U.S. support to the ICC and authorized the US government to use “any means necessary” to return any American citizen detained by the court, and the Bush administration strong-armed countries into signing bilateral immunity agreements, vowing that they would never surrender U.S. citizens to the ICC.
Consequently, the US government does not recognize the jurisdiction or authority of the ICC…when it is investigating the US for its crimes. But suddenly when the same entity that the US says is illegitimate claims that Russia has committed war crimes, then the US government celebrates the ironclad authority of the court. Except Russia also does not recognize the jurisdiction or authority of the ICC, and neither does China by the way, probably because they both see how it is used as a political tool by the US whenever this government feels like it..
I’m not at all saying that there were no crimes committed by Russian forces in this war. I know that Ukraine has committed crimes because bombing your own people is indeed a war crime. But the fact that the ICC hasn’t said anything about that causes me not to trust them to be a truly politically independent and unbiased adjudicating body.
And after all, the ICC refused to investigate police killings outlined in the damning 2021 Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States.
Why should I take seriously their arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin when our bodies lying in US streets from police killings don’t rise to the level of a response from them?
Jacqueline Luqman is co-host of By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik, a daily show that analyzes current political and social events through an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, radical Black internationalist tradition and lens. She was a panelist on the February 16, 2023 webinar Why and How to End the War in Ukraine, which was sponsored by Chicago Area Peace Action.