Give "pro-peace" activists a microphone for long enough, and their pro-Russia slant comes out. It's not a coincidence that Max Blumenthal, a co-founder of Grayzone, a blog that follows the dictum that the United States is bad and anti-U.S. dictators are good, didn't heckle any Russian officials in Washington on the day Zelensky arrived, demanding that they do what they could to stop the war. Instead, Blumenthal and his comrades focus their efforts on denigrating Zelensky personally, while either denying or downplaying Russian atrocities.
American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker (born 1977)
Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author and blogger who is the editor of The Grayzone website. He is a contributor to Russian, Chinese and Iranian state-owned media. Earlier in his career he wrote for AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, and Media Matters for America.
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Blumenthal went to Moscow on a junket to celebrate RT’s tenth anniversary [in 2015]. We don't know what happened during that visit, but afterward, Blumenthal's views completely flipped. He has attacked not only the White Helmets but also Bana al-Abed, a nine-year-old girl who lived in rebel-held Aleppo and ran a Twitter account with her mother. The man who once wrote an essay called "The Right to Resist is Universal," and attacked [Sharmine] Narwani as an "Assad apologist," now accuses anti-Assad Syrians of belonging to al-Qaeda and has claimed that the White Helmets were affiliated with the Islamist group.
The White Helmets are not the only humanitarian group targeted by Russia and its cronies. Blumenthal has also vented his disgust at a charity raising money to "fortify medical facilities" in rebel held areas.
Why do medical facilities need fortification? Because clinics run by Medicins Sans Frontieres and the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation are being bombed deliberately by the Assad regime and Blumenthal’s deployers in the Russian government.
Again, the Geneva Convention is very clear. Every medic must be protected, regardless of whatever insinuated and baseless claim of to whom they swear allegiance.
In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt.
We have to look at the bigger picture here, and realize this is the culmination of a long-standing, neoconservative attempt to reignite the Cold War for a variety of reasons. They want a massive arms buildup. The neoconservative movement really emerged from anti-Russian sentiment in the 1970s... They despise Vladimir Putin... because he is the main leader in the world who is challenging US hegemony... It has to do with NATO expansion, as you mentioned, it has to do with Ukraine. The failure of the US to put a NATO ally on Russia’s borders. All sorts of reasons. The failure of the US to enact regime change in Syria because of Russian intervention.... Through H. R. McMaster, they implanted Fiona Hill, who is known simply for being at the Brookings Institute and writing a book-length attack on Vladimir Putin. She’s now kind of the in-house Russia expert. ...the US has rejected Russian proposals to sign treaties against meddling in cyber attacks. So, the Cold War continues with total liberal consent.
For raising questions about the efficacy and environmental cost of renewable projects like these, and proposing an explicitly solution to the corporate destruction of the planet, the makers of were steamrolled by a network of professional climate activists, billionaire investors and industry insiders.